How Feminism Leads to the Oppression of Women
According to Heather MacDonald, the feminist takeover of Harvard is imminent. The university is about to name as its new president radical feminist Drew Gilpin Faust, following Lawrence Summers’s all-too-brief reign. Summers’s recklessly honest speculations about women in science strengthened the feminist hold on faculty hiring and promotions. The Task Force won a $50 million commitment to increase faculty “diversity efforts” at Harvard.
As University President, Lawrence Summers in 2005 gave a speech where he dared to suggest that innate differences between men and women could explain why men hold more seats as top scientists than women. This is a plausible thesis. According to Dr Paul Irwing at Manchester University, there are twice as many men with an IQ of 120-plus as there are women, and 30 times as many with an IQ of 170-plus. There are other studies that indicate similar, disproportionate numbers of men among those with extremely high intelligence.
Besides, even though Summers may have been wrong, it is dangerous to embark on a road where important issues are not debated at all. One of the hallmarks of Western civilization has been our thirst for asking questions about everything. Political Correctness is thus anti-Western both in its form and in its intent. It should be noted that in this case, feminists formed the vanguard of PC, the same ideology that has blinded our universities to the Islamic threat.
It makes it even worse when we know that other feminists in academia assert that the veil, or even the burka, represents “an alternative feminism.” Dr. Wairimu Njambi is an Assistant Professor of “Women’s Studies” at the Florida Atlantic University. Much of her scholarship is dedicated to advancing the notion that the cruel practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) is actually a triumph for Feminism and that it is hateful to suggest otherwise. According to Njambi “anti-FGM discourse perpetuates a colonialist assumption by universalizing a particular western image of a ‘normal’ body and sexuality.”
Harvard university recently received a $20 million donation from Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud, a member of the Saudi Royal Family, to finance Islamic studies. This will no doubt be used to influence the curriculum to make it friendlier and less “Islamophobic.” Senior Western institutions for higher education such as Harvard are thus simultaneously serving as outlets for Saudi Islamic propaganda and for left-wing radical feminists. This may on the surface look like quite a paradox, but in different ways both groups discredit traditional Western culture by highlighting its “history of oppression and injustice,” and they both stifle ideological dissent and suppress criticism of their holy doctrines. Perhaps feminists failed to listen to fellow Harvard Professor Charles Fried, who has warned that “The greatest enemy of liberty has always been some vision of the good.”
Feminism has hurt us by encouraging public accept for intellectual hypocrisy, which later paved the way for Islamic infiltration. The official mantra is that men and women are not just equal but identical, but at the same time that women are also somehow superior. Both of these claims cannot, logically speaking, be true at the same time, yet both are being made simultaneously. This gross double standard closely mirrors that of Multiculturalism, where all cultures are equal but Western culture is inferior and evil.
This is a technique labelled Repressive Tolerance by the cultural Marxist Herbert Marcuse in 1965. Briefly speaking, those who are deemed to belong to “dominant” groups of society should have their freedom of speech suppressed by progressives and radicals, and simply be denied access to discussion forums, in order to rectify the “institutional oppression” in society. Marcuse’s ideas had a huge impact in the 1960s and 70s. He also advocated free sex without any constraints as a method of freeing people from religious morality.
Prof. Bernard Lewis warned in The Jerusalem Post that Islam could soon be the dominant force in a Europe “Europeans are losing their own self-confidence,” he said. “They have no respect for their own culture” and have “surrendered” on every issue with regard to Islam in a mood of “self-abasement and political correctness.” Although Mr. Lewis did not say so, this is to a significant extent the result of decades of demonization by left-wing academics, including radical feminists. The goal of radical feminism was never about equality between the sexes, it was about the destruction of the nuclear family and of the power structures of society in general.
As Ellen Willis, self-proclaimed democratic socialist and founder of Redstockings, a radical feminist group from 1969, stated to left-wing The Nation in 1981: “Feminism is not just an issue or a group of issues, it is the cutting edge of a revolution in cultural and moral values. [...] The objective of every feminist reform, from legal abortion [...] to child-care programs, is to undermine traditional family values.” Feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir stated that “no woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children […] because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.”
Well, after two generations of Second Wave Feminism, Ms. Willis and Ms. Beauvoir have had their way: The West has skyrocketing divorce rates and plummeting birth rates, leading to a cultural and demographic vacuum that makes us vulnerable to a take-over by… Islam. And feminists still aren't satisfied.
Toy researcher Anders Nelson at Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology has warned that toys have become increasingly gender-segregated over the past fifteen years: “People often explain [their toy purchases] by saying that boys and girls want different things. But in order for children to be able to reflect on [the toys] they receive, adults have to open their eyes to [inherent gender] structures. To children, these [gender] roles are more unquestioned and instinctual.” Mr. Nelson encouraged parents to give more gender neutral Christmas presents. In other words, no Barbie dolls for girls and no cars for boys. This is the result of a culture destroyed by Political Correctness.
Swedish Marxist politician Gudrun Schyman has suggested a bill that would collectively tax Swedish men for violence against women. In a 2002 speech, the same Schyman famously posited that Swedish men were just like the Islamic Taliban regime in Afghanistan. A male columnist in national newspaper Aftonbladet responded by saying that Schyman was right: All men are like the Taliban.
Misandry, the hatred of men, isn’t necessarily less prevalent than misogyny, the hatred of women. The difference is that the former is much more socially acceptable.
When young politician Kjetil Vevle showed up for a meeting planning the demonstrations at that year’s protests at the International Women’s Day on 8 March in the city of Bergen, Norway, he was told that men didn’t have voting rights at the meeting even though they were passionate feminists. The leaders didn’t think there was any cause for complaints, as the men had generously been awarded the right to voice their opinion, just not the right to make decisions.
Although countries such as Norway and Sweden like to portray themselves as havens of gender equality, I have heard visitors comment that the sexes are probably further apart here than anywhere else in the world. Radical feminism has bred suspicion and hostility, not cooperation. And it has no in any way eradicated the basic sexual attraction between feminine women and masculine men. If people do not find this in their own country, they travel to another country to find it, which is now easier than ever. A striking number of Scandinavian men find their wives in East Asia, Latin America or other nations with a more traditional view of femininity, and a number of women find partners from more conservative countries, too. Not everyone, of course, but the trend is unmistakable. Scandinavians celebrate “gender equality” and travel to the other side of the world to find somebody actually worth marrying.
Norway and Sweden are countries with extremely high divorce rates. Boys grow up in an atmosphere where masculinity is demonized, attend a school system where they are viewed as deficient girls and are told by the media that men are obsolete and will soon be rendered extinct anyway.
A feminist culture will eventually end up being squashed, because the men have either become too demoralized and weakened to protect their women, or because they have become so fed-up with incessant ridicule that they just don't care anymore. If Western men are pigs and “just like the Taliban” no matter what we do, why bother? Western women will then be squashed by more aggressive men from other cultures, which is exactly what is happening in Western Europe now. The irony is that when women launched the Second Wave of Feminism in the 1960s and 70s, they were reasonably safe and, in my view, not very oppressed. When the long-term effects of feminism finally set in, Western women may very well end up being genuinely oppressed under the boot of Islam. Radical feminism thus leads to oppression of women.
I wonder whether Virginia Wolf saw this coming. Maybe if she were alive today, she would hail the Islamic veil as an “alternative road to feminism” and write a book called A Burka of One’s Own. With some luck, it might even have earned her a Diversity Scholarship at Harvard.
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