feminism

Camille Paglia: The Modern Campus Cannot Comprehend Evil

Camille Paglia

Nice short essay in Time on the campus rape panic, and the promotion of the Victorian “fragile flowers of womanhood” idea under new feminist management. It’s really all about getting 5% more votes from young single women, of course, but it’s dangerous and illiberal. It’s a short read, but here’s the best bit:

Wildly overblown claims about an epidemic of sexual assaults on American campuses are obscuring the true danger to young women, too often distracted by cellphones or iPods in public places: the ancient sex crime of abduction and murder. Despite hysterical propaganda about our “rape culture,” the majority of campus incidents being carelessly described as sexual assault are not felonious rape (involving force or drugs) but oafish hookup melodramas, arising from mixed signals and imprudence on both sides.

Colleges should stick to academics and stop their infantilizing supervision of students’ dating lives, an authoritarian intrusion that borders on violation of civil liberties. Real crimes should be reported to the police, not to haphazard and ill-trained campus grievance committees.

Too many young middleclass women, raised far from the urban streets, seem to expect adult life to be an extension of their comfortable, overprotected homes. But the world remains a wilderness. The price of women’s modern freedoms is personal responsibility for vigilance and self-defense.

Current educational codes, tracking liberal-Left, are perpetuating illusions about sex and gender. The basic Leftist premise, descending from Marxism, is that all problems in human life stem from an unjust society and that corrections and fine-tunings of that social mechanism will eventually bring utopia. Progressives have unquestioned faith in the perfectibility of mankind.

The horrors and atrocities of history have been edited out of primary and secondary education except where they can be blamed on racism, sexism, and imperialism — toxins embedded in oppressive outside structures that must be smashed and remade. But the real problem resides in human nature, which religion as well as great art sees as eternally torn by a war between the forces of darkness and light….

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

Feminism’s Heritage: Freedom vs. Special Protections

Suffragettes – jebkinnison.com

Peter Wright at AVFM pointed out the division among early feminists between those who wanted freedom to enjoy the rights and opportunities of men (voting, professional employment, equal treatment under the law) and those who wanted special treatment (exemptions from military service, favorable alimony and custody rules, lighter criminal sentences, lowered physical qualification standards for physical jobs.) He pointed me to the work of Ernest Belfort Bax, an early (1913) men’s rights advocate:

Modern Feminism rose slowly above the horizon. Modern Feminism has two distinct sides to it: (1) an articulate political and economic side embracing demands for so-called rights; and (2) a sentimental side which insists in an accentuation of the privileges and immunities which have grown up, not articulately or as the result of definite demands, but as the consequence of sentimental pleading in particular cases. In this way, however, a public opinion became established, finding expression in a sex favouritism in the law and even still more in its administration, in favour of women as against men.

These two sides of Modern Feminism are not necessarily combined in the same person. One may, for example, find opponents of female suffrage who are strong advocates of sentimental favouritism towards women in matters of law and its administration. On the other hand you may find, though this is more rare, strong advocates of political and other rights for the female sex, who sincerely deprecate the present inequality of the law in favour of women. As a rule, however, the two sides go together, the vast bulk of the advocates of “Women’s Rights” being equally keen on the retention and extension of women’s privileges. Indeed, it would seem as though the main object of the bulk of the advocates of the “Woman’s Movement” was to convert the female sex into the position of a dominant sexe noblesse. The two sides of Feminism have advanced hand in hand for the last two generations, though it was the purely sentimental side that first appeared as a factor in public opinion.” — The Fraud of Feminism – Chapter I: Historical (1913)

Bax is part of the “patriarchal” reaction to early feminism — these men were horrified that the suffocating sentimentality of women and what they thought was woman’s overly emotional reaction to issues would, with women’s suffrage and increasingly equal roles in the world, lead to disaster and the end of civilization as they knew it. For a pop culture model, imagine Professor Henry Higgins of My Fair Lady — grumpy, male chauvinist, orderly intellectual. Bax was quite reasonably complaining that the law had already started to bend to favor women over men in some areas (divorce, criminal punishment) for sentimental reasons, while feminists continued to push for even more special treatment, at the same time demanding equality where it would favor women. WWI is what actually ended the fin de siècle order of the world, but feminism continued, contributing in the US to the Progressive movement and its errors (e.g., Prohibition and eugenics.)

