Combatting Feminist Ms-Information

Robert Sheaffer





Refuting the Most Common Feminist Lies and Pseudo-Scholarship





translated the information on this page into Belarus

It's official now: Science Magazine and the University of Chicago Press own up that the "Peaceful Ancient Matriarchy" on Crete was just a

politically-inspired fantasy. (But remember how fiercely it was defended by so many "intellectuals" just fifteen years ago! Remember the fuss over Gimbutas, Eisler, etc.?)

Is There Anything Good About Men? by Dr. Roy F. Baumeister. An invited address given to the American Psychological Association on August 24, 2007, it gives seldom-heard answers to feminists' charges that men are dysfunctional (or worse).

Bonobos are celebrated as peace-loving, matriarchal, and sexually liberated. Are they? "Frans de Waal... who is the most frequently quoted authority on the species, has never seen a wild bonobo." (And how did so many bonobos lose their fingers and toes if they're so "nonagressive"?)

The feminist movement as we have come to know it in recent decades is fundamentally a "con." It is as filled with falsehood, inaccuracy, and foolishness as astrology or parapsychology. As it is considered treasonous to criticise a sister feminist, no standards of accuracy or honesty are ever enforced. Hyperbole and deceit thus become the formula for success, "peer review" playing no role in reining in misinformation. Any would-be feminist who raises scholarly objections to the rampant misinformation ( Christina Hoff Sommers , Camille Paglia , Wendy McElroy , Elaine Showalter , Erin Pizzey , Elizabeth Loftus, etc.) is branded an 'enemy of women' and is drummed out of the movement.



Various feminists proclaim that women are 'under siege', that a monstrous social bias against them, if not a virtual war, is going on, that women have little respect or power (Steinem, Faludi, Tavris, etc.) Yet the notion of the American woman as a powerless "victim" is one of the most absurd notions ever foisted upon anyone. American women live, on average, seven years longer than men. They control 86 % of all personal wealth [PARADE Magazine, May 27, 1990], and make up 55% of current college graduates. Women cast 54% of the votes in Presidential elections, so they can hardly claim to be left out of the political decision-making process! They win almost automatically in child custody disputes. Women suffer only 6% of the work-related fatalities (the other 94% are suffered by men). Women are the victim of only about 35% of violent crimes, and only about 25% of all murders, yet because of our society's exaggerated concern and respect for them, special legislation has been passed to punish "violence against women" as if it were a more heinous crime than "violence against men". (Feminists claim to want "equality", and this is an example of what "equality" means to them, i.e., preferential treatment to address their concerns). Two out of every three dollars spent on health care is spent on women, and even if you don't count pregnancy-related care, women still receive more medical care than men - yet feminists still holler that womens health is being "neglected", and far too many of us credulously believe them. Of the 25 worst jobs, as ranked by the Jobs Related Almanac based on a combination of salary, stress, security, and physical demands, 24 of them are predominantly, if not almost entirely, male, which might explain why men commit over 80% of all suicides. (Most of these statistics come from The Myth of Male Power by Warren Farrell.)

Now, if it were really the case, as feminists claim, that men have selfishly arranged everything to be wonderful for themselves, absolutely ignoring womens' legitimate concerns and needs, would the above be true? Of course not. It is much more realistic to suggest that women have cleverly seized the upper hand by pretending to be helplessly trapped below! Looking at the full picture, and not the tiny, distorted one that feminists and those they have duped present, we see a very different picture: The American woman emerges as perhaps the most privileged large group in history, enjoying a never-before- seen level of affluence, power, leisure, and health, supported by the work, discipline, and self-effacing, life-destroying exertions of a group they have bamboozled - their men - into believing their cries of "victimization". The links below will help you to start finding your way out of the familiar maze of feminist lies.

Click here to read my article, Feminism, The Noble Lie

Take Back the Campus: refuting the Ten Most Common Feminist Myths (which are more accurately termed "lies," because feminists just keep on promoting them with reckless disregard for truth, no matter how many times the falsehood of these claims is pointed out to them.).

Read my article Bill Clinton and the Gender Gap, in the August, 1996 issue of The Backlash Magazine.

Read Steven Goldberg's article, Feminism Against Science

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My Debunking of Lenore Walker's The Battered Woman, a preposterous and indefensible work of pseudo-scholarship that has nonetheless attained near-icon status within so-called 'Womens Studies'.

