The biggest lie of modern feminism has been its stated goal to overthrow traditional gender roles for men and women, even while exhibiting a near-complete reliance on traditional masculine qualities of chivalric restraint, deference, and self-sacrifice.
In late September, 2019, an Egyptian-American feminist activist named Mona Eltahawy must have surprised many when, in an interview with Canada’s state broadcaster, she declared that the time for female politeness and civility towards men was over. When had it ever been practiced?
Eltahawy went further to claim that girls and women should enact what she called “justifiable violence,” and, barely able to contain her glee, outlined a sordid fantasy of vigilante attacks in which “a certain number of men” would be killed every week until the so-called patriarchy would cease its so-called war on women.
“I ask people to imagine—now I’m using this word imagine, and I’m underlining it three times—a scenario in which we kill a certain number of men every week. How many men must we kill until patriarchy sits across the table from us and says, ‘Ok, stop.”
Eltahawy’s rhetoric was, to say the least, highly aggressive and insulting, a thinly-veiled advocacy of violence against men.
Yet Eltahawy full expected, and was not mistaken in expecting, that she would be allowed to express her hatred and insults unimpeded, un-harassed and unharmed—even almost unchallenged. She did not fear violence. In fact, so secure was she in her harangue against men and expression of murderous fantasy that one wonders whether she was in fact taunting men and attempting to provoke a lashing out (perhaps out of an unconscious need to be restrained).
Any such actual lashing out would, of course, be turned to her advantage as supposed evidence of the white supremacist patriarchy. A woman such as Eltahawy—an elite upper-class woman who lives a life of once-unimaginable comfort and plenty as a result of the labors and inventions of men—can express her hatred and contempt for men openly, knowing that she will be allowed to do so with impunity, and will even be applauded for it.
Many feminists explicitly demand changes in the behavior of men that, if the men were anything like what feminists claim, it would be worse than useless to expect because very few or no men at all would be capable of making the changes. When Suzanna Walters published her crazed op/ed piece in the Washington Post titled “Why Can’t We Hate Men,” she spent half of the article explaining why men, not just some men but men as a group, were rightly to be despised, and the second half calling on these same men to sacrifice their own interests to advance women in order that they not be hated quite so much—though one would think that men as morally deficient as Walters had declared men to be wouldn’t care whether women hated them or not.
“So men,” she challenged them, “if you really are #WithUs and would like us to not hate you for all the millennia of woe you have produced and benefited from, start with this: Lean out so we can actually just stand up without being beaten down. Pledge to vote for feminist women only. Don’t run for office. Don’t be in charge of anything. Step away from the power. We got this. And please know that your crocodile tears won’t be wiped away by us anymore. We have every right to hate you.”
Feminists make their presumptuous demands and slanderous statements in full knowledge that similar insult-based demands in the past have been enthusiastically embraced by male legislators, pundits, and policy-makers, and in full expectation that they will be met again.
The hypocrisy is part of a decades-old strategy that may not be fully conscious or articulated, but is nonetheless discernible to a sane observer. It aims at nothing less than the total remaking of relations between men and women, though not at all in the manner that feminists claim, having nothing to do with equality, fairness, or justice, and involving the complete destruction of the gender contract.
All societies operate according to a gender contract, though these have varied over time. All successful ones involve some form of reciprocity and mutual recognition of male and female contributions.
Traditionally, western societies developed complementary roles for men and women that fit their biological capacities and tendencies: men took on the roles of hunter, protector, provider, defender, warrior, trader, harvester, leader, and law-maker; women took on the roles of life-giver, gatherer, nurturer, sexual companion, healer, advisor, and home-maker. At different times men and women shared the roles of teacher, scribe, and visionary. Women’s contributions were affirmed and celebrated.
Now feminists insist on an entirely new gender order without reciprocity. Women must no longer be confined to traditional roles; they are to be not only allowed but assisted, applauded, and promoted in any formerly male domains that they wish to enter.
Note that last clause: that they wish to enter. There are various male spheres—dangerous and dirty jobs—that women have not wished to enter and largely have not entered, such as construction, mining, and oil-drilling.
And there are a few masculine roles—some of the most traditional, those of rescuer, protector, warrior—that while coveting in the abstract, women have mainly not taken on.
