Tuesday, October 08, 2013

It's not just that feminists are anti-male...

The term feminist is very unpopular, even amongst young women. For instance, research by the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK found that:
...the label 'feminist' is often forcefully rejected, particularly by young women. New research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) suggests that, in rejecting feminism, women are often seeking to position themselves within conventional norms of femininity and heterosexuality.

"In many contemporary European societies, the term feminism provokes unease and even hostility," says Dr Christina Scharff of King's College London, who carried out the research"...

Playing an important role in the rejection of feminism in both countries are the distorted stereotypes of the 'man-hating feminist', the 'unfeminine feminist' or the 'lesbian feminist'. Many participants in the study did not want to call themselves ‘feminist’ because of these stereotypes.

...Although none of the participants could point to specific individuals, most still viewed the pioneers of gender equality as 'lesbian, man-hating feminists'.

And then there's this:
A study commissioned by the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) and published today found that feminism is regarded virtually unanimously in negative terms, ranging from old-fashioned to "ball breaking".

Those questioned felt women were more equal than ever before and believed that issues such as women's greater domestic role or concentration in lower-paid jobs are the result of individual choice and natural differences between the sexes which had to be addressed by individuals rather than, as the women's movement argued, society as a whole.

The findings of the Future Foundation study, Talking Equality, have sent shockwaves through the EOC.

The suspicions that young women have when it comes to the "pioneers of gender equality" are fully justified. And the problem is not just that a fair proportion of these pioneers were man-haters. Equally significant is that they were women who did not like or accept womanhood or femininity. Many were as anti-female as they were anti-male.

I was reminded of this when reading about one of the major pioneers of second wave feminism in the 1970s, Shulamith Firestone. She wrote:
The end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital difference between human beings would no longer matter culturally.

That is one of the drives of liberal modernity: to make sex distinctions not matter. If you believe that the end goal of politics is to maximise individual autonomy, then you will want to make your life as self-determining as possible, which will then mean that you will reject predetermined qualities, such as your own sex. As you cannot change your sex, the next best thing you'll be able to do is to make it not matter.

A generation earlier, the same ideas were in circulation. In 1949 Simone de Beauvoir could describe the intellectual temper of her own times as follows:
If today femininity no longer exists, then it never existed. But does the word woman, then, have no specific content? This is stoutly affirmed by those who hold to the philosophy of the enlightenment, of rationalism, of nominalism; women, to them, are merely the human beings arbitrarily designated by the word woman. Many American women particularly are prepared to think that there is no longer any place for woman as such; if a backward individual still takes herself for a woman, her friends advise her to be psychoanalysed and thus get rid of this obsession. In regard to a work, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, which in other respects has its irritating features, Dorothy Parker has written: ‘I cannot be just to books which treat of woman as woman ... My idea is that all of us, men as well as women, should be regarded as human beings.

That's particularly interesting as it traces the failure to accept sex distinctions to an even deeper change in philosophy: from philosophical realism (which accepted the real existence of masculine and feminine essences) to nominalism (which saw such categories as having no real existence but as being names to group things).

Can sex distinctions be made not to matter? Well, not very easily. A University of California neuroscientist, Larry Cahill, has just recently been interviewed on differences between the male and female brain:
The differences exist at virtually all levels, he says, from those of tiny cells to large structures in the brain, from brain chemistry to what he calls intriguing differences in the way men and women remember emotionally searing events.

And this:
What it is, is just a storm of sex differences, big and little, found all over the place – down to the level of single neurons. We see these differences everywhere, and we started to realize, damn, we simply assume they aren't there. And these sex differences have implications for how the brain works and how to fix brains. That's your big story right there.

For me it's the existence of this huge fire in neuroscience. We've been collectively in kind of denial about it. But we've hit some sort of critical mass in the last couple of years. It's really starting to change.

10 comments:

  1. Poor Dorothy Parker. She had a grievance against men: they were always bastards in their relationships with her, though she admitted that these same men were wonderful for and with other women.

    Maybe these other women were letting themselves be woman and the men be men. Men are very good for women; they're made that way.

    But Dorothy Parker would not acknowledge that men or women were made any particular way.