As Christina Hoff Sommers shows, the famous "Rule of Thumb" for Wife Beating is really just a feminist lie. Laura Flanders of a group calling itself "FAIR" (which played a major role in promoting the "Superbowl Battering" hoax) made a big stink, accused Sommers of misrepresenting facts. Read Sommers'devastating reply to Flanders. (To this day, Politically Correct feminists still try to use Flanders' accusations to bash Sommers in attempting to presuade people they believe to be naieve, even though they know the charges aren't true. If you show them that you've read Sommers' refutation of the charges, they'll quickly shut up, or change the subject.)

Feminists, bolstered by oceans of phony statistics, are now trying to seize Valentine's Day (a day traditionally for celebrating good relations between the sexes) and re-define it as V-Day, a day to protest supposed systemic patriarchal violence against women. (Feminists always have had a big problem dealing with heterosexuality.) Fortunately, Christina Hoff Sommers has shown how phony their male-bashing claims are. (It might be a good idea to check out V-day's list of sponsors and boycott them.)

Every Seven Seconds, a Feminist tells a Lie about Domestic Violence. Noted researcher Richard J. Gelles tries to set the record straight.

A wonderful expose' of how feminists have sabotaged and hijacked the fight against Domestic Violence, turning it into a weapon for use in their war against men, is found in "Prone to Violence" by Erin Pizzey, who founded the first Domestic Violence shelter in the U.K.

Feminists can only get away with claiming that "domestic violence" equals "men beating up women" because people are unaware of the massive documentation of female-instigated domestic violence.

Facts refuting feminist propaganda on Family Violence by Family Resources and Research.







(left) In her best-selling book on 'recovered memories', Michelle Remembers what Satan looks like. A debunking of Michelle's story was published in the London Sunday Mail on Sept. 30, 1990.

My debunking of the feminist "Recovered Memories" book, The Courage to Heal, that has sold millions of copies, bringing discord and misery to many thousands of families across North America.

Feminists say that Women Don't Lie About Rape, but in reality no other crime has as high an incidence of false reporting.

Dr. Ed Friedlander talks about False allegations of child abuse that he has encountered (and gives valuable references).







My unmasking of a well-known feminist scholar's deceptions about a supposed Native American Gender-Equal Society that has been widely taught in Womens Studies classes.

In 1994 the New York Times reported the existence of another supposed Gender-Equal Society in the South Pacific. But this claim appears highly dubious as well.

Professor Steven Goldberg's website discussing Patriarchy.

In The Mismeasure of Woman , Carol Tavris attempts to blow smoke in the readers' eyes about the realities of male dominance. Steven Goldberg cuts through the fog.

Prof. Goldberg explains the logic, and some of the fallacies, associated with discussions of Patriarchy.

Is Patriarchy Avoidable? Professors Ridley and Goldberg dispute.

Some claim that the Iroquois represent an Exception to Universal Patriarchy. Here Prof. Goldberg examines that claim.

Every claimed instance of a supposed "nonpatriarchal society" is examined in Why Men Rule by Steven Goldberg. (Chicago: Open Court, 1994) Not one such claim stands up to critical scrutiny.







Unable to find any "Matriarchies" in the present day, many feminists resort to inventing an idyllic Lost Matriarchal Paradise in the dim mists of pre-history. Even though there is no acceptable scholarly evidence for this, it has become an accepted fact in "Womens Studies"

My debunking of The Goddess Remembered, a pseudo-historical documentary widely seen on PBS during 'pledge weeks'. (Hint: If they're broadcasting this garbage, Don't Pledge!. Instead, call them up and explain why you won't pledge)

Read Charlotte Allen's piece demolishing feminist/neopagan "Goddess History" in the January, 2001 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

Detailed sources debunking the Goddess Garden of Eden myths promoted by Marija Gimbutas, Riane Eisler, etc. These are unscholarly claims that are routinely taught in "Womens Studies" classes as if they were established fact. However, the newly-online Encyclopedia Brittanica article on "matriarchy" refutes these claims, and states plainly that "the consensus among modern anthropologists and sociologists is that a strictly matriarchal society never existed."

The best book debunking the Goddess nonsense is Goddess Unmasked by Philip G. Davis. Read my review of the book.

How historically accurate are the "Goddess" claims made in the best-seller The DaVinci Code? Not at all, as we see in this article from a Catholic magazine.

The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory by Cynthia Eller. "Why an Invented Past Won't Give Women a Future."

Faces of the Goddess by Lotte Motz.

The Pagan religions of the Ancient British Isles - their Nature and Legacy. by Ronald Hutton. Scholary refutations of wildly-inaccurate contemporary neopagan claims.







