CONTRADICTIONS OF FEMINISM

 (My first political blog since 2022, short but pithy.  No, I'm not "misogynist" (a point I also make below), but I am intrigued by the finding of psychology that we humans often believe contradictory things simultaneously--GF)  

Now that we are into third-wave feminism, where women managers proudly have signs on their desks reading “Girl Boss,” and the ultimate goal of “women’s liberation” is for women to be CEOs and managers, such as the female head of GM, which is now feeling the heat of the UAW strike against it and the other Big Three automakers (Update:  GM just settled with the UAW, making major concessions to the union.  Ford also settled, and made major concessions to the union.), and who makes $29,000,000 a year salary alone [!], far and above what any rank-and-file auto worker makes, perhaps we should revisit Freud’s pensive and irritated, yet honest for its time, question, “What does a woman want?”  (Freud, who could be so iconoclastic on certain matters of sexuality, while simultaneously being a prisoner of then-prevalent societal Victorian sexual norms.)  This admitted cis male’s jaded answer is, “They want both the derivative perks of being on the pedestal as well as full equality with men, and the want them both at the same time.”  Yes, I say cynically, women want simultaneously to say to a man, “You’re a heel, and a louse” while dining in a fancy restaurant with that man she is berating, and with that man picking up the whole of the tab, plus tip, for both of them!  But this is not meant to be either anti-feminist or misogynist:  it’s just to point out one of the many contradictions of life and protest, such as what I experience as a worker in my workplace, where so many of my fellow work colleagues both resent management, yet long to become managers themselves!  Such is life; and such is one of the ironies—and ironing boards—of lived life.

Confessions of a "Misogynist" Feminist

We’ll start out with confession number one:  the two worst persons in my life were both women, and one of them was—my own mother!  Both of them have been written about previously in “Politically Incorrect Leftist” blogs, this one about my mother penned by myself appropriately on Mother’s Day:  http://politicallyincorrectleftist.blogspot.com/2011/05/on-mothers-day-for-those-mothers-who.html.  The other, on a very sanctimonious, self-righteous Quaker woman, Jane Haldeman, who was correctly characterized by a mutual friend of both of us as “abusive, manipulative, emasculating,” was penned by another mutual friend of ours, John Williams, in the form of a short story, with names changed, but with personas and events described accurately, as they had occurred: http://politicallyincorrectleftist.blogspot.com/2011/05/guest-blog-from-my-friend-john-williams.html.  I urgently insist that all feminists, especially those considering themselves left feminists, read these, and pointedly note, if you don’t it will only be for willful blindness.  Though both women are now (thankfully) dead, their destructive legacies toward me live on, just proving that real women, as opposed to ideological stereotypes, can be very destructive to men, and though perhaps products, in a hidebound way, of patriarchy, can be every bit as destructive as male-dominated, male-generated patriarchy!

Further, and this properly reflects on my deep-seated atheism, which not only objects to faith in God or in gods, also pointedly notes the crass immorality, the convenient sinning, the winking at “divine” moral laws, admonitions, and strictures, of God- or gods-believers themselves.  My mother was Catholic, Jane Haldeman was Quaker:  yet both had an abiding belief in the Christian God and this God’s supposedly unbreakable and abiding love for all, which they effectively translated as “I can do whatever I want, as God, the Indulgent Sugar Daddy in the Sky, will certainly approve of all that I do.”  But both, as the blogs demonstrate, engaged in behaviors that can only be characterized as immoral, self-indulgent, cruel, insensitive, and responded to criticism of their behaviors with indignation and rationalizations! 