The new gender order that feminists are bringing about—with some initial success—is perhaps unique in world history in refusing reciprocity and mutual recognition. Yes, men are to recognize female achievements, and most men are happy to do so.
Men are also to continually seek to aid women in their endeavors, defer to women, come to women’s defence professionally, put women first, sacrifice for women, even die for women if necessary. This is an almost universally acknowledged social goal; and many men are prepared to do it.
But women do not recognize male achievement or sacrifice and are not exhorted, or willing, it seems, to aid men in their endeavors.
They are certainly not expected to sacrifice their lives, their careers, their desires for men. They are not expected to offer emotional support, verbal advocacy, or financial assistance.
It would be considered the height of sexism if they were expected to offer their sexuality, beauty, and child-bearing capacity to men. What about kindness, empathy, gratitude? No, no, and NO.
In fact, the denial of reciprocity and recognition is so total that in the new gender order, even the basic fact of men’s contribution to society is almost completely ignored.
How has this come about? We already know that feminist activists and academics, aided and abetted by the feminist media and public culture, have rewritten the past as a story of male domination of women. It is more tricky to deny men’s present contributions and sacrifices—whether in war, killing work, or personal valor, as we see these around us—but this is done too with the complicity of journalists, broadcasters, teachers, and Hollywood, often simply through avoidance and silence, or through belittling or recasting male contributions as irritations or forms of sexism.
As fathers are exiled from the home and men are exiled from public school classrooms, both boys and girls are taught a woman-centered perspective that erases the significance of maleness and masculine identity. When feminism refers to gender parity in the workplace, it sets its sights on a corner office in the law firm, a seat on a judge’s bench, a university professorship, the CEO position in a Fortune 500 company, or the president’s desk in the Oval Office.
It does not see the men who work at night removing trash, cleaning toilets, maintaining the sewage treatment system, repairing the roads, operating the heavy machinery, fixing broken equipment, and so on.
It never mentions the gender disparities in prison incarceration, homelessness, addiction, suicide, or educational attainment that put men at a disadvantage. Or it claims it never wanted such things, blames them on men themselves, or pretends that women sacrifice more in the domain of emotional labor.
Feminism thus seeks, and is achieving, a social order in which nothing at all is seen to be owed to men as men and everything is owed to women, not for their contributions to society but simply for existing.
And no matter the number of pro-female government programs, wealth transfer schemes, anti-male initiatives, gynocentric laws, and celebrations of female supremacy, the female sex continually demands more, complaining that nothing whatsoever has been done for them—often claiming, in fact, that things have never been worse, or that what has been done is far too little, or that what has been done simply contributed to male advantage, or was done in bad faith, or was done with inadequate results, or created unforeseen problems for women that must now be rectified.
Boys are taught that they must continually attempt to make amends for past wrongdoing even though such wrongdoing was either so far in the past as to be irrelevant to the present or never existed in the way described.
In the new order, the female sex denies not only that men contribute to society but even that they are necessary at all—all the while relying without thanks on male labor, male inventiveness, male technical know-how, and male decency and forbearance.
Even women who like men or at least bear no animosity towards them have been encouraged to believe that such unequal treatment is necessary to correct the injustice of the past. Men, whether because of weaker in-group preference or out of competition with other men or self-serving opportunism or because of innate chivalric impulse or because they’ve been working too much to pay attention, have allowed this to happen with relatively little resistance.
The good news is that the situation cannot last forever. Societies lacking appropriate recognition and reciprocity tend to collapse of their own dysfunction, as the exploited group gradually becomes alienated, removes its labor, seeks oblivion in hedonism and/or self-harm, or resorts to violence directed outward or against the self. The group refusing recognition becomes so mired in its delusions that it is increasingly unable to comprehend or deal with reality and exhibits symptoms of anxiety, hysteria, and nihilistic destruction.
Unfortunately, the bad news is that once a society has reached this point, rebalancing of the gender order becomes very difficult, and total social breakdown becomes a frightening possibility. Then we will see violence against women, and we will all be caught in the maelstrom.
No one is so clear in understanding or articulate in describing the counterproductive nature of feminist supremacism as Professor Fiamengo. All mentally balanced citizens who wish well to all men and women owe her a debt of gratitude. As she makes evident, every healthy society requires a reciprocal pact between men and women in which both have appreciation of and care for the other.
I am going to read this to some friends at our reading aloud group meeting next week.