Kate O’Beirne’s Women who Make the World Worse is a scholarly review of the literature surrounding the discrepancy between feminist positions and reality.
Across the span of human history, men and women have joined together, in complementary roles, to produce a species that is arguably the most successful on earth; yet victory can result in the creation of powerful enemies. Few adversaries have been more potent or destructive in a shorter period of time than radical feminism. With its open hatred of men and complete disrespect for the choices of women, it is unique among the various “isms” currently defiling our culture. It makes a victim out of every female, brings about an element of barbarism to our daily relations, and has conjured up a war between the sexes.
Considering that the media constantly refers to the main feminist organizations as “women’s groups” and that pusillanimous politicians pretend that these leftist extremists are representative of the average woman, it is not surprising that there has been such a frenzied response to the publication of Kate O’Beirne’s Women Who Make the World Worse And How Their Radical Feminist Assault is Ruining Our Families, Military, Schools, and Sports. Activists are so threatened by this rather slim volume that they have waged a campaign to downgrade the author’s Amazon ranking and fomented considerable madness on the net (which Kathryn Jean Lopez documented in an excellent article). With O’Beirne’s masterful detailing of the feminist defilement of both human dignity and culture in general, along with her pervasive use of logic — the feminist kryptonite — perhaps hysteria was the only way in which the faithful thought they could keep the general public from discovering the true extent of their contempt for the citizenry.
One of the non-response response methods used to deal with O’Beirne’s critique will be familiar to conservatives who lived through the taffeta days of sleaze and innuendo otherwise known as the Clinton Administration. It consists of repeating things like, “are you still dwelling on that? Isn’t it time to moveon.org?” Such a tactic was on full display in the New York Times review:
Sure, she tosses invective at some specific (and predictable) targets, but for the most part the women in her book are less a real threat to the contemporary conservative project than a history lesson. Her salvos against such dusty icons as Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda and Catharine MacKinnon do all these women the enormous favor of making them relevant again.
While it is true that these individuals no longer adorn the covers of Newsweek, their ideas, once revolutionary, now reign supreme as conventional wisdom. This aftereffect was far too obvious for the sophistos at The Times to consider. The complaints, recriminations, mental breakdowns, and paranoid fantasies of the feminist avant-garde were given a free pass by hordes of people smart enough to know better because they cloaked their harangues under the protective cover of femininity. To defy them was supposedly to hate women on the whole. The upshot is that contemporary judges view divorce hearings as a mechanism for punishing men, child custody hearings reflect a considerable bias in favor of women, employers now hire on the basis of chromosomal characteristics, and the workplace, thanks to the sexual harassment industry, is an environment hostile to males.
In these pages, the incompetence and inferiority of the feminist mind is readily evident to the reader as O’Beirne gives us a comprehensive tour of their advocacy and opinion. The Equal Rights Amendment is revealed to be a legal absurdity as its vagueness, should it have passed, would have ensured either tyranny or meaninglessness. The egregious Violence Against Women Act (1994) was designed not to protect women, but, rather, to guarantee female supremacy by elevating them in the eyes of the law. Measures like the Equity Pay Act were proposed to allow women to be highly paid for work which matches their personal interests while ignoring the need of consumers. That the root of radical feminism is actually an attempt to procure jobs for the unemployable is a perspective I had never thought of, but it is extensively — and devastatingly — developed here by the author.
The text lives up to its secondary billing by carefully explaining in individual chapters the way in which feminists have denigrated the family, the armed forces, every form of education, and sports. I figured that my favorite chapter would be “Mother Nature’s a B—tch,” but it wasn’t because the introduction, albeit quite short, dismantled the jaggedy bricks of this Jacobinism as if they were stones atop Monte Cassino.
