[this ended up being a long post, but what the hell, I had a few minutes to spare, and maybe some of you will find it of interest]
I remember reading an essay by Adolph Reed in which he singled out "intersectionality" as the core belief system of identitarians. This was several years ago and it was the first time I had come across his work. I don't remember which essay it was (I think it was published in The Nation), but I observed at the time that even this bold iconoclast didn't dare mention the "f" word: Feminism.
Intersectionality is an attempt by feminists to cast themselves as kindred spirits with other "oppressed groups." They will acknowledge their "white privilege" so long as they get to keep their victim status as women. From their alleged oppression comes their power. This paradox was noted by the feminist-cum-MRA Warren Farrell: “Men’s greatest weakness is their facade of strength, and women’s greatest strength is their facade of weakness.” Feminism exploits this tendency rather than challenging it; you could even argue that it is the entire basis of their movement: the female is a perpetual damsel in distress, always in danger, always in need of more help by men. Men in power like being chivalrous, so they support feminism. What feminists call "benevolent sexism" is therefore the entire reason they exist. It is their raison d'extra.
Under intersectionality the "straight white male" must be the villain of the tale, because most people in power are straight white males. It's all very peculiar, because feminists are perfectly happy to date and marry this villain, and if we're being honest they would actually much prefer to date and marry the villain than the underdog. Gloria Steinem dated Henry Kissinger, no less, though that becomes less eyebrow-raising when you realize she was working for the Central Intelligence Agency at the time.
The "white male privilege" trope has been rendered absurd in the UK, where a recent equality report found that "white boys" now get the "worst start in life." Thus white males simultaneously occupy the highest and lowest rungs of society. Intersectionalists in the UK have proven themselves unable to accommodate this new reality. They haven't adjusted their pie charts, they haven't rearranged the progressive stack; no indeed, last week it was announced that white male privilege theory will now be taught in British schools. So you have one of the apparently least privileged groups being told that they are the most privileged group. What could go wrong? I wonder if any right-wingers are recruiting? This inability to acknowledge reality is a recurring theme in the history of feminism, as it is in all religions, more on that in a moment.
The relative timidity shown by Reed in criticizing feminism as a doctrine is apparent on the left as whole. There must be a qualifier. So we hear about "bourgeois feminism," or "carceral feminism," or "white feminism" etc. This is of course understandable: if you think feminism = women's rights then of course you are going to support it. The problem is that there is an iceberg beneath the tip; feminism is an ideology and a (very, very powerful) movement, it cannot be reduced simply to "women's rights."
The World Socialist Website has been far more daring in their critiques of "modern feminism" than virtually any other leftist website (eg they harshly criticized the MeToo movement), but they too will not challenge the underlying thesis of feminism itself: that men have spent all of history trying to oppress their own mothers and daughters. Feminist doctrine is fundamentally absurd, yet this bizarre hypothesis has become the religion of the modern day left. Go criticize feminism on R/Communism or R/Socialism or R/Anarchism and see if you won't be banned (I'm curious to see what kind of response this post gets here. Is feminism the one form of identity politics that must remain sacrosanct?)
It wasn't always this way. The first major critiques of feminism were actually written by a Marxist -- Earnest Belfort Bax. He wrote two major works on the subject in the early 20th century: The Fraud of Feminism and The Legal Subjugation of Men. One of his main complaints was that feminists simultaneously demanded "equality" and chivalry:
“Chivalry, as understood by Modern Sentimental Feminism, means unlimited licence for women in their relations with men, and unlimited coercion for men in their relations with women. To men all duties and no rights, to women all rights and no duties, is the basic principle underlying Modern Feminism, Suffragism, and the bastard chivalry it is so fond of invoking. The most insistent female shrieker for equality between the sexes among Political Feminists, it is interesting to observe, will, in most cases, on occasion be found an equally insistent advocate of the claims of Sentimental Feminism, based on modern metamorphosed notions of chivalry.
Sound familiar?
[Here it is worth noting a fascinating study which found that both men and women view equal treatment of women as a form of "hostile sexism"; chivalry is the mainstay, and any departure from that is viewed as misogyny]
Intriguingly, Bax's works are nowhere to be found on Wikipedia's "anti-feminism" page, nor is GK Chesterton's brilliant critique of feminism in "What's wrong with the world?" This is because feminists have associated themselves with the left, even though they have no business here.
Chesterton summed up first wave feminists as follows:
“It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.”
The great labor organizer Mother Jones expressed similar sentiments. Indeed, take any socialist from the early 20th century and they would be immediately de-platformed if they were scheduled for a lecture in the here and now. Another great labor organizer, Elizabeth Gurly Flynn of the Wobblies, wrote that "society moves in grooves of class, not sex." Such an hypothesis would be considered downright heretical in modern leftist circles. It flies in the face of intersectionality. The current consensus was summed up by a speaker at a gay conference in the 1970's headlined "Dangerous Trends in Feminism":
According to this ideology, the most basic division in society is not between class and class, but between male and female; distinctions according to gender are seen as far more important than distinctions based on wealth and power. According to this ideology, there is a hierarchy of oppression, with the oppression of women being the worst of all. It is an oppression so profound, so mysterious, and so ineffable, that it cannot even be described in concrete terms, as might other, lesser forms of oppression.
