Saturday 10 July 2010

Dumb Ideologies: Feminism

I don't think men and women are equal; I know they are equal.

But how do I know this? First off; I have no problem observing what is there. It's blatantly obvious that men and women are intellectually and cognitively identical in practically every single respect. There is almost no justification for separating them on the grounds of gender.

So why do I hate Feminism? It's ultimately very simple; Feminism is sexist.

The fact that 'feminism' is the world's excuse for a gender equality movement makes me blood boil. It starts with the definition. I shamelessly quote the wiki when I describe feminism as;

"Feminism refers to political, cultural, and economic movements aimed at establishing greater rights, legal protection for women, and/or women's liberation."

I hope the fundamental fucking mistake that underpins the entire theory is evidence from this paragraph. This is not a theory even fundamentally designed to tackle gender inequality but to tackle female inequality.

There was a time when this was not a bad thing. The first wave of feminism, which we will say vaguely began at the turn of the 20th century with the likes of Margaret Sanger (it is worthy of note that I would consider her very much a proponent of 'gender equality' and not feminism, and she truly was campaigning for equal, not women's rights), was centered around addressing the laws that specifically disadvantaged women based on how their bodies worked.

In a bizarre way, this is the crux of gender equality. All gender equality spans from the fact women give birth to children, and 90% of female liberation is about giving women the right to not carry out that role. Men can fuck without getting (themselves) pregnant and women can't, and what gender equalists (that term will do for now) were campaigning for was allowing women sexual freedom to not have children which is, lets face it, a life-long prison sentence for anyone who doesn't want kids (myself included).

At this point I am so on board with the first wave of feminism. There is nothing here but a staunch observance of inequality and clever, rational means of defeating it, and I recommend anyone reading this research Sanger because she (along with the PENIS she married) are certainly major heroes of the gender equality movement.

The first-wave of feminism was, to me, equivalent to the "Jesus Christ" days of Christianity or the "Siddarta Guatama" days of Buddhism. The second-wave brought what all shifts towards mass-adherence bring; a whole lot of fucking idiots who dragged the average down to, well, average. And average is pretty fucking dumb when you're handling something as sensitive as gender equality, let me tell you that.

Here's where the bullshit starts.

Second wave feminism shifted the focus from 'equal rights' to actively fighting oppression. Now, keep in mind that, at this stage, whilst there was 'sexism' there was little in the way of 'oppression'. Sure, there was sexism and plenty of it; it was still considered unusual for a woman to be in any technical role, but it wasn't actively opposed. When second-wave feminism began women had practically equal rights under the law. As De Beauvoir observed, women were "the other" sex, but they were not, legally speaking, an "oppressed sex".

Now that is not to say the discrimination was not to as bad as oppression. But oppression would involve an active conspiracy, rather than a simple sexist zeitgeist that was already regressing rapidly and had to cower away in the face of a woman choosing to exercise her equal rights under the law.

But this is a hard thing to grasp isn't it? It's hard to grasp that life can be very hard for a woman, almost devoid of educational and employment choices, but there not be any conspiracy involved. It requires a clever mind, and by this point there were a lot of feminists, afflicted with mediocre intelligence by the necessity of large numbers, and consequently when feminism took direction it was not momentum in the way of gender equality through education, employment and social welfare.

It was, in fact, a religion, where Feminism was God and a mysterious, demonic entity called The Patriarchy played the role of all-powerful, omnipresent global conspiracy to keep women as housewives and child factories forever and ever.

Let's start with a character who embodies what I now call the "Cosmonati Conspiracy"; the idea that magazines and media somehow do not reflect the attitudes of the day but a vast, global conspiracy to beam negative, oppressive messages into the brains of women, causing them to go glassy eyed and walk to the nearest kitchen like a zombie with a hunger to eat brains wash dishes.

Betty Friedan's work on The Feminine Mystique (a book that, very usefully, almost ignited second-wave feminism whilst, with retrospect, giving the illusion of rationality to Cosmonati Conspiracy Theorists) underpins this entire ethic, in which she notes that years of women's magazines depicted women in the "Housewife" role, and that these magazines are usually run by sexist men (rude assumption to make I think).

In any case, a seductive notion, that men are somehow manipulating the media to bring about the oppression of women, and the worst thing is that, if that model is applied as an explanation with sufficient hate and mental deficiency, you can make it fit. You can almost believe that it is a conspiracy, if you are blind to the simply power of the sexist Zeitgeist.

Oh and, as a side-note, Joanne Meyerowitz kindly pointed out that some of these magazines criticsed for depicting the 'housewife' role actually depicted the complete fucking opposite.
Does this ring a bell with how feminism is today? Many people who describe themselves as feminists are just about sick of the complete farce that is looking at magazines, pornography and television programs and hypothesizing that, like our English Literature teachers would have us believe during our formative years, every fucking word is laced with triple meanings and subliminal messages but there by shadowy figures with sculptures of penises and pictures of beaten wives in their wallets as part of a global conspiracy to keep women oppressed and force them to remain in the kitchen forever and ever.