Confession number two:  I am a true feminist, believing and acting fully in accord with the notion that men and women are equal, deserve equal rights and protections under law, and have certainly been discriminated against in the past, some now which continues into the present, and that the harmful effects of such discrimination must be corrected and alleviated.  No one should be invidiously judged and slighted because of his/her sex or gender.  Equal rights for all.  Period.   Beyond that, however, I also believe women are equal to men in these respects as well:  they are every bit as capable as men in venality, stupidity, hypocrisy, cruelty, insensitivity, abuse, manipulation, special pleading, rationalization and outright lying, cheating, and every other moral vice as men are, and often act out such vices, same as men, and often to the same degree or more as men themselves!  They are not angels on a pedestal!  Furthermore, women are just as capable and culpable as men in parental child abuse, including “mere” verbal and emotional child abuse, as opposed to physical abuse (of which they are also fully capable, as the incarceration of women attests).  In fact, my mother was actually more abusive toward me than my father, who was also abusive, in this significant regard—as I knew my father was abusive and not to be trusted, my equally-abusive mother had a thin veneer of culture and intellect that beguiled me into trusting her, only to be betrayed by her over and over.  Yes, she differed from my father in being more treacherous, and her guile in this sucked me into her abusive vortex over and over again!

Then, taking a page from Lenin’s Imperialism, and analogous to his concept of the comprador bourgeoisie, is the matter of comprador women, women who, themselves victims of patriarchy, take the attitude of “If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em,” and become agents of anti-woman patriarchy as women themselves!  Just as Chiang Kai-shek and the comprador Chinese under Guomindang rule, themselves victims of anti-Chinese racism from the Western colonialist powers and the Japanese, became effectively agents of these same racist powers!  Numerous examples, of course, abound in real life, of whom we might name just some of the more prominent:  Sarah Palin, Joni Ernst, Ann Coulter, Condoleeza Rice, and all those supermodel-looking female talking heads on Fox News.  Then there were those glass-ceiling-breaking neoliberal centrist feminists who avidly supported Hillary Clinton in 2016, even those of avowedly “progressive” and “leftist” credentials such as Joan Walsh, Amanda Marcotte, and the man-trashing Sady Doyle, who tagged the Bernie Sanders candidacy as a chauvinistic white male campaign fueled by woman-hating “Bernie Bros,” and did so in the name of—allegedly “real feminism”!  Even going so far as to cavalierly and condescendingly dismiss those women who supported Bernie Sanders publicly—as did Madeleine Albright, who notably remarked, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!” (i.e., Hillary Clinton); or former feminist icon Gloria Steinem’s (my, how the mighty have fallen!) dismissal of Bernie-supporting young women being in his campaign only because “That’s where the boys are,” i.e., they’re just boy-crazy and want to meet young men!

Sheesh!

Confession number three:  although feminism has (unevenly, to be sure) made discussion-worthy and raised individual and societal understanding of sexism, rape and rape culture, patriarchy, and sexual discrimination and harassment, its seduction by the siren calls of Postmodernism (a series of logical and material fallacies searching vainly to establish itself as a true philosophy), Political Correctness, and intersectionality/identity politics have only muddled and undermined these understandings, and reduced “sexism,” “rape and rape culture,” “male privilege,” (I do not like the word “privilege,” as real privilege is socio-economic—“advantage,” or even better, “comparative advantage,” are much superior terms) to hyperbolic swear words with which to label anyone who disagrees with, or even questions, our now massively self-righteous left.  This is especially revealing when we “unpack” (a word used by my former academic advisor) what they really mean as opposed to what they allegedly mean, and when we discuss what is actually sexism, rape, rape culture, and patriarchy form what they have come to mean by a most destructive Political Correctness.