Feminism as a movement continued and expanded, each victory leading to more issues needing its attention. Public sympathy for the rational goal of equal legal and professional treatment coexisted with the reservoir of sentimental feeling for women and ingrained desires to help mothers and children, which affected decisions on governmental support and handling of divorce. Enlightened and empowered women joined academia and government in large numbers, until today they are dominant in some departments and fields.

But the split identified by Bax is still there.

Feminist thinker Naomi Wolf tried to influence the future of feminism with her 1994 book Fire With Fire: The New Female Power and How to Use It. From the Amazon page:

[T]he book argues that women should renounce “victim feminism,” which casts them as sexually pure, fragile, beleaguered creatures whose problems are all the fault of men. As an alternative, Wolf outlines an anti-dogmatic “power feminism” which sees women as no better and no worse than men, celebrates female sexuality and encourages women to claim their individual voices through a variety of tactics. These include “resource groups” for sharing contacts and increasing access to information and services; consumer campaigns; and pressure on the media to alter their portrayals of women. Wolf theorizes that little girls, as much as boys, have fantasies of absolute dominion but learn to repress their “will to power” at a very early age. Wolf here sketches a psychological road map designed to help women deal with their ambivalence about success, power, equality and money.

I don’t agree with Naomi Wolf much of the time, but in this she was on the right side: a feminism directed toward remaining real issues of equality, empowerment, and respect would be far less authoritarian and far less harmful to women’s partners in continuing civilization, men. But the cadres embedded in Woman’s Studies departments, government, and NGOs were not interested in giving up the easy demonization of men and continued to seek refuge in grievance, victimhood, and moral superiority.

One of the problems with Social Justice Warriors and activists generally is their myopic focus on their own culture and government, applying their search for ever-smaller irritants (“microaggressions” and remaining disparities in treatment) to the most progressive societies on the planet while ignoring the far more serious maltreatment of women, gays, religious and ethnic minorities, and poor people in other countries and cultures around the world. They elevate and sentimentalize other cultures as more “authentic” and seem to assign blame for most problems there to the imperialism and interventionism of Western countries. I would agree that societies on the other side of the world should not be lightly trifled with and Western countries have been foolishly intervening for centuries, but the treatment of women and minorities in those places was in place long before Western powers showed up. And yet activists spend far more time and energy on lobbying government to pressure businesses to provide free birth control and weaken standards of proof in university rape cases than they do on improving girl’s schools in Islamic countries or combatting female circumcision.

Today’s column in Toronto’s Globe and Mail by Margaret Wente continues the effort to get away from “victim’s studies” thinking:

Do we still need feminism? According to many younger women, we do not. For the past few weeks, a Tumblr hashtag campaign called #WomenAgainstFeminism has been stirring up a lot of angst in the Twitter/blogosphere. As part of the campaign, young women submit selfies with handwritten signs that say: “I don’t need feminism because [fill in reason here].” The reasons include things like: “My self-worth is not directly tied to the size of my victim complex!” “I love being an engineer, but I’d rather just be Mom.” “I like men looking at me when I look good.” “Feminism has become a pseudonym for bullying.” And, on a lighter note, “How the [bleep] am I supposed to open jars and lift heavy objects without my husband?”

Naturally, this campaign has been like a red flag to a bull, if I may use that expression. Shock, horror, ridicule and satire have ensued, along with a great deal of reproachful head-shaking from those who say that women who reject feminism are ignorant and misinformed.

To make sense of the debate, the CBC’s The Current convened a panel. It was the type of panel that muddied these already turbid waters even more. I felt sorry for the moderator, Jeffrey Kofman, who was stuck trying to elucidate the views of three not-very-interesting young women (two feminist, one anti). They left me longing for the days of Gloria Steinem and Germaine Greer – fierce, magnificent, passionate, witty lionesses who would put any modern feminist to shame. They never stooped to academic jargon. They never spoke in uptalk, either, a mannerism these panelists unfortunately had not shaken. It’s hard to take anybody seriously when she’s droning on about oppression, colonialism and imperialism, especially when she’s uptalking.