This is all very convenient for the ruling class, I must say. Feminism is next-level divide and conquer: split the working class straight down the middle.
The deranged worldview of feminism is now taken for granted. Boys and girls are taught in school that men have oppressed women since time immemorial, and continue to do so; thus males are reduced to an "oppressor class" and basically a race of psychopaths. People are being fired for criticizing Black Lives Matter, but when a gender studies professor wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post titled "Why Can't we Hate Men?", she didn't even receive a reprimand from her University. Such is the state of things.
It would help a great deal if feminism wasn't so totally loopy. It is though. Gender Studies was founded by a woman (Sally Miller Gearhart) who believed that males should be reduced to ten percent of the population. She got the idea from breeding stallions. So it was batshit from the start. Finally, decades later, a couple of academics in Sweden decided to look at what these crazy broads were teaching their students. They starting by noting the common critique of the "discipline":
The core of the criticism reviewed above is that Gender studies has a political, activist agenda, dourly subscribes to certain theories in the face of opposing facts, and mixes scholarship and ideology (e.g., Popova 2005; Sokal 2006).
...And they found that yes, the common criticism is entirely correct, indeed alarmingly so; indeed they noted:
...As exemplified by the Neutral group in the present sample, there is a huge literature that explores causes for sex differences amongst endocrinological, neurodevelopmental, and genetic factors....It is reasonable to assume that these theoretical perspectives, by and large, explain a substantial proportion of the variance related to group or individual differences, otherwise would these approaches have waned for lack of empirical support. It is therefore notable that such factors are only mentioned five times in all 24 articles with some level of gender perspective, as compared to 33 times in the 12 Neutral articles. The probability of mentioning such a factor is thus 13 times smaller when a gender perspective is applied. This would not be all that remarkable if Gender studies, with its heritage from the social sciences and humanities, were compared with the natural sciences and medicine. It seems quite remarkable when compared with other social sciences, however, which are nominally equally unconcerned with biological and genetic explanatory models. It seems therefore recommendable that gender scholars and other interested parties consider and examine whether Gender studies might be prey to selective accounts of reality on the basis of ideological preferences.
Let's put this in normal speak: Gender studies is horseshit.
One of the most interesting things about feminist theory is its ability not only to be wrong about nearly everything but be counter-predictive. I'll give you an example.
Feminists oscillate back and forth between the "blank slate" theory of human nature and the "women are superior" theory of human nature. It depends on context. Sometimes they will state their supremacist views outright, as did the founder of the feminist movement in the US, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: women are "infinitely superior to men." Germaine Greer, one of the two or three most influential second-wave feminists, said something similar: males are the product of a "damaged gene." More often however they will say that the sexes are identical except for genitalia and physical strength; though this take becomes very muted indeed when women or girls are ahead in some area. Thus when challenged with the fact that boys are falling way behind in school, feminists will not argue for structural changes; instead they will insist that the impetus is on the boys to change their behavior. The fault cannot possibly lie with the (mostly female) teachers, and in any case females have no agency (they are merely oppressed), so how could they possibly inflict harm? If they do it can't possibly be their fault, it must be the fault of some man somewhere. Or let's look at the criminal justice system: the "gender sentencing gap" is six times larger than the racial sentencing gap. This is to say that a black man, on average, will be sentenced to ten percent longer in prison than a white man; yet a man, on average, will be sentenced to sixty percent longer than a woman. Bring this up to a feminist and they will simply state that "men are more likely to be criminals." Thus they retreat to biological determinism when it suits them.
(in other fun news from the UK: feminists are trying to make "misogyny" a "hate crime"; however in typical feminist fashion they are trying not to make misandry a hate crime. It's understandable: if misandry became a hate crime in the UK you'd have to arrest literally all of the gender studies professors and half of the staff at The Guardian).
[Here I will quote Bob Black, who in the 80's wrote an essay called Feminism as Fascism: "self-styled radical feminists actually reduce women to nothing but helpless, cringing near-vegetables, passive victims of male contempt and coercion. This profoundly insults women in a way which the worst patriarchal ideologies — the Jewish notion of woman as a source of pollution, for instance, or the Christian nightmare of woman as temptress and uncontrollable sexual nature-force — fell short of. They defamed woman as evil but could hardly regard her as powerless. The new woman-as-victim stereotype is not only directly traceable to nineteenth century Victorian patriarchal attitudes reducing (bourgeois) women to inert ornaments, but by denying to women the creative power inherent in everyone, it places women’s demands on a par with those advanced for, say, baby seals."
