Are We Seeing the End of Feminism?

If feminist firebrand Michelle Goldberg is seriously torqued about the future of feminism, the rest of us should celebrate. Not to lay on the Schadenfreude too thick this morning, but seriously, seeing that feminists have finally understood that their radical cause has alienated women-- or at least those who still dare to call themselves such-- is cause for relief.

Of course, Goldberg, not being especially talented, as a thinker or a writer, limits feminism to political activism. In fairness, she and a certain number of movement feminists see all of life as politics. We, however, see feminism as an important front in the culture wars, even though, strangely, or not, women, as a class has now been superseded by new appellations, like bleeders and breast feeders.

Then again, one wonders whether anyone was ever dumb enough to believe that feminism is pro-women. Movement feminism, feminism as a political movement, only favors those women who adhere to the feminist ideology. When feminists encounter a successful woman who thinks differently, they shoot looks of derision and hate in her direction. They treat her as a witch a traitor to their cause.

Trust me, feminists do not celebrate that the unimpeachable success of Justice Amy Coney Barrett. They despise her to the roots of their being.

Moreover, not that feminism has turned into something of an infertility cult, any woman who expresses the wrong opinion on abortion rights will immediately be expelled from the sisterhood.

Of course, one reason that feminism has been failing as a political movement is that the women who lead it, women whose intelligence is a smidgeon of that of Amy Coney Barrett, have identified so thoroughly with infertility that they have missed the fact that one of their defining principles, one of the bases of cultural feminism, that women to postpone childbearing until they are fully ensconced in their careers, has produced a fertility crisis-- and a boon for reproductive endocrinologists. 

As for the politics of it all, consider that feminists chose to protest the inauguration of President Donald Trump by donning what they called pussy hats and marching on Washington-- led by a despicable band of anti-Semites. In the world where you want to advance your cause, promoting anti-Semitism, looking unhinged and forcing people to discuss things like pussy hats, looked like a sign of mental incompetence.

Ironically, movement feminism, as a political cause, was inspired initially by a nineteenth century thinker, by the name of Friedrich Engels. You know him as the sidekick of one Karl Marx. In his book, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels sought to dupe gullible women into joining the vanguard of the Revolution. He made them into an oppressed class and declared that the revolution would give them happy marriages to faithful husbands. Hah!

Obviously, he had some considerable success. As did the lost cause of the Revolutionary overthrow of the patriarchal, capitalist order. Not only did Engels convince some mini-minds to sacrifice their lives to the cause, and especially to turn every aspect of their lives into political theatre, but he persuaded governments in what we call the Western world to empower strong women. 

As we have noted on this blog, empowering women is an idea whose time had come. Sadly, the West’s enemies do not think that empowered women are as strong as all that. Strangely, they believe that more empowered women is a sign of weakness. As you know, weakness invites aggression. Yesterday, it was the Spanish Armada; today, it’s Ukraine. 

Against the less-than-capable Russian army, the great leaders of the West have little to offer beyond sanctions and weaponry. They are happy to fight to the last Ukrainian, in a war that seems lately to have turned in Russia’s favor. And Europe, having shot itself in the foot with its bluster, is now facing severe energy shortages. And the world is facing food shortages.

Dare we notice that serious people in the twentieth century did try to overthrow the capitalist patriarchal order. They produced some of the most horrid totalitarian dictatorships the world has ever seen. The horrors that the effort to overthrow the patriarchy produced during the twentieth century persuaded most sentient beings that it was a very bad and very destructive idea, indeed.

And yet, as leftist dictatorships failed, crowned by the colossal failure called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, engineered and masterminded by Mme Mao herself, feminists soldiered on. They continued to fight the good fight for the revolution, at a time when everyone knew that it was a lost cause.

And, let’s not forgot, on a personal level, that feminism stoked animosity between men and women. Feminism contributed mightily to the breakdown of the American family and to the spike in single parent homes. It made women’s lives more difficult, both within and without the home. One is always happy to blame the perpetrators for their appalling behavior, but once feminism declared war against men, they should not have been surprised to see that the idiots who pretend to be men, are not very bright. Not being very bright, some of them chose to fight back. And some even got the impression that antagonism was the name of the new game.

Besides, in an effort to destroy Western civilization-- an arrogant and presumptuous cause if ever there was one-- feminists decided to unsex the population, to eliminate all male and female roles, and to make everyone into a neutered person. Down with male breadwinners. Down with male protectors. Women were strong and empowered; they did not need men for much of anything, beyond an occasional sperm deposit.

