Feminists From The United States

"From Stonewall to the first AIDS alert was only twelve short years. In the Eighties and early Nineties, displaced anxiety over the horror of AIDS turned gay activists into raging nihilists and monomaniacs, who dishonestly blamed the disease on the government and trampled on the rights of the gay majority, and whose errors of judgement materially aided the rise and consolidation of the far right. AIDS did not appear out of nowhere. It was a direct result of the sexual revolution, which my generation unleashed with the best intentions, but whose worst effects were to be suffered primarily by gay men."

"Far from poisoning the mind, pornography shows the deepest truth about sexuality, stripped of romantic veneer."

"Feminist anti-porn discourse virtually always ignores the gigantic gay male porn industry, since any mention of the latter would bring crashing to the ground the absurd argument that pornography is by definition the subordination of women."

"Despite hundreds of studies, cause-and-effect relationship between pornography and violence has never been satisfactorily proved."

"Idiotic statements like “porn degrades women” or “pornography is the subordination of women” are only credible if you never look at pornography. Preachers, senators and feminist zealots carry on about material they have no direct contact with. They usually rely on a few selectively culled inflammatory examples that bear little resemblance to the porn market as a whole. Most pornography shows women in as many dominant as subordinate positions, with the latter usually steamily consensual."

"Men, gay or straight, can get beauty and lewdness into one image. Women are forever softening, censoring, politicizing."

"My prescription for women entering the war zone of the professions: study football. . . . Women who want to remake the future should look for guidance not to substitute parent figures but to the brash assertions of pagan sport."

"In America, the best model yet for the first woman president can be found among the Texas feminists, notably Governor Ann Richards. East Coast feminists, like Gloria Steinem, who created the smug, superior feminist smirk (done to an unctuous turn by NOW president Patricia Ireland), have failed to produce a credible persona for national leadership, partly because of their juvenile, jeering attitude towards men. The irony is that the legal and media world inhabited by Steinem and her cronies is filled with bookish white-collar men who are the only ones in the world who actually listen to feminists rhetoric and can be guilt-tripped into trying to obey it. … In Texas, unlike the urban Northeast, men are men. Women politicians in that state have the toughness and grit to handle men at their most macho. Southern women, particularly those of the plantation-belt, “iron magnolia” school, are able to get what they want and still retain their graceful femininity."

"Woman's sexuality is disruptive of the dully mechanical workaday world, in which efficiency means uniformity. The problems of woman's entrance into the career system spring from more than male chauvinism. She brings nature into the social realm, which may be too small to contain it."

"Campus speech codes, that folly of the navel-gazing left, have increased the appeal of the right. Ideas must confront ideas. When hurt feelings and bruised egos are more important than the unfettered life of the mind, the universities have committed suicide."

"The [sexual harassment] situation has gotten so out of hand that, in 1993, in one of the first British cases, a plumber was fired for continuing to use the traditional term "ballcock" for the toilet flotation unit, instead of the new politically correct term, sanitized of sexual suggestiveness. This is insane. We are back to the Victorian era, when table legs had to be draped lest they put the thought of ladies' legs into someone's dirty mind."

"In negotiating with rejected lovers or husbands, women must stop thinking they can make everyone happy. In many cases of harassment and stalking, it is clear that the woman never learned how to terminate the fantasy — which requires resolution and decisiveness on their part. Wavering, dithering, or passive hysterical fear will only intensify or prolong pursuit."

"What I see is not a world of male oppression and female victimization but an international conspiracy by women to keep from men the knowledge of men's own frailty. A strange maternal protectiveness is at work."

"[W]earisome as it may seem, women must realize that, in making a commitment to a man, they have merged in his unconscious with his mother and have therefore inherited the ambivalence of that relationship."

"Much violence against women originates in emotional territory that they already command. By midlife and early old age, as the hormones of both genders change, women are in total, despotic control of their marriages."

"In pondering why a battered woman does not leave, we must remember that gay men with a taste for violent “rough trade” have always paid for this kind of sex. Are women so perfect and angelic that we cannot imagine them having sadomasochistic impulses? When they are genuinely victimized, women deserve our pity. But victimization alone cannot explain everything in the tragicomedy of love."

"Any woman who stays with her abuser beyond the first incident is complicitous with him."

"The polemical tactic of exhibiting garish mugshot photos of women’s bruised faces evades the real issue. What led up to that moment in the emergency room? A video camera recording episode before and after the assault would upset the received black-and-white view of male ogres and female martyrs. This is not to excuse men for their scurrilous behavior; it is to awaken women their equal responsibility in dispute and confrontation."

"The Bobbit case, which brought to life the ancient mythic archetype of woman as castrator, demonstrated that women are as aggressive as men and that sex is a dark, dangerous force of nature. But of course the feminist establishment, stuck in its battered-woman blinders, learned nothing as usual from this lurid refutation of its normal views. Classic art works like Bizet’s Carmen tell us more about the irrationality of love, jealousy and revenge than do all the pat formulas of the counseling industry."

