Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil. – Eric Hoffer
It’s fairly common these days to hear people marveling at the fact that neofeminists and religious fundamentalists agree on the prohibition of prostitution and porn, but actually it’s not remotely surprising. What causes these people’s confusion is that they have bought into the artificial and long-outmoded political framework of “right” and “left”, which was a poor fit to real political landscapes when it was first used in reference to the French Assembly more than 200 years ago and has become completely worthless since the rise of industrial welfare states in the 20th century. Because pre-industrial societies changed only slowly, the labels “liberal” and “conservative” actually meant something in the 1700s. But modern telecommunications created a cosmopolitan bazaar of ideas and industrialization made it possible to implement those ideas with astonishing speed, so trying to fit modern politics into an 18th-century dualism is as absurd and futile as attempting to describe modern technology using only the scientific terminology of that period.
Adherents of political dualism classify feminism as “leftist” or “liberal” because it seeks to replace much of the existing social order, but by this same standard we would have to classify Islamic militants as “liberals”…which I hardly think most people would. Dualists think of religion as inherently “conservative” (even when it wants to turn a society upside-down) because religion has been around for a while; it’s an “old” (therefore “conservative”) way of doing things. But as I pointed out in my column of April 26th, it’s a mistake to think of neofeminism as anything other than a religion:
Though [secular] religions concern themselves with physical reality and avoid talk of the soul, the Divine or other such esoteric concepts, they are yet religions because they insist on rigid adherence to a morality and interpretation of reality (i.e. an approved set of both “truth” and facts) derived entirely from knowledge revealed in sacred scriptures by the founders of the religion. The dogma of…neofeminism…must be accepted unquestioningly by adherents; dissidence is suppressed and any scientifically-sound facts which contradict the teachings are denied…the Scandinavian countries infected with institutionalized neofeminism are every bit as irrational and ideologically-driven as the staunchest theocracy.
Neofeminist tenets such as “social construction of gender” and the mystical interconnectedness of all women fly in the face of biology, psychology, physics and common sense, and as I said yesterday the idea that “humans are an exception to every single rule of mammalian biology is religion, not science; it’s no different from the fundamentalist denial of evolution.” Attempting to comprehend ardent feminism in general and neofeminism in particular as what it claims to be, a political philosophy, will leave a rational person scratching his head over the plenitude of contradictions. But when one understands it for what it actually is, a religion, it all falls into place. Now, this is all theoretical for me; though (like most girls my age) I went through a feminist stage in my teens, the kind of dogmatic feminism which qualifies as a religion has never really penetrated the Deep South, and even if it had I was far too critical a thinker to ever embrace its evident absurdities. But a couple of weeks ago I got an email from a friend of mine who had just read the March 25th column, and I found her “insider” viewpoint to be well worth sharing (with her kind permission):
I grew up with a lot of exposure to feminism. My stepmother is an ardent feminist with a big collection of feminist books, some of which I read…Second Wave feminism did explicitly preach that all women are interconnected in a giant sisterhood, and that this sisterhood is the only thing that can defeat the patriarchy. Women born since 1970, raised in bigger cities or suburbs, and college educated, were often taught in their late teens, if not sooner, that womanhood is a single entity. As ludicrous as it sounds to a sensible adult, I did find the idea appealing when I was 13 and I didn’t know any better. This appeals to the normal human desire for group membership, which is especially strong during the teen years, so many girls embraced the idea enthusiastically. Hence this idea of a super-group of all women soon became one of the defining characteristics of feminism.
Camille Paglia said in an interview: “Next, one of my major criticisms of Naomi [Wolf] is that she has drifted from any kind of ethnic affiliation. I have constantly said this about her, Susan Faludi, or Gloria Steinem: that these women are not identifiably anything. Feminism has become their entire metaphysical, religious, and cultural world view.” For women raised in liberal, mostly secular families, where there is no clear identification with one’s ethnicity or one’s family’s historical faith, feminism has become their substitute for religion. They react to any women who behaves in any way that is considered non- or anti-feminist the way religious fanatics react to apostates.