This being the CBC, the audience reaction was predictable. Older, affluent, liberal, second-wave females generally agreed that we all have feminists to thank for our freedoms, and the anti-feminists shouldn’t forget it. Also, they protested, feminism has been badly misunderstood. It is not a bunch of shrill, hairy-legged man-haters, as the antis seem to think. Any younger woman who knew the slightest thing about feminism would be one!

So how come they’re not? (Most polls say fewer than half of younger women identify with feminism.) One big reason is: We won. Thanks for your hard work, Gloria and Germaine. The heavy lifting’s over. You can rest on your laurels now.

Another reason is that #WomenAgainstFeminism is essentially right. There is a hard core of misandry and victim-culture in modern feminism that is deeply disturbing. #WomenAgainstFeminism is in part a reaction to the #YesAllWomen campaign, which began in reaction to the murder rampage of Elliot Rodger last May. The lonely misogynist – who killed two women and four men, before killing himself – was cast as a symbol of the worldwide war against women. As one Facebook comment (quoted in Time by Sarah Miller) said: “If you don’t think this is about misogyny there is something wrong with you.”

Modern feminism has split into two distinct strands. The mild-mannered mainstream version, having achieved most of its objectives for equality (and then some: upward of 60 per cent of postsecondary graduates are now women) is focusing its efforts on ever more elitist issues, such as the lopsided gender split in Silicon Valley and the shortage of women on corporate boards. Will all due respect to the problems of the one per cent, I do not think these are the types of issues that will send young women to the barricades.

The leftist, postmodernist strand of feminism insists that women are still oppressed, and the world’s still stacked against us, and there is basically no difference between the rape epidemic in India and the one in North America. One example of this thinking is The Guardian’s Jessica Valenti, who, in response to #WomenAgainstFeminism, wrote: “[D]enying that women are a victimized class is simply wrong. What else would you call a segment of the population who are systematically discriminated against in school, work and politics? How would you describe a population whose bodies are objectified to the point of dehumanization? Women are harassed, attacked and sexually assaulted with alarming regularity in America and around the world.” This is a belief system rather than a depiction of reality, and, as with all belief systems, there’s no point arguing about it with the faithful.

Views like this wouldn’t matter much, except that they have real-life consequences, as Cathy Young has pointed out in Time. One is the destructive “rape culture” myth that has gripped campuses across North America, along with the meme – utterly fictitious – that one in five women will be sexually assaulted by the time she gets her degree. This claim is on the face of it absurd, but it has spawned an epidemic of victimology and abuse of due process that will take a generation to undo.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

Red Pill Women — Female MRAs

Doris Lessing, on Men

In the posts Life Is Unfair! The Militant Red Pill Movement and Madmen, Red Pill, and Social Justice Wars I discussed the Red Pill movement, a kind of men’s reaction to modern extreme feminism. Red Pill ideology, hammered out by a variety of more-or-less intellectual leaders online, is based on some partly-baked evolutionary psychology mixed with quite reasonable grievances about how the liberation of women starting in the 1920s turned into a male-bashing, male-stereotyping cult in the new millenium, and how this new feminist grievance bubble portrays women as deserving of equal treatment when it is to their advantage, but asks for special treatment when it is not, and ignores continuing disparities in divorce and child custody decrees. The posts Modern Feminism: Victim-Based Special Pleading and Purge: the Feminist Grievance Bubble cover that aspect. Another post of interest, Stable is Boring? “Psychology Today” Article on Bad Boyfriends discussed the tendency of modern women (and men) to avoid commitment for years while engaging in sex with partners chosen for sexual magnetism, then settling down with a more stable, more likely provider when their youthful sex appeal fades — a phenomenon called “alpha fucks — beta bucks.”

I am not a “social conservative.” I don’t believe there was some Golden Age in the past where everyone was happier because of rigid sex roles and societal expectations of early and forever-after marriage. Those customs and expectations were evolved under completely different conditions, and wasted the potential of many people. Nevertheless, there is an important lesson in enlightened conservatism, which acknowledges that self-organizing, evolved systems should not be torn down without understanding how they operated, and that top-down, government-sponsored innovations in social arrangements might have unintended consequences the “social engineers” fail to foresee. This post, “Hunger Games”: Soft Oppression Destroys the Poor, gets at the destruction of communities after well-meaning meddling in their affairs by distant governments — not understanding the incentives and social signals in place, then overwhelming them with impersonal “aid” and destroying the existing system of financial and moral support (by family, friends, churches, and community businesses and organizations) in favor of dependence on government (or government-created black markets.)

