ROBIN writes:

Carla writes: 

…And most important, if feminism is making women so unhappy why are women not embracing traditional role more?…

I would add to your excellent commentary only by suggesting that men are also not embracing traditional role more. When Betty Friedan and Margaret Sanger, et al, began their wicked, Marxist campaign, I believe they were well aware that they would influence men as well as women, eventually altering an entire society. 

As a reformed (and continually reforming, thanks be to God) feminist myself, I can confidently say that I have the utmost respect for men. I am far from a man-hating feminazi, so to speak. However, I will say that there exists a sea of men in America who are quite comfortable with their feminist wives. Not happy, mind you, but quite comfortable – some even encourage feminist qualities in their wives! 

Many of the men where I live are not only content that their wives work full-time outside of their homes (young mothers included), they insist upon it. They enjoy the fruits of their wives’ labors, their less modest mortgages and all of the perks that come with dual incomes. Often, they purchase toys for themselves, such as boats, ATV, guns and other items men enjoy – not because they have the money, but because their wives’ salaries pay for a large portion of these items. More than a few men where I live have expensive hunting and fishing budgets that they would not ordinarily have on a single income. Quite a few are unemployed for the entire winter season, while their wives continue to work full-time, as there is a heavy manual labor and construction pool here. Many do not seek seasonal, temporary employment, which in and of itself does not strike me as wrong or unusual, unless one is demanding that his wife work full-time outside of the home and pay for childcare. 

The majority of the men that I speak of have also passively given over their patriarchal authority in the home to their wives: authority over the affairs of the household, the children, the money, most purchases, etc. They have become gophers for their wives on their days off, running about getting whatever she needs. Many have been castrated as fathers, silenced by their wives’ interpretations of the latest popular positive parenting and discipline books. Their children often tell them what to do! There are no small children to be seen running about the neighborhood during the day; they are mostly institutionalized in their care until at least 5:30 p.m. Entire subdivisions are devoid of life until almost dark, when everyone is either exhausted are headed off to one of many entertaining activities to keep themselves from thinking about the emptiness and lack of order in their lives. 

Some would say this is because women have forced the issue and brow-beaten their husbands. There is truth to this. However, the men have put blinders on as well. Some have formed men’s rights groups, which in my opinion are as dangerous as feminist groups due to their extreme nature and failure to address the true issue: neither gender is deliberately trying to destroy the other; rather, there is an Enemy trying to destroy both genders and create androgyny. 

I do not share anything that you haven’t already seen, Mrs. Wood, even where you live. It is rampant. My reason for sharing this is to further your explanation to Carla and take it to the point where others may see that not only have women rejected their God-given roles, but men have no idea what their roles are, and definitely not what their wives are called by God to be doing in the home and society! 

Unfortunately I have lived thirty-three of my forty-one years under a feminist mindset; it has only been recently that God has lifted the veil. Due to this indoctrination, I am not well-read on the subject. However, Mrs. Wood, please correct me if I am wrong: isn’t feminist doctrine a branch from the root of Socialism and ultimately Communism? Isn’t this a larger agenda than just “getting women to be dissatisfied?” Aren’t they really trying to completely overturn society (from the inside out) and create a bunch of passive men and ignorant, exhausted women (along with uneducated children and youth) who never question authority until it’s too late? Isn’t this a much larger ploy designed to completely dismantle the American family so that the State can then BE the “patriarch?” 

I recently enjoyed a short film entitled “Agenda: Grinding America Down” by Curtis Bowers describing just this: feminism is simply a tool used by socialists/communists who desire to overthrow the very moral fiber of America and destroy it from the inside out, rather than via outright armed revolution as in some Communist nations. For the past forty years, their insidious lies have taken root by way of the media, public schools, easy divorce, the propagation of the homosexual agenda and liberal politics. 

