Germaine Greer Approved of Sex with Boys - Janice Fiamengo

Decades of feminist theorizing have stressed the dark side of male sexual desire, its violence, its alleged objectification of women, and its alleged infliction of indignities. When Germaine Greer turned her attention to female sexuality, in a book about female pederasty, or sex with boys, she was unashamedly celebratory. 

Germaine Greer

In 2003, well-known Australian feminist Germaine Greer published The Beautiful Boy, a picture book with commentary that had as one of its stated purposes to encourage women to reclaim their pleasure in looking at boys’ naked bodies. The book also included approving commentary about sexual relationships between adult women and pubescent boys. 

Andrea Dworkin, Feminist Fury Personified - Janice Fiamengo

Andrea Dworkin

Andrea Dworkin was feminism’s most brilliant and deranged propagandist, and the failure of most feminist leaders to disavow her claims offers conclusive proof that feminism is a hate movement.

Most people are at least familiar with Andrea Dworkin as feminist icon, with her massive physical bulk, her impassioned rhetoric, and her trademark lesbian-identified overalls. Fewer have read her books. In their time, the books were considered ground-breaking and even true. Feminist author Ariel Levy has called Dworkin a “savior goddess” and the “evangelical, untouchable preacher for the oppressed” (Intercourse, xix). Today Dworkin’s unhinged hatred of men seems bombastic and disingenuous. Yet her impact on North American feminist culture is undeniable. 

The Shamelessness of Feminist Affirmative Action - Janice Fiamengo

As feminists were transforming universities into centers of higher indoctrination, feminist activists were also changing the workforce by mandating affirmative action. Upending the merit principle entirely, feminists made it law that women be hired because they are women. More than 50 years later, they’re still at it. 

In the year 2020, the Irish government announced that it would use taxpayer money to create 20 women-only professor positions to close the alleged academic gender gap. Designed to raise the percentage of female profs at Irish postsecondary institutions, the move was hailed as a “game-changing moment,” with the Minister of State for higher education Mary Mitchell O’Connor stating that she was “incredibly proud that this intervention will ensure a swifter gender re-balance.”

Feminism’s Long History of Anti-Whiteness - Janice Fiamengo

Recently propelled into the spotlight through discussions of critical race theory, anti-white hatred has a long history in Second Wave feminism. In this video, I offer an outline of how white feminists came to accept second-class status within the movement they created. 

In the late 1960s, as we’ve seen, feminists capitalized on the enormous social power of female victimhood. White feminists at that time were certainly aware of racism, but they were largely unconcerned by it as a competing paradigm of victimization. In her 1972 essay “Sisterhood,” feminist leader Gloria Steinem asserted that women had a deep bond with other women born of shared patriarchal oppression; it was a bond that transcended all differences. She stated that “The odd thing about these deep and personal connections among women is that they often leap barriers of age, economics, worldly experience, race, culture—all the barriers that, in male or mixed society, seem so impossible to cross” (“Sisterhood,” p. 129). Sisterhood, forged in the universal experience of male dominance, was powerful. This was the utopian position of most feminist leaders in the early 1970s. 

Second Wave Feminism Conquered the Universities with Ease - Janice Fiamengo

It is impossible to appreciate the impact of Second Wave feminism without recognizing its takeover of our universities. Evidence suggests that the takeover was quick and easy, and that feminism never even needed to hide its radicalism in order to conquer America’s institutions of higher learning without a fight. 

In 2008, a major publisher brought out a book titled The Evolution of American Women’s Studies: Reflections on Triumphs, Controversies, and Change. 

Written by feminist academics involved in the founding of women’s studies programs across the United States, the book is well worth reading for its picture of the objectives and methodologies of Second Wave Feminism.  

Susan Brownmiller on Rape and Male Power - Janice Fiamengo

The one thing genuinely new about Second Wave Feminism is its extensive theory of rape, rape not as an individual crime but as the paradigmatic expression of male power. Though she alone did not invent the theory, American feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller gave it influential expression in her repulsive 1975 tract Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. 

Susan Brownmiller

“I wrote this book because I am a woman who changed her mind about rape” (9). So wrote Brownmiller in a “Personal Statement” she placed at the beginning of her book. 

Fakery, Posing, and Madness, Feminism Comes of Age in the 1960s - Janice Fiamengo

Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Kate Millett essentially made 1960s feminism. They accepted and amplified Simone De Beauvoir’s assertions about a patriarchy that subjugated women and privileged men. Such a conception necessarily dehumanized men and promoted revolutionary anger.

We have seen that far from being a new phenomenon, feminism was already a force to be reckoned with by the mid-twentieth century. 

The Monstrous Lies of Simone De Beauvoir - Janice Fiamengo

Paris intellectual and novelist Simone De Beauvoir wrote a treatise on womanhood entitled The Second Sex that is now considered the twentieth century’s most influential work of feminist philosophy. Despite numerous inaccuracies and logical fallacies, Beauvoir’s assertions about the social construction of sex differences and woman’s Otherness have had a profoundly deforming impact on all subsequent feminist theorizing. 

Simone De Beauvoir

Simone De Beauvoir’s magnum opus The Second Sex, published in French in 1949 and clocking in at over 750 pages, has been cited as a major influence by key American feminist writers Betty Friedan and Kate Millett. First translated into English in 1953 (with a fuller, more accurate version in 2009), the work is credited with establishing the much-employed distinction—now causing grief to anti-trans feminists—between biological sex and what came to be called gender identity.