Jack Kapicka's debunking of The Burning Times, another pseudo-historical documentary often shown on PBS during 'pledge weeks'. (Again: If they're broadcasting this garbage, Don't Pledge!.)

Both women and men were accused of 'witchcraft,' and men make up the majority of those accused of 'heresy.' Both groups were brutally tortured by the Inquisition. Furthermore, most of the accusers of supposed witches were women. Feminist claims that witch-groups actually existed, and were "healers", are not supported by scholarship, nor is the claim that accused witches were actually the remnants of a gentle, female-centered pagan religion. Historian Norman Cohn debunks the pseudo-scholarship of Margaret Murray who is the principal source for those "neopagan" claims, noting that Murray selectively quoted from her sources, citing those passages tending to support her thesis, while ignoring or deleting intervening sentences that invalidate her claims. (Europe's Inner Demons. New York: Basic Books, 1975). T.M. Luhrmann reached a similar conclusion after examining Murray's claims in Persuasions of the Witch's Craft (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989), suggesting that "those accused of witchcraft in early modern Europe were very likely innocent of any practice."

In Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (Viking, 1996), Oxford professor Robin Briggs writes, "Historical European witchcraft is quite simply a fiction, in the sense that there is no evidence that witches existed, still less that they celebrated black masses or worshiped strange gods... On the wilder shores of the feminist and witch-cult movements a potent myth has become established, to the effect that 9 million women were burned as witches in Europe, gendercide rather than genocide. This is an overestimate by a factor of up to 200, for the most reasonable modern estimates suggest perhaps 100,000 trials between 1450 and 1750, with something between 40,000 and 50,000 executions, of which 20-25% were men."

Click here to view a Portrait of 3 Men Condemned by the Spanish Inquisition (68K GIF). The caption reads: "1., Garment of one who is to be burned alive. 2., Garment of one who has escaped being burned by confessing before being condemned; 3., Garment of one who has avoided the fire by confessing after his condemnation." (from an 18th-century French history book).







Feminists often claim that Lady Ada Lovelace was "the world's first programmer." While she was no doubt very intelligent, her accomplishments have been grossly overstated, for reasons of ideology. Read an article debunking the feminist 'Ada myth'. "All of the programs cited in her notes," writes Allan Bromley of the University of Sydney, "had been prepared by Babbage from three to seven years earlier."

Feminists also claim that Einstein's first wife Mileva Maric made substantial contributions to his historic Relativity Theory. Allen Esterson got PBS to withdraw many unfounded claims made in its 2003 documentary Einstein's Wife (and indeed the Australian Brodcasting Company withdrew the documentary itself, although US PBS did not). Many unfounded claims still remain on the PBS website.







Who Stole Feminism? by Christina Hoff Sommers

Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Womens Studies by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge.

Feminism Under Fire by Ellen Klein. ( Prometheus Books, 1996.) "Modern-day feminism is intellectually dishonest and scandalously unscholarly," says this professor of philosophy and one-time academic feminist.

Michael Wright's critique of the use of bogus statistics by the Womens Studies Department at the University of Oklahoma (and the university's complete unwillingness to hold them accountable in any way!)

The "Difference Deniers"

Under the auspices of "Womens Studies," feminists run a cottage industry of "Difference Deniers," claiming (variously and usually inconsistently) the the observed cognitive and even physical differences between women and men are either

A) not real,

B) wholly socially constructed,

C) diminishing,

D) insignificant, or

E) have already disappeared!

The best-known of the Difference Deniers are Anne Fausto-Sterling, author of Myths of Gender, and Carol Tavris, author of The Mismeasure of Woman. Modern science, of course, is moving precisely in the opposite direction, documenting more and more innate and intrinsic male/female differences with each passing year.

The noted Darwinist author (and feminist) Helena Cronin debunks the Difference Deniers: Getting Human Nature Right.

The Difference Deniers score a Big Win: Science Magazine pulls an already-accepted article by a respected developmental biologist explaining innate male/female brain differences because it allegedly did not "lead to a clear strategy about how to deal with the gender issue." In other words: "feminists will kill us if we run this article." (And people still talk about an alleged 'Republican War on Science'! Read the censored article here - it has been attracting a great deal of attention).

MIT brain researcher Steven Pinker debunks the Politically Correct dogma of the mind as a Blank Slate.

Some references on Sex differences, which if the Difference Deniers were correct, would be an empty list. Also, the peer-reviewed scientific publication Hormones and Behavior would contain nothing but empty pages!

Sex differences in the distribution of mental ability. (According to the Difference Deniers, such differences can't possibly exist.)