The Big Feminist Lie

In this day and age it’s impossible to imagine that anyone would dare lie to women. It’s inconceivable that anyone would systematically give women bad advice in order to deceive them. OK, maybe some male scoundrels and sociopaths might try.... 

Today’s women are smarter, better educated and more conscious of all matters sexual. No one could possibly get away with lying to them.

And yet, when Tanya Selvaratnam tried to get pregnant in her late 30s she discovered that she had been lied to. To her chagrin she learned that the stories about how science had made it easier for women in their late 30s and early 40s to get pregnant were untrue. They were all a pack of lies.

Tricia Romano sums up Selvaratnam’s experience:

So imagine Tanya Selvaratnam’s surprise when she had her first miscarriage at 37, and then another, when she was 38, and yet a third when she was 40. Like a lot of women, Selvaratnam, a film and theatre producer, actress and activist based out of New York City, thought that 40 was the new 30 and that she could have a baby whenever she wanted. And if she couldn’t, well, there was IVF (In Vitro Fertilization) for that. Her new book, The Big Lie: Motherhood, Feminism, and the Reality of the Biological Clock, chronicles her own personal journey through three miscarriages, her trials with IVF, her shocking cancer diagnosis, and her own personal tribulations with her marriage. But it also delves into the deeper issues surrounding infertility in America, namely that women’s pursuit of career first, family second, may come back to haunt them. 

Who was it who told women to put career first and family second? Take a guess:

In The Big Lie she [Selvaratnam] writes: “I have found myself wondering lately about the connection between feminism and my generation’s decision to delay motherhood. Did feminism devalue motherhood? Did it lure us to impossible expectations? Did it lull us into complacency? Or did it create a world full of new possibilities that enticed us to wait until it was too late?”

If this is true, feminism has a lot to answer for. It seems to have tricked large numbers of women out of having children in order to enlist them in an ideological crusade.

If you think that feminists are pro-women, think again. Feminism is an ideology. It is pro-feminism, no more and no less.

What’s surprising here is that any of this is surprising. Many people, including yours truly on this blog, have been writing about this for years.

As might be expected, Selvaratnam manages to exculpate feminism. Not for nothing is she an activist. Romano explains:

Though, said Selvaratnam, it’s not necessarily feminism’s fault. “I don’t blame anyone for this situation. Advances in reproductive science dovetailed perfectly with the liberating messages of feminism and made women feel they could do things on their own timetables…. Our biologies do not bend to feminist principles, and science can’t work miracles,” she said. “It is very feminist to arm women with knowledge so that they can make better decisions about their futures.”

Naturally, she does not want to be judgmental. But still, how about some honesty? Feminism has actively promoted the life plan that has led many women to this impasse. It has shamed women who did not follow it.

Feminists might not have wanted to cheat women out of their children, but childlessness is the direct and foreseeable consequence of the life plan that they have been selling to young women.

Just watch what happens when someone, some day comes out, yet again, with the idea that women do better to marry young and to have children young. The shrieks and howls from the sisterhood will drown out the message.

Need I mention that feminism spends far more time railing about how best to prevent conception and gestation than it ever has about the joys of motherhood. In the feminist playbook motherhood is the new “curse.”

How common is this problem? Romano answers:

What’s striking about Selvaratnam’s story is not how unusual it is, but how common it is. She talks to dozens of women who went through one miscarriage after another or who tried for years to get pregnant using IVF. But one of the biggest ways women are failed is by their own doctors, many of whom do not advise women correctly or early enough.

Naturally, good progressives will shift the blame to the media. But, ask yourself, who is running the media? Who is crafting and editing the message that is being communicated to young women? Do you think it’s the Tea Party or feminists?

Romano writes:

“One of the things that women really do believe, because of the media and because they want to,” said Whelan, “is that IVF is what you do when you can’t get pregnant. You’re 42 and IVF will get you pregnant. And that unfortunately is very far from truth,” she said citing a success rate between 1 percent and five percent for women over 40. “That’s the ballpark,” she said. “It’s not a good ballpark.”

The Feminist War on Science

On its face the conclusion seems intuitively obvious and unobjectionable.

Things being what they are, today’s researchers needed to interview a group of college students to establish the facts of the matter.

The matter in question is not the sexual behavior of college students, but, more specifically their sexual regrets.

Lo and behold, they discovered that young women are more likely to regret having indulged in too many or the wrong kind of sexual experiences while young men are more likely to regret having missed out on sexual opportunities, for not having been sufficient assertive.

Amanda Hess, no fan of the study, summarizes its conclusions:

… female students were more likely to express regret over sexual actions they’d taken—like “losing their virginity” to the “wrong partner”—while male students were more likely to feel remorse over actions they did not take—like being “too shy to indicate sexual attraction to someone.”

That male and female sexual behaviors differ significantly is central to Darwinian psychology. One might even say that it is settled science.

The science says that men and women have significantly different reproductive potential—men can in their lifetime produce far more offspring than can women—that the direct consequences of conception are vastly different for the two sexes and that it's far easier for a man to walk away from a pregnancy, men and women are psychologically predisposed to live their sexuality differently.

In so doing they are acting rationally and making decisions based on the reality of their experience. As a rule, women are more selective and more cautious in choosing sexual partners while men are more reckless.

You probably did not need Darwin to tell you this and you probably do not need a degree in biology to understand it. As I say, it feels unobjectionable.

Human psychology and human behavior are, to some extent, hard wired into the organism. And it is likely that they have been part of the human makeup for quite some time now.

Evidently, feminists find this all to be offensive. They prefer ideology to science and rush out to attack any scientific study that contradicts their deeply held convictions. 