I got my first hint that there was something wrong with feminism from one of the essays in Sisterhood is Powerful [edited by Robin Morgan] called “The Tired Old Question of Male Children”, in which a lesbian advocated figuring out how to reproduce by parthenogenesis and then routinely aborting all male babies to create an all-female human race. At 13, I knew, there is something wrong with people who would even allow that to be included in their anthology, even if they don’t agree with it. But it wasn’t until a couple of years later that I really started questioning feminism…Many girls who are raised with these ideas never question them, and then they get these ideas massively reinforced by what they’re taught in college…
I think she’s bang on. Though the neofeminist leaders must be held accountable for their crimes against society in general and women in particular, the rank and file who parrot their dogma are no more culpable than fundamentalist Christian women who believe that the Bible is literal fact or conservative Muslim women who never question why they must hide their faces and figures under concealing garments. They have been taught not to think, and they learned their lessons well. So the predictable reaction of such an indoctrinated feminist to prostitution or porn is the same as that of her conventionally-religious sisters: she condemns it as sinful, and attacks any defense of it as blasphemy against the catechism which has been drummed into her.
I am the Friend whom Maggie quotes in this blog post. Hi, Maggie! I plan to become a regular here once I catch up on the old posts and choose a screen name.
Hi, sweetie! Glad to see you on board! 🙂
Oops! I accidentally posted in the middle of a sentence. I meant to say, I’m going to choose a name to use here, and in the meanwhile, I’ll use Friend.
Young girls raised with neofeminism are brainwashed because they don’t know anything else. “Patriarchy” is the root of all evil and “Sisterhood” is the one and only force for good in the world. They believe everything their feminist teachers and professors tell them because feminist academics are the anointed priesthood of the Sisterhood.
Sexual fantasies that are politically incorrect are a major source of guilt for neofeminist-brainwashed girls – especially any fantasies of being a submissive female with a dominant male. One of the reasons they react so furiously to pornography is that it portrays scenarios they feel guilty for being aroused by.
I am really enjoying your blog, especially all the other posters I’ve encountered here who are so bright, funny, and entertaining.
I think my readers really add a lot to the site, and I’m really glad you’re joining them!
It was observed some time ago that Marxism is a religion. It is a millenial religion too – after the revolution we will live in Paradise, or at least Utopia. Feminism follows the same pattern, only in Marxism entire classes must be wiped out. With radical feminists like the lesbian mentiond only want to get rid of half of humanity. How charitable!
That essay is a perfect example of the neofeminist ignorance of basic biology. Zygotes with the chromosome pattern XX develop into females, while those with the chromosome pattern XY develop into males. Gametes (sex cells, i.e. eggs or sperm) are haploid, that is they only carry half a complement of chromosomes, so while sperm can have either an X or Y chromosome, eggs can only have an X because women have no Y chromosome to donate. If we learn to produce diploid gametes (i.e. eggs with a full set of chromosomes) the resulting offspring would merely be clones of the mother – all female. If we learned how to fuse two eggs, each could only donate an X chromosome and the result would still be female. Result: no male babies to abort in the first place. Anyone who paid attention in high-school biology would know this, but as with fundamentalists rejecting evolution we can’t expect budding feminists to learn biology because it contradicts their dogma.
I made a mistake: “The Tired Old Question of Male Children by Anna Lee, from Lesbian Ethics Vol 1 No 2, 1985 is just a general lesbian screed against little boys and adult sons. Now I can’t remember the title and source of the essay that advocated abortion of male fetuses. I read so much feminist lit growing up that it’s all a blur.
Maggie, honestly my memory of that essay is so blurry I’m not sure exactly what it was about. Everything else I said still stands.
I don’t know how long ago Camille Paglia said what she did about Naomi Wolf, but Wolf today has come out strongly against Swedish state-feminism, and in particular has defended Julian Assange against what are clearly bogus charges made by the Swedish State.