I’m old and I’m married, and so these wars between extremes don’t affect me. My personal history is far from mainstream and I certainly didn’t benefit from the old-school rules — my father left when I was 5, and I had to work very hard to grow myself up without a lot of guidance outside of books. But because I am largely self-created, I can probably see more objectively than most. And I can see the Red Pill guys’ point, as well as note the lingering injustices to women that fuel some extreme feminist posturing. A social movement that has achieved some or all of its aims (women are free to enter any profession, women are competitive in political races, women’s salaries in exactly comparable jobs are very similar to men’s, rape is taken very seriously) will tend to persist while fixating on and exaggerating ever-smaller issues until reaching a point of absurdity, and the grievance bubble once begun goes on until the proper response to it is ridicule.

I’m not the only one who sees this. Sites like Women Against Feminism and the associated hashtag #womenagainstfeminism explore many younger women’s rejection of the anti-male extreme feminist position, and assert their strength as individuals and respect for men as partners. Where original feminism was a fight for freedom, modern feminism has turned into a fight for restrictions on freedom.

Vice has a great longread on “The Women of the Men’s Rights Movement.” by Alex Brook Lynn. Notable excerpts below:

It was just after she’d had her first child that Janet Bloomfield realized she didn’t want to go back to work and pay some nanny to raise her kids. She had gone to college to study film theory and assumed, like practically every American woman does, that she would start a career before marrying and having a family, but that wasn’t how things turned out. She met a man, fell in love, and stayed at home.

She didn’t feel ashamed of this decision, nor did she feel denied in any way—a close college friend of hers nicknamed Pixie had wound up in a similar situation when her son was diagnosed with some severe health issues. But other people, especially other women, apparently had a problem with Janet’s choices. She felt that her friends were disdainful of her and thought she was crazy or stupid to rely on a man for her income; they insinuated that her husband would “trade her in for a younger woman,” and that she would wind up broke and abandoned.

Janet and Pixie started writing letters back and forth while Pixie’s son was in intensive care, where Pixie wasn’t allowed to bring her cell phone. They talked about how housewives had fallen out of cultural favor, and about how Janet was a “victim of parental alienation,” as she would later say—her parents had gone through a vicious divorce and her mother had turned her and her three brothers against her father. In October 2012 these paper and ink musings became a blog, JudgyBitch.com, with Janet writing rants and Pixie doing the graphics and maintaining the back end.

As she was starting the website, Janet was searching for answers as to why her peers disliked stay-at-home moms and why her mother had had the power to separate her from her father. She found herself exploring a part of the internet that was full of complicated theories about social hierarchies, propaganda, and gender bias, in the process reading story after story of men being discriminated against in family courts and custody battles. Respect for traditional family structures was waning. The very concept of the family, in fact, was now regarded as a means by which men oppress women.

As she read more, disparate threads started clicking together—all these things were the result of a systematic vilification of the male gender. The misinformation, the lies, the poison, it all came back to radical feminism. Even her film-theory courses had taught her to watch movies through a feminist filter. She gradually acquired a set of beliefs with the help of a loosely organized online community of thinkers and writers called the Men’s Rights Movement (MRM).

Her new worldview ran counter to the way people were supposed to think and talk about gender and society. As she used her website to strike back against feminism, people got angry, which was fine with her—the more animosity she got for pushing boundaries, the more boundaries she pushed.

Today Janet is a slender blond just entering middle age who’s far more affable in person than on the web, where she is fierce, self-assured, and cutting. Even as she adopted her strident views, she didn’t share them with her neighbors in her small town out of fear of the imagined consequences. “My husband could lose his job,” she told me. “I don’t need all my kids’ teachers, and all the parents of their little friends, treating them differently because of my views.”

…

Later that year, three of these women formed the Honey Badger Brigade, a website and podcast on which they discussed men’s rights, feminism, and geek culture. Janet became a regular on the podcast, putting her at the heart of the YouTube channels, blogs, vlogs, subreddits, Facebook groups, and Twitter accounts that make up the MRM. Though the movement is all about defending men and boys from social misconceptions, discrimination, and feminism, in an odd twist it’s the female activists—pissed off, extremely well read, and spoiling for an argument—who are driving the conversation.