The left has tried to dismiss this work as a Coulter-esque rant, but this is clearly not the case. More than anything else, Women who Make the World Worse is a scholarly review of the literature surrounding the discrepancy between feminist positions and reality. O’Beirne is not detached from the discussion, however, but she refutes and responds to her opposition far more than she insults them. It would be easy to isolate a quotation like, “A woman being brutally killed alongside men is a long-awaited dream of equality,” and pretend that O’Beirne is polemicizing; yet, such a sentence would be taken out of context because it was preceded by a quotation from a retired female general reading, “There’s been an acceptance of the fact that women…are in harm’s way and they are being killed. That is defining to me.” The author’s remark was well-justified in light of the situation.
Perhaps the best reason for the Left’s outraged reaction to this text is that it exposes the totalitarian foundations of political correctness, an ideology of which feminism is irrefutably a subset. PC has eroded the value of a university education due to its outlawing the search for truth. Indeed, as one psychologist O’Beirne cited remarked concerning daycare: “Psychologists must refuse to undertake any more research that looks for the negative consequences of other-than-mother care.” Why? Well, the outcomes might not be favorable to the points of view of today’s politicized pseudo-scholars, so the findings must be buried when they don’t meet the demands of theory.
Radical feminism, with its Manichean outlook and attempt to subjugate men in the name of equality, is a malignant and vile influence upon our society. We should all be thankful that Kate O’Beirne has the courage needed to stand up to these fanatics. It is now time for all of us to stare down these vindictive bullies and prevent them from ruining the lives of any more people than they already have.
Women Who Make the World Worse is available on Amazon.com.
This is a reasonable assessment of the radical left. I’m currently in a course entitled “Women Writers of the Twentieth Century” for my degree in
English at a woman’s college. I was interested in the subject as I had many favorite female (and male) authors, such as Toni Morrison, and wanted to be introduced to more, and to examine these works within their historical contexts. Instead of just reading the books and discussing what’s actually there, we’re also reviewing radical feminist “interpretations” of the works. Whatever interesting points these writers
make are completely decimated by their absolutely irrational leaps into bizarre feminist interpretations. In the most recent reading, a psychoanalysis of the character Mildred Pierce, from a 1947 film about a woman who seeks a career to support her family, begins by discussing plausible gender inequities. Reasonable enough, right? But the rest gets fruity. The author launches into a Freudian-inspired polemic concerning the character’s “castration” and “loss of bisexuality” and “matriarchy,” and how the woman destroys her “phallic” power under the men who put her in her place, back into “hierarchal, heterosexual” relationships (the woman in the movie IS always heterosexual!). Unfortunately all reasonable views in these interpretations seem to have been eradicated and traded for a bombastic image of victimization and sexual repression. And of course, while the class can discuss these ideas to a limited extent, they are never repudiated or openly questioned. Instead, everyone assumes the premises are correct (well, almost everyone). ;-)
At other times in my courses, radical feminist statements referring to female or male genitalia appear out of almost nowhere. Such statements used to make me laugh, but now they just irritate me. I’m not exactly sure why, but many hoity-toity feminist extremists simply can’t avoid mentioning something about the oppressive power of the phallus or the redemptive quality of the womb or something equally silly. For instance, in a
Creative Writing class, where the instructor was discussing the arch of a plot (it looks like a check mark, if you remember from grade school), she suddenly talked about how it was created by males, as it resembled sexual copulation. “Feminist interpretations,” she added, had connected these male attributes to a phallic symbol, while some have attached it “to a birthing process.” Yes, in case you missed that, she found a way to connect a plot to phalluses and labor. Forgive me, madam, but I had thought we were learning about creative writing, not narrow-minded pc philosophies? Oh well, I guess that’s how most things go in upper-level college courses at otherwise excellent schools.
I just thought that I’d throw that out there. This kind of PC thinking is probably widespread at a number of universities. I still get the urge to giggle when I think of some of the innane comments I’ve heard, but at other times I get the urge to cringe because respectful, responsible debate on these matters has been essentially squelched by those in power.
