To anyone in the west struggling to deconstruct the biased, feminist propaganda in their head, I recommend this book. Here is a quote from chapter 2, pp 50-52:
An awful lot of feminist polemic amounts to a tunnel-vision survey of history's atrocities, the moral being that yes, women have been singled out for victimization. It is a method available to anyone who wants to get mad. Give me some time and the services of a genealogical society and I will prove to you that history reveals a pattern of systematic violence against Gordons, going back to my family's origins in Scotland -- first with the depredations of whatever clan our clan feuded with, then on to Culloden and the bloody British, then a tour through the industrial nightmare up to the casualties of our own calamitous century. It's easy -- just a matter of leaving everybody else out of the picture. To read Susan Brownmiller on the Second World War, for instance, is to forget for a time that the Germans and Russians ever got around to actually killing any men, so busy seem they to have been with the women.
By leaving everybody else out of the picture, feminists have put together a number of histories designed to show that the past is one long story of male jackboot coming down on female face, fitfully illuminated by upwellings of female resistance.
We are repeatedly reminded of witch-burnings because the constitute the sole recorded instance of female victims of capital punishment outnumbering male victims; we are not, of course, reminded of the many cases (for instance Salem) where witches were convicted mainly on the testimony of other women; we are likewise allowed to believe, against all available evidence, that women had no part in the trials or executions, or in the moral climate that brought them about.
We are reminded of Joan of Arc, burned by men, but not of the hundreds of men burned by (Bloody) Mary Tudor, nor of the hundreds of thousands of other martyred heretics who, not being women, are ideologically impertinent.
We are shown evidence that male doctors over the ages have been responsible for the deaths of untold women in labor, though ignorance or the indiscriminate application of medical technology. And of course it's true; Up until quite recently, doctors have almost certainly killed more people than they've cured, including for instance George Washington (if it had been Martha, we'd never hear the last of it), and the statistics on unnecessary surgery indicate that even today many doctors, both male and female, are disinclined to leave well enough alone.
Speaking of medical women, Florence Nightingale of course puts in an appearance, fighting off the male chauvinism of the British medical establishment, ministering to the wounded of Balaklava. But there is a curious averting of the eyes from the hospital itself, full of mutilated humans, all of them male, suffering and dying because of the military adventurism of their female monarch.
Queen Victoria does, to be sure, show up as part of another exhibit. Like Catherine the Great and Elizabeth I and Isabella of Spain, she demonstrates what exemplary rulers women can be when given the chance. But we are not encouraged to linger very long on this particular display, since to do so might be to recall Elizabeth's genocidal campaign against the Irish, Catherine's role in the partition of Poland, Isabella's expulsion of the Jews, or Victoria's ferocious militarism. Listen, for instance, to Victoria writing to Disraeli: "The Queen is really distressed at the low tone which this Country is inclined to hold [she means its reluctance to go to war]. ... Oh, if the Queen were a man, she would like to go and give those Russians... such a beating!" (They did, which was why Florence Nightingale became necessary.)
That would have come as news to Victoria's advisers, who spent much of their time trying to restrain their queen's wilder plans for conquest of everything in sight. It would have seemed a very strange account of events indeed to those cavaliers goaded into joining the Second Crusade by Eleanor of Aquitaine, contemptuously throwing distaffs to the shirkers ("Oh, if the Queen were a man...") and leading her contingent of Amazons to glorious disaster in the Holy Land. Zoologists will perhaps wonder how the female shell duck, who habitually demands that her mate attack every other male in range and abandons him if he doesn't, has been forced into this obnoxious practice by male influence. And American males recalling from their high-school days the program of selectively administered sexual rewards through which they were encouraged by women to bash their bodies against one another in weekly combat, on the football field or in some other arena, will perhaps doubt that it was the men who rigged the whole business, the women who were brainwashed.
All the same, the old idea that women are naturally exempt from blood lust continues and thrives, held back from the wastebasket to which other such ideas have been consigned. Feminists want to believe it, and so does everyone else. I would like to believe it. That gentle man W.H. Auden, echoing many another, looked forward to the day when males would be relieved of the "phallic toys" of warfare, and all international affairs would be turned over to women, "preferably married ones." Who would not endorse such a plan? Except that the women, for instance Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi, turn out to be rather fond themselves of those phallic toys.
Above all, feminists want to believe it, even when the evidence to the contrary is hitting them in the face. The feminist interviewer Oriana Fallaci, for instance, who has pierced through the fronts of more powerful men than you could shake a phallic toy at, only to frisk like a puppy at the feet of Indira Gandhi, woke up one morning to discover that her hero had abolished the Constitution and thrown the opposition into jail. To her credit, she searched her soul. In Interview with History she says: "... It was impossible to be a woman and not feel redeemed, vindicated, by her enormous success, which belied all the banalities used to justify patriarchy and male rule in any society. Being a woman, justifications of her wrongs came much easier."
In other words, it was just as Indira's opponent, M. Moraji Desai, had told her: "Had Indira Gandhi been a man, the world would have realized at once she was a fascist." And even worse: "... considering too the complicity that exists between you women, you didn't notice her fascist mentality."
For a few moments, Oriana Fallaci brought herself to consider this earthshaking possibility -- that the word "woman" could belong in the same sentence with the word "fascist." For a few moments. Then the complicity of which Desai spoke began to reassert itself:She has beautiful hazel eyes, a little sad, and a strange, indulgent [indulgent!], enigmatic smile that awakens curiosity. ... In that sense [the sense that she's a woman] I'm still on the side of Indira. My refusal of the woman as politician is not accompanied by my refusal of the woman as such. Even during the hours that followed the arrest of the opposition leaders and her coup, that is even during the burst of my indignation against her, I couldn't help thinking how alone she was and how much more unhappy than a man [like Nixon?] who puts himself in the same situation.
What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is woman's intuition, another cliche that feminists are reluctant to discard. In this case it is telling our correspondent that while other, male, international thugs who try their enigmatic smiles on her are lying through their teeth, Mrs. Gandhi, with her hazel eyes, wasn't, or at least not on some level. Some intuitive level. We have male leaders invading countries and planning assassinations not to expand or secure their power but because, being men, they like doing such things, guns being (Freud again!) simply masculine extensions and so forth and so on. We have female rulers doing exactly the same things, but only out of painful necessity and against their natures, and all the while feeling much more sensitive, more unhappy about it than men. Above all, we have an essentially hormonal theory of history, a testosteroniad, coming from people who will then tell you that anyone who suggests that women are hormonally programmed is a male chauvinist genetic-determinist reactionary pig. And we have a steadfast, steely-eyed refusal to consider the most obvious reason for the pretty much equal distribution of atrocities between male and female leaders: that nations never have as much land or power or wealth or security as they would like; and that anyone entrusted with enacting national will is frequently tempted to do atrocious things, regardless of hormonal makeup.
No comments:
Post a Comment