Many feminists also believe that their ideology and the concomitant indoctrination that so many people have undergone has radically altered human nature, to the point where the experience of their grandparents is not relevant to the way they live their life.

If this isn’t out-of-control narcissism, I don’t know what is.

Or better, in this ideologically driven view of humanity, people become silly putty, to be molded by their new masters into a form that corresponds to their ideas. 

Whatever the merits or demerits of specific policy prescriptions, the feminist enterprise is geared toward reducing, even obliterating the difference between the sexes.

For example, if women are allowed to have abortion on demand then it would be "almost" as easy for a woman to walk away from conception as it is for a man. And obviously, complete access to contraception would strike another blow against the patriarchy. All we need now is the invention of gestation devices to replace wombs. Then we can all pretend that men and women are the same.

Note well that the logic of evolutionary psychology has nothing to do with the way people lived during the Stone Age. It takes the realities of human biology as a constant. Stone Age behaviors might be relevant, if we knew very much about them, but so would the way human beings functioned in Biblical times, in ancient Rome, in primitive cultures and during the last century.

For her part, Hess is deeply offended that anyone would care compare today’s college students with hunter-gatherer, Stone Age cultures. And yet, without having to quiz a bunch of college students, a minimal amount of ratiocination tells us that where Stone Age women were expert at gathering, today’s woman is equally expert in a correlative activity: shopping.

Still and all, nothing about the argument thus far requires that we understand the psyche of the Cave Man or Woman. I underscore the point, and I present the case for evolutionary biology in terms of biological constants. this grounds the theory in reality, not in speculation about the way we all lived way back then.

These facts have not impressed the feministocracy. Hess reduces science to mythmaking and dismisses it:

So evo-psychologists look to “modern-day hunter-gatherers as proxies” for Stone Age psyches, then rely on a lot of guesswork to crudely construct the gender dynamics of our ancestral homes. Scientists in the field make projections about our deep ancestors that are colored by their understanding of contemporary human beings; then, they use those projections to “explain” why differences between modern men and women have been set in stone for millennia, and are unlikely to budge any time soon.

So what's the point in "proving" that among a tiny sample of college students, a handful of men and women feel a different sort of deep regret about sexual scenarios that we can vaguely compare to our fantasies about the gender roles of our prehistoric ancestors? A study of the sex lives of 200 college students can’t actually tell us anything about how our early ancestors shacked up, and vice versa. It could, however, speak to the masturbatory tendencies of some scientists.

But, since when did feminists believe that masturbation is a bad thing? When did masturbation become an insult? In the old days, feminists promoted masturbation as a way for women to liberate themselves from the tyranny of male sexuality. Besides, it’s foolproof contraception.

As for the notion that evolutionary psychology rests on a mythic reconstruction of the Stone Age psyche or even the Stone Age social organization, it is a nonsensical caricature, one that is specifically designed to erase the biology of gender difference.

One has slightly more sympathy for the complaint about the mind of the average American college student, but if the responses of those students are not as clearly defined as an evolutionary psychologist would expect, the reason might be that they have been indoctrinated by feminist ideology and conduct their lives accordingly.

When placed in an academic setting where they are answering question they are certainly cognizant of what the politically correct answers are.

The only real myth here is the myth of gender sameness, a myth for which there is no evidence whatever.

To be fair, many feminists believe that their ideology has transformed women and men so radically that they do not even resemble their grandparents. By this logic, we are a brand new species and we can make it up as we please.

Effectively, this anti-science intends to write human beings out of the natural world, to say nothing of the animal kingdom.

If human beings do not have fundamental and essential qualities in common with their ancestors, they will become silly putty in the hands of ideologues.

Now, Hess and other anti-scientists point out that the studies performed by evolutionary psychologists on college students are not as definitive as one would wish. The differences are not marginal, but they are not as radical as the Darwinian hypothesis would suggest.

But, what exactly does this prove? Does it show that human being is more plastic than the scientists imagined? Or does it show that young American college students, products of their culture as well as of their nature, have learned what is and is not the correct way to think about sexual regret.

If the reality of evolutionary psychology rested on a quiz given to some American college students, Hess might have a point. In truth, the quiz shows that human nature remains in tact, even after having been indoctrinated.

Angry Young Feminists

Mark Judge read it, so I don’t have to. Give him some extra credit: now you don’t have to read it either.

I am referring to a new book, The Book of Jezebel. You remember Jezebel from Bible study. She tried to entice people to worship idols instead of God, to forms cults instead of religions. Wikipedia summarizes her story:

 According to the biblical accounts, Jezebel incited her husband King Ahab to abandon the worship of Yahweh and encourage worship of the deities Baal and Asherah instead. Jezebel is said to have persecuted the prophets of Yahweh, and to have fabricated false evidence of blasphemy against an innocent landowner who refused to sell his property to King Ahab, causing the landowner to be put to death. For these transgressions against the God and people of Israel, the Bible relates, Jezebel met a gruesome death - thrown out of a window by members of her own court retinue, and the flesh of her corpse eaten by stray dogs.

Nowadays, for those who missed Bible study and are connoisseurs of contmeporary feminist thought, Jezebel is known primarily as a website that traffics in feminist rage.

To be fair, Jezebel’s editor, Jessica Coen is an exceptionally talented writer. Her site would be better if she would fill it with more of her own writing and less feminist boilerplate.

Personally, I have long found the site a wonderful supplier of self-discrediting feminism. It shows us what feminism has become. Considering how influential feminism is, those of us who have not bought it can read Jezebel to find out what the other half is thinking. Or, should I say, to see whether the other half is thinking.