"In the Seventies, women runners, developing amenorrhea and calcium-related shin splints, were the first to realize that nature is hovering over us, ready to shut down our systems if our fetus-feeding fat reserve drops below a certain percentage of body weight. In other words, in nature's eyes we are nothing but milk sacs and fat deposits."

"Feminists had an astoundingly naive view of the mutual exclusiveness of sex and aggression, which, Freud demonstrates, are fused in the amoral unconscious, as revealed to us through dreams. That rape is simply what used to be called “unbridled lust,” like gluttony a sin of insufficient self-restraint, seems to be beyond the feminist ken."

"We must philosophically strengthen feminist theory so that it can admit that abortion is an aggressive act, that it is a form of extermination. Modern woman has become an agent of Darwinian triage. It is or should be ethically troubling: abortion pits the stronger against the weaker, and only one survives. The feminist coat-hanger symbol, prophesying the return of back-alley butchery if abortion is regulated or banned, is dishonest. A small number of women may die in botched procedures, but in successful abortions, the fetus death rate is 100 percent."

"With their propagandistic frame of mind, feminist leaders never admitted that their opponents could be equally motivated by ethics."

"Patriarchy, routinely blamed for everything, produced the birth control pill, which did more to free contemporary women than feminism itself."

"Shocked disbelief greets suggestions that many women may take pleasure in rape fantasies, established long ago by Nancy Friday in her pioneering 1973 study, My Secret Garden, and dramatized today by the staggering mass-market popularity of Harlequin Romances, where heroines are overwhelmed by passionate, impetuous men."

"As a teacher, I have seen time and again a certain kind of American middle-class girl who projects winsome malleability, a soft, unfocused help-me-please persona that, in adult life, is a recipe for disaster. These are the ones who end up with a string of abusive boyfriends or in sticky situations with overfamiliar male authority figures who call them “honey.”"

"Films of the mating behavior of most other species — a staple of public television of America — demonstrate that the female chooses. Males pursue, show off, brawl, scuffle, and make general fools of themselves for love. A major failing of most feminist ideology is its dumb, ungenerous stereotyping of men as tyrants and abusers, when in fact — as I know full well from my own mortifying lesbian experience — men are tormented by women’s flirtatiousness and hemming and hawing, their manipulations and changeableness, their humiliating rejections. Cock teasing is a universal reality. It is part of women’s merciless testing and cold-eyed comparison shopping for potential mates. Men will do anything to win the favor of women."

"Following the sexual revolution of the Sixties, dating has become a form of Russian roulette. Some girls have traditional religious values and mean to remain virgins until marriage. Others are leery of AIDS, unsure of what they want, but can be convinced. For others, anything goes: they’ll jump into bed on the first date. What’s a guy to do?"

"When feminist discourse is unable to discriminate the drunken fraternity brother from the homicidal maniac, women are in trouble."

"The dishonesty and speciousness of the feminist rape analysis are demonstrated by its failure to explore, or even mention, man-on-man sex crimes. If rape were really just a process of intimidation of women by men, why do men rape and kill other men? The deceptively demure persona of the soft-spoken, homosexual serial-murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, like that of the handsome, charming Ted Bundy, should warn everyone that we still live in a sexual jungle."

"All men — even, I have written, Jesus Christ — began as flecks of tissue inside a woman's womb. Every boy must stagger out of the shadow of a mother goddess, whom he never fully escapes."

"Ambitious young women today are taught to ignore or suppress every natural instinct, if it conflicts with the feminist agenda posed on them. All literary and artistic works, no matter how great, that document the ambivalence of female sexuality they are trained to dismiss as “misogynous.” In other words, their minds are being programmed to secede from their bodies … there is a huge gap between feminist rhetoric and women’s actual sex lives, where feminism is of little help except with a certain stratum of deferential, malleable, white middle-class men."

"Man has traditionally ruled the social sphere; feminism tells him to move over and share his power. But woman rules the sexual and emotional sphere, and there she has no rival. Victim ideology, a caricature of social history, blocks women from recognition of their dominance in the deepest, most important realm."

"Women are not in control of their bodies; nature is. Ancient mythology, with its sinister archetypes of vampire and Gorgon, is more accurate than feminism about the power and terror of female sexuality."

"White middle-class girls at the elite colleges and universities seem to want the world handed to them on a platter. They have been sheltered, coddled and flattered. Having taught at a wide variety of institutions over my ill-starred career, I have observed that working-class or lower-middle-class girls, who are from financially struggling families and must take a patchwork of menial jobs to stay in school, are usually the least hospitable to feminist rhetoric. They see life as it is and have fewer illusions about sex. It is affluent, upper-middle class students who most spout the party line — as if the grisly hyperemotionalism of feminist jargon satisfies their hunger for meaningful experiences outside their eventless upbringing. In the absence of war, invent one."