I am strongly against false accusations of rape, because they trivialize the plight of REAL rape victims. These women accusing Assange are scum, as far as I’m concerned.
The interview was from 1995; I read it when my friend sent me the link, and one of the things Paglia mentions about Wolf is the way she changes her views as the wind blows. I would agree with this assessment; I remember how surprised I was when Wolf first came out with those statements about Assange and Sweden last year.
Naomi Wolf does change her views drastically.; in 2000 she was a campaign adviser to centrist liberal Democrat Al Gore, and in 2008 she campaigned for right wing Republican Ron Paul.
Dear Friend, please note that Ron Paul doesn’t FIT with many in the Republican Party and the leadership of the Republican Party hates him (which I see as a huge plus when looking overall at how the Republican Party has degenerated since it started). Paul is for decriminalization of drugs and prostitution. He isn’t for them for himself (him and I are the same in this area), but is for decriminalization. He’s NOT part of the neo-conservative ###*** and isn’t the type who loves to literally order anyone else around when it comes to life choices. It isn’t always a bad thing to change your views drastically. Somtimes things so big happen to us (sometimes things we had nothing to do with either) that cause big changes and these can be very positive also. Thanks for listening.
I think Wolf’s defense of Assange if more of a support of wikileaks and far less any budding sensibility on issues.
… the rank and file who parrot their dogma are no more culpable than fundamentalist Christian women who believe that the Bible is literal fact or conservative Muslim women who never question why they must hide their faces and figures under concealing garments.
You are being very charitable here. I’m less so; I believe that no matter what upbringing a person has, he/she is responsible for sorting what what makes sense and what is obvious BS. This is especially true when s/he is engaging in religion-approved persecution of “the Other”, who amazingly enough always takes human form at least part of the time, which is convenient if one wants some witches to burn, etc.
It could be argued that if followers of a religion can be at least partially excused for buying in to what they were fed as children, so too can leaders be excused, for the same reasons. I’m not willing to excuse either group.
Generally, I don’t worry about the sheep because they can as easily be led one way as another; it’s the leaders who need to be, as the late, great Douglas Adams put it, “up against the wall when the revolution comes”.
Was it wrong, then, to prosecute low-level prison guards who had taken part in the murder of Jews (and others) in Germany? They were, as they claimed, “just following orders.” With that fact on top of being sheep rather than leaders, they might have had a double chance of being excused legally. There are scholars who have asserted that the prosecution of such people was immoral, but I don’t buy it.
In my book, anyone who voices support for evil actions, anyone who stands in the crowd and yells “Crucify him!” is morally and legally culpable for what follows. It is, after all, the followers who give a leader his power. Without the support of at least a sizable minority of German citizens, Hitler would have been just another madman standing on a street corner spewing hateful trash, and the mass murders which followed his rise to power would have existed only in his fevered brain.
I considered that very question in my column of March 5th.
I need to find time to read all of your columns! The one you reference is right on target in my view. It does not absolve the foot soldiers who are by disposition sheep and by vocation “just following orders.” So when in today’s column you use the phrase “are no more culpable”, perhaps we agree there there is a significant amount of culpability in both halves of your comparison.
Sailor Barsoom comments to your March 5th column, “I’m a lot quicker to forgive those following orders than those giving them.” I’m not sure. For every set of gullibilities in the population, there will arise a “leader” to exploit them. The tendency of society to descend into despotism will be broken (if it ever is) only when the populace as a whole is better informed than it ever has been, and certainly much better informed than today’s Reality TV generation.
Of course, I’m right there with you when you say that evil leaders should be put “up against the wall.” While they’re standing there, we’ll give them a DARN good talking-to! 😉
Starting on July 11th, my column will contain a new feature named “one year ago today”, which will contain a link to the column from that day last year and often a few sentences of update or additional commentary. I figure it’ll be an easy way to draw newer readers’ attention to older columns without the daunting proposition of slogging through all of them one after the other!
Does this “up against the wall” thing mean any kind of violence against people? I’m wondering.