Being a dedicated reader to the Jezebel website I feel that I have earned an exemption from reading The Book of Jezebel.

According to Mark Judge the book is organized alphabetically—very original, that—with C following B following A. Under each letter you will find, Judge assures us, several items indicating what you, if you are a Jezebel, must hate and several items you must like.

It’s like an encyclopedia, get it:

Under A there is Madeleine Albright and Christiane Amanpour, Allure magazine and Isabel Allende. There’s also Biblical Adam, who represents “male supremacy based on primordial male precedence.” And Adoption, which would be OK – maybe – except “antichoicers would have you believe this is a relatively easy process and a morally superior alternative to abortion.”

What's wrong with adoption? The people who defend it as an alternative to abortion are opposed to abortion. Thus, there shall be no more adoption.

Want to read more about the dread anti-choicers? The Book of Jezebel offers this:

… antichoice does fail to reflect the breadth and depth of the fear and loathing expressed by antichoice activists when it comes to the subject of women having sex without paying a terrible price, either at the end of a coat hanger or in being forced to march down the aisle to marry a guy who sole husbandly qualification is that he turned you on after a few rounds on a Saturday night.

Antichoicers hate women who have sex, women who like having sex and women who hookup. Precisely why the patriarchy would not want women to enjoy having sex is, I suspect, never addressed. Its’ an article of faith, to be accepted as dogmatic truth

People have debated the issue of abortion—when, where, why—for decades now. Yet, anyone who disagrees with the feministically correct position—which means... abortion on demand—whenever, wherever a woman wishes—is branded a misogynist who fears women’s sexuality.

One wonders whether The Book of Jezebel contains, under the letter G, an entry for Dr. Kermit Gosnell?

And then The Book of Jezebel defines anti-feminists as:

People who object to feminism’s goals, i.e. people who often (willfully) misunderstand feminism and/or huge assholes. Notable examples include Phyllis Schlafly, Camille Paglia, Caitlin Flanagan, the entire “men’s rights” movement, proponents of wifey “surrender,” hard-core religious fundamentalists, teenagers who just discovered Andrea Dworkin, Bart Stupak, Mike Pence, and the pope. Not to be confused with thoughtful people who believe in women’s equality but object to the mainstream feminist movement’s tendency to focus on middle-class, white, heterosexual women to the exclusion of everyone else.

If you are not a feminist, you are an ignorant asshole. That pretty much sums it up, don’t you think? It shows how much the Jezebels respect differences of opinion.

Actually, the writers do accept that some people might believe that today's feminism is insufficiently leftist and multicultural.

Other than that group, anyone who disagrees with contemporary feminism is an ignorant asshole.

Who is this book’s target audience? Perhaps the authors are writing for fellow fanatics who believe that the world should be divided into good and evil, between those who share their extreme zealotry and those who, because they reject it, deserve to be drawn and quartered.

One is struck by the mindlessness of it all. One is struck by the shameless display of raw emotion.

Remember the time when feminists insisted that women be respected for their minds? Now they have gotten over that wave of feminism. They want to tyrannize people with their righteous rage.

Why would they be trying to convince us that they, being women, can only make histrionic displays of emotion? Why haven’t they gotten over that shopworn stereotype?

Forty years ago second-wave feminism washed up on our shores. One must say that it has accomplished many of its objectives. And yet, the dumbed-down feminists of Jezebel are in a white-hot rage.

The world that these junior feminists are living in today is a world that feminism, in very large part, has created. Modern women have seen their lives altered by feminism. If they don’t like it, they should start blaming themselves and their feminist foremothers.

The followed Gloria Steinem’s advice and grew up to become the men that they had wanted to marry. They had every right to do so. Now, it seems that they are surprised to have discovered that the men who might be willing to marry them are not the men that they want to marry.

Having become the men that they wanted to marry feminists are facing men who are trying to become the women these feminists did not want to be.

You may want to consider it a crushing irony. You do better to consider it poetic justice.

If their inability to respect the difference between the sexes has made their dating and mating lives decidedly unsatisfying feminists are learning the hard way that you shouldn’t mess with Mother Nature.

No wonder they are angry. It’s all projected self-loathing. It’s time to get over it.

In his review Mark Judge offers his own explanation for the feminist rage he so aptly describes. Unfortunately, he relies on the authority of one Robert Bly, a poet turned men’s-rights activist who created the Iron Man movement a few decades ago.

I would call it an unforced error.

Judge admits that invoking the name of Robert Bly is not going to lend very much credence to his argument. In that he is right. He would have done better to find a more substantive writer, even a research scholar whose work might have buttressed his argument: feminists are angry because there are no more fathers around.

It is altogether possible that feminists are enraged at the absence of father figures. But it is equally possible and perhaps more probable that they are angry about the manifest failure of their own ideology to provide what it promised.

Should Lindy West Change Her Name?

Sometimes life imitates The Onion.

Pity Lindy West. She’s a feminist who wants to get married and to take her future husband’s name.

This is tormenting her, first, because it is not the feministically correct thing to do and, second, because her current boyfriend would never allow it.

In West’s words:

However, here's where this gets complicated—here's why "tradition" is an insidious concept and why feminism is a beautifully nuanced discipline—I, Lindy West, despite all of the above, personally find the idea of taking my future husband's name kind of...romantic. I would probably do it if he would let me (doubtful, though—my current boyfriend takes a way more hardline feminist stance on this than I do). The thought of taking the right person's name doesn't feel mandatory, but it does feel good. Even though I know, intellectually, the shitty implications of becoming Mrs. Husband, I love the idea of becoming one family with one name. … And anyway, even if I could, I’m not sure that I want to escape the instinct to mould my future family into the shape of the family I came from. No amount of critical thinking about our warped, oppressive system can change the fact that I grew up in it and feel its pull in my cells. I do want to be like my parents. I just want to do it on my terms.