Which brings me to my objection to #metoo’s “Believe all women.”  Even LeAnn Tweeden?  Or maybe precisely, don’t believe LeeAnn Tweeden!   Because of her public record and persona, readily available, as a pro-Trump Republican; a friend of Sean Hannity’s, and a frequent guest on his Fox News program; and an Obama Birther.  Not to mention that Tweeden herself has crafted her own professional persona as a raunchy woman, is a former Playboy nude model, frequently appears as a scantily-clad cheesecake model, is seen at that infamous 2006 USO show patting a male country singer on the buttocks (the same USO show she blasted Al Franken for, alleging he sexually abused her in a publicity photo of the kind common just a decade or more ago, before being “woke” came into fashion), and how conveniently her 7:00 AM radio broadcast on a sports station in Los Angeles was publicized 24 hours in advance by Republican operative Roger Stone, and served the purpose admirably of deflecting attention from 2018 Republican Alabama Senatorial candidate and established sexual predator Roy Moore onto Democrat and outspoken liberal Senator Al Franken!  Whereupon, Kristen Gillibrand and other incensed women Democrats formed a circular firing squad and demanded Franken’s resignation without even a hearing, a hearing Franken wanted and vowed to testify at!  I would say here, “woke” #metoo fell directly into a Republican trap carefully crafted for precisely that purpose; assuring that Democrats would finish the dirty work already undertaken by the Republicans!  Such naïvete, if it can be called that, and not horribly misplaced sanctimoniousness, among supposed political professionals, is indeed stupid.  As is the assumption, automatically assumed, that women themselves can never lie, dissemble, be partisan or opportunistic, or disingenuously shade the truth to make commonplaces for the time direct symbols of egregious guilt in these present “woke” times.  And of course, without giving Franken the opportunity to say anything in his defense or in explanation.  Such is indeed on par with the request made to a woman author to write an essay on “The Feminist Case against Due Process” (the woman writer, to her credit, turned down this assignment, and instead spoke out for freedom of speech and not automatic guilt-by-association). 

Unfortunately, our feminist “left,” like so much of what passes for “leftism” nowadays, clamors for “safe spaces” away from controversy and anything that might give “offense,” such as any views, no matter how polite or humanist in their expression (e.g., inclusive of both men as well as women, or pointing out the vulnerabilities that men themselves also face in their socially-stereotyped roles as “providers,” in being emotionally “stoic,” the rampant discrimination against males in divorce court and in child-custody matters, as women are automatically stereotyped as “better” because they’re more “maternal,” etc.) is frequently subjected to shouting-down, hostile and even violent counter-demonstrations, and other manifestations of what can only be called “left” thuggery and hooliganism.  Which is also ultimately counterproductive.  Want to give your opponent the air of sanctity, of simply defending “free speech” against tyrannical censorship?  Simply move to silence his/her expression of ideas and threaten and attempt to intimidate him/her with implicit or explicit violence and rage!  Why else do you think the right has been so effective in making the “left” today look like enemies of “free speech,” of fear of expressing “unpopular” ideas?  And really, feminists, do you think you and your causes are so threatened by speakers merely speaking against your viewpoints, or expressing what they might term a man’s point of view, or challenging your ideological premises or your carefully chosen and specially picked facts?  If these intimidate and scare you, feminists, then you are indeed no match intellectually or ethically to your opponents!

All this and more was brought home to me by seeing the 2016 documentary on the Men’s Rights Movement produced and narrated by a young feminist woman, The Red Pill.  Not only does the documentary reviewer bend over backward to be fair to both Men’s Rights advocates and their feminist critics (though, let it be mentioned, the Men’s Rights activists, when allowed to speak in their own words, come across not as misogynists, but as inclusive humanists who wish to give voice to both men’s as well as women’s concerns).  But, as the film pointedly notes, for a certain   of “far left” feminists, the enemy is not merely discrimination, or capitalism, or even class society (for in many a “socialist” country, both gender and massive economic inequality persisted, and even do so today), but instead, “patriarchy,” which not only has persisted since time immemorial, is present today almost totally unchallenged, and will persist in the future unless women become dominant, it is also males themselves, who are automatically “oppressors.”  Whereas women are not?  Not even Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Theresa May, or Angela Merkel?  And surely it is nonsense to talk of such heroic males and champions of all downtrodden as Eugene Debs, Bernie Sanders, Fighting Bob Lafollette, and others as “oppressors” by simple accident of birth!  Just as it is facile in the extreme to talk of women such as Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, Melania Trump, Ivanka (Trump) Kushner, and by benefit of “intersectionality,” Condoleeza Rice, Candace Owens, and the two Trump-supporting African American sisters who host “Diamonds and Silk,” thus endearing themselves to Fox News, as all—victims of patriarchy! 

