“Feminism lies about domestic violence. It lies about rape. It lies about families. It lies about fathers. It lies about little boys. It lies about girls. It lies about women. It lies about history.

“Feminism bullies. It bullies women who won’t toe the line. It bullies men who won’t toe the line. It bullies children who question its precepts.

“Every time a feminist repeats racist hateful lies about ‘patriarchy’ or ‘rape culture’ and you don’t identify both those ideas as toxic pseudoscience based on hateful, bigoted preconceptions, you enable that toxic, bullying, pseudo-scientific hate movement.”

— Dean Esmay, A Voice for Men

There comes a point at which you get tired of having the same argument over and over, and you just stop talking to people who seem to enjoy arguing for the sake of argument. I reached that point in March 2011 when my friend Joy McCann (the blogger Little Miss Attila) insisted on arguing that Sarah Palin is a “feminist.” Joy had an attachment to the word “feminism” and evidently hoped to rescue that word from its rightful owners, i.e., the radical women who are the feminist movement.

It quickly became obvious that Joy knew less about the history of feminism than I did; my mistake was in thinking that mere facts counted for anything in such a discussion. Words mean things, and definitions cannot be infinitely elastic. The history of feminism, and the words of actual feminists, must be taken seriously if we are ever to understand the phenomenon defined by the word “feminism.” And I address this issue directly on the very first page of my book Sex Trouble:

What do we mean by the word “feminism”? This question has become increasingly crucial to the way that we talk about men, women and sex in the 21st century. Almost everyone claims to accept feminism if they can be permitted to define it in the most commonly accepted understanding of “equality” as basic fairness. Especially in terms of educational and employment opportunity, no one argues in favor of discrimination against women. Yet this widely accepted idea of feminism, as a concern for equality in the sense of fairness and opportunity, is not the goal of the feminist movement today, nor was this the goal of the movement when it began in the late 1960s. The leaders of the Women’s Liberation movement were radicals — many of them were avowed Marxists — who advocated a social revolution to destroy the basic institutions of Western civilization, which they denounced as an oppressive system of male supremacy, often labeled “patriarchy.” Women are oppressed and men are their oppressors, feminists declared, calling for the destruction of this systematic oppression: “Smash patriarchy!”

This movement and this ideology define “feminism” in the 21st century, and this has been the case for more than 40 years. Any attempt to define feminism as something other than what the organized feminist movement believes is futile. We must abandon the delusion that feminism can be reformed. The poisonous tree always yields a poisonous fruit. Every day we see further confirmation that feminism is what it has always been, a radical movement waging a War Against Human Nature.

“Marriage means rape and lifelong slavery. . . . We reject marriage both in theory and in practice. . . . Love has to be destroyed. It’s an illusion . . . It may be that sex is a neurotic manifestation of oppression. It’s like a mass psychosis.”

— Ti-Grace Atkinson, 1969

“We identify the agents of our oppression as men. . . . All men have oppressed women.”

— Redstockings, 1969

“I think heterosexuality cannot come naturally to many women: I think that widespread heterosexuality among women is a highly artificial product of the patriarchy. . . . I think that most women have to be coerced into heterosexuality.”

— Marilyn Frye, “A Lesbian’s Perspective on Women’s Studies,” speech to the National Women’s Studies Association conference, 1980

“The radical feminist argument is that men have forced women into heterosexuality in order to exploit them . . .”

— Celia Kitzinger, The Social Construction of Lesbianism (1987)

“Institutions construct systems of inequality in a variety of ways. . . . Such institutions engage in practices that discriminate against women, exclude or devalue women’s perspectives, and perpetuate the idea that differences between women and men and the dominance of men are natural. . . .

“For example, a complex social system throughout much of the world — what feminist poet and scholar Adrienne Rich called ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ — exerts strong pressures on women to enter into heterosexual marriages.”

— Verta Taylor, Leila Rupp and Nancy Whittier, Feminist Frontiers (ninth edition, 2011)

“There are politics in sexual relationships because they occur in the context of a society that assigns power based on gender and other systems of inequality and privilege. . . . [T]he interconnections of systems are reflected in the concept of heteropatriarchy, the dominance associated with a gender binary system that presumes heterosexuality as a social norm. . . .

“As many feminists have pointed out, heterosexuality is organized in such a way that the power men have in society gets carried into relationships and can encourage women’s subservience, sexually and emotionally.”

— Susan M. Shaw and Janet Lee, Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions (fifth edition, 2012)

This remarkable consistency of feminist rhetoric and ideology over the course of several decades — a radical hostility toward men, marriage and motherhood, carried forward from the earliest days of the Women’s Liberation movement into the most widely assigned textbooks in Women’s Studies programs today — simply cannot be ignored. Attempts to deny, limit or mitigate the actual meaning of feminism can never change that meaning. Feminism Is a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It, and anyone who refuses to recognize this reality is living in a world of illusion. Unless and until we are willing see feminism as a “pseudo-scientific hate movement,” to use Dean Esmay’s description, this poisoned tree will continue yielding its poisoned fruit in the form of young women who have been indoctrinated to view all men as agents of their oppression. Radical feminism now exercises hegemonic control within America’s colleges and universities, where the movement’s power is protected by federal law (Title IX) that effectively prohibits criticism or opposition, and where Women’s Studies programs function as the Feminist-Industrial Complex that trains activists as advocates and enforcers of the movement’s dogmatic beliefs. Examples of how this system operates are not difficult to find.