I’m not sure that this makes feminism seem more nuanced. I am sure that feminism is not a discipline.

West is telling us that she would like to get married, but that her feminism is confusing her.

According to feminist ideology taking a man’s name makes a woman his property. And yet, taking his name, West correctly observes, has a logic of its own. A family where husband and wife and children all have the same name feels a bit more united than a family where one member has a different name. It may have been associated with objectionable practices but the custom has a logic that surpasses patriarchal possession.

Feminist West has developed a relationship with a male feminist—aka an oxymoron—and tells us that said male feminist would, if he were to marry her, refuse to allow her to take his name.

I suppose that this explains why some men become feminists. They can impose their will on their mates with impunity. Keep in mind: West's article says that men who insist that a woman change her name make bad husbands. What about men who insist that a woman not change her name? 

Oppression by any other name would smell as rancid.

Feminism creates unnecessary difficulties. Call it nuance, if you like. It’s the price of trying to make your life conform to an ideology.

James Taranto summed up the feminist dilemma well:

The preferred feminist convention is for the woman to continue using her father's name as a statement against patriarchy.

Now you know why the sisterhood is confounding.

More on Emily Yoffe and the Feminist Freak Out

The feminist freak out over Emily Yoffe’s advice to her teenage daughter has crossed the pond.

This morning Olivia Fleming reports on the firestorm in the London Daily Mail. Apparently, she could only find one author who dared defend Yoffe—that would be your humble blogger—so she quoted my post on the subject. I would have been happier if she had remembered to link my post, but, all told, I am proud to have been quoted in the Daily Mail.

If there is a moral to this kerfuffle it is this: when passions are enflamed, reason goes on leave.

Feminists are so consumed with hatred over rapists—with good reason, one might add—that they fail to make the most elementary rational distinction. Telling a young woman not to take an unnecessary risk in no way, shape or manner excuses rape. A woman who drinks herself to the point of blacking out is not asking for it. No one believes that. It is not the issue.

Yoffe was saying that such a woman is making herself unnecessarily vulnerable to assault. Is that not something that a mother should tell her daughter?

If the outrage over rape was a deterrent, we would be having fewer rapes. We do not, so perhaps it is not the best way to solve this problem.

Some who have taken issue with Yoffe recommend that we teach men not to rape. But, whatever makes you think that young men are being taught to rape or that young men do not know very, very well that rape is an extremely serious crime? Does any man not know that if he is convicted of rape he will receive an extreme punishment?

We aren’t living in Dubai, after all.

Fleming offers an “expert” opinion:

But this, according to Thomas MacAulay Millar from Yes Means Yes, Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape, focuses on treating the symptom, instead of looking for ways to treat the disease -- the repeat rapists and the social constructs that allow them to get away with it.

'She [Yoffe] gives up on catching and punishing them, in favor of telling women that they can’t do something that men take for granted the right to do,' he writes.

Millar’s last sentence tells us that he not expert in English grammar. The sentence is illiterate.

When Millar talks about a “right” that men take for granted, he is talking about the right to get completely wasted on alcohol.

Since when is that a “right” that we need to defend? Since when is that a hallmark of anyone’s liberation?

Writing for her daughter Yoffe  was counseling moderation in the consumption of alcohol. She did not address the question of how to punish rapists or even how to deter them from doing it.

And Yoffe never said that no one should ever have another drink. She was not proposing a return to Prohibition. She was arguing for moderation. Her detractors seem to think that moderation is equal to repression.

In the Huffington Post Emma Gray also suggested that, by counseling moderation Yoffe was blaming the victims. She made it sound like Yoffe was saying that women who get raped are at fault and that the men who rape them are not.

Again this is an absurd distortion.

Fleming reports:

Emma Gray, editor of Huffington Post Women, agrees. 'Have we lost so much faith in our male population that instead of publishing columns telling young men to stop raping tipsy women -- or encouraging the expansion of programs on college campuses that work to educate students about such matters and prevent sexual assault -- some of us believe it is most effective to tell women not to drink at all?' she asks.

'We need to place the burden of blame for these assaults squarely where it belongs -- on the shoulder of those individuals who choose to commit them.'

Since Yoffe never blamed young women for getting raped, one does not quite understand what Gray is trying to say. She makes a serious error when she conflates binge drinking with getting “tipsy” and declares that Yoffe wants women not to drink at all.

Many of those who denounce Yoffe make recommendations that would naturally lead to more and better policing.

Amanda Hess wrote this:

We can prevent the most rapes on campus by putting our efforts toward finding and punishing those perpetrators, not by warning their huge number of potential victims to skip out on parties.

Colleges can start changing those structures by refusing to put the onus on victims to prevent their own assaults and instead holding perpetrators accountable for the crimes they commit—often, while drunk.

How much extra policing would accomplish that goal? Should armed guards be stationed at fraternity parties? Should men be banned from women’s rooms and vice versa? Should young couples have chaperones? Does Hess believe that we as a culture do not hold perpetrators accountable for the crimes they commit?

The truth is, the only people who dare suggest that rapists should be excused for misreading signals are their defense attorneys. I trust that even they do not believe what they are saying. Does the legal system need to be reformed or does Hess want us to deprive those accused of rape of a fair trial and competent counsel? Would she prefer to see extra-judicial proceedings, run by college administrators and students deal with the problem of on-campus rape?

