During the late 1990s came the
culmination of a creeping, insidious trend perpetrated by
feminists and denizens of
political correctness. The crawling horror that had lurked within the very fabric of
modern society for fifty years had finally, terrifyingly reached its
logical conclusion. It was no longer
socially acceptable to be male.
Before I get flamed to a crisp... think about it. Women's emancipation, fine. Women's Suffrage, fine up to a point. (It's the whole jumping-under-horses thing when I start to think they've gone too far.) Equality, absolutely great. I have no quibble with equality. It just doesn't seem like that's what's going on any more.
Things have got completely out of hand. Here at the Edinbugh Festival the other day I was at a book review discussion thing, and one of the distinguished authors there was a certain Ms Andrea Dworkin (I presume she's a Ms, anyway. This particular type of feminist tends to insist on being called Ms. My apologies to Miss/Mrs/Freiherr (Freifrau?) Dworkin if she prefers some other ridiculous title)... author of Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continued War Against Women, who was promoting her new book Scapegoat: Jews, Israel and Women's Liberation. In this tome (which I haven't read) Ms Dworkin draws a parallel between the plight of the Jews during the Holocaust and the plight of women. She declares that just as the establishment of the state of Israel helped the Jews with their own cultural identity, so should there be a state of Women.
Or something like that, anyway. As far as I can tell all this 'woman-only country' malarky is just an analogy, and Ms Dworkin doesn't actually advocate annexing a section of the United States and calling it Lesbia... mind you, from listening to her talk, I'm convinced that if someone else suggested the idea, they would have Ms Dworkin's support one hundred per cent. There was talk of "declaring war on men". There was a snide little remark slipped in about how women can now buy firearms in the US. My flatmate, whom I had dragged along to the event, said that if an alien was sitting in the audience with no prior knowledge of the situation, he would get the impression that, for centuries, women had been rounded up by men and shot for no reason other than that they were women.
Stop me if I'm wrong, but this is not the case.
And even if my ancestors had been shooting women for shits an' giggles, the point I'm trying to make here is that I have never shot a woman in my life. Nor have I raped one of same, molested, pestered, frightened, struck or, to my knowledge, ever made a woman feel uncomfortable against her will. I don't believe I have ever neglected to hold a door open for a woman in an appropriate context for such. Therefore, I don't see why I should be victimised for the (alleged) crimes of my forebears.
In a similar vein, Germaine Greer has claimed that "all men are rapists".¹ Yeah, right. I don't care how you interpret that or what viewpoint you're coming from, it's libel.
In the absence of a better quotation, or actual knowledge of any such legislation in the Real World (TM), in the pilot episode of Star Trek TNG Data claims that the court of the United Nations declared that no one may be held responsible for the crimes of his ancestors. Even if it isn't law in real life, it certainly makes a lot of sense.
Also, I belive Ms Dworkin is somewhat overstating the case when she claims this millenia-long feud against the female species. Specifically, I find the allegory with the Holocaust to be in particularly bad taste. I don't recall anyone in recent history rounding up and gassing seven million women. I don't recall any continued persecution of women on any such scale, and I believe Ms Dworkin hasn't checked her sources properly in this regard. (Andrea Dworkin is herself Jewish by birth. Her parents could probably tell her, from empirical knowledge, the difference between discrimination and genocide.) There is no "continued war against women", nor has there ever been.
And in the spirit of getting my retaliation in first: it seems that things are rather more equal than we've been led to believe, anyway. Studies on sexual harrassment in the workplace show that such does occur between senior women and subordinate men, obviously in much lesser proportion than that perpetrated by senior men on junior women. But - here's the kicker - the figures show that the proportion of sexual harassment performed by women to that performed by men is exactly the same as the proportion of women to men in management. Hence, women do it just as much as men, they just have less opportunity. Michael Chrichton's novel Disclosure has more on this.
Another point, brought to my attention in Scott Adams' book The Dilbert Future, goes something along these lines: it's true that men earn more than women, an indication that there is inequality and discrimination. However, if you walk into any department store you'll find maybe two things that a man wants to buy. All the rest of that stuff is being bought by women, and:
"If you were from another planet ... and you only knew these two facts -- 1) Men earn most of the money, and 2) Women spend most of the money -- what would you assume about who is holding whom by the whatchamacallits and swinging the person who owns the whatchamacallits around in the air while yelling, 'I AM WOMAN, HEAR ME ROAR!'?
"It's a rhetorical question."
Hmm. Seems like Rudyard Kipling (and, later, the group Space) weren't lying when they claimed "the female of the species is more deadly than the male"....
[1] All right already. Germaine Greer has, apparently, never actually said that all men are rapists---although I'm sure that she has, in fact, used all of those words at one stage or another, and that with judicial editing it could be claimed that she has in fact said it. What is nonetheless almost certain is that she believes it, and so do her feminazi cronies. That's not libel, that's an opinion.
Admittedly, while this quotation is most often attributed to Germaine Greer, it must be said that Ms Greer is at least a little more sane than Ms Dworkin. Here's a few all-men-are-rapists quotes from the latter:
"Women are an enslaved population. The crop we harvest is children, the fields we work are houses. Women are forced into committing sexual acts with men that violate integrity because the universal religion `contempt for women' has as its first commandment that women exist purely as sexual fodder for men."
"A commitment to sexual equality with males ... is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered."
"Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine."
Note that Ms Dworkin's sole concession to the concept that
all men are not rapists is that occasionally
alcohol is involved. Note also that I did
actual research.
I'm not an anti-feminist. I'm not a rapist, and I do not subscribe to a universal religion of contempt for women. I simply cannot stand these ridiculous claims of persecution from women who really should know better.