How did that one work out for women? In truth, it produced a wave of macho behavior and a sexual revolution wherein women asserted their liberation by allowing themselves to be used for sex. 

Nowadays, of course, no one really knows or dares to say what a woman is anyway. Given the need to create a coalition of the oppressed, many feminists-- but certainly not all-- have embraced the cause of trans rights. Given that feminists have routinely disparaged womanhood as a social construction, they could hardly take very vigorous offense to the notion that a few hormones and a bit of surgical mutilation could turn a woman into a man or vice versa. 

And these people wanted to be respected for their minds.

So, feminism has made a complete mess of relations between the sexes. And their solution, if we are to believe Michelle Goldberg, is to complain about it.

The story is getting tired. It should be getting tired. Fewer and fewer people are signing on to sacrifice their lives to a lost cause.

Whereas the #MeToo movement was going to be a great leap forward for feminism, things did not turn out as planned. In fact, it undermined the feminist cause. After all, any time you are being consumed by some ginned-up outrage, you will most likely make mistakes. While some of men attacked by the #MeToo movement deserved whatever they got-- that involves Harvey Weinstein and other important Democratic Party donors-- others did not.

Of course, to keep things in perspective, feminists had gone to the barricades to defend Bill Clinton against harassment and rape charges. And they had rallied to support a woman who was a rape apologist and the nation’s leading enabler of sexual harassment. And they thrilled to the leadership qualities of a woman who, when Secretary of State, blessed the election of a presidential candidate whose political party supported female genital mutilation, honor killings, wife beating and murdering homosexuals. I am thinking, of course, of Hillary Clinton’s trip to Cairo to bless to the election of Mohamed Morsi, a leader of the Egyptian Brotherhood.

For a movement that wanted to politicize everything, this level of political incompetence was hardly a sign of mature judgment. 

Anway, #MeToo backfired. Sensitivity training sessions produced more animosity between men and women. Overt instances of sexual harassment and assault, felonious behavior, became replaced by a war against tweets. Consider the hubbub at the Washington Post when now former staffer Felicia Sonmez threw a tantrum over what she considered a sexist retweet.

If feminism had made women radioactive, why would any man want to work with a woman, or even to mentor a woman. Let us not forget the wives of executives who told their husbands never, ever to mentor a young woman. And surely, once the question is the wrong use of language or even the wrong pronouns, why would anyone take the risk of conversing with a female colleague?

So #MeToo became an exercise in impotent rage. It did not accomplish much of anything, except to hurt men, to hurt companies, and especially to hurt the wives and daughters of any man who was accused, rightly or wrongly. The point deserves emphasis: punishing a man for making a joke, ruining his career, putting him on the unemployment rolls, does not just hurt him. It hurts his wife and his daughters. They are not likely to be drawn to the feminist cause.

So, like Felicia Sonmez, recently fired from the Washington Post, and even Michelle Goldberg, whiner supreme, movement feminists, with their rage to politicize their and everyone else’s lives, have become humorless scolds. They have, as Goldberg reports, failed their cause and failed women. If women are turning away from a label that makes them radioactive and takes them off the marriage track, it might be cause for celebration.

After all, and Goldberg misses the point, feminists, from the onset of the second wave, competed for men by using a simple tactic. At a time when most women were being demure and modest, feminists competed for men by being more open, more available, and more willing to offer up their sexual favors, often for free.

Surely, this attracted men. It garnered male attention. It did not tell men to respect these women for their minds, but then again if feminists were attracting male attention, at least there was that.

Of course, by now the bloom is off the rose, so to speak. Being a feminist today has become associated with being a chronic scold, a culture warrior, a totalitarian despot who polices thought and language.

More significant, ask yourself this question: would any male today want to marry a feminist? If you ask a man today what he might be looking for in a potential wife, would commitment to the feminist cause be on the list?

Anyway, feminists do not want to be wives. They certainly do not want to be housewives. It took some time for men to figure out that feminists were not offering a good deal, but apparently they have. Even women have not figured it out.

Being a feminist gets you off the marriage track. Being a feminist, sacrificing your life to politics, ceasing to be what all societies consider a woman, might make you feel like you have become part of a larger historical cause. But, every woman who uses her head for more than a stand on which to place a pussy hat has figured out by now, not only that the cause is lost, but that if she persists she will be sacrificing herself and her children for nothing.