And if she would, what would she say to the young men who are falsely accused? What would she say to the young men who have been wrongfully convicted of the crime?

Alexander Abad-Santos wrote on the Atlantic Wire:

… these people [women who binge drink] aren't breaking the law, yet they're the ones being targeted and asked to compromise their lives. What about teaching men not to rape?

What about teaching Abad-Santos how to think? Why does he imagine that a young woman who is told by her parents that it is a bad idea to binge drink is being asked to compromise her life?

Again, how exactly do you teach men not to rape?

Presumably, he favors sensitivity training where men are taught to pepper their amorous advances with requests for permission.

But, don’t these classes assume that all men are potential rapists and all women are potential victims? How do you promote more loving relationships between men and women when you start out accusing young men of being potential rapists and young women as potential victims?

Fleming closed her article with a remark of mine: the best approach to reducing sexual assault on campus is to teach young people to respect each other.

She might have mentioned that it is also a good idea to teach men that they have a fundamental moral obligation to protect and defend women. You cannot teach people not to do something without teaching them to do something constructive in its place.

Emily Yoffe Provokes a Feminist Freak Out

You would think that it is normal for a mother to offer advice and guidance to a daughter who is preparing to go to college. You would think that a mother who takes her parental responsibilities seriously would explain to her daughter that too much drinking is a bad idea, not only because excessive consumption of alcohol is bad for her health but also because it makes her more vulnerable to sexual assault.

If you were counseling your daughter wouldn’t you want to teach her to avoid situations that might place her in danger?

If you think that this is perfectly unobjectionable, you don’t know feminism.

Two days ago Slate’s Emily Yoffe wrote an article saying that young women should not drink to excess. This would, she said, help them to avoid situations where they might be sexually assaulted. Most sexual assaults on campus occur when the victim has drunk too much. Ergo, women can help protect themselves by drinking less.

Surely, Yoffe knew what she was going to face. She deserves credit for telling the truth anyway.

Before you knew it, Yoffe’s example of responsible parental advice had produced a feminist freak out. From Katie Baker to Amanda Hess to Erin Gloria Ryan to Ann Friedman to Emma Gray the voices of contemporary feminism rose up to denounce Yoffe for, they seemed all to believe, blaming the victim and going easy on the male perpetrators of these heinous crimes.

If I may summarize it, they seemed to be reasoning that when a woman is raped it is not her fault. True enough. Thus, any suggestion that she might have avoided placing herself in a dangerous situation can make her feel that she was at fault, and thus will impede her recovery.

Yoffe was saying that she wants her daughter to do everything in her power, as an individual with free choice, to avoid being raped. Feminists believe that her message circumscribes the freedom of young women and tends to blame them when they are victims of sexual assault.

Feminists want to focus the maximum of outrage against rapists. Any suggestion that a woman might have knowingly herself in harms’ way diminishes their outrage.

You might ask yourself whether this outrage, directed against men as potential rapists and abusers is likely to make said men more or less likely to assault women.

And you might also ask yourself how many men are really capable of rape. Of those who are, how many of them do not know that they are committing a crime? Why would you want to teach all men that they are potential rapists?

True enough, none of the feminists mentioned above says that young women should go out and binge drink. Yet, they are in such high dudgeon over Yoffe’s recommendation that one would easily forgive a young woman for coming away believing that binge drinking was a way to assert her independence and her liberation.

Apparently, feminists believe that liberation means that a woman should be free to do as she pleases when she pleases how she pleases and not to have to suffer any ill-effects.  They fail to see that freedom for responsibility is not the same as freedom from responsibility.

Worse yet, Yoffe was suggesting that women, far more than men, possess a specific vulnerability to sexual assault. It inheres in the biology of sex. And she was taking account of the fact that women are generally, significantly weaker then men.

If you take these realities into account, you will be advising your daughter to exercise caution when imbibing alcohol. You will be telling her to act responsibly.

For decades now, feminism has been telling women that they are strong and empowered. Yet, when you tell women that they are strong and powerful you are suggesting that they are invulnerable.

Yoffe’s feminist detractors did not specifically say it, but they must have been seriously incommoded by her willingness to accept the fact that a young woman is weaker and more vulnerable than a young man.

Let us not forget that some feminists, one of them Tufts professor Nancy Bauer have publicly said that equality means matching a man drink for drink and hookup for hookup.

If women are drinking more than ever it’s not because they are following advice given them by men. Most young women today refuse to accept any advice from any man.

While it is well known, as Yoffe documents, that women who get very drunk are more likely to be sexually assaulted, it is also true that women who choose to hook up, that is to perform consensual sexual acts with men they barely know often use alcohol as a psychic lubricant.

To return to the salient point, feminists are up in arms about sexual assault, as they rightly should be, but they seem to believe that the best solution is to prosecute rapists, thus to threaten men. Second best, they assert, is to organize sensitivity training sessions to teach men not to drink too much and to empathize with rape victims.

Unfortunately, the criminal justice system is not a very effective deterrent. As Yoffe points out, only a very small number of sexual assaults are ever prosecuted. The reasons are several, beginning with the pain inflicted on female victims during trials, but the truth is, most rapists know that rape is a serious crime and they do it anyway. For all I know, they get aroused by the risk. Many rapists are predators who will attack the most defenseless victim they can find. If they are true predators they will choose victims who are less likely to be consciously aware of what is happening.

Predators and psychopaths develop an enhanced consciousness of crime because they want to be able to do what they want to do without getting caught.

