Tag Archives: Ideology

Commentary

Barbara Kay writes the best essay against feminism ever written

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Let me introduce the ideology of feminism with a quote from a founder of the feminist movement.

“[A]s long as the family and the myth of the family and the myth of maternity and the maternal instinct are not destroyed, women will still be oppressed…. No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.” ~ Simone de Beauvoir, “Sex, Society, and the Female Dilemma,” Saturday Review, June 14, 1975.

Here is the greatest essay ever written against feminism – written by Barbara Kay.

Introduction:

The feminism I take exception to today is not the mild and blameless right of a woman to self-actualize that all women absorb by osmosis from the cultural air we breathe, but the radical ideology that has come to dominate the movement’s academic and institutional elites over the last 40 years.

This is an ideology that sees the relations between the sexes as a never-ending antagonistic power struggle, with women as eternal victims and men as eternal oppressors. It is an ideology that explains away the moral failings of women as the fault of a patriarchal “system”, but holds men responsible for their actions. And most important, it is an ideology that shortchanges children by privileging the rights and importance to children of mothers over fathers.

Her first point:

As a result of feminists’ promotion of career equity with men and unrestrained sexual experimentation over early and faithful commitment, women are having fewer children later, and many are having none. Consequently, birthrates are down in all western countries, in many below the replacement levels. Canada’s current fertility rate is 1.54 per woman, behind one-child China’s 1.7.

Sadly, many women realize they want to have children, but too late. They were not warned by their Women’s Studies teachers or by feminist commentators that fertility peaks by age 25, or that late pregnancies carry elevated risks, or that induced abortions pose a risk of pre-term delivery in future pregnancies.

Abortion is now such a commonplace here that it is used as a backup form of birth control. Abortions in Quebec have doubled in the last 10 years: in 1998 16 percent of pregnancies resulted in abortion. Today 30 percent do. You don’t have to be a religious Christian to find that statistic disturbing.

All of these realities are directly traceable to feminist doctrine. Feminists’ original goal may not have been the intention to preside over the actual demographic decline of western civilization. Their goal was to empower women. But as the old saying goes, when you are up to your neck in alligators, it’s difficult to remember that your original intention was to drain the swamp.

Her second point:

Misandry, which is the female equivalent of misogyny (misanthropy is a hatred of humankind), is now entrenched in our public discourse, our education system and social services. Misandry flies beneath most people’s radar, because we have become compliant in the acceptance of theories that have nothing to do with reality, and compliant in the speech codes that accompany that tendency.

Denigration of men in ways both casual and formal are a commonplace in society.

[…]For overt misandry, one has only to survey the industry around domestic violence. You could be forgiven for thinking that domestic violence is a one-way street, for that is certainly the impression one has from the fact that there are innumerable tax-funded shelters for abused women, none for abused men, unlimited funds for campaigns to raise consciousness around abused women, none for abused men. There is not a single social services agency or charity in Canada advertising “family services” that offers counseling, shelter or legal services for men who have been physically abused by women.

Her third point:

I want to talk about the implosion of the traditional family, which can be directly traced to feminism’s repudiation of normative marriage and the role of fathers as vital to a child’s psychological well-being. In June 2006 I wrote about the imbalance, in women’s favour, in the family law system: 90 per cent of contested custody suits end in sole custody awarded to the mother. Such a skewed percentage is unthinkable in any other branch of law.

The family law system is now systemically colonized by radical feminists. Their goal is the incremental legal eclipse of men’s influence over women’s spheres of “identity” interests, which includes children. To that end the custody issue has become a front line in the gender wars, supported by all feminist academics and institutional elites, by supine cabinet ministers and by feminist judges.

Either the majority of women will come to accept her views on feminism… or marriage, and consequently Western civilization, will end.

News

Who is really responsible for the abolition of marriage? Men or feminists?

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Consider this analysis of the roots of feminism by a moderate pro-abortion equity feminist named Wendy McElroy. In her article, she explains two views of marriage by the old-style “equity” feminists, who wanted equal opportunity, and the “gender” feminists, who want men and women to be identical in every way. The gender feminist view is the view that dominates law, policy and culture today.

So let’s look at the history of gender feminism.

Excerpt:

In the ’70s, [Germaine] Greer… declared a guerrilla war against dependency on men.

Greer called for the revolutionary breakdown of sex roles. She encouraged women to be promiscuous and otherwise sexually adventurous. She claimed that women have no idea of how much men hate them. Greer recounted stories of gang rape and brutality, and seemed to consider such violence to be the norm between men and women. Her solution: women should refuse to marry. If they do marry, they should refuse be monogamous or to accept the ‘trappings’ of marriage such as the husband’s last name, a shared tax return, a wedding ring….

[…]The truly radical assault on the family began with Kate Millett’s book Sexual Politics (1970). Although Millett’s views were extreme, she presented them in a dispassionate and well researched manner that lent her credibility. In dealing with male/female relations (‘sexual politics’), Millett dwelt almost obsessively on pornography and sado-masochistic literature, rather than on love, motherhood or successful marriages. To her, pornography seemed to epitomize the male/female relationship. And in attacking sexual politics, Millett attacked the entire structure of power in society; that is, patriarchy. Marriage was the agency that maintained the traditional pattern of man’s power over woman.

The article also mentions other widespread myths that cause women to hate and mistrust men, such as the myths about domestic violence. (She might also have brought up inflated rape statistics). But the main idea is that gender feminists wanted women to be sexually liberated, to work full-time outside the home, and to stop modesty, chastity and courtship. They wanted to destroy marriage because they believed that marriage oppressed women.

And the plan of the feminists worked. We now have a 40% out-of-wedlock birthrate, and a total breakdown of the family. Young women have problems from being raised without fathers, causing young women (and men) enormous damage. Somehow, the widespread adoption of feminist ideology caused men not to want to marry, either. Why did that happen? Well, men are not marrying because marriage is a terrible deal for men – men are not getting what they want from marriage.

Why do men marry anyway?

Men want to have the main role of protector and provider – it’s one of the main reasons why men marry. And men are more likely to want to marry if women are modest and chaste. Men want to have a special role in the home that is unique to them, and they want to be needed and valued. Men don’t want to be disarmed and have to call 911 when their home is invaded, and they want criminals and terrorists punished, too. Men want to have the freedom to teach the children right and wrong. Men don’t want to be taken to court by their wives for grounding misbehaving daughters, as in the Quebec case. Men want to keep most of what they earn, and to not pay sales tax on what they buy. Men want to choose schools for their children, and choose the amount of health care they need. Men don’t want to be forced to pay for other people – having one family is expensive enough. And men want to get respect from society for their decision to marry, to be faithful, and to raise children. And so on.

We need to get to the point where women understand exactly why men don’t want to be husbands and fathers anymore. Women need to ask themselves how to give men what they need in order to marry. Women need to investigate whether the anti-male myths that feminists want them to believe about men are really true in reality. Women need to fix their beliefs about men and study to understand men and to love men. Women need to take responsibility for their role in destroying marriage. Women need to take the initiative reverse feminism and repair the institution of marriage.

The feminist notion of marriage is that women can do anything they want at any time, and dismiss their obligations to meet the needs of their husbands and children. Men know that and that’s why they freely choose not to marry. Most women today are just not suitable for marriage and parenting because they have been too influenced by feminist ideology which is opposed to marriage. Women have to change themselves, by renewing their minds through study. Men aren’t afraid of marriage, we just don’t want to marry women who don’t understand what marriage is and aren’t ready to commit properly.

Mentoring

The importance of being the first to frame issues for your children

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Dan’s post at The Bumbling Genius on the importance of parents talking to their children FIRST about controversial issues related to Christianity is a must-read. The post drew 100 comments, so far. The post is here.

Excerpt:

The common assertion that “Christians are narrow-minded, or anti-science” is a logical fallacy called”Poisoning the Well”. Well poisoning is a preempted ad hominem attack that attempts to pre-program, or especially in this case to embed into society’s thinking a predisposition against a particular point of view.

My first exposure to the effectiveness of this tactic-from the outside looking in-occurred during discussions in my home with Jehovah’s Witnesses. It was here that I began to appreciate the persuasive power of this logical fallacy, and to develop a similar technique in teaching my own children in ways to help insulate them against this kind of mind poisoning by doing a little pre-poisoning of the well of their thinking myself. I hope to accomplish this by being the first to present the messages of our culture except that I do so under the microscope of scripture, logic, and objective truth. In this way I am the one setting the table, so to speak, for the future discussions my children will encounter involving their worldview.

Not unlike the tactics used by the JW’s and anti-Christ cultural apologist, as I teach my children I employ the key concept of “firsts.” For example: when an institution or media is the first to present a cultural issue, and also the first to present my response in a “closed-minded”, “Christian” caricatured stereotype, followed by their a pithy, high-browed, and cognitive dissonant response to that stereotype, then my children’s Well becomes poisoned against my teaching. Everything I as parent subsequently espouse may then be seen through the lens of that stereotype. On the other hand, if I am the first to present the tenets of those opposing worldviews along with a logical and realistic explanation as to why they are flawed, then I will have achieved the objective of firsts.

This is something Christian parents really need to think about. You want to inoculate your children against pressure from teachers and peers by discussing issues long before they are introduced in the classroom or the playground. And you should be on guard against other sources of sin and lies, too.