Fortunately, a woman with irreproachable feminist and humanistic credentials, Meryl Streep, has but it well and succinctly.   In a June 2019 interview with the magazine In Style, Streep pointedly stated: 

Sometimes, I think we’re hurt. We hurt our boys by calling something toxic masculinity. I do. And I don’t find [that] putting those two words together … because women can be pretty fucking toxic. It’s toxic people. We have our good angles, and we have our bad ones. I think the labels are less helpful than what we’re trying to get to, which is a communication, direct, between human beings. We’re all on the boat together. We’ve got to make it work.

And this sense of personhood, of it being not just a matter of male vs. female, but of persons of both genders and all sexual orientations and persuasions, trying to find their way to freedom, equality, dignity, and respect, is the humanist essence of why I call myself a male feminist, albeit, in some eyes, and with a sense of wryness, a “misogynist” one!

FOR ALL YOU AHISTORICAL FEMININSTS OUT THERE (A Poem)

 

(A poetic argument against Gloria Steinem, Sady Doyle, and other pro-Hillary Clinton feminists of the "left" who think making her President would be absolutely peachy-keen for women's empowerment:  a look at the historical record of women in power, hoping to clarify a few issues--GF)

 

So you think women’s

political empowerment

began with Hillary Clinton?

I guess you never heard of

Eleanor Roosevelt,

or Frances Perkins,

or perhaps the influential

Jackie Kennedy,

or (heaven forbid!)

even Barbara Bush!

Or Betty Ford, President

Gerald Ford’s wife,

upsetting the

Catholic Church

with her pro-reproductive

choice comments, including

open support for abortion rights! 

 

 

Or, for that matter,

on the opposite side

from that supposedly “leftist”

feminist political agenda

(women in political office

automatically means

advancement of progressive

and humane social policies

and political priorities, not

mere distaff office-holding;

or so it was said),

Britain’s Iron Lady,

Margaret Thatcher,

whom feminist icon

Gloria Steinem

gushingly called “a sister”

even while demurring,

“I don’t agree with her politics.”[i]

Indeed not (we would hope),

for the Iron Lady built a

political career on pleasing

the stodgy old men of London’s

financial district while vigorously

attacking the working-class women

who depended on the British

social safety net, which she

enthusiastically shredded!.

Or the ascent to power

of Indian despot Indira Gandhi ,

with which another U.S. feminist icon,

Betty Friedan, was excitedly pleased.[ii]

 

 

But we need not stop there, in what

to many people is merely

history, something that

occurred before they were born.

We may merely look at women’s

obvious political empowerment

in such “noted” personages

as in those women taken seriously

by millions whether we (of both sexes)

who style ourselves

“leftist,” “liberal,” or “progressive”

like it or not—Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter,

Michele Bachmann, Condoleeza Rice,

even Joni Ernst and Melania Trump!

(Though it does confirm the

invidious judgment of  nasty male

Karl Marx, who wrote, 

“Hegel remarks somewhere that

all facts and personages of world history

occur, as it were, twice.  He forgot to add:

the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”[iii]) 

Not to mention “liberal” women and

Hillary Clinton supporters Nancy Pelosi

and Madeleine Albright!  (This latter who

gave then-Chief of Staff [mere nasty male!]

Colin Powell “almost an aneurism” by insisting,

 “What’s the point of having this superb military…

if we can’t use it?”[iv])  

 

 

But oh, the “glass ceiling” has

been broken, can’t you see?  But didn’t

Carly Fiorina’s abortive Presidential

candidacy break it as well?  And isn’t

Jill Stein’s Presidential candidacy doing

the same thing?  Both showing

from opposite ends of the political

spectrum that women Presidential candidates  

are indeed taken seriously in 2016, even when

their names are not Hillary Clinton!  Same as

Barack Obama showed  for African American

Presidential candidates in 2008.  Can we ask,

Aren’t there enough glass ceilings

to break, or that haven’t been broken

already?   Because a 74-year-old Jewish

male socialist, Bernie Sanders, broke a

few of them too!  Or need we enumerate:

first Jew, first avowed socialist, to be taken

seriously as a major U.S political party

Presidential candidate!  Not to mention his being

a septuagenarian taken very seriously by, and

attracting enthusiastic mass support from,

Millennials young enough to be his grandchildren!  

 

 

And shouldn’t character count for something?   

