Elizabeth Wurtzel: Feminist Gone Wild

With friends like Elizabeth Wurtzel feminism does not need enemies.

Yesterday Wurtzel let fly with an epic rant about women who do not have jobs but who still dare call themselves feminists.

Wurtzel wants to purge the feminist ranks of women who are feminists in name only, FINOs, we can call them.

It’s not because the FINOs do not bow down to the goddess. It’s not because they fail to proclaim themselves feminists as the occasion requires. No, it’s because they do not live as Wurtzel wants them to live.

They talk the feminist talk but do not walk the feminist walk. Thus, they have no right to call themselves feminists. In short, that means that they are housewives and homemakers.

They have not sacrificed themselves for the cause. They have not followed the course that a feminist zealot like Wurtzel has followed: happily choosing singlehood by rejecting marriage proposals from the many men who want to wed her.

Wurtzel makes very clear that she refuses to date wealthy men who might provide for her. Thus she has turned down what we are led to believe were multiple proposals from men who might inclined to allow her to provide for them.

Stay-at-home-mothers and full time homemakers had best steer clear of the wrath of Wurtzel.

In her words:

I am going to smack the next idiot who tells me that raising her children full time -- by which she really means going to Jivamukti classes and pedicure appointments while the nanny babysits -- is her feminist choice. 

For someone who practices law Wurtzel is not showing a great deal of respect for the rule of law. She is threatening to assault women who do not have a job but who dare call themselves feminists.

And, of course, she is happy to disparage their intelligence by calling them “idiots,” because only the most stupid woman would ever trade the law office for the nursery. Caring for a child on a full-time basis is, to Wurtzel, contemptible.

If you had ever doubted that feminism is a form of stealth misogyny, take a short trip into the mind of Elizabeth Wurtzel. Just make sure that you don’t linger very long.

Wurtzel went to law school so she shows off her learning by defining her terms:

Let's please be serious grown-ups: real feminists don't depend on men. Real feminists earn a living, have money and means of their own.

Allow me to make a suggestion. When you are launching a rant that is worthy of an adolescent you shouldn’t talk about being a grown-up. You only draw attention to your own immaturity.

In truth, there might be a bright side to this. Wurtzel is offering the cold, hard truth about feminism. She is showing us that feminism is a cult. It attracts zealots and fanatics. It does not just lust after women’s minds. It wants to control and dictate the way they live their lives.

It is not sufficient that a woman believe in the dogmas of modern feminism. She must live her life as feminists think that she should. If not she will be denounced as a FINO and expelled from the feminist cult, never again to belong to the sisterhood of the feminists-in-good-standing, thus the sisterhood of the FIGS.

As  you know, feminism has always thrown up a rhetorical smokescreen about free choice? Now you know that women only free to choose what Elizabeth Wurtzel wants them to choose.

Calling stay-at-home mothers idiots is only the beginning of Wurtzel’s shaming.

In a peculiar rhetorical twist she has taxed feminism for being too quick to accept adherents. This makes feminism, in her words, an “easy lay.”

As Jerry Seinfeld would say: as though there's anything wrong with that!

In her words:

Most of all, feminism is pretty much a nice girl who really, really wants so badly to be liked by everybody -- ladies who lunch, men who hate women, all the morons who demand choice and don't understand responsibility -- that it has become the easy lay of social movements.

Calling out feminism here is simply a cute way of calling out FINOs. “Easy lay” is a euphemism. A woman who sells herself for lucre is not just an easy lay. Obviously, Wurtzel is suggestively engaging in slut-shaming.

But, look on the bright side. If Wurtzel encourages more women to stop calling themselves feminists and to stop adhering to feminist ideology, that would be a good thing.

Thinning the ranks of the feminists would greatly improve everyone’s home life.

But why are there so many FINOs? If we grant the premise of Wurtzel’s argument, we would have to conclude that many women have been brow-beaten, threatened, and intimidated into calling themselves feminists. Having been told that they can either side with feminism or side with patriarchal oppression, they feel obliged to pretend to be feminists. They pay lip service to feminism and live their lives as they please.

This can only mean that feminism has created a cultural climate where dissent about feminist dogma is strictly forbidden. In more colorful language, feminists are ideological bullies.

Shaming techniques are not new to feminism. They are central to its intimidation tactics.

They took cultural power by doing what Wurtzel is doing in her column. Feminists shamed women for being housewives and homemakers, for being stay-at-home mothers.

I applaud Wurtzel for exposing a strategy that feminists have employed since the early 1970s. For want of a better term I will call it home-wrecking... shaming women for being housewives, homemakers, and stay-at-home mothers.

When this strategy was introduced into the culture it was like a plague: women took off their aprons, got jobs, refused to prepare meals, and, invariably got divorced.

This meant that they could join the sisterhood of the FIGS. Wurtzel does not especially care about the consequences that ensued when women lived by the terms that define her own bad attitude, but home-wrecking feminism produced many, many divorces and broken homes.

Many individuals, especially children were traumatized and psychologically damaged by the wave of feminist-inspired divorces. Credit where credit is due.

Also, the divorces produced what is called “the feminization of poverty.” Women who divorced their breadwinner husbands tended to become more impoverished than they had been when they had been homemakers.

Divorce is not a good thing for anyone.

Worse yet, what happens when a woman asks for alimony and she runs into a judge who follows the Wurtzel rule. Wouldn’t this judge be correct to deny alimony on the grounds that a woman should never have to depend on a man, thus, that she should go out and find fulfillment by getting a job, supporting herself and discovering the joys of penury.

Unfortunately, that case is real. I did not make it up.

What is shocking, and refreshing about Wurtzel’s rant is that is, from a feminist perspective, so honest.

And yet, Wurtzel errs in seeing men and women as separate but equal, independent and autonomous monads, engaged in a fateful struggle for power and prestige.

When two people are married and only the man his working his salary is not just his; it is theirs. The principle that defines a marriage is not his-or-hers but ours. If Wurtzel does not understand that, perhaps it is a good thing that she chose not to marry.

Unfortunately, I have heard tell of households that operate on the feminist principle: what’s mine is mine; what’s yours is yours.

If the man makes more than the woman, then his side of the refrigerator is full while hers is bordering on empty. Since she is terrified of feeling dependent she must pay an equal portion of the rent, even if she cannot afford it. 

So, a housewife whose work at home allows her husband to work harder and to earn more money should rightly be consider co-recipient of his wages. Call her what you will but most non-feminist courts recognize her contribution to the family wealth when it hands out alimony.

If she happens to run across a feminist judge, especially one who functions according to the Wurtzel rules, she will discover what it really means to be screwed.


[P. S. I recommend highly a post by blogger Artemis Retriever on the same topic from a different perspective. It's well worth a read.]