 It is fascinating to me, however, that I could have lived the bulk of my life believing all this garbage and taking it at face value until it destroyed everything in my life! I grew up with a feminist mother who basically emasculated my father (I believe her behavior is partially responsible for his myriad illnesses), and I was set to perpetuate the same pattern until God graciously stepped in and began to shake everything in my mind that could be shaken. I almost divorced my wonderful husband who is a fantastic father to our children, after having already had one failed marriage. Thankfully he is a loyal man, even if he is still entrapped in many feminist beliefs himself. That is okay; we will get free of the terrible tentacles of this beast and become a testimony to others that it can be done – families can live against the grain of this world. Behaviors can (and do) change through the power of the Holy Spirit. One family at a time, we will unplug from the Matrix and speak and live the truth and help other men and women have eyes to see as well.

Laura writes:

When Betty Friedan and Margaret Sanger, et al, began their wicked, Marxist campaign, I believe they were well aware that they would influence men as well as women, eventually altering an entire society.

The intention was to alter all of society. The past was wicked (for women only) and nature could be remade. You ask whether feminism was a way of covertly introducing Communism. These movements were guided by similar principles and inspired by the same philosophical developments in Western society. 

By the way, in her book The Second Stage, Betty Friedan predicted the men’s movement. She said there would be a “quiet revolution” among men, who would seek reform of their own – “not to ‘help’ women, but because of their own new problems and needs and choices, as fathers and for themselves of men.” She saw the fracturing of society into selfish interest groups as a good and necessary thing.

The love of comfort and softening of men you describe is a more a result of liberalism and feminism than the root of it. People worship comfort when they have lost heroic ideals. “Exertion, self-denial, endurance, these make the hero,” wrote Richard Weaver, “but to the spoiled child they connote the evil of nature and the malice of man.”

In the gray sameness of equality and the ease of sexual freedom, there is very little motivation to sacrifice.

Men are driven, more so than women, by suprapersonal goals. They are moved to sacrifice themselves for family at least in part by impersonal objectives. For men especially, the turning away from the heroic is related to racial and cultural decline. When white men accepted the demonization of their race and a position of moral inferiority, they were emasculated and prepared for feminism. With the feminization of Christianity, the fighting spirit dissipated. A ‘Kumbaya’ world is not a world where men are called to slay dragons or endanger themselves for the sake of chivalry.

 Said Weaver in his book Ideas Have Consequences: “This is, in conclusion, a story of weakness resulting from a false world picture.”

Kristor writes:

I’ve thought a bit about Carla’s question. Your response covers a lot of the ground I would have covered in responding to it. Her question is as you suggest a type of the far more general question, how can people begin to believe that they can perfect the world? How can rational adults make such an obvious mistake? Have they never heard of Babel? 

The answer is I think fairly simple. Everyone suffers, and everyone tries to avoid suffering. When we suffer, we want to understand the source of the problem, so that we can ameliorate it more effectively. Suffering is the root of all inquiry and prompt of all deliberation. Even curiosity is a form of mild suffering, analogous to a general interest in new sources of food, whether or not we now worry about hunger, or feel it. So, whether or not they are actually harming us, we want to understand novel phenomena in rather the same way that we want to find out whether they can be eaten (both sorts of curiosity – intellectual and gustatory – being manifest in the infant who puts everything in his mouth). 

It’s a good thing to be wired so as to snatch your hand reflexively away from the hot stove; it is another, and much better, to know ahead of time that the stove is always likely to be hot, and why. So, we seek to discover general principles that can be usefully applied in the disparate adventures of life. Such principles confer great advantage, and are therefore valuable, and their discovery is an occasion of pleasure. The intensity of that pleasure is in direct proportion to the sheer amount of discomfort the newly discovered principle appears to ameliorate, which is in turn a function of the apparent scope of its useful application. The more general and fundamental the principle, the greater the psychic payoff to its discovery. This is why religious principles are so much more compelling than, say, principles about baking, so much more likely to win our devotion, and so much more likely to lead us grievously astray. 

Practically the whole of human discourse is devoted somehow, at least in part, to the discovery, refinement and promulgation of such principles. But – and this is the simple part of the explanation – getting at the truth is difficult. So we take intellectual short cuts. This is not a defect; if we waited to act until we were absolutely sure we understood things perfectly, we’d never do anything. I speak here from personal experience! To act at all, then, is implicitly to wager in the face of uncertainty; and while the wages of errant action is death, so is moral paralysis. We are obliged to act, by our best lights. 