It’s a reference to people being executed by firing squad. Such are usually place up against a wall, ergo…
Dear Emily Hemingway, I’m HOPING when people on here say this they also want ALL of these people to have a fair trial before being executed?
I personally don’t want any sort of bloodbath. I just want to defang the thugs so that I can live my life as I choose without their endless meddling. The only time violence is justified is when there is an immediate threat of injury or death from an aggressor. Example: a violent gang of screaming criminals is pounding your front door down. If you kill them, that’s justifiable homicide.
Laura, speaking only for myself, I use the expression as a colorful way of saying “are held accountable”. Speaking only for myself, I’d just as soon send them to Coventry as put ’em in front of a firing squad, but revolutions often take shortcuts. The important thing, as JdL points out, is making sure they’re “defanged”.
No, Laura, Maggie actually means she’s fondling her gun and Googling Mitt Romney’s address as we speak. And then she is going to bathe in the blood while doing the hokey-pokey and cackling in mad glee.
You’re a sweet girl, Laura, but sometimes you’re kind of silly.
While it comes from vivid origins, “when they are up against the wall” is just another way of saying “when those dirty rats have been brought to justice/made to pay for their crimes”.
@Emily, the hokey-pokey and cackling in mad glee: LOL! 😀
But yes, exactly. It’s just a colorful way of saying that. 🙂
Just stumbled across this blog via Maggie’s article on the types of prostitutes in ancient Rome, posted on Feministe. Interesting blog, that. This blog seems a bit more… open range, with the posts. Refreshing. The topic on world view being derived from early childhood inculcation to dogma is in my mind the core issue, regardless of stance; feminist, religionist or any other ‘ist’ or ‘ism’ that continue to be re-birthed with fresh conscripts in every new era.
JDL’s line “It is, after all, the followers who give a leader his power.” says it perfectly. Then and now. In today’s world of slick television marketing and propaganda machines we call news, we as the social body have lost the ability to think objectively as a people. We have been subdivided into social categories that pit us against each other, and reduced to individuals for every social ‘have to have’ item, including all the fun techy toys right down to our food, packaged now in almost bite sized containers. We have become nothing more than well trained lab subjects with the label “Consumer”. It is easy to fool the masses when the individuals making up the masses have little identity beyond being “buyers of stuff”. Perhaps I am being naive, possibly just being silly, but as consumers, we hold the power of the purse, as for women, they have way more power than they know. Remember the Greek women who made it clear to their men, that if said men wanted sex in the future, they had better think twice about their actions. Worked quite well from the historical record. Ladies, thoughts on that one?
I wonder how planning to exterminate the male sex is ethically any better than planning to exterminate a given “race” of people.
But it certainly is grist to the mill of science fiction writers! It’s fascinating to speculate how an all-female human race would develop – especially after the memory of men faded from the memory of all but specialist historians and scientists. Presumably, like the Marxist state, feminism would wither away once Utopia had been attained…
Oh, it’s OK to exterminate bad people. And don’t worry: people with power would never make a mistake about who the bad people are.
OK, now that the sarcasm’s out of the way…
Edgar Rice Burroughs did create an all-female race of beings who reproduced artificially: the Mahars of Pellucidar. They… weren’t very nice.
What does this tell us about human beings, should What’s-Her-Face achieve her dream of a maleless world? Well, not very much. The Mahars are fictional, and so they tell us more about Burroughs in particular than about human beings in general. Also, they’re psychic pterodactyls, so it’s to extrapolate from them to human beings.
Whiptail lizards are all female, but again, it’s hard to extrapolate from reptiles to humans. For the record, whiptails do engage in lesbian lizard sex.
I’d like to add here that whiptail lizards are not fictional. This may not have been clear in my above post, where I skipped from Mahars directly to whiptails. But they (whiptails, not Mahars) really do exist, right here in what we generally call the real world.
“If we learn to produce diploid gametes (i.e. eggs with a full set of chromosomes) the resulting offspring would merely be clones of the mother – all female.”
