Why I loathe feminism... and believe it will ultimately destroy the family
ERIN PIZZEY set up the world's first refuge for battered women in 1971 - and went on to establish an international movement for victims of domestic violence.
...Having escaped the brutality of the war, we were introduced to a new brand domestic cruelty.
Indeed, my mother's explosive temper and abusive behaviour shaped the person I later became like no other event in my life.
Thirty years later, when feminism exploded onto the scene, I was often mistaken for a supporter of the movement. But I have never been a feminist, because, having experienced my mother's violence, I always knew that women can be as vicious and irresponsible as men.
Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the movement, which proclaimed that all men are potential rapists and batterers, was based on a lie that, if allowed to flourish, would result in the complete destruction of family life.
...
Feminism, I realised, was a lie. Women and men are both capable of extraordinary cruelty. Indeed, the only thing a child really needs - two biological parents under one roof - was being undermined by the very ideology which claimed to speak up for women's rights.
This country is now on the brink of serious moral collapse. We must stop demonising men and start healing the rift that feminism has created between men and women.
Harriet Harman's insidious and manipulative philosophy that women are always victims and men always oppressors can only continue this unspeakable cycle of violence. And it's our children who will suffer.
Hey, let's start a sharing meme:
"Why I hate feminism: a personal revelation that I've never written before."
I'll go first.
People often comment to me about how much I hate feminism. How much I have consciously rejected its tenets and proposals, its invidious temptations, its poisonous suggestions. Sometimes the violence of my loathing for it spills over into my writing. People have noted how sometimes I seem almost racked with hatred for it, with an anger that seems far beyond any merely intellectual rejection of a repellent and evil ideology. I've been told that I sometimes seem like those people who fled Soviet countries and spent their lives in a dedicated campaign against communism. There is a kind of fury that motivates me that other people who also may reject feminism don't have.
Well, I'll tell you why.
I hate feminism, and leftism and hippie-ism (if there is such a thing) and the collective new ideology that seems to have no name but has taken over the world since the 1970s because it destroyed my mother's life and her ability to fend for herself by turning her into a professional victim, rendering her incapable of normal human relationships and robbing me of the one person in the world I loved the most.
That ideology, whatever it's name is, corroded her personality and fed upon her innocence until there was nothing left of her. It enslaved her will and her intellect for forty years and reduced her in the end to a kind of shell of a person. It poisoned her and crippled her emotional and intellectual and spiritual life and left her in the end, to die alone and penniless in a government-sponsored cancer paliative care home. It turned her into a wraith.
My mum was raised in England after the war and was trained and educated in the traditional middle class manner for girls to prepare her for a normal life as a wife and mother. She could cook, sew, knit, crochet, she knew all about gardening, she could draw and play the piano and make any domestic thing needed. She was also sweet tempered and had a great empathy and love for little innocent things like small children and little animals. She was a great cat lover and was great with dogs too. She was a gentle person, and very feminine in the old-fashioned way that was normal before feminism got its evil hooks into everyone's minds.
And she was brilliant. She learned eight languages, taught herself music theory in her 40s and did calculus problems the way other people do the crossword. I've got her CV and it is a thick binder of qualifications from the Canadian government certification for French, to 1st class engineering tickets, to grade 10 piano, to her undergrad mathematics degree.
When she fell into it in the 1970s, feminism and the trendy pop-psychology theories that eventually were to congeal into the festering clot that we call the New Age movement, began to unravel everything that had created her personality and to leave nothing behind but chaos and psychopathology. It taught her (and this was partly the work of the RCIA programme in the Catholic Church in Victoria at that time,) that everything she had been raised to know and do was worthless and wrong, that everything she had been taught to expect was bad and that she would only be happy in the work force after years of university.
She went to university, did degrees in mathematics and biology, studied languages and then became an engineer. None of this ever made her happy. She spent years being told that all her problems came from her evil patriarchal upbringing. She tried to throw it all off, adopted the fashionable vulgar manners and ideas of the time, that conflicted starkly with her gentle and kindly and commonsensical polite upbringing. She started to lose the sense of who she was. Feminism kept trying to provide her with a new identity that never fit her. She continued to be unhappy as her personality eroded away.