We take short cuts, then, as we must; and they mostly work out OK. So we grow overconfident, and forget that, by the skin of our teeth, we have at best, usually, cadged our way to a solution that in its full implication we but dimly comprehend – which is to say that we grow more and more proud, and arrogant, our errors more magnanimous and more consequential – and, potentially, vicious. The more we err in thinking we know what we are doing, the less we know what we don’t know. Nature and Nature’s God cannot be mocked, of course. We will get our comeuppance, inevitably, and learn humility. In the meantime, though, we can do a lot of damage, and by the nature of things almost all damage is permanent, and the rest may be repaired only at great cost. 

In the case of feminism, women looked about in the nineteenth Century and, seeing that they were unhappy, latched on to a simple and powerful theory that seemed to explain that unhappiness, and so give them leverage upon it: not the intractable human condition, no, but rather the male oppression of women, entailing the corollary that traditional notions of sexual differences are almost entirely the tendentious – i.e., false – deliveries of an ancient, pervasive, and wicked male conspiracy against women. It was a thrilling insight, not just because it enabled them to understand the source of the problem, but because the source – male authority – could be eliminated, thus offering them a way to solve the problem at the very root, and usher in a new age of happiness (for women and men, both). They could not easily have seen their theory was false because it had never been tried – had not ever been carried into practice. So the dire outworkings of feminism were never suspected, except by those the feminists deemed its evil enemies, mostly men, whose prophecies of doom were discounted on account of their obvious perfidy and self-interest. The feminist utopians expected to implement feminist reforms, and then find themselves in a society pretty much like the one they lived in, but for the one difference that it would treat women the same as men, while preserving all the venerable privileges traditionally conferred on their sex. They thought, not that their reforms would destroy society, but only the bad ugly bits of society. They meant well; they meant very, very well. 

The logic of the feminist reformation, which with its gnostic siblings is today proceeding inexorably toward the total destruction of civilization, is still driving feminists. Like the frog in the pot of slowly heating water, they have not yet realized that their reformation is lethal to women (in an exactly analogous way, liberal multiculturalists have not yet realized that the non-Western cultures they celebrate are inimical to liberals). They are intoxicated still by the thrill of their intellectual discovery about the underlying, conspiratorial structure of history, and by the vision of the utopia their reformation seems to portend. And, like the first feminists, they mean well. Their adversaries, then, inevitably come to seem to them to mean ill; and they can see no reason for such a thing, except to think their adversaries stupid, ignorant, or simply evil.

Laura writes:

I agree that feminism was bound to be tried because it had never been tried before and that disorienting technological change lent it the appearance of sense. 

But if one acts in a spirit of revenge, can one “mean well?” If one speaks constantly in the rhetoric of self-interest, can one “mean well?” If one believes one’s ancestors were stupid and unjust, can one “mean well”? If one rarely considers the needs of future generations can one “mean well”?

Many people working within the logic of feminism have meant well. But the begetters of feminism – both men and women, because it was not a movement created by any means by women alone –  chose to turn away from and deny some aspects of reality and to indulge the grossest impiety toward their forebears.

When one accepts the thrill of a false religion, one can no more be excused of the consequences than the alcoholic can be excused of his inability to function.

The Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls in 1848 proclaimed in its Declaration of Sentiments:

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.

This is a declaration of war. It is a declaration of hostility towards half of humanity, towards fathers, sons, brothers, and friends.

This is not meaning well. Not at all.

                                                                         — Comments —

John writes:

Bravo, Laura. I’m so tired of hearing that leftists really “mean well.” Perhaps some do. But the hard core of them are just plain mean and evil. And they truly mean us harm. It’s something we’d better think about. 

Robin: You’re right. There is a lot of male complicity in feminism. As I was saying to one of my friends the other day, quite a number of American men seem to enjoy their castration. Some men now are rebelling with the “men’s movement,” but this, as you point out, has its downside. Many of them, due to the hurt they’ve experienced, lash out in bitterness against all women and family life–and by doing so they play right into the hands of the Powers and Principalities. The true spirit of Christ, often hard to find in American churches, is the answer to bitterness and the contrived confusion we face today.

