When the feminