Stuart Schneiderman on the message sent to young women by radical third-wave feminists.
Excerpt:
If you yourself are wondering what women want, feminist author Hanna Rosin has the answer: women want to hook up.
Rosin believes that hookups advance the cause of feminism. Women who hook up are more likely to be immune to the siren song of husband, home and family.
If we ask what feminists want women to want, the answer is clear: feminists want women to repress their feminine mystique, the better to be good feminists.
They do not just want women to adhere to feminist ideology, but they want women to live their lives as feminists want them to live their lives.
Women’s liberation seems merely to be a way for feminists to run women’s lives. Having thrown off the shackles of the feminine mystique women are supposed to do what their feminist masters tell them to do.
Young women are more willing to submit to random sexual encounters with men they barely know because feminism told them to do so.
If these women are exposing themselves to repeated sexual traumas, then clearly the hookup culture is throwing women off of the family track and putting them squarely on the career track.
Rosin states it clearly:
To put it crudely, feminist progress right now largely depends on the existence of the hookup culture. And to a surprising degree, it is women—not men—who are perpetuating the culture, especially in school, cannily manipulating it to make space for their success, always keeping their own ends in mind. For college girls these days, an overly serious suitor fills the same role an accidental pregnancy did in the 19th century: a danger to be avoided at all costs, lest it get in the way of a promising future.
Rosin would have been more accurate if she said that it is feminists like her who are perpetuating this culture.
By warning women against serious suitors feminism is telling them to choose between hooking up or dating bad boys who will never cut it as husband material.
Like most of the Pied Pipers of feminism Rosin sees a “promising future” only in career. She is not against eventual marriage but she is fantasizing when she claims that women who have spent their twenties in a relationship daze will wake up one day and jump right into a wonderful relationship with a wonderful man.
In so saying, she is lying to young women.
If a woman has developed the skills necessary to navigate the hook up culture she will not be developing the skills necessary to conduct a relationship, no less a marriage. Better yet, if she had learned that suitable suitors are toxic she will not suddenly decide that she wants one of them to ravish her.
The psychic malformation she has suffered by living the feminist nightmare will preclude that kind of happy ending.
Read the second half of the post to see how young women who are taking this advice feel about it. They are doing it, but is it satisfying them?
Here is an article written by an academic feminist in the New York Times. (H/T Stuart Schneiderman)
Stuart exegetes the article:
In Bauer’s words: “If there’s anything that feminism has bequeathed to young women of means, it’s that power is their birthright. Visit an American college campus on a Monday morning and you’ll find any number of amazingly ambitious and talented young women wielding their brain power, determined not to let anything– including a relationship with some needy, dependent man– get in their way. Come back on party night, and you’ll find many of these same girls… wielding their sexual power, dressed as provocatively as they dare, matching guys drink for drink– and then hook up for hook up.”
Given the relatively lesser body mass of women compared with that of men, matching men drink for drink is a fool’s errand. Anyone who glorifies such behavior has completely lost touch with reality.
And why should Bauer be in awe of the fact that these girls can match men, hook up for hook up? If these women are so desirous of becoming unique individual self-creations, why should they be trying to emulate male behavior?
And let’s not overlook the piece of undisguised contempt for “some needy, dependent man” with whom these women might have relationships. The latest wave of feminism prefers hooking up to relationships.
According to Bauer, the party ends with said liberated empowered inebriated woman down on her knees. As Bauer so nicely expresses it: “When they’re on their knees in front of a worked-up guy they just met at a party, they genuinely feel powerful– sadistic even.”
Sometimes we get commenters who question whether feminism has anything to do with the behavior of women that we see today in college campuses. And to find out the truth, you have to read the elite feminists at the modern universities who have been grading the papers of women for the last 40 years. Was this alcohol-drenched hook-up culture unexpected by these elite academic feminists? On the contrary. It was their goal.
Feminists wanted to abolish the distinctions between men and women. They decided to achieve this by encouraging women to act like men. And the men they chose to emulate were alpha-male bad boys, since these are the men that women who don’t like marriage seem to really admire. Academic feminists like Bauer believe that women are happier now than they ever have been, with all this hooking up and being raised without fathers. They think they’ve won.
I think that women should go to college and work a couple of years before marrying and having children. I think that mothers should stay home with children younger than 6, at least, and maybe even stay home until the children are working. I am curious to know if any of my female readers were ever told by older women not to focus on finding a man in their 20s. Are young women really being told by older women to play the field and to have a good time and to not marry too soon? Because that’s bad advice. Men are most interested in marriage in their 20s once they get a marketable degree and a good-paying job that they’ve been in a few years straight.
WINTERY KNIGHT 