Thanks for the simple, clear explanation, Maggie. So not only would they be dispensing with men – they would actually be un-inventing sex itself! How very cool, and how thoroughly appropriate!
Girls raised with neofeminism live in conflict with themselves. Natural impulses rooted in female biology have to be repressed because they don’t fit the script. Hence these supposedly “liberated” girls often feel deep shame and practice extreme secrecy about their sexual desires. They’ve been told they should want a “sensitive guy” (read: wimp who is easy to control) and they wonder why they don’t get turned on by this type of man. They feel attracted to “bad boys” thinking that what attracts them is the “badness” when what really attracts them is the masculinity, and they’ve never been allowed any concept of morally upright masculinity because according to neofeminism, masculinity is inherently harmful and dangerous.
I’ll never forget my first encounter with feminist fundamentalism. I had a feminist philosophy professor and we were getting to the part about women being forced to live stay the home until modern times. I pointed out — not unreasonably I think — that a) before modern times, tending a home and raising a family was a full time job and then some and women have advantages over men in that regard (I didn’t know about the Law of Comparative Advantage, but that’s what I was stating); b) if a woman wanted to have a few kids reach adulthood, she had to spend most of her adult life pregnant or trying to be, since miscarriage and mortality rates were so huge.
Now maybe I was wrong. But what I got was not an argument, but a response as though I had blasphemed. The reaction was that of a fundamentalist responding to evolution or cosmology. To even talk about the role of technology in changing gender roles was to deny the power of the women’s movement.
This indoctrination starts early, by the way. My first week of college, we had a teach-in about sexual harassment and rape which stated that (1) all men are potential rapists; (2) if someone thinks they’ve been harassed, they’ve been harassed and (3) sex with an intoxicated (not drunk) woman is rape. Being a freshman who had never even kissed a girl, it had a definite effect on me. I can only imagine how the women felt hearing that.
It really would be simple to fix 90% of the worlds problems by kiling of 75% of the worlds males and 33% of the worlds females. You’d wind up with 2.3 women for every man. Wars over resorces would stop over night, overcrowing and resulting pandemics would disapear, with males so scarce a resorce that they cant do anything realy dangerous women would have to assume the primary provider role and within 25yrs I’dd be willing to bet you’d see mothers aborting females in an atempt to bump up the number if men, neo feminism wouldnt rear its head for a least a few centuries.
Emily Hemingway said,
And then she is going to bathe in the blood while doing the hokey-pokey and cackling in mad glee.
I’ve heard that the hokey pokey was what it was all about. I never got that. Apparently I was missing the bathing in blood and cackling part of the ritual.
Tom Welsh said,
they would actually be un-inventing sex itself! How very cool, and how thoroughly appropriate!
Given that sexual reproduction is thought to be an evolutionary response to thwart pathogens by scrambling DNA every generation, their brave new world might just collapse into constant pandemics culling their clonic populations. At what point does a clonal monoculture make all intimacy a form of incest?
Maggie,
I didn’t see this in any of your previous posts. While I’m not of the right polarity to make this method work for me, anyone who gets out of law school without crushing student loans gets kudos from me.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-06-10/news/ct-met-lawyer-prostitution-charges-20110609_1_prostitution-felony-illinois-attorney-registration
Notice how “doing it” within 1000 feet of a school turns a “misdemeanor to a felony.” And they didn’t even say if school was in session when the deed took place.
So it was a consensual act between consenting adults? Welll we know what to do about that.
Argh.
If I were the dictatrix I would make use of the passive voice a crime, and use of the passive voice within 1000 feet of a school or library (or in any place children could read it) a felony. “Police say they were investigating another case when they found evidence that linked Bajaj to prostitution that occurred in August 2010.” It takes a criminal mind to come out with crap like “prostitution that occurred”. 🙁
So passive voice is the sort of thing up with which you would not put?