As for sensitivity training, I posted a while back about the ineffectiveness of anti-bullying sensitivity programs. It turns out that they do little to decrease the incidence of bullying. In fact, they provoke more of it.

Some feminists have been outraged to see that Yoffe does not place as much onus on the behavior of adolescent males as she does on her daughter. The reason might be that Yoffe does not have an adolescent son, but it also might be that, as all men know, when a man’s binge drinking surpasses a certain limit he will become, to be delicate, incapable of performing.

Be that as it may, telling people that an action is grievously wrong and even felonious does not appear to have a very strong deterrent effect. Threatening prosecution does not seem to prevent many rapes, either.

Here’s another proposal: how about teaching men that they have a manly duty to protect and defend women. Not merely in the most egregious situations where a woman is in danger, but in the smaller gestures that signify protectiveness. That might mean picking a woman up at home before a date; it might mean escorting her home after a date; it might mean opening doors for her and helping her to carry heavy packages.

It would mean behaving like a gentleman and treating women like ladies.

One understands that such thoughts might provoke yet another feminist freak out. Women are independent; they do not need men to protect them; they can take care of themselves; they have taken judo classes.

Why not try to change the culture so that men are encouraged to demonstrate more respect and more gentlemanly concern for women?

In the old days, before people became enamored of the power of the state to solve all problems, if a man assaulted a woman he did not have to answer to the court system. He had to answer to her brothers and her father. They would have meted out swift and merciless justice.

A potential rapist would have known that the women he was thinking of preying upon was not merely an independent, autonomous, strong, powerful woman… she was the sister and daughter of some very, very strong and very, very brutal men.

Camille Paglia on Feminism

I know you are going to find this hard to believe, but there are real people who believe that anyone who opposes today's feminist ideology is indulging in hate speech.

Thus, they fail to distinguish between offering a dissent and demonizing the opposition.

They want to criminalize differences of opinion, presumably on the ground that opposition to feminism is misogyny.

Yet, feminism contains more than its fair share of misogyny. Very little about second-wave feminism tells girls that it is good to be a woman. Too much of it sees women as victims, victims of sexism, constant abuse, discrimination and prejudice. If that is a woman’s destiny why would anyone relish being a woman.

Being an ideology, second-wave feminism has ignored reality, especially the reality of human biology.

So said Camille Paglia before an audience of students at American University. By systematically denying biology, Paglia explained, second-wave feminism has harmed young women, to say nothing of young men.

Gender-bending is all the rage nowadays and Paglia has concluded that it does not merely deny biology. It is sympatomatic of a broken culture. If people do not feel that they belong to a community, a nation or a family—at times, because these have been denounced as organized criminal conspiracies-- they experiment with different gender roles.

If American society—or is it all human society—is a patriarchal conspiracy to oppress women, no women should feel comfortable being a part of it. Thus, the fallback position, Paglia argues, is to identify primarily by gender and secondarily by membership in an ideologically-driven cult like feminism.

Paglia explained:

Furthermore, gender experimentation, while very intriguing to us today, has usually remained an exceptional practice that was not embraced by the majority in any given society. Finally, a volatility in gender roles is usually symptomatic of tensions and anxieties about larger issues. That is, sexual identity becomes a primary focus only when other forms of identification and affiliation—religious, national, tribal, familial—break down. Furthermore, while androgyny or transgender fluidity is currently regarded as progressive, such phenomena have at times helped trigger a severe counter-reaction that could last for centuries. For example, the permissiveness of imperial Rome, with its empty, ritualistic religion, created an ethical vacuum soon filled by a massive spiritual movement from the eastern Mediterranean— Christianity, which two millennia later remains a powerful global presence. Elite Romans vacationing in Pompeii or Capri undoubtedly felt that their relaxed, hedonistic world would go on forever.

Hedonism, decadence, lotus-eating… a culture that makes the pursuit of pleasure and the indulgence in leisure important values for being is headed for trouble. Whatever our problems we are not going to pleasure ourselves out of them.

In Paglia’s words:

Extravaganzas of gender experimentation sometimes precede cultural collapse, as they certainly did in Weimar Germany. Like late Rome, America too is an empire distracted by games and leisure pursuits. Now as then, there are forces aligning outside the borders, scattered fanatical hordes where the cult of heroic masculinity still has tremendous force. I close with this question: is a nation whose elite education is increasingly predicated on the neutralization of gender prepared to defend itself against that growing challenge?

How does the denial of biology hurt young women? Imagine that biology dictates that it is better for a woman to marry young and to have children young. Feminism has not offered a choice between marrying young and postponing marriage and childbearing. It has stigmatized marrying young, thus depriving women of choice.

Paglia explained:

The overflow of gender theory into real life can conceal developing problems. For example, what are the long-term consequences of the disruption of biologic patterns in our imposing on young women a male-centered career path that occupies women’s optimal years of fertility with a prolonged sequence of undergraduate and postgraduate education? By the time our most accomplished young women are ready to marry, they may be in their 30s, when pregnancy carries more risks and when their male peers suddenly have an abundant marital choice of fresher, more nubile girls in their 20s. The TV series, Sex and the City, which was a huge surprise hit internationally as well, dramatized the quandary of young career women as an unsettling mix of comedy and tragedy.