Laura writes:

Here is commentary on the softening of men by Allan Bloom from The Closing of the American Mind:

And here is where the whole business turns nasty. The souls of men – their ambitious, warlike, protective, possessive character – must be dismantled in order to liberate women from their domination. Machismo – the polemical description of maleness or spiritedness, which was the central natural passion in men’s souls in the psychology of the ancients, the passion of attachment and loyalty – was the villain, the source of the difference between the sexes. … Men tend to undergo this reeducation somewhat sullenly, but studiously, in order to avoid the opprobrium of the sexist label and to keep peace with their wives and girlfriends. And it is indeed possible to soften men. But to make them “care” is another thing, and the project must inevitably fail. (p. 129)

John E. writes:

I’m interested to know what it means to “mean well,” and of what worth is it whether someone means well or doesn’t mean well. It looks like Kristor’s meaning of the term is a person’s sincere desire to pursue the truth, regardless of where that person is in reality relative to the truth. If my definition is accurate in relation to what Kristor was saying, it seems to be an important factor, to “mean well” or not. Those who “mean well” should be able to communicate and understand each other at least somewhat based on the common foundation of a love of truth.

On the other hand, with Laura, I question whether the feminists ever meant well. Their doctrine has been so insidious from the beginning, as Laura demonstrates with the Seneca Falls quote, that I’m left pondering–if they at Seneca Falls meant well, is there anyone who can’t mean well?

Alissa writes:

It’s a good thing John mentioned the men’s right movement. It’s a male version and replica of feminism (women’s rights). There’s also male players and their compliance with women’s sexual liberation. What I like about traditional websites is how they focus on liberalism. The liberal worldview has affected both genders, different races and various ages. People will never be free until they reject liberal ideals. Trying to work with the system won’t work and will only bring more of the same. To many, the rejection of liberalism is like an epiphany. It is akin to religious conversion for some individuals.

John writes, As I was saying to one of my friends the other day, quite a number of American men seem to enjoy their castration.

I have noticed something insidious in the decline of traditional masculinity: in the films and books quite a number of men are weak and castrated in character and often the only men who stand out tend to be villains or evil. When I was in my early and mid-teens (I’m currently 18 years old) I had this fixation on quiet dark male characters whether in cartoons, films or books. I’m not talking about “bad boys” and posers which I ran away from or ignored. Many of these male villains had a female follower or servant that complimented his character which I liked. If the female follower took the appearance of a “strong, independent, ultra sexy” woman and started to become domineering I would switch off and rarely would come back. I’m not endorsing for young women to love villains but it’s something I noticed in my personal lifetime.

Kristor writes:

You disagree that feminists, or at least the angry feminists, mean well. But it seems to me that the only way it can be simply true that they mean purely ill, is if they are beings wholly given over to evil, without any jot or tittle of righteousness left in them, and utter slaves to sin. And it seems to me that unalloyed evil of that sort is really quite rare in human history. Nero is the only famous example I can think of, aside from the sociopathic serial killers. Even Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot had some sort of rational justification for their enormities. We don’t buy their justifications for a heartbeat, but they surely did. Such justifications could have had no operational leverage in their minds, or those of their lackeys – could not, in fact, qualify as either rational or justifications – unless they were proposed in terms of, and in ostensible service of, some important goal, that everyone can understand as at the very least appearing to be in itself good. 

Thus while it is true that when the early feminists declared war on male authority, and ipso facto on men qua men, they meant ill toward men, they must at the same time, in order to justify the dreadful decision to make war on their own sons, have meant in so doing to serve a much higher good, that would in its achievement redound to the ultimate benefit of all people. They would not have felt that the Declaration you quote (“The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.”) was worth even talking about unless it seemed to them that oppression and tyranny are, per se, wrong. They meant to right an instance of that wrong. And, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. 

In saying all this, I don’t mean to excuse the feminists, at all. They erred in their thinking, enormously. I seek only to understand how they could have reached their conclusions. In retrospect, their intellectual errors seem perverse, insane, wicked. But to them, at the time, their own thinking must not have seemed wrong, in any sense of that word. One doesn’t undertake a project to up-end the social order at the most fundamental level on the basis of a proposition one suspects might be false. 