I do try not to end sentences with prepositions (har-de-har-har, Winston), but the legitimate uses of the passive voice are very limited indeed. That, however, doesn’t stop cops, military officials, politicians and others who want to make it look as though they weren’t to blame for abominations (“the suspect was shot by 35 rounds”) from using it nigh-constantly. And it rises from just clumsy construction to an actual error when a noun denoting an activity is used as a subject with no mention of the actor. “Linked to prostitution that occurred” makes it sound like she was the prostitute, thus prejudicing the reader, when actually it might mean that she witnessed the act, or drove the hooker to a call, or hired a girl for her boyfriend. The passive voice hides the actual meaning while still making an accusation, and that should not be legal. You want power? Fine, but it’s going to come with accountability.
Seems fair enough. After all, police are always wanting to hold the rest of us accountable for everything in sight and a few things not.
Oh goodness. The distinction between the passive and active voice is one of emphasis, that is, what the attention of the reader is drawn towards. If one desires to speak concisely on the experience or even pathology of a subject, it is often desirable to employ the passive voice. There are a myriad of other rhetorical reasons one may desire to use to passive; it would be a discussion unto itself. In some, typically older, languages, the passive may be formed without auxiliary verbs, so common in English. It would be incorrect to say that the passive construction was formed merely as an afterthought to the active.
Some languages even make use out of a “middle” voice which is something rather like the reflexive, but a little more complicated. It is a matter of some contention to linguists, but it appears the passive construction may have been actually derived from the middle voice.
Merely because some may use the passive voice to obfuscate is not reason to condemn its use outright.
Certainly there are legitimate uses for the passive voice, but the police aren’t familiar with them. Passive-voice construction is best avoided in English except by someone who is a strong and capable enough writer to use it properly, but unfortunately the opposite is generally the case.
P.S. – I hope you understood that my saying use of the passive should be a crime was sarcastic hyperbole designed to mock the authoritarian desire to criminalize things which offend them but hurt no one.
It has just come to my attention that the middle voiced is had by some languages.
Ug… I’m not any good at this at all.
It seems to me the taste for the active voice is modern. If you read novels like War and Peace, the passive voice is very common, yet it’s a masterpiece. In a long piece of writing it’s nearly impossible to avoid using the verb ‘was’.
You can’t use translated novels as a comparison, though; different languages have different patterns. The active voice has been preferred in English for quite a long time now.
Thanks, Maggie. You seem to be well educated in English. Here’s another question: Back in 1953 (I believe) the American poet Conrad Aiken won either a Noble Prize or a Pulitzer Prize for his poetry. He was in English poetry anthologies right up until the 1970’s, then suddenly seems to have lost status. Nowadays hardly anyone reads him (though his poetry is excellent). How do critics change their evaluation of a poet over the years?
Political pressure. Since anthologies (especially those used in schools) are under considerable pressure to exercise a sort of critical “affirmative action”, some very good white male poets and writers are evicted from the canon in favor of second-rate female or nonwhite poets or authors. Important nonwhite and female contributors have always been included, but nowadays it’s all about the bean-counting and the numbers must be “balanced”. This too shall pass, and future critics will rediscover the good and ignore the lackluster.
[…] are those who A) believe in the ridiculous “left wing-right wing” dichotomy which “was a poor fit to real political landscapes when it was first used in reference to the French Assemb…”; B) accept fanatical cults’ propaganda about their motives as truthful even if it demonstrably […]
I’m sorry MM but I think that this is somehow just all too slick and easy an assessment of things all round, for quite typically, at no point does it seem to ever show any curiosity regarding the possible, even ultimate sources of one’s very own moral enlightenment, that which has so happily sprung us from hapless intellectual bondage, &c &c… One is just too busy declaiming on how ‘religious’ others are to even seriously think on this for a while… I trust that you are not silly enough to believe that your freeeeedom proceeds purely and solely from the acquisition en route of this or that salient little scientifically-based fact, and trust also that we will not haul out the the grim old “troll” saw just because I have decided this day to put my shiniest spanner in the HC works to see what happens..