Lifeboat Feminism

Author’s note: Today’s column is a slightly edited re-post of an article that I had penned over at my blog back in May. I wrote it after a decade or two of observing the modern female’s persistent affinity for the privileges as well as the rights that come with being a franchised citizen in an egalitarian society. This having-one’s-cake-and-eating-it-too phenomenon is dubbed “lifeboat feminism”, and it is part of my “Evils of Feminism” series. Enjoy!

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Back from the boats…the first man that touches a boat, I’ll brain. Women and children first, men

Quote from W.D. O’Connor’s Harrington, 1860.

I am not a wymmin’s studies major. Nor do I have much formal schooling in the theory and history of feminism. As such, I do not know with much certainty if the first wave feminists advocated true equality (equal rights and equal responsibilities) between men and women. They may very well have done so, but whether or not they did is irrelevant today because the successors to First Wave feminism most certainly do not strive for de jure and de facto equality between the sexes.

As the quote above indicates, the chivalrous among us–usually men, but women play a key supporting/reinforcing role–value women and children more than themselves. In this view, men are disposable, and men should sacrifice their time, wealth, comfort, even their very lives, so as to ensure that women, the women’s (note, not the man’s) children, even society in general, benefit from their gallantry.

As it so happens, women, feminist and non-feminist alike, generally are in agreement that that men should bear the brunt of boosting women onto a pedestal. The non-feminist thinks that this is just the natural “just so” order of things, and the second- and subsequent-wave feminist lobbies for the acquisition of political privileges over the disposable male because she knows that it isn’t. The result, then, is that feminism is not a political movement that seeks the legal and social equality of women in which women and men are legally equal in all respects, but is instead a political movement that seeks to accrue advantages to itself while attempting to bestow new disadvantages upon, or cement existing disadvantages for, men. It is a movement of, by, and for chauvinists, looking to make their position all the more superior, and no never-mind is paid to the male corpses left strewn in its wake. What’s more, to the disappointment of men searching for allies in this political death match, the non-feminist woman isn’t bothered much by the feminist’s agitations–in fact, while she may tut-tut at the methods, she herself gladly reaps the benefits from feminist jockeying for political power over men on her behalf, all while ignoring or rationalizing away the deleterious effect that such political acquisitiveness has had on the men around her.

I’ve commented upon this phenomenon before, in a post over at my blog entitled “Boats and Votes“. While I certainly understand how feminists can adhere to this hypocritical viewpoint, in that post, I sadly observed that even women that profess to be Believers, appear to have drunken the fembot kool-aid and demand entitlements and advantages over their brothers while simultaneously demanding that their brothers serve them, even die for them. And as far as I can tell, nothing has changed wrt women’s attitudes in this regard. The message is: serve us, placate us, cater to our neuroses, or we won’t bother with you. You are a fish to our bicycle.

These attitudes appear to be set in stone, anchored in the bedrock of our culture, immovable.

Or maybe not.

While it is possible that it is wishful thinking, perhaps I am detecting a minor foreschock on the cultural seismograph, in that this obtuse notion, this chivalrous hangover, of feminine entitlement to boats (a literal and euphemistic reference to the privileges afforded women in Western patriarchal cultures) and votes (privileges and advantages bestowed upon women by a government in transition to matriarchy) is now starting to be critiqued in in the wider media. As an example, I give you Kevin Myers, writing in the Irish publication the Independent, about the Lifeboat Feminism he witnesses in his own country:

So…we see what the official, government-sponsored version of Irish feminism has mutated into: the cry of the officers on the deck of the foundering Titanic — “Women and Children First”. But at least in those days there was a coherent moral order behind that command. Children were children, and women were seen to be weaker and inferior and thus voteless; gentlemen of all classes would naturally stand back and give them places in the lifeboats first.

If there is a coherent moral order to the present thoughts of the National Women’s Council, it is that words no longer mean what they used to. In the Council’s prospectus for the year 2009, the word “equality” is used 38 times. Yet clearly, in the sisters’ deviant vocabulary, “equality” does not mean equality of pain, or hardship or suffering or poverty. No: it means the opposite of equality. It means a protection from these conditions, regardless of what men are enduring. In other words, lifeboat-feminism, surely the most ignoble and unprincipled of all the many liberal political creeds which dominate our ethos today.

And no, the NCWI press release doesn’t mean “mothers”, it makes no mention of mothers, not even once. Though interestingly enough, it refers to “women and children” four times, and to “women” just three times. Psychologically, this is simply placing women at the protected level of children, just as was done on the Titanic: quite an achievement for a state-subsidised feminist body in 2009, if a largely unsurprising one.

One need only to look around to see that this sort of lifeboat feminism is all around us. In the USA, feminists consistently wrap their rhetoric in “women and children” terms, get pissed when programs are set up for the ostensible benefit of men while crowing about programs and government money spent for the exclusive benefit of women, and even have their own council on women and girls in the Executive Branch. They have multiple federal offices dedicated to improving their health. And they bray incessantly about the pay gap, which I have shown repeatedly works in favor of women instead of against them, and in any case is a direct result of their own choices.

All this while men die earlier at far higher rates from every class of disease, and spending on men’s health lags significantly lags spending on women’s health. In addition, women are routinely let off the hook for crimes (scroll to bottom) (also here)–that is, if they are even arrested at all–which send men to jail for comparatively longer terms. Furthermore, only men are required to register for the draft…interestingly enough, legislation that would probably have required women to register as well was defeated by a conservative woman–and cheered by her conservative sisters who didn’t want responsibilities to come with those rights–in 1973. And men are routinely evicted from their families for no other crime than allowing his wife to become unhappy, and have their children stripped from them with the full cooperation of the state (which takes its cut of the largess that women garner from the transaction). As Robert Franklin of Glenn Sacks’s blog writes, it is noteworthy that the biggest opponents to a father’s equal status in the family often hail from the feminist camp.

Fellow Spearhead author Novaseeker was absolutely spot on in his observation that feminism has operated to permit women to invade the male social and legal spaces, without ceding any territory of their own. As such, women are now able to vote and be breadwinners, soldiers, pilots, politicians, housewives, and play against men in sports. But men are rarely permitted female privileges such as being a homemaker, taking time off for family, or being exempt from military service on the basis of sex and / or young children at home, or, increasingly, to occupy the same floor as women in hotels or the same car in subways in several countries.

This is what feminism, a movement that, if one ignores its misbegotten nature, may have had some shred of well-intended nobility of egalitarian purpose, has boiled down to: the crass acquisition of privileges for women at the expense of children, particularly boys, but also the male half of society in general. Thinking more of themselves than the others in their midst, they embody the opposite of love as they heave their corpulent solipsistic (thanks FB!) egos into the lifeboats while snickering at everyone else’s misfortune.