After all, public opinion consistently shows

Hillary Clinton leading by only a few percentage points,

as regards basic untrustworthiness,  against an openly

quasi-fascistic, fraudulent and bombastic Presidential

candidate, Donald Trump!  Fact is, Clinton and Trump

are the two most disliked and most distrusted major

Presidential candidates in recent history!   Their joint

bamboozlement in 2016 rivals only that of the worst

days of the corrupt 19^th Century! 

 

 

But that doesn’t address the other issues in the race, nor Clinton’s political baggage elsewhere:  her pro-corporate economic orientation, her hawkish approach to foreign policy and warfare, that she is the overwhelmingly favored recipient

of Wall Street largess, her pandering to the African American vote on strictly symbolic cultural issues to show she’s “one of them” (carries hot sauce in her purse; really!), or what progressive stances her campaign does embody, she stole from Bernie Sanders!

 

 

So just what are you crowing about, all you supposedly

progressive pro-Hillary ahistorical feminists?

---

[i] I believe it was in her 1983 book, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, as it is the only Gloria Steinem book I personally own and have read; but I am relying on memory here.  The index in the book is horribly inadequate.

[ii] Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement, New York: Random House, 1976, pp. 265-287.

[iii] Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954, p. 15.  Originally published in 1852.

[iv] Michael Dobbs, “With Albright, Clinton Accepts New U.S. Role,” Washington Post, December 8, 1996, quoting from Colin Powell’s memoirs. Michael Dobbs, “With Albright, Clinton Accepts New U.S. Role,” Washington Post, December 8, 1996, quoting from Colin Powell’s memoirs.

On Mother's Day: for those mothers who were really "mothers"

...as in that compound word that begins with “mother” and is followed by a second word that begins with “f.” Unofrtunately, that was the kind of mother I had, as will be seen below, and I see no reason to be disingenuously silent about it.

This piece was originally posted on my former Bloomington Alternative blog on Mother’s Day, 2008. The only thing changed is to give it the date for Mother's Day, 2011--GF

Well, it’s May 8, 2011, Mother’s Day. A day to get sentimental about Mother, celebrate fulsomely how our mother contributed so positively to our upbringing as children that she guaranteed our satisfaction and success as adults. But what my mother so fulsomely gave me through the way she raised me—and I’ll be brutally honest here—is simply a deep sense of regret at being born.

Had I a choice in the matter I wouldn’t have chosen either her or my father to be my parents. And I certainly wouldn’t have chosen to be raised in their Catholic religion. Nor would I have chosen to be part of that dysfunctional, authoritarian, repressive Catholic family I was raised in, and which was so very typical of Catholic families, both in its authoritarian lovelessness and in its exercise of arbitrary, repressive power.

My mother had one particular bête noire, and that was men and boys urinating standing up, and thus allegedly dripping and splashing. She was so obsessed with this that any little faux pas on my part would set her off in a screaming apoplectic rage so deep that her face would not only turn beet red, but the veins and tendons in her neck stand would out like mountain ranges as well. She’d screech at the top of her lungs, “All women just hate that!” then go into a ten-minute tirade on how all women were deeply offended and put upon by males urinating standing up, with their inevitable dripping and splashing on the rim of the toilet bowl. (But I never did know another woman who was so deeply offended by this natural male urination the way she was.) These unpredictable apoplectic rages, which could be set off at any time over any issue, were an integral part of not only my childhood, but my adolescence and even adulthood as well. Needless to say, as a good Catholic wife and mother, she never did go off on my father for his urinating the same way I did. She saved the expression of her seething rage at my father (and probably her own father as well) for when he was completely out of earshot. She needed a convenient scapegoat for her rage at my father, and lucky me, I became it.

Of course, that’s fundamentally child abuse, verbal and emotional child abuse that cuts as deeply as any physical abuse does (but which I was not generally subject to, only continuous verbal and emotional abuse). Needless to say, such abusive tirades not only undermined my most basic sense of self-esteem, any sense whatsoever of ever living up to any positive expectation on my part that I would ever please my mother; and their very capriciousness and unpredictability made me grow up with a constant fearful awareness of walking on eggs. With no recourse or avenue of escape whatsoever, for neither church nor society provided for that; they only upheld and reinforced such abuse as within the proper realm of parental authority.