However hellish the consequences of their thinking, then, and however great the evil they ignorantly unleashed upon their sons thereby, that hellishness and evil must have been invisible to them. They must somehow have said to themselves of the hurt they then knew they would impose upon their sons, “This will hurt him, but it will be good for him in the end.” 

Notice that to say this to oneself is, on the one hand, to usurp the prerogative that belongs properly only to God – for only God can fully know the truly best good for us, and what it is worth to obtain it – while on the other it is the inescapable obligation of the careful parent, who in his loving judgement imposes a small evil upon his child so as to prevent a greater. This is what parents do every time they force their children to go to bed at the proper time, or do their homework, or turn off the TV, or eat their vegetables. To be a parent is a great and terrible office, beset on every side with opportunity for profound moral error. How many mothers and fathers, meaning the very best for their children, have ruined them? What parent has not bitterly regretted his honest mistakes? 

The feminists are mistaken, no doubt about that, and many of them may furthermore be obstinate and willful in their ignorance. They may even be so committed to their doctrines as to think that they justify deceit and bad faith – to their interlocutors, or even toward themselves. But no one can willfully disregard the plain evidences of history or experiment that contradict a deep doctrinal commitment, unless he believes also at root that the doctrine in question is really true, despite the evidence that seems to undermine it. And that fundamental act of credence must itself be honest, and felt as honest, or else it is not credence at all. 

If the feminists don’t honestly believe what they themselves think they honestly believe, then their actions (that are predicated on what they take to be honest beliefs about what is really, truly good) are simply inexplicable. 

It is important that we avoid the trap the feminists and liberals have fallen into, of so misunderstanding their adversaries that they cannot understand us at all, leaving them no alternative but to think us wholly evil, deluded, stupid, or insane. If you think your adversary is purely, merely irrational, or nuts, or whatever, you are bound to be underestimating him; particularly so, when he has managed to take over your society, as the liberals and feminists have done. As Lawrence Auster has often repeated, we must remember that liberals, feminists, Muslims, or for that matter anyone else, would not do the things they do unless they honestly thought it served the greater good according to doctrines they honestly believed were true.

Laura writes:

I would never call feminism insanity or deny a real coherence to its principles. In describing it as a false religion, I acknowledged that it is indeed a religion and therefore possesses sense. And of course, I do not believe that the influential feminists at Seneca Falls were entirely evil and depraved or that they were incapable of decent motives toward others. Many women who have followed feminist principles have been decent and well-meaning. I understand the enormous attractiveness of these ideas, having been feminist myself as a young woman. They are intoxicating. But I don’t think they can really take root where there is not some form of dishonesty, shallow thinking, pride or spiritual rebellion. Perhaps disappointment or maladjustment, maybe an unloving father, makes these ideas congenial in some cases. We can with confidence judge the beliefs, not those who hold them.

However, we can go further than that. The Communists meant well too, but those able to reflect were more than simply mistaken in their beliefs. Something had to happen outside the sphere of reason to deflect the propagators of Communism so far from the truth. For feminists to look on men as capable of mass conspiracy against them, to radically devalue the work of women before them and to suppress some of their deepest inclinations, they had to harden their hearts first. 

MarkyMark writes:

Robin should check out Aaron Russo’s interview on the TRUE orgins of womens’ lib. If she wishes to watch the entire interview (over 1.5 hours long), she can do so here. Anyway, feminism had nothing to do with LIBERATING women! Men, of course, had to be taken out of the equation, so we could not and would not perform our historical role as civilization’s guardians and protectors. Why would many men fight for a society that has bashed, trashed, and demonized them for their entire lives? Seems to me that leaves women open for exploitation. Once men are out of the equation, women WILL get theirs! The only reason they haven’t yet is because they still have a role to play as useful idiots doing the bidding of those Principalities and Powers that Robin alluded to. Once they’re (the Principalities & Powers) finished using women (for their OWN destruction, no less!), women will be next on the hit list. They’ll have no one to turn to, either. It was all quite deliberate, I’m afraid.

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