I consider it completely irresponsible that public schools offer sex education but no systematic guidance to adolescent girls, who should be thinking about how they want to structure their future lives: do they want children, and if so, when that should be scheduled, with the advantages and disadvantages of each option laid out. Because of the stubborn biologic burden of pregnancy and childbirth, these are issues that will always affect women more profoundly than men. Starting a family early has its price for an ambitious young woman, a career hiatus that may be difficult to overcome. On the other hand, the reward of being with one’s children in their formative years, instead of farming out that fleeting and irreplaceable experience to daycare centers or nannies, has an inherent emotional and perhaps spiritual value that has been lamentably ignored by second-wave feminism.

Right now in the U.S., young mothers are automatically regarded as déclassé; they are pitied for “wasting” their talents. This animus, shot through with social snobbery, must end. Colleges and universities that claim to support women’s rights must adapt to a more humane recognition of biologic needs and patterns.

Note well: Paglia is saying that sex education is oriented toward achieving pleasure, not toward offering women information that will help them to make basic life decisions.

It has been well-documented that boys and young men are also being victimized by the feminist ideology that is afoot in the school system. I have often pointed it out on this blog, and I am hardly alone in having said so.

Paglia’s take:

Similarly, our present system of primary and secondary education should be stringently reviewed for its confinement of boys to a prison-like setting that curtails their energy and requires ideological renunciation of male traits. By the time young middle class men emerge from college these days, they have been smoothed and ground down to obedient clones. The elite universities have become police states where an army of deans, sub-deans and faculty committees monitor and sanction male undergraduate speech and behavior if it violates the establishment feminist code. The now routine surveillance of students’ dating lives on American campuses would be unthinkable in Europe. Campus gender theorists can merrily wave their anti- male flag, when every man within ten miles has fled underground.

Paglia accepts that gender roles can be malleable and are often shaped by the culture. Yet, in the war between ideology and reality, reality tends to win out. Gender roles are somewhat flexible but they do have a base in biology. As she puts it, they nearly always return to the norm:

In conclusion, I do believe that gender roles are malleable and dynamically shaped by culture. However, the frequency with which gender roles return to a polarized norm, as well as the startling similarity of gender roles in societies separated by vast distances of time and space, does suggest that there is something fundamentally constant in gender that is based in concrete facts.

Liberated Women and Alcohol

Philosophy professor Nancy Bauer once stated that women had gained a fuller measure of equality because they could now drink as much as men. See my previous posts, here and here.

As the old saying goes… be careful what you wish for.

Feminist professors tell young women that the difference between the sexes is just a social construct, but, when it comes to alcohol consumption, it’s simply not true. Women are paying a heavy price for the bad advice.

In her new book about women and alcohol Ann Dowsett Johnson reports:

“Are the girls trying to keep up with the boys?” asks Edith Sullivan, a researcher at the Stanford University School of Medicine. “Quantity and frequency can be a killer for novice drinkers. Adding alcohol to the mix of the developing brain will likely complicate the normal developmental trajectory. Long after a young person recovers from a hangover, risk to cognitive and brain functions endures.”

Sullivan, who has done a lot of work with the brain structure of alcoholics, is certain that what is known as “telescoping” is real: “As they develop alcoholism, women seem to develop dependence sooner than men. Drink for drink, it is worse for females.”

“It is the issue affecting girls’ health — and it’s going sideways, especially for those 13 to 15.” This is the voice of Nancy Poole, director of research and knowledge translation at the British Columbia Centre of Excellence for Women’s Health. “And the saddest thing,” says Poole, “is alcohol is being marketed as girls’ liberation.”

But, why is it sad that this is part of the women’s liberation movement? The really sad part, as Johnson suggests, is that a woman who wants to live a feministically correct life will often fall prey to the lure of the bottle. (And this says nothing about the use of psychoactive medication.)

Peggy Drexler reported on the rise in female binge drinking a few months ago:

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more American women are drinking more heavily than ever before: one in eight women binge drink -- defined as four drinks or more in one sitting -- about three times a month.

A forthcoming study in the October 2013 issue of the journalAlcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research found that college-aged women are drinking more often than their male counterparts, confirming a January 2013 study of college students in Spain found female students were more likely to binge drink than male students.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports thatarrests for women driving while drunk are on the rise, by about 30% from 1998 to 2007. And according to the CDC, white, college-educated woman ages 18 to 24 with $75,000 or more annual household income were more likely to binge drink than women of other races, ages, and socioeconomic categories.

In her new book Ann Dowsett Johnson blames her own and other women’s excessive alcohol consumption on feminism. In particular, on Gloria Steinem:

I came of age in the ’70s, a heady time for women in North America. Smack-dab in the middle of second-wave feminism, my baby-boom peers and I headed off to university in our miniskirts and tie-dyed T-shirts, assured by Gloria Steinem and a host of others that the world was ours for the taking. We could, in Steinem’s words, “grow up to be the men we wanted to marry.”

Ah yes, second-wave feminism. It was only yesterday that I posted about it on the blog.

Yesterday we saw how some mothers who got caught up in second-wave feminism neglected and abandoned their children for the cause. Now we find out that the movement-induced excessive alcohol consumption has had a deleterious effect on women’s health.

I have occasionally suggested that feminism teaches young women that they should not like being women. It’s so much better, in the feminist world view, to be men. Some may question my opinion, so I am happy to note that Steinem is on my side.

Young women, she said, should grow up to be men. In particular, to be the men they want to marry. How much clearer can you get? How much more contempt can you have for women?

Naturally, Steinem was so taken with her cleverness that neither she nor any of the young women who jumped on the feminist bandwagon gave any thought to the idea that very few men were going to want to marry a woman who really wanted to be a man.

Or better, very few men would want to stay married to a woman who was aspiring to be a man.

Johnson does not explain how it happened, but when her son was 5 she herself became a single mother.