    It's typical of feminism that when its unlikely theories fail in practice to bring happiness or good results in general, that shows the true feminist that there is a need to double down on coercion, or when that is not possible at least to increase the dose of nastiness and disapproval directed at alternative ideas.

    Women who think like this can do quite a lot of harm as critics and cultural gatekeepers.

    But if we could just close the borders for a few generations, I think women willing to educate themselves in this direction would die out, out-competed by womanly women who like manly men and don't care who tells them not to.

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    1. Do you happen to be related to Emperor Marcus Claudius Tacitus? If so, you must be very proud that your Pa was one of the few not to be assassinated during his era. Well, most claim he died of fever.

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  2. Excellent article. In fact, I`ve just recovered from getting a black eye, all because I opened the door for a lady!!! They`re hard to please sometimes!! My eye should be ok, but I don't plan on having a family soon because last year a lady was offended when I told her to use Loreal 'cause she's worth it.

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    Replies
    1. Its not chivalry but the appearance of power conveyed through confidence and other hallmarks of behavior of powerful men.

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    2. Hey thank you, for replying to my comment. Good point indeed. There's also a possibility that the Lynx Company might be to blame as well!! It's giving men a false sense of over-confidence. Maybe that chap who tried to sue Lynx when he couldn't pick up girls a few years ago is onto something.
      The article link(s) {sorry bad joke, get it, links vs lynx um don't worry}
      is this below:
      http://forums.vogue.com.au/showthread.php?t=347459

      I checked it for viruses and didn't catch the flu from it so thus
      read it if you want.

      -daren

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  3. At least Dorothy Parker (her numerous faults aside) could be genuinely amusing, unlike the feminazis.

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  4. The UK has one of the most oppressive Politically Correct regimes in the world. But it also seems to have a greater disjunction between elite and popular views than you see elsewhere; perhaps one reason that our regime is so oppressive is that it's so at variance with the views of most people. Because it is not internalised it constantly needs to be reinforced through force.Modern Brits are mostly social Liberals, but have mostly not accepted PC/cultural Marxism.

    So I'm not sure you would see the same result in eg Sweden or the USA, if you asked middle-class college girls their views on Feminism. In these nations there seems to be much more internalisation of the official narrative across the middle class mainstream.

    Some possible speculated reasons for this:
    1) The USA, Sweden etc are relatively conformist. 'Respectable' people, especially women, are more likely to accept top-down leads. The UK, especially England, has a tradition of respecting eccentricity, which extends to women, whereas the US is very 'tall poppy', vs women especially.
    2) The UK has an iconoclastic print media which is typically socially liberal (the Telegraph used to have a Traditionalist element, though) but the most-read papers such as the Daily Mail and the Sun are anti-PC, so there is validation for an anti-PC narrative.
    3) When compared to US, Sweden etc, UK schools and Universities are really bad at political indoctrination. The very narrow nature of UK higher eucation makes political re-education hard. By contrast the US emphasis on a "broad liberal arts education" gives plenty of space for cultural Marxist reprogramming.

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    Replies
    1. Simon, I agree with the specific points you make, but a recent poll in the US showed that only 23% of women and 16% of men identified as feminists.

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  5. It's a good proof that western white women do actually react to things that are not in their best interest (If anyone was wondering).
    Being seen as a feminist kills dating and relationship chances faster than a woman can blink.
    Very simply why would a man pursue a toxic relationship with a feminist if he can date a more pleasant. genuinely feminine non-feminist. Women instinctively or as a group consciousness realise how detrimental ever being associated with feminism is while trying to hold down a man.

    This is the Achilles heel of feminism. Unpopularity among the majority of females because it jeopardises their relationship chances.

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  6. Steve Sailer, Los Angeles film critic, clearly gets it:

    http://takimag.com/article/in_search_of_sexier_scientists_steve_sailer#axzz2hINbxFWD

    I am particularly taken with Mr. Sailer's conclusion:

    "Contemporary feminism is quite simple: If men are at fault for you not being able to do whatever it is you want to do, blame men. But if women are at fault, blame society or American culture or the media or institutional sexism or whatever. How many will dare call you on your verbal sleight of hand? Who will even notice? And after a while, you won’t notice it, either."



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