But why do they see it this way? Well, you can guarantee that, at the time, Christians were reading those articles thinking "This is clearly atheist/liberal propaganda designed to oppress christians and water down the bible's message" and any Muslims would be reading the same words thinking "This is christians and jews trying to suppress the message of Allah" and UFOlogists would be reading it thinking "I can almost see the scaley hand of the Lizardmen editing this article to remove all evidence of their global conspiracy to inject us all with theri bioslime".

Folks, it's becoming relevant to point out that Feminism, as of the Second Wave, is a fucking religion. Rather than actually promote gender inequality, which would mean looking for ACTUAL sexism and dealing with it, Feminism is based around the idea that anything is the result of patriarchy, and women always need help. And for a while this was true, they practically did always need help, but the ideology, like all religions, underpins everything; it makes ALL magazine articles part of a conspiracy, it makes ALL men conspirators and it makes all media an evil reflection of the patriarchal overlords, who probably never existed in the first place.

Sexism was a natural consequence of an ignorant species realizing itself. It is transient, it vanishes and re-emerges, but feminism is an unchanging dogma of "women are always oppressed". By its nature it cannot acknowledge female liberating, just as the "save the planet" people oppose nuclear power despite the fact that it practically would "save the planet", because their ideology is based around the idea that nature is always in trouble.

And this religious belief despite evidence is apparent in the feminist amendments to the US constitution. They tried to force in ammendments stating that there were equal rights for men and women under the U.S. constitution, and at no point did the fact that the constitution doesn't contain anything limiting rights to either gender get in the way of this. Well, thankfully this was narrowly quashed, but it is a prediction made by, and understood only through, the idea that feminism was designed to perpetually fight for female liberation, even where no oppression actually existed.

Oh, and the name of this piece of legislation which was forced on a document that already declared equal rights for all? The "Equal Rights Amendment". This is not evidence, but it's an intriguing look at the psychology of the movement, a movement that would demand "equal rights" in a situation where no rights would actually be added by the bill they were proposing. The fact that they already had all the rights they were asking for was irrelevant.

Finally, let me get philosophical.

You can never, ever control people. And that's fine, because by and large people are good. Men don't want to oppress women; there is no global conspiracy. You want to know why men oppress women? Well, they don't.

You see folks; there are no men and women. We are all a consciousness maintained by a human brain, possessing a hunk of dead meat we call a "body". There is no difference between the male and female consciousness, but let's say that we could re-write reality, so that every consciousness that ever existed was born as the OPPOSITE gender. Every mind that came to inhabit a male body was born female, and every mind that inhabited a female body was born male.
What would have changed?

Fucking. Nothing.

Female bodies would still have been oppressed because oppression is not caused by any inherent evil or predisposition towards oppression. It is caused by the fact that human beings are a bunch of dumb idiots. The stronger ones oppress the weaker ones, the ones that don't menstruate oppress the ones who do, because they're stupid shits and they take hundreds of years to learn right from wrong.

Feminism is an expression of that dumbness. It's people with inadequately normal IQs being unable to comprehend that an "eye for an eye" is not the enlightened way forward. It's people whose brains don't allow them to develop a philosophical framework for knowing why ALL people are idiots doing what dumb people do best; getting it completely wrong. They're as dumb as the sexists they fight against, because they are sexist themselves.

Meanwhile I am sat here wishing everyone would just fucking recognize that we're all ghostly mental presences inhabiting bodies which are arbitrarily assigned to be male or female, brown or white, dwarves or giants.

Yeah, sexism exists. But you know what feminism is? It's the necessary half of the problem; in a dumb planet full of dumb people, there's never going to be oppression followed immediately by enlightened balance. It's always going to be one group of fucking idiots hurting another group, then that group hurting them, then that group hurting them back, and it'll be the privilege and curse of a select few to be smart enough to see that they're both a set of idiots.

You can't champion equality by promoting one gender or the other, only by adhering to an ideology that holds equality to be the ideal, and naturally shifts one way or the other depending o social circumstance. Feminism doesn't do that; it's preprogrammed to champion women exclusively, and as a result it has become toxic in a world where the issue has become too-close for it to be about 'women versus men' anymore. The issue is idiocy, and if you believe women need to be uniquely championed in a western country, you're part of the problem.

2 comments:

  1. Write a little more about how dumb everyone except you is, I didn't quite get the part where the whole world except you is dumb. (That's why you invented agriculture and vaccines and the sextant and the iPod and space travel while the entire rest of the world was sticking fingers up their butts going "durrr duurrr durfy durr," right?)

    Feminism isn't the flip side of sexism. Feminism doesn't say that there should be more violence against men, or that men should have less control over their own bodies, or they should have less access to men's health resources, or that men should be paid less, or that men are less suited for leadership than women, or that casually degrading men is acceptable, or that men should be judged on their bodies while their minds are ignored, or that men should be afraid to go out at night, or that men have to wear high heels.

    Question: say the Equal Rights Amendement did pass. How exactly would that hurt men?

    ReplyDelete

  2. Write a little more about how dumb everyone except you is


    I will

    ReplyDelete