Have a good day,
Melissa
P.S. I am not a feminist in the radical sense, but I do believe in the essential ideals of the feminist movement as they existed in the last 19th and early 20th centuries, epitomized by the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, the increasing interest in women’s social and political welfare, and the views expressed by women like Margaret Fuller, Margaret Sanger (to a degree), and most of all Susan B. Anthony.
But even I can’t begin to swallow the garbage the some of these women parrot with a pitchfork, like their views on contemporary male oppression in the Western world, their insatiable love of playing the victim, or their attempts to circumvent the healthy signals of the capitalistic marketplace. Most of all, I dislike how many radical feminists discourage other women from choosing paths they find personally unacceptable (a.k.a being “mom”).
Unfortunately, these phallic-centered banters issuing from radical feminists often detract the rest of us from the real issues that affect women. Hope this helps to shed some light on the issue. :-)
I like what both of you (Mr Chaping/Melissa H) had to say, but could both of you please find an editor :)?
Chaping=Chapin, just an editorial comment there (jk).
Thanks. I saw that immediately after I sent the comment. Boy did I feel foolish. See how that editing thing works?
Sorry about the editing issue. I didn’t think to check the spelling or grammar with a word processing program before I posted it.
It’s ok, I like your ideas. Just thought they could be more succinct.
I’m a copywriter and my philosophy is good writing is often the elimination of words,
particularly on the Internet. There just isn’t time. I give myself 1 hour each morning to read
political blogs and you made me go over the allotted time. I suppose that’s really a compliment.
Guess I was just cranky. I apologize for being such a @#*!
Keep writing.
“ … the root of radical feminism is actually an attempt to procure jobs for the unemployable …”
Far from being the root of radical feminism, employing the unemployable is but a means to an end, the end being the harnessing of power in favor of the agenda of those women most hostile to men.
“ … the incompetence and inferiority of the feminist mind is readily evident …”
I hope you don’t mean this literally. I have known highly intelligent people capable of the most injurious nonsense. There may be some poison in their past to explain such things, yet they must be held accountable without reference to intellect and without discounting them as imbeciles. Otherwise, we give them the excuse of an idiot, while exposing ourselves to a complaint of bigotry that makes their case. Do not mistake these people for idiots. That gives them too much power.
“ … men and women have joined together, in complementary roles, … Few adversaries have been more potent or destructive in a shorter period of time than radical feminism …”
Too soon we forget that not so very long ago there were some powerful misogynistic men who practiced the same kind of hateful disempowerment upon women. You can look for proof of it (both in defense and complaints of it) in the writings of Conan-Doyle, Nietzche, Maugham, and Tolstoy. The later decades of the 19th century and first two decades of the 20th are rife with men who openly voiced their contempt of women and sought to exclude them from all public affairs. This was particularly true in Europe, but had its expression here also. Certainly there have been misogynists in other times and places, and misandrists too (though not to the extent or pervasiveness claimed). The Muslim world is a place where women really do live and die at the whim of tyranic men, something never equally practiced here. In the West, the writings from 1875 through WWI include some of the most openly vitriolic polemics against women made with smug self-assurance of being in the right. In politics, women were excluded from voting at the moment we set up house in America. Yet, that did not mean they were without political influence or influence in the financial and other concerns of their lives. As the 19th century progressed, however, women came more and more to be regarded as inferior beings, demoted to smaller roles, and placed under the rule of men; until it became necessary for them to reassert themselves through the suffrage movement. In truth, that era is better described as an excess of paternalism and a desire to treat women with a cloistering reverence than of hate against women. Yet, the general status relegated to women made it easy for the spiteful to vent against them and make them still more vulnerable. The expressions of loathing were not unlike the feminists rants now hurled against men, and it is the acceptance in both times that makes such expressions possible.
