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Bettina Arndt's avatar

Excellent piece, Janice. It is intriguing trying to understand why so many men have been willing to endorse policies and documents denigrating men, particularly when you look back to the time the Declaration of Sentiments was signed, when most men would have been happy to speak out against this type of nonsense. It is more difficult in our feminist-controlled culture where there are very real negative consequences for males who attract the ire of feminists by being honest about such matters. You make a good point that we have to stop excusing feminism by simply suggesting it has gone off the rails. As your videos are exposing, the vicious anti-male bias and deceptive lies being promoted by feminism were there from the start. They've just done a great job in whitewashing their own history.

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howard's avatar

I feel like the main purpose of 20th century feminism, state feminism, was to cure 'female' as tho it were a disease. I'll post a statement on that view below, which I wrote as a comment to some other related article a year ago.

Feminism is guided by the belief that 'women', as they are, have been developmentally insulted by the patriarchal imposition of a socialized gender. Women as they are, the adult women we see around us, are not 'whole' in that they were molded, guided in such a way throughout their development that they would flow like water into the roles that were prepared for them, actually shaping themselves or being shaped by unconscious processes to fully conform to expectations.

All that Feminist thought regarding development is strongly behaviorist in nature. Behaviorism has a long history and some of the first large scale projects to attempt to modify the beliefs and attitudes of the public were focused on women. In essence, behaviorism can be thought of as an extreme 'nurture' position on the 'nature vs nurture' question, full scale as such behaviorism holds that all development outside the womb is fully mediated by social factors.

You will recall that Dr Money who infamously experimented on a boys gender development was a behaviorist who believed that gender was fully learned by children, and that a child who was apparently 'male' (in todays language 'assigned male at birth') would fully develop into a typical girl if that child were 'socialized' in typical way girls were.

Feminism concerns itself with managing 'influences' which it believes will have effects on girls (and in some cases on boys) removing representations of subservient women, fronting representations of empowered women, from the 'beach body' incident to female Thor, feminist activism in regard to the representation of women and girls as presented to girls is strongly behaviorist. The mechanism whereby these images are expected to effect the development of girls is the behaviorist expectation that children will develop in such a way as to fill the adult roles that they observe around them, forming themselves like water to fill out expectations as nearly as can be achieved.

So the expectation all along has been that when patriarchal norms have been sufficiently abolished and feminist ones implemented, the result would be fully realized women, who would be IRL stand alone versions of the largely propped up or completely fictitious 'strong empowered women' role models that had been presented to them as children.

'Women' as they are, are what the patriarchy shaped them into, and yes, they were made to require a great deal of support, they were made to focus on home activities and neglect economic participation, they are very emotional in general and they have a strong tendency to pair bond with their oppressors - the promise of feminism has always been to fix all that. To prevent girls from developing in this way and cause them instead to develop into the equals of men.

This is the view that sees women as both helpless and all powerful. Women are not responsible for their own actions because they are nothing more than 'patriarchy robots' who can do nothing other than react to their environment in the ways they have been trained. Helpless because they were socialized to be, they require a great deal of support since they effectively suffer from a developmental disorder, but the need for this support must be presented as being caused by existing sexism while at the same time the image of strong unstoppable women is maintained to guide the development of girls, and roles prepared for them to form themselves into.

So, in this view feminism has always been motivated by jealousy. More than any desire for rights, deeper than any idea of patriarchy or any hatred of men. It sees feminism as presented to girls as nothing more than a big ‘skinner box’ where girls are trained to become men. And now they’re actually doing it. Since feminism has been in place for so long there are feminists in every field, in every institution, and medicine has come up with the answer – hormones and surgeries for every unfortunate victim of the crippling disease called Female.

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