Does Feminism Work?

Feminist firebrand Lindy West is in ecstasy. I’m sure you wanted to know.

Writing in Jezebel West trumpets the good news: feminism is working! It's changing the world. Naturally, West does not say whether it is changing the world for better or worse.

It would be better news if West knew what the word “works” meant, but when you are dealing with an ideologue it is best not to quibble over meanings.

For West, the good news is that more and more people have been indoctrinated in feminist ideology. They may not be living feminist lives quite yet, but, according to a survey conducted in Great Britain they no longer respect traditional gender roles.

She quotes the study’s conclusion:

The vast majority of young people – about 80% of women and 70% of men across all races, classes, and family backgrounds - desire an egalitarian marriage in which both partners share breadwinning, housekeeping, and child rearing.

West is not too worried about the fact that, when it comes to practicing what they tell researchers, people seem to fall back into the familiar old gender roles:

Whatever they actually do in practice, the fact is that 70% of men expressed a desire for an egalitarian relationship. That's huge. And it makes sense that it would take time for practice to catch up to theory. We can want equality before we achieve it. In fact, we have to.

West never considers the possibility that a perfectly egalitarian marriage, of the kind that more and more young people have been brainwashed into thinking they want, is simply dysfunctional. It is a throwback to an economy where there is no division of labor or specialization, and where everyone grows his own food, makes his own clothes, and schools his own children.

A feminist utopia, if you like, but a profoundly reactionary vision, nevertheless.

West is right on one score: a vast majority of women in one survey would rather divorce than become housewives. Clearly, young women have been brainwashed by feminism, but will their attitude contribute to marital stability?

When it comes to traditional gender roles, West is filled with blinding contempt.

The great feminist epiphany, she explains, occurred when women discovered that: “we're more than just babymakers and rug-scrubbers and penis-receptacles.”

To me this sounds like raw misogyny.

West denounces the traditional division of the sexes in typically intemperate terms:

For years and years and years and years and years and years, the expectation was that you should find a "good" husband, and then you're taken care of. 4 LYFE. You take care of the house, beat the rugs, maybe you get a cute little vanity degree, you sleep in a weirdly chaste twin bed with your hair in a scarf. That's your "job." He pays the bills, provides the penising, trips over the ottoman, maybe has an affair or two. That's his no-quotation-marks job. He's happy. You're happy. The end. Except — PLOT TWIST — women weren't happy. And it wasn't the end, it was the beginning of all this shit we're endlessly shouting about.

One might ask how she knows that all of the women who chose such a lifestyle were unhappy, but that would be unkind.

We do need to ask how all of that feminism is working out for women today. Are they happier? Do they have better and more stable marriages? Do they have more or fewer divorces? Do they have as many children as they wanted? Do they have more or fewer eating disorders? Do they take more or less psychiatric medication? Do they consume more or less alcohol and narcotics? Do they suffer more or less abuse?

One doubts that West would be impressed, but the kind of egalitarian marriage that most young people today want and that most parents today want their children to have is, as other studies have shown, 50% more likely to end in divorce and 100% more likely to contain abuse.

Why isn’t Lindy West cheering that news?

And then there’s this: men who follow the feminist playbook and do more womanly household chores have less sex than do men who limit their activity to more manly chores:

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say: the more housework married men do, the less sex they have, according to a new study published Wednesday.

Agence France-Presse reports:

Husbands who spend more time doing traditionally female chores -- such as cooking, cleaning, and shopping -- reported having less sex than those who do more masculine tasks, said the study in the American Sociological Review.

"Our findings suggest the importance of socialized gender roles for sexual frequency in heterosexual marriage," said lead author Sabino Kornrich, of the Center for Advanced Studies at the Juan March Institute in Madrid.

"Couples in which men participate more in housework typically done by women report having sex less frequently. Similarly, couples in which men participate more in traditionally masculine tasks -- such as yard work, paying bills, and auto maintenance -- report higher sexual frequency."

The article concludes:

But both men and women in couples with more traditional household labor divisions said they had more sex.

"The results suggest the existence of a gendered set of sexual scripts, in which the traditional performance and display of gender is important for creation of sexual desire and performance of sexual activity," Kornrich said.

How long before men figure out that the feminist vision is a trap? How long before women figure it out? How many broken homes will it take before people discover that utopian feminism leads to dystopia?