"What feminism calls patriarchy is simply civilization, an abstract system designed by men but augmented and now co-owned by women."

"Even the most morbid of the rape ranters have a childlike faith in the perfectibility of the universe, which they see as blighted solely by nasty men. They simplistically project outward onto a mythical "patriarchy" their own inner conflicts and moral ambiguities."

"In the summer camp mentality of American universities, the ferocity of genuine intellectual debate would just seem like spoiling everyone’s fun. Ambitious humanities professors go about the business behind a brick wall of “theory,” which they imagine is the dernier cri, but which has long been out of fashion, even in Paris. Drab, uncultivated philistines, without broad knowledge of the arts, have seized the top jobs in the Ivy League, simply because they have the right opinions and know the right people. In the past twenty years, conferences became the infernal engine driving the academic profession. The conference crowd, an international party circuit of literary luminaries ever on the move, was put together by the new humanities centers. These programs had the initially laudable aim of fostering interdisciplinary exchanges outside the repressive framework of the conservative, static and over-tenured university departments. But the epidemic of French theory was abroad in the world. The humanities centers quickly became careerist stockyards, where greedy speculation and insider trading were as much the rules of the game as on Wall Street."

"I hate dogma in any form. I hated it in the Catholic Church and Girl Scout troops of the 1950s, and I hate in in gay activism and established feminism today."

"Is there intellectual life in America? At present, the answer is no."

"I do not believe in God, but I believe God is man’s greatest idea. Those incapable of religious feeling or those (like hard-core gay activists) who profane sacred ground do not have the imagination to educate the young. … Until the left comes to its senses about the cultural power of religion, the right will continue to broaden its appeal."

"The venerable emeritus professors still at Yale when I entered graduate school [in the 1960s] may have been reserved, puritanical WASPs, but they were men of honor who had given their lives to scholarship. Today in the elite schools, honor and ethics are gone."

"Most professors know that American higher education in the humanities is in a deplorable state. Yet many remain silent, perhaps through prudent self-preservation, which is starting to look a lot like moral cowardice. They have put loyalty to their colleagues before loyalty to their students, ostensibly the raison d'être for educational institutions. How many more minds must be distorted or destroyed before the faculty decides to defend the Western intellectual values of free inquiry and orderly acquisition of knowledge?"

"Economic analysis is the first principle of Marxism. Professors who were genuine leftists would have challenged the entire economics-driven machinery of American academe — the wasteful multidepartmental structure, the divisive pedantry of overspecialization, the cronyism and sycophancy in recruitment and promotion, the boondoggling ostentation of pointless conferences, the exploitation of graduate students and part-time teachers, the subservience of faculty to overpaid administrators, the mediocrity and folly of the ruling cliques of the Modern Language Association."

"Just released in 1994 is Christina Hoff Sommers’s landmark study, Who Stole Feminism?, which uses ingenious detective work to unmask the shocking fraud and propaganda of establishment feminism and the servility of American media and academe to Machiavellian feminist manipulation. This bracingly precise, fact-based book should be required reading for every journalist. Sommers is a courageous academic philosopher who was one of the very first to systematically critique current feminist ideology and who took tremendous abuse for it. … Sommers has done a great service for women and for feminism, whose fundamental precepts she has clarified and strengthened."

"I admire hard-bitten, wisecracking realism of Ida Lupino and the film noir heroines. I’m sick of simpering white girls with their princess fantasies."

"Women will never succeed at the level or in the numbers they deserve until they get over their genteel reluctance to take abuse in the attack and counterattack of territorial warfare. The recent trend in feminism, notably in sexual harassment policy, has been to overrely on regulation and legislation rather than to promote personal responsibility. Women must not become wards and supplicants of authority figures. Freedom means rejecting dependency."

"I want a revamped feminism. Putting the vamp back means the lady must be a tramp. My generation of Sixties rebels wanted to smash the bourgeois codes that had become the authoritarian totems of the Fifties. The 'nice' girl with her soft, sanitized speech and decorous manners had to go. Thirty years later, we're still stuck with her — in the official spokesmen and the anointed heiresses of the feminist establishment... Equal opportunity feminism, which I espouse, demands the removal of all barriers to woman's advance in the political and professional world — but not at the price of special protections for women which are infantilizing and anti-democratic."

"Ten thousand years ago, when man the nomad took root in one place, he brought animals with him into human service. But domestication was to be his fate too, as he fell under architecturally reinforced female control."

"Hitchcock finds women captivating but dangerous. She allures by nature but she is chief artificer in civilisation, a magic fabricator of persona whose very smile is an arc of deception."