Imagine a mainstream newspaper printing an op-ed article by a former master of an Oxbridge College aseerting all women to be hysterical men-hating leeches with whom men would be better off having nothing to do.
Although few in their right minds would take such an article seriously, you can imagine it would not go un-remarked on by the sorority running the Equal Opportunities Commission. ‘Male prejudice’, ‘disgraceful insult to women’, ‘rampant misogyny’, we can imagine them complaining in letters of protest to editors and on ‘Women’s Hour’.
Time was, however,-- and not too long ago at that, when it was practically de rigueur among ‘progressive’ newspapers to carry some article written by a women levelling an equivalent accusation against men.
In the late ’sixties and ’seventies, such misanthropic feminists were given full license by academia and the media to preach their man-hating message throughout society.
It is difficult to know exactly what overall social effect their anti-male ranting had. It can hardly be doubted, however, that it contributed in no small measure to the general discrediting of the institution of marriage that happened at that time, as well as the concomitant discrediting of the related system of complementary gender roles which led to young children being nurtured primarily by their mothers while their fathers laboured to support them both during the early years of their children’s dependency.
Among the two most vociferous champions of feminist misanthropy were Germaine Greer and her American counterpart, the lately deceased Andrea Dworkin, the obituary for whom appeared in yesterday's Times.
In today’s Times, there appears in the form of an op-ed article by Ms Greer an encomium to her former sister-in-literary arms and dungarees. In it, Ms Greer continues to spew forth the same man-hating message she and Ms Dworkin did so much to propagate in former years.
A few sample sentences from Ms Greer’s piece will give both its gist and tone:
‘Woman-hating is alive and thriving; even in mild-mannered Britain in 2005 two women every week will meet their deaths at the hands of their male partners. Dworkin’s object was always to … bear witness against the oppression of women. What she said was often shocking; the shock of the true….
‘What she … point[ed] to was the fact that throughout the mammalian world penetration is synonymous with domination; the penetrated individual, whether male or female must lose status. To be feminised is to be degraded, no matter what the context….
‘Dworkin wanted women .. to become enraged and dangerous because men, unless they were unmanned by mortal fear, would continue to abuse and degrade women in fantasy and in reality. At the hour of her Dworkin’s death, prostitution was the fastest growing industry across the globe, with pornography, its promotion material, even faster growing.’
Now one might have thought that the best antidotes against both prostitution and pornography would be for women to seek the sanctuary from them both provided by marriage. But our two sisters will have none of it:
‘Women have no way of realising themselves because the very concept of women has been invented, described and prescribed by men…. In Dworkin’s herstorical analysis, marriage, which she characterised as “living legal and social death”, was historically founded in rape.’
Greer ends her piece by endorsing a claim made by Dworkin in 1986 that, despite all that had been accomplished on behalf of women’s liberation in recent decades, women were still losing the battle of the sexes. Greer writes:
‘In the intervening years no alternative system of sexual relationship has been invented; rather women have struggled to conform more exactly to the dehumanising fantasy, carving themselves into the shape of the sexist stereotype, enduring ever more ingenious forms of penetration of mind and body.’
Reading Greer today is like stepping into a literary Tardis to be carried back to the late sixties or early seventies. Mercifully, fewer and fewer younger women buy into this anti-male invective these days.
However, the legacy of the likes of Greer and Dworkin is all about us, even to the point that, in its web-site, the Equal Opportunity Commission cites the statistic about lethal male domestic violence as evidence that women are not equally as safe as men.
It is worth, therefore, citing a few facts as a reality check against the wild posturing of Ms Greer and her dwindling band of remaining followers.
First, despite more female partners being killed by their male partners than conversely, it cannot be inferred either that men hate women or that women are less safe than men.
Men are more violent than women period, but their victims are as likely, if not far more likely to be other men than women. If there are more domestic murders than other forms of murder, this is not because women are especially victimised by men, but because men are more likely to be living with women than with other men, and, being more violent than women, are, therefore, more likely to kill female domestic partners than male ones.
Second, despite rape being an appalling act of violence of which women are more likely to be victims than men and men are overwhelmingly more likely to be perpetrators than women, it does not follow either that there is anything inherently oppressive to women in consensual heterosexual intercourse, or that men are more implicated in or culpable for prostitution and pornography, or that there is anything oppressive to women about marriage.
Greer’s claim that women’s becoming wives, and, therefore, most probably mothers in the usual way, prevents them from realising their natures could only have been made by someone whose appreciation of gender was so distorted as to have led to her once describing herself with pride as a female eunuch.
In the course of her piece, Greer observes: ‘No one would dare show representations of a racial or religious minority being systematically humiliated and abused for fear of reprisals from activist females.’
Clearly, male oppression cannot be quite so all-pervading and severe as Greer claims it, or else, by the same token, she should have been inhibited from writing such an anti-male diatribe as she has done by fear of male reprisals.
It would go too far to suggest that, in writing as she did, she was asking for it.
Rather, far better is it to say, as an epitaph on Ms Greer's article, that her very act of having written it for publication is the best living proof there is of the falsity of what is asserted in it, as well as of the ultimate insincerity of its attention-seeking author.
Comments (2)
Ms. Greer's diatribe seeks to maintain men as the "Other", and in so doing provides clear evidence of Gender Feminism's fundamentally fascistic nature. In much the same way as the Nazi's sought to create the Jews as the "Other", and to depict them as the source of all ills, so does Gender Feminism seek to portray men. The need for this "other" is to provide an object of blame and culpability, and to deny any responsibility, whilst claiming authority and power. The creation of the "patriarchy" in the gender feminist paradigm is an essential element in its fascistic construct. The "patriarchy" becomes like the "Elders of Zion", an amorphous and malevolent entity against which the "us" are perpetually struggling against until they eradicate it. But the struggle must be eternal in order to prevent backsliding amongst the "us". Gender Feminists have not sought to engage with men to build a better and fairer world, they have set out to dominate. However, unlike the Nazis, they have not sought to destroy men physically for they require men to continue to contribute to the commonwealth that funds their activities. Instead they have sought to insinuate themselves into positions of influence where they can control the manner in which society evolves.
The feminism that Messrs Dworkin and Greer desired failed in its objectives because it could not be sustained, because women didn't want it.
Posted by R. Davies | February 27, 2006 8:58 PM
Posted on February 27, 2006 20:58
Women were liberated, entered the job market and found out why most men go to work - not because they love their jobs, but because they need money to live.
Posted by steve | April 14, 2005 6:14 PM
Posted on April 14, 2005 18:14