…

The most common concerns of the MRM [Men’s Rights Movement] include:

(1) The family court system, which activists say frequently forces men to pay too much alimony while not considering their feelings when awarding the custody of children;

(2) Government programs that assist only women rather than both genders, especially those that give aid to female victims of sexual assault—MRAs claim that men who suffer the same abuse are often ignored;

(3) The right to opt out of raising a child, since, some MRAs say, women can opt out of a pregnancy;

(4) False rape accusations, which MRAs think don’t get enough attention from a culture increasingly inclined to believe women who say horrible things about men;

(5) Fighting back against radical feminism, the ultimate evil as far as the movement is concerned.

These aren’t mainstream issues, but the modern-day MRM has acquired a constituency online that its forebears couldn’t have dreamed of. “We are growing exponentially because of the difference in modern communications,” Janet told me.

The internet, of course, has made it possible for people to broadcast their words to the entire globe without the restrictions that come with finding a publisher or being part of a larger organization. The floodgates are open, and everyone is free to write and disseminate long-winded manifestos, form tough-talking groups, and break away from them into increasingly splintered factions when disagreements arise.

Thus, you’ve got run-of-the-mill MRAs like most of the readers of AVFM, but you’ve also got a constellation of related online phenomena: the pickup artists (PUAs), who concoct elaborate systems for interacting with and seducing women; the anti-PUAs, who feel ripped off by PUA gurus promising to get shy young men laid but don’t deliver (they achieved notoriety recently because Elliot Rodger, the Isla Vista shooter, frequented one of their forums); Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOWs), who have vowed to stay away from women entirely, often after being sexually traumatized or otherwise abused; and Red Pill, a catchall term for those who see the world as being dominated by women and oppressive to men, and exhibit some of the most extreme language of anyone affiliated with the MRM.

The Latest from Jeb Kinnison:

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, In Kindle and trade paperback.] The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of Death by HR

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat. For it is now fairly impossible for any company not to erect an HR wall as a legal requirement of business with the sole purpose of keeping government diversity compliance enforcers as well as unethical lawyers from pillaging their operating capital through baseless lawsuits… It is time to turn the tide against this madness and Death by HR is an important research tool… to craft counter-revolutionary tactics for dealing with the HR parasites our government has empowered to destroy us. All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

Purge: the Feminist Grievance Bubble

Grievance Bubble

“Rape Culture” and the politics of offense are much in the news lately; I’m doing some work on these “grievance bubbles” (closed communities of hyper-sensitive ideologues that try to control thought and eject heretics) and Reason has a recommended post which puts much of this into perspective:

The message, as Freddie de Boer wrote, is that only some women “deserve” the protection of feminism. Those who fail to fall in line with the left-feminist consensus du jour are branded “bad feminists or, ludicrously, actually misogynists.”

The message of this Twitter mob is that feminism means women are not free to form their own opinions, not about the right language to discuss rape and rape threats, not about the public nature of public tweets, not about how to honestly criticize others in a productive way. “Because no woman with an opinion online goes unpunished, Kilpatrick was swiftly, crudely, and constantly attacked. See, because Kilpatrick is a woman, she is required by this style of “leftist” to have certain opinions, and since she violated that expectation, she has been and continues to be attacked, being accused of not caring about sexual violence against women. In these insults, arguments that Kilpatrick is a bad feminist go hand in hand with sexism against her.”

De Boer called these attitudes “palpably sexist” in their assumption that women have an obligation to hold any particular viewpoint. But this is what good “male allies” do these days: accept whichever feminist narrative implies the most oppression and then swoop in to parrot the terms and save the day. Nevermind those of us who both consider ourselves feminists and reject prevailing progressive victimhood narratives. Dissenting opinions won’t do. Dissenting opinions are violence.

“The mob wants to ensure that a certain experience gives you full control over the language,” de Boer wrote. But it’s not merely that—there’s a trending leftist contingent that wants to ensure certain experiences give you full control over the world.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

Jeb Kinnison

Writing About Life and Love

feminism

Camille Paglia: The Modern Campus Cannot Comprehend Evil

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Red Pill Women — Female MRAs

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Purge: the Feminist Grievance Bubble

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