Anti-Family Feminism

I had thought that no one could out-stupid Helen Lewis. I was wrong. Whereas Lewis, a fountain of empathy, wanted to know whether the coronavirus was good for feminism, one Sophie Lewis (who may or may not be related) outdoes her with a call to abolish the human family. (via Maggie's Farm)

Lewis declares that her work:

...focuses on eugenic, bioconservative and imperial feminism, queer and trans social reproduction, Black feminist family abolitionism, hydrofeminism, postgenomics, and Marxist-feminist accounts of care…

Put it all together and it spells,  you guessed it-- imbecile. A woman who lacks any real intelligence is pretending to be a great theoretical thinker by tossing around terms that designate membership in the woke sorority.

Mark Tapson calls her progressive, but the truth is, she’s a radical leftist who does not even understand Engels. He quotes a recent Lewis pronouncement:

We deserve better than the family. And the time of corona is an excellent time to practice abolishing it.

What is this “we” that deserves better? Does she really think that she belongs to the guardian class of philosopher queens who are going to reorganize and restructure human society, beginning with the abolition of the family.

Tapson continues to quote her:

Writing in her article titled, “The coronavirus crisis shows it's time to abolish the family,” Lewis addresses what she calls “the unspoken and mostly unquestioned crux of the prescribed response to the pandemic: private homes.” She criticizes the assumption that we should all “stay at home” to contain the spread of the virus, arguing that 1) not everybody has a home, and 2) private property is already a “fundamentally unsafe space.”

“How can a zone defined by the power asymmetries of housework (reproductive labor being so gendered), of renting and mortgage debt, land and deed ownership, of patriarchal parenting and (often) the institution of marriage, benefit health?” she asks. “Such standard homes are where, after all, everyone secretly knows the majority of earthly violence goes down… A quarantine is, in effect, an abuser’s dream – a situation that hands near-infinite power to those with the upper hand over a home.”

So, since private homes are a refuge from the virus, we should abolish private homes. And replace them by communes, by conditions that would allow the virus to propagate more freely. You thought I was kidding when I said that she is an imbecile.

As for who has the upper hand in the home, it’s always been women. Except that feminism has wanted men to spend more time invading a woman’s space. 

Of course, the private family is a universal principle of social reproduction. In Lewis’s communist utopia private families would be relieved of the duty to bring up children… with the power being granted to the commune, or to the state.

Think about it: she is following Plato, as it happens, in recommending that children be taken from their mothers so that their mothers can have better career opportunities. If you imagine that women would ever stand for this, you need to think again. As for the flagrant misogyny that is lurking in the proposal, the truth is, that radical feminism is stealth misogyny.

The vision of anti-family theorists like Lewis is to replace the ideological straightjacket of the family with a world of communes of “collective social reproduction,” in which the entire community cares for children and rescues them from “abusive parental relationships.” Apparently communes will be free of spouse beating, child abuse, and all the other dark shadows of human nature. Oh, and no compulsory heterosexuality.

Anyway, Lewis believes, hold on to your thinking cap, that the private family “sucks.” Speak for yourself, Sophie. Tapson quotes her:

In her Open Democracy article, Lewis adds that “even when the private nuclear household poses no direct physical or mental threat to one’s person – no spouse-battering, no child rape, and no queer-bashing – the private family qua mode of social reproduction still, frankly, sucks. It genders, nationalizes and races us. It norms us for productive work. It makes us believe we are ‘individuals.’”

As for the origin of these deliria, we can find it in the writings of a man, one by name of Friedrich Engels, sidekick of Karl Marx, author of the book: The Origin of the Family, Private property and the State.

As Engels knows well, the picture of a pre-family stage of human evolution can be found in the fiction concocted by a Swiss sociologist named J. J. Bachoven. In the beginning, Bachoven posited, all humans lived in a matriarchy where women were sexually liberated, to the point that they did not know who their childrens’ fathers were.

Obviously, this entailed risks and women eventually sacrificed their sexual license in favor of protection by stronger males. This gave males ownership, so said Engels, over children and caused them to produce social institutions that would guarantee their rights to own their wives and children.

Excuse the brief summary. Engels was merely trying to dupe women into becoming part of the vanguard of the revolution against capitalism. But, as opposed to Lewis and her ilk, Engels was not an imbecile. He promised women that the revolution would grant them happy marriages with faithful husbands and with lots of orgasmic sex. Who could possibly argue with that?