[The Marxist Mary Beard had a similar complaint. She was so annoyed by the feminist tendency to paint women as hapless victims that she ended up writing a whole book about it: Women as a Force in History. She found that most feminist theory is rooted in myth: the claims that women "couldn't own property" or "weren't allowed to work" or were treated as mere "property" were all totally bunk. Most of these myths -- which are widely believed to this day -- can be traced to the work of one William Blackstone, an Englishman, who made them all up in order to make England appear enlightened compared to the "savage past." She concluded:
Since such were the rights of women in Equity as things stood in 1836, fortified by a long line of precedents stretching back through the centuries, it seems perfectly plain that the dogma of woman’s complete historic subjection to man must be rated as one of the most fantastic myths ever created by the human mind.]
Anyway, getting back to the fact that feminism is counter-predictive, let's take a look at the subject of gender roles. When convenient, feminists argue that the sexes are identical, and everything comes back to nurture. Thus if there isn't a fifty-fifty split in STEM fields that must be because women are being oppressed in some fashion. As it turns out, however, the highly "patriarchal" country of Iran has a significantly higher percentage of female engineers than Norway. How could this be? It comes down to choice. The more choice women have, the less likely they are to pursue certain fields such as engineering.
The Israeli Kibbutz provides the most striking example of the failure of feminist doctrine. As most of you are aware, the Kibbutz started out as an anarchistic society; one of their ideas was that there would be no enforced gender roles. Children would be raised more or less equally and could do as they please. Well in what should have caused a major upset in the feminist community, the Kibbutz became one of the most traditionalist societies in the world. Turns out that most women simply preferred to work in the home rather than go out and do labor, and most men preferred to do labor than work in the home. Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that people should be forced into such roles, I'm merely suggesting that gender roles evolved for a reason.
It is apparently much more palatable for the average person to believe that "Men oppressed women through all of teh history!!" than to suggest that the sexes are, on average, different, and that this can lead to differential outcomes. The problem with acknowledging difference is that you may well conclude that, on average, women are better at some things, and men are better at some things (again, on average). Tell a feminist that women are better at discerning colors, as they are, and they will say, "huh, that's interesting." Tell a feminist that men are better at creating large organizations and the steam will begin to flow from their ears. Consider the hypothesis of Roy Baumeister, author of the provocatively titled "Is There Anything Good About Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men." He argues:
The notion that women were deliberately oppressed by being excluded from these institutions requires an artful, selective, and motivated way of looking at them. Even today, the women’s movement has been a story of women demanding places and preferential treatment in the organizational and institutional structures that men create, rather than women creating organizations and institutions themselves. Almost certainly, this reflects one of the basic motivational differences between men and women, which is that female sociality is focused heavily on one-to-one relationships, whereas male sociality extends to larger groups networks of shallower relationships (e.g., Baumeister and Sommer 1997; Baumeister 2010). Crudely put, women hardly ever create large organizations or social systems. That fact can explain most of the history of gender relations, in which the gender near equality of prehistorical societies was gradually replaced by progressive inequality—not because men banded together to oppress women, but because cultural progress arose from the men’s sphere with its large networks of shallow relationships, while the women’s sphere remained stagnant because its social structure emphasized intense one-to-one relationships to the near exclusion of all else (see Baumeister2010). All over the world and throughout history (and prehistory), the contribution of large groups of women to cultural progress has been vanishingly small.
That seems to me a perfectly reasonable explanation -- it's certainly more logical than the "men tried to brutalize their own mothers and daughters" theory -- but we simply cannot abide it because it suggests that men are necessary. Because we are so profoundly concerned about the well being of women, men would rather paint themselves as oppressors than acknowledge the truth: that men may, on average, be better at some stuff (just as women are, on average, better at some stuff). And thus we have erected this monstrous edifice known as feminism.
There is a saying, I think it's from Nigeria, that if you don't welcome young men into the village they will come back and burn it down. I think feminism and the profound injustices it entails is an overlooked factor in the growth of the far right. And really, no civilization or culture is going to survive if they attack their boys. That's what we're doing. It is shameful. It is despicable. It is clearly supported by the ruling class. It is now a billion dollar industry. Feminists have successfully colonized the left. If you're a leftist, you must believe in the feminist church. If you don't believe in intersectionality you must be a racist or a sexist. Oh yeah, and if you're a white male, shut the fuck up. Know your place.
Feminism drives men to the far right. It's about time that the left had a reckoning on this issue. I don't consider myself an "MRA" because I have not and don't intend to engage in gender activism on behalf of men and boys. It seems like an uphill battle, to put it mildly, and I think socialism would solve most of the solvable problems affecting men and boys. Having said that, MRA's are one of the few identity groups that should be supported. It is simply a fact that men have fewer rights than women, and that men and boys suffer huge institutional discrimination. But it goes against our biological instincts to admit as much -- men will happily fight and die on behalf of some other group or cause, or sometimes even as a class, and preferably to protect women and children, but it goes completely against our gender role and indeed our instincts to evince vulnerability (males literally have differently shaped tear ducts than women, making it more difficult for them to cry). That's why MRA's are scorned.
And that's why feminism is funded by the likes of JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs while MRA's meet in broken down buildings. Well that and the fact that feminism is the ultimate divide and conquer mechanism. We would do well to remember that the sexes are symbiotic: anything that harms women will ultimately harm men, and anything that harms men will ultimately harm women.