As in this era, I find that, although radical-feminists are not the true mainstream, they, nonetheless, have general acceptance and excessive influence on the basis of past wrongs and a prejudice that men are unfairly endowed and too little accountable. They assert men are too ready to war, unequal physically (making us riskier to both women and children), dominating, reckless, and given to philandering. Each of these indictments are held to prove that, although we may be individually ‘safe’, we are collectively risky and in need of external controls. To “balance” things, women accept the proposition of hobbling men in some matters and excluding us in others. The difference between the radicals and mainstream is, thus, a matter more of degree than philosophy. Even conservative women stop short of admitting to this much acceptance in the feminist proposition. This partial acceptance is the more insidious, and will prove the harder to repair. The thing to guard against is, in righting this wrong, we don’t simply swing back to the opposite extreme; but seek a true partnership. For this to happen, women must admit some modern modalities don’t measure up to theory, and men and women together must work to find the right balance between masculine and feminine approaches. And, this we must do without constant resort to meddlesome, one-sided referees.
Do two wrongs make a right? Of course not. Radical feminists are just as wrong and there is no justice in perpetuating the same crime in opposite guise. The great evil of feminist misandry is that it pretends women have a greater share of wisdom and act more responsibly in the care of the species. It was patently false when men made such claims, and is no less false in reverse.
P.S. to Mike Carlson: Please don’t get mad at me for going over your word limit. ;)
I liked your points, Bob Stapler. It is good to keep a sense of proportion in these things; I know it’s easy to forget that in partisan squabbles. I also agree that past mistakes should not be forgotten, eithier, lest they rear up in other forms.
I must comment on the quality of your work. Every now and then, I see writing which leaves me with a sense of awe and admiration: I enjoyed the force, clarity, and depth of your argument!
P.S. To Mike Carlson: You remind me of an English teacher I had in my Freshman year. As I am still a young student pursuing my BA in English, so I hope that you can forgive some of my grammatical errors. I know that my writing can become repetitive and wordy. I’ll learn to correct that in the future, provided that my instructors focus on teaching rather than indoctrination.
Melissa, you’ve renewed my optimism that young people will be capable of independent thought, despite the best efforts of our educational institutions to suffocate ideas deemed politically incorrect by intellectual. You’ve doubtless observed that instructors of the ilk you mention, are perhaps the least tolerant people (while simoultaneously demanding tolerance for their own whacky views). Take heart in the knowledge that the real world is decidedly different than what passes for fact and reality on most college campuses. And that you’ll graduate some day!
Just wanted to pass on an amusing episode I witnessed. I think in some cases the radical feminists have created their own monster. I was visiting my fraternity and during a party, I saw a female guest, aka the Grace Jones charactor in Conan the Destroyer, tell one of the brothers to “Take me upstairs. I want to use you” He said, ” I didn’t know you liked me” She said, ” I don’t, just fufill me” Now that I write this, I realise that it sounds a little torid for this board, but at the time it was hilarious to see how rather than equality and mutual respect, ‘the movement’ has turned some young women into praying mantisis. And the radicals say we men only want one thing. Sheeeesh
Scott,
I have heard feminist who argue the movement is about protecting the virtue of women, the empowerment of women to compete with men, or even, and rather ridiculously, to be every bit as crass, insensitive, and sex-crazed as men. Of course this latter claim is stupid for two reasons. First is that some women have always been so, and only make the excuse it is part of the movement. Hormones drive some to do things that stretch the bounds of conventionality, and they do so regardless of political philosophy. If anything, their philosphy is made to conform to support their behaviors rather than their behaviors a reflection of credo. The rest of us are just shy. The other reason is that men are not so shallow and mind-stultifyingly sex-driven as we are depicted. Yes, young men are far more hormone driven than old farts like me, but much the same can be said of young women. Once that burns away, the clarity of thought and character is more pronounced. The real differences are more in the way we approach things, and that is more pronounced with age rather than less. During the childrearing years, our interest coincide and we are driven to accomodate one anothers views. After that, both men and women tend to become more independent of thought; and what you get is less PC. Must be why we are so opinionated. :D