When she was alone bringing up her son, she needed a little alcohol to get through the day. And then, her son went away to college. She described what happened:

For me, all the juggling took its toll. Certain disappointments at work were bruising. Menopause hit and anxiety and depression reared their ugly heads. Somewhere along the line, my occasional evenings of drinking too much morphed into drinking on an almost nightly basis.

When my son left for university, when the marathon was over and the house was empty, I was lonely. It was then that my evening glass of wine turned into two or three, which eventually became three or four.

On this, I am not alone.

She was, you might say, liberated. She had reached a level of independence and autonomy that feminists dreamed of. And she was alone. She drank.

Of course, Johnson adds, this is surely not what Gloria Steinem had in mind. And yet, it does not matter what Gloria Steinem had in mind. It does not matter what her intentions or her visions were.

Unsurprisingly, the women who bought into the second-wave feminist message did not have the lives that feminism promised. Some became manic; some became alcoholics; many ended up alone.

Ought feminism to be held accountable for the consequences that its revolutionary social policies produced?

Of course, it should.

When you tell women not to like themselves for being women you are putting them in a very precarious and vulnerable position. If that is not what you expected you made a mistake.

Everyone makes errors. Once you do so, it’s better to correct yourself than to blame the sexist patriarchy.

Her Feminist Mother

For those who are too young to have seen it, Janet Benton offers a sobering look at what it was like for children whose mothers got caught up in second-wave feminism in the early 1970s.

It’s a story of broken homes, of abandoned or neglected children, of women becoming manic for the cause. It’s a story of women who got caught up in a cult and who abrogated their most fundamental moral responsibilities.

Is there a more fundamental moral responsibility than to care for a minor child?

If you want to know why feminism has a bad reputation and why so many daughters of feminists despise their mothers, Benton’s article will open  your eyes.

Benton begins:

Once upon a time, I had a mother who inhabited the kitchen with care. The bliss of licking drippy, sweet things off the mixing spoon after she had stirred pudding or poured cake batter into a pan was often mine. I believed my mother loved those moments, and our entire home-based family life, as much as I did.

Yet by the time I turned 9, my brother and I lived in a post-divorce household, with Dad in a new home and Mom in full feminist revolt. Dinners of chicken cordon bleu and baked desserts gave way to oven-roasted meats that were deemed done whenever my mother could tear herself away from making art and selling it — or, when she wasn’t home, to no dinner at all, unless you counted the banana I nibbled while crouched in my closet, hoping any would-be attackers couldn’t see me through the window as darkness fell.

To second wave feminists homemaking was anathema. Women who got caught up in the movement decided that they needed to fulfill their creative potential through work, even if it meant not feeding their children.

When the women’s movement blossomed in the late 1960s, she was ready. She vanquished the spirit of homemaking the way Virginia Woolf had killed her “Angel in the House.”

And then a tidal wave of rage, disappointment and raw desire overtook her. I saw it in her vehemence toward my father and in the raucous consciousness-raising groups that met in our living room. I saw it in the changed contents of our dinner plates: a dried-out chicken leg, a potato collapsed inward from overbaking.

When my mother banged out work correspondence on an electric typewriter way past bedtime, my needs had no standing. On other nights I would lie awake for hours, unable to sleep until she came home at midnight.

And also:

My mother was an unstoppable force, powerful, beautiful and finally happy. As her days and nights expanded to include solo shows, romance and the founding of feminist organizations, I could see in her radiant face and laughter that she was fulfilling her potential. Her red hair grew ever upward, a hood of curls that shouted out her freedom.

She had suffered and struggled. She was talented. She deserved to thrive.

But my body spoke my devastation. I went from being well fed and popular in third grade to near skeletal and often mocked in fifth. I wasn’t anorexic; I just didn’t know how to cook. I turned sallow and hollow-eyed and suffered headaches, eczema and stomach pains. On the windy playground, other children would crow, “She’s so skinny, she’s going to blow away.”

And also:

But back then, on many afternoons, I would return to my bedroom, sit on my pink shag rug and cry. It seemed I mattered to no one anymore. My heart shrank into a knob of hurt and yearning.

How can a woman suppress her nurturing instinct for a cause? Doubtless, she has been told that nurturing is a social construct, unjustly given to women.

I believe that psychiatrists would call what Benton's mother underwent an extended manic episode, one that produces a complete loss of one’s moral sense. Normally, Benton’s mother would have been severely taken to task for child abandonment. Nowadays, we are not allowed to be judgmental.

Of course, Benton was not the only child who suffered for her mother’s maniacal feminism. And many of the activists who abandoned their children for the cause still fail to understand why their children reproach them their negligence.

When receiving an award for her mother in front of an audience of feminist activists, Benton put the best possible face on her mother’s dereliction:

But the pride she has brought me, and the self-respect and assertiveness she has worked so hard to teach me, have proved far more nutritive than hundreds of perfectly cooked meals.

The assembled feminists loved it:

I received a standing ovation. Activists lined up to thank me, with one confiding that her daughter remains furious at her for marching on Washington instead of baking brownies.

I suspect that she was telling them what they wanted to hear. If she hadn’t she would have been run out of the room. Besides, public meetings are not the place to settle scores.

When the time came to bring up her own daughter, Benton found her own moral sense, the one that her mother had thrown away for the cause:

I listened. I am a feminist, too, and I know there were and are innumerable good reasons for outrage and action. Yet children do not stop needing what they need, even when their parents are fighting for justice. And if you do not attend to them or find a loving substitute, they will suffer and may hold it against you. Even if you have never felt stronger and more truly yourself. Even if you love them.