When she did finally get married, the conflict continued. Graham wanted a wife and loved her for what she really was. Feminism told her that wasn't good enough, so she left him to go to engineering school. She became more miserable after the divorce and hated being an engineer. When Graham died she lost all interest in anything, left her job, retreated into fantasy and delusion, became addicted to various conspiracy theories and psychotropic medication and finally died of cancer, having alienated herself from the Faith which she had been told was too patriarchal, and the rest of her family who hardly knew who she was. Before she died, my uncle in England begged her to come there and be at peace. She refused.
A year before she died, I sent her a last letter pleading with her to give up what we both knew was her addiction to falsehoods, fantasies and emotional evasions and to devote herself to the Real. She never replied.
My mother's vast confusion in life was characterised by the perpetual name changes. In her life, she had six surnames, only two of which came from marriages, the rest were the result of her desperate lifelong search for an identity. She spent her whole life fighting her nature, her upbringing and what she knew was true with a deep natural conviction, to keep trying to embrace an alien and logically contradictory false creed.
When I read this article about the incredibly fast destruction of the IHM nuns in Los Angeles by unleashing the demonic doctrines of Carl Rogers, I know in close personal intimate detail exactly what happened. I watched it being done to my mother with her "dream workshops" and "encounter groups" and "realness training" and "gestalt therapy" and the endless navel-gazing rubbish she brought home and tried to foist on me. By the time I was nine I had learned to make up plausible sounding stuff to tell her about my inner life, stuff that fit the trendy pop-psych template, to keep it all out. It was just instinct, but even then I knew enough to hate and fear it.
My violent rejection of it all, like the body's rejection of poison by vomiting, was painful and alienating like a deprogramming, and took decades. But it has resulted in the end in my desperate (and sometimes fragile) white-knuckle grip on The Real, that ultimately led me into the Faith-That-Is-About-The-Real. No matter how hard and unforgiving it can be, no matter how many times I have failed to live it in daily life, it is the only thing that can make meaning in a life and a world that would otherwise look like an absurdity.
When I see these anti-nuns going to their risible conferences and issuing their media releases, I would laugh if I didn't know from personal experience how truly deadly these apparently childish theories can be. If only they were really childish, children would reject them as idiotic.
As I believe I've said before, it's all a big laugh, these ridiculous old ladies, until someone loses her soul.
Finally, some vestigial instinct for self-preservation prompted my mother to ask for a priest to see her before she died, and that priest told me she recieved the sacraments, so something of The Real remained in her even at the very end.
But her life and death have taught me a grim lesson: things don't always work out in the end. Sometimes there is just failure and tragedy and no kindly or wholesome resolution.
Feminism has taught me these things.
OK,
someone else's turn now.
4 comments:
Very moving, yet sad reading, Hilary. Glad that you were able to see through it all and get past it - though I expect it is still a struggle. We’re none of us perfect, men or women, parents or children - and we all have a long way to go.
What has always gotten me about extreme feminism is the universal dismissal of half the human race. “You’re a man, ergo…” You can see it in their eyes and expressions – a priori dismissal. “You’re a man and there can be no good in you”.
And while we may protest: “You don’t know me!” it takes on the Pharisaical appearance of: “I am not as other men...” - with the consequent dismissal.
I suppose Adam could have taken the same approach with Eve: “It’s all your fault!” (pace the Serpent…). And if he did, we’d none of us be here. But he didn’t - and we are – so let’s make the best of it. As someone sagely remarked: “There is some good in the worst of us and some bad in the best of us”… Hopefully, in the final analysis, the good will tip the balance over the bad for all of us.
Wow. That is very powerful.
My problems with feminism stem first of all from its unthinking hatred of Catholicism. Actually, that's what first made me doubt it.
My elementary school was rife with sexually aggressive boys and featured a sexist Grade 7 teacher who made anti-girl remarks, so I thought feminism was the way to go until I found out that Catholic women were invisible as far as Canadian feminists were concerned. My mother wrote to one of its principal players, Doris Anderson, to point out that the Catholic Women's League (now with a membership of 90, 000) should be on her master (mistress? masteress? mattress) list of women's groups.
Next, I hated how feminists on TV made my mother, a homemaker mother of five, feel terrible for being a homemaker mother of five. Some woman MP actually called housewives parasites.