Sandra M. McEvoy has a Ph.D. in Women’s and Gender Studies from Clark University in Massachusetts. She is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Political Science and Global Studies program at Boston’s Wheelock College (annual tuition $32,830). Professor McEvoy “is active in several professional associations, including the International Studies Association, where she is former Chair of the Women’s Caucus and founding Chair of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Allies Caucus.”

What sort of education do you suppose Professor McEvoy provides her students? We need not speculate, for we have testimony from her student Emily Hart, who is “double majoring in American Studies and Political Science and Global Studies”:

Walking into Sandra McEvoy’s Introduction to Feminist Theories the first day of class, I was confident in my knowledge of the feminist movement. I was well versed in the different type of feminists and knew exactly where I fit in on the spectrum of feminism. I believed that much of women’s oppression could be owed to capitalism, and the huge profits inextricably tied to keeping women in their place. I knew the origins of the patriarchy, and had my ideas on how I thought it could be dismantled. But even with all of my prior understanding, I was hardly even breaking the surface of feminism. This class has flipped all of my notions of feminism upside down. . . .

Feminist Theories has completely transformed my understanding of the world around me, has made me rethink such important institutions as motherhood and marriage.

Another testimonial from Wheelock student Jessica Kuhn:

I am currently in the course Feminist Theories (HDS 322) with Dr. Sandra McEvoy. The course is challenging because topics that are unique to academics such as sexualities, education, and motherhood are discussed throughout feminist theory. . . . Modern society inherently imposes a threatening nature on woman resulting in oppression. . . .

Dr. Sandra McEvoy exposes students to topics that trigger emotions such as sexual violence and rape. . . . Feminist theory can serve to uncover what defines women’s subordination in culture and create global prevention and awareness of women’s oppression in a patriarchal society. A major take-away from this course is to challenge society’s social norm in order to combat women’s oppression.

What these young women are taught — what their parents are paying more than $30,000 a year for them to learn — is to view men with contempt, hatred and suspicion, to regard male sexuality as inherently dangerous to women, and especially to despise marriage and motherhood as oppressive “institutions” of male supremacy. Although neither Ms. Hart nor Ms. Kuhn identify themselves as anything other than heterosexual, we must wonder how any woman could ever experience happiness in a relationship with a man once she has internalized the lessons taught by radical feminists like Professor McEvoy.

“Fear and Loathing of the Penis — a paranoid resentment of men, characterized by irrational suspicion — is the underlying mental condition that feminism turns into a political ideology. What disturbs me, after months of studying this phenomenon, is that this madness is both contagious and incurable. Feminism is a sort of cultural virus that, once it takes hold in a woman’s mind, makes it impossible for her to relate to men in a normal manner and, because misery loves company, she feels compelled to share her hateful anti-male attitudes with other women.”

— Robert Stacy McCain, Sex Trouble: Radical Feminism and the War Against Human Nature (page 108)

Wishful thinking cannot change what feminism actually is. Those who ask us to imagine a “feminism” that is something else are inviting us on a snipe hunt, and nothing can be gained by joining them in their pursuit of an impossible fiction. It is a frightening thing to realize how few Americans know anything about the toxic ideas being poured into the minds of our nation’s young people. There are more than 700 Women’s Studies programs at U.S. colleges and universities, employing thousands of instructors to teach this hateful ideology to tens of thousands of students every year. We can see the result — a weird mixture of anxiety, anger and confusion — emerging daily from the fetid emotional swamp that is Feminist Tumblr. (Hello, Wheelock College Tumblr!) Yet in researching this phenomenon, I find myself quite nearly alone.

Almost no one else is paying attention to how academia serves as the headquarters of the feminist movement, with Women’s Studies faculty functioning as the General Staff in taxpayer-funded boot camps for the training of young feminist soldiers. Think about this: Where else have you seen any in-depth examination of the faculty and curricula of Women’s Studies courses? Who else has actually taken the trouble to purchase these textbooks and quote what they say? Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions is edited by two Oregon State University professors and published by McGraw-Hill, which calls it a “leading introductory women’s studies reader.” Feminist Frontiers is edited by three lesbian professors, two at the University of California-Santa Barbara and another at Smith College, and is also published by McGraw-Hill, which describes it as the “most widely used anthology of feminist writings.”

Meanwhile, here I am, a mere blogger who was double-dog-dared by his readers to write a book about this. Seven months after I published the first “draft chapter” (“Radical Feminism and the Long Shadow of the ‘Lavender Menace’”), I produced the 120-page first edition, and next month I will publish a revised and expanded second edition. That is, I plan to publish a second edition, unless I am overwhelmed by existential dread caused by staring too long into feminism’s vast abyss of despair and insanity. Your prayers are most earnestly solicited.

Why You Should Hit My Tip Jar: Who else is crazy enough to spend hours researching "feminist theory" on Tumblr? https://t.co/rUoIM5TJbI — Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) July 16, 2015

Loyal readers have been funding my research, thanks to the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

Like I keep saying: People need to wake the hell up!









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