I inherited a less-than-sterling set of genes from both my parents. Those behavioral patterns and mind-sets that have been so troublesome for myself and others in my life—my irritability, moodiness, sudden mood changes, depression and seething rage that suddenly, unpredictably explodes in volcanic eruption—I now see clearly as being integrally part of both my parents’ personalities also. But their power and authority enabled them to completely get away with it. As for me, when I was 18 and a college student, I sought psychiatric help for depression, only to have my life essentially put 40+ years on hold as the perpetual psychiatric outpatient. (Such is the result for most people entering into psychiatric treatment—the “professionals” now take it upon themselves to micro-manage their patients for the rest of their lives, because they’re obviously incapable of ever being more than demented cripples. This is called “curing mental illness.”) The Problem George I was to my parents and to the Catholic Church now became Problem George to psychiatry as well.

My mother’s great fear was somehow not being found quite respectable enough no matter what she did or didn’t do. This according to that tawdry, constricted sense of what was respectable and what was not so assiduously promulgated by the Reader’s Digest especially in those days of my youth, the 1950s and early 1960s. Both my parents read the Reader’s Digest religiously, the only magazine either of them ever did read regularly, or at all (my mother also read religiously the eminently respectable woman’s magazine of the day, McCall’s). Being “respectable” under such conditions meant not only not challenging authority, but also never being suspect or doubted by authority; and for parents, that “respectability” also meant never having children who weren’t also “respectable” by those standards. Alas, I failed miserably at that test. I was simply too bright, too stupidly unable to resist asking the question “Why?” in the Catholic school system to ever expect to pass that test, the test by which “good Catholics” were measured. And, needless to say, a system dominated in the most brutally authoritarian way by priests and nuns, and one never, never, crossed a priest or nun and expected to be considered worthwhile. My father once did so in my defense, and after being firmly rebuffed by the priest who was also the school’s principal, never made that mistake again. As for my mother, she hated those “liberal, questioning” priests that came out of the authoritarian closet in the early, heady days of Vatican II, much preferring those rigid, fundamentalist priests who could comfort her in her sorrowful lot as the Sinful Daughter of Eve, but who was still redeemable as a woman if she kept her nose clean.

Feminism changed (only partially, conditionally, unevenly) part of this. Needless to say, my mother hated feminism as “un-womanly,” and still does. She’s not overly fond of anti-racist (she’d say regularly in the 1960s, “They don’t want equal rights, they want special rights.”) or antiwar attitudes either (she’d say also in the 1960s against my opposition to the war in Vietnam, “No one wants war, but…” and then uphold the Vietnam War in knee-jerk, “respectable” fashion). In the early 1970s she went into a burning rage over the daughter of a family friend who took, along with her husband, a hyphenated surname instead of her husband’s name. As noted above, “male chauvinism” to her was men urinating standing up, to which she took righteous umbrage on behalf of oppressed womanhood easily as great as that that might be expressed (on different matters, of course) by Gloria Steinem. Needless to say, I’m horribly politically incorrect by the standards of contemporary leftism for expressing such thoughts and noting such things; but as I wrote many years ago on structural oppression and the human personality, “While oppression may ennoble in some cases, in the majority it curdles, it sours and makes opportunistic the personality.” I stand by this politically incorrect, yet palpably real, insight 100% today still, even as I wish mine and yours a “Happy Mom’s Day” this May 8, 2011.

*********************************************************

It should be added here that I did successfully confront my mother on her past abuse and moral blindness, following the course advocated by psychotherapist Dr. Susan Forward in her excellent book, Toxic Parents, in which she says the only way to move beyond abuse is to confront the abuser. I did so, and all my mother could say in "response" was to indignantly utter the egregious falsehood, "You never had to clean toilets!" However, I will say positively that when I needed a new car my mother volunteered to take out a bank loan to pay for it. Of course, that was in her direct self-interest also: having a car to go to work and get around here in Indianapolis kept me from moving back with the family, and thus preserved peace on both sides through geographical distance!