Then I was annoyed at how feminism seemed to have sucked the holiness out of women's religious orders, and the more I heard about what a great feminist this or that foundress was, the less I wanted to join.
Now it blows my mind that mainstream feminists ignored Catholic women (the kind who actually go to Church) for decades have now embraced Islamic women and bend over backward to accommodate and justify various Islamic practices. They talk about not imposing what they call Western cultural values (like, you know, education and showing your face in public) on women in so-called Islamic countries. Such cultural relativism does not apply to Catholic Ireland or Poland, of course.
The very worst thing, however, is its constant denial that unborn babies are human beings who shouldn't be killed (but are too often killed, and without anaesthetic).
I am terribly sorry about your mother.
Hi Hilary, that was a pretty moving story. The faith conviction that grew out of the situation you describe is pretty amazing.
Personally, I hate feminism because I get really tired of people telling me I need more 'me-time' and acting as if I must be so unhappy because I am home with my children.
I also particularly loathe the post-feminist habits of asking people if they are "done" having children and confirming one's own medically-induced sterility in the hopes of finding out if the mother of too many children in question has also wised up and opted for sterility. It is a digusting but all too common conversation.
Hope to see you in Rome with Greg next week
-Silvia Aldredge
I hate it, for one, because it masquerades as a thing that shouldn't be hated: so many times I have seen a female college student say "I'm not a feminist," be told by a professor "do you believe women have equal rights to men?" say "yes" and then be told that she therefore is a feminist. The professor then goes on to explain what feminists are supposed to believe (which goes way beyond "equal rights" to things like abortion, endorsement of pornography(?), and the necessity of abolishing patriarchal Western Culture), and usually the girl passively accepts that, since she believes women are equal, she therefore must believe the things being promoted by the professor.
Interestingly, every time I've seen this the professor has been a man.
Anyway, I also deeply hate any movement that seeks to butcher language as much as feminism. Even politically-correct racial consciousness doesn't violate our language like feminism does. African-American or whatever other terms there are work like nouns, and can be substituted for whatever the previous term was. Feminism forces a language like English, which has historically used the concept of gender so judiciously, to abandon:
1. Proper formal titles (Miss, Mrs.)
2. The generic masculine (Every student must do his best)
3. Common expressions (Mankind, Every man for himself, etc.)
4. Typical, dependable role expectations for literature (like that men will want to marry women and vice versa).
Finally, feminism as it is practiced tends towards nihilism. It helps no one: vile, abusive men continue to abuse women. Weak, defeated women continue to stay with them. In fact, when these weak, defeated women are taught the "feminist" things that they are supposed to think, they are more likely to use it as justification for staying with their abuser (my dad can't tell me what to do, I love this guy, that's my choice, etc.) than to actually be strengthened themselves.
However, it hurts lots of people. The young man who sincerely loves and seeks femininity is told that he is wrong and sexist to do so. Men who (perhaps sometimes innacurately, but innocently) expect that women are beautiful, delicate "ladies" who must be protected is told that he himself is the enemy of women. He doesn't have the heart of an abuser, so he becomes instead a weakling who looks up to women who can only look down on him.
Meanwhile, the young woman who understands her own abilities but innocently and sincerely seeks masculinity in a partner is told that she is wrong, that she is responding to a patriarchal upbringing and that she should not expect anything good from men. She, in the end, either settles for less (and perhaps becomes a weak, defeated woman who stays with an abuser) or becomes bitter and angry and afraid.
I am a young, engaged, male English teacher, and I think that all of these things have shown me what is "really happening" with the ideology called feminism. I see my male and female students with lives torn apart by these revolutionaries, lives that were destined to be torn apart before they were even conceived. I see it when I have to tell students to use "he or she" and have to tolerate their ungrammatical use of the generic plural (every student must do their best). I see it most of all in the attitudes towards marriage and family that I see in the world around me (no one believes me when I say that I don't know how many children I will have, people constantly assume that my fiancee already lives with me, etc.)
Sorry if that was long-winded, but this is a fascinating subject. I loved reading all the other comments, and Miss White's (see how I can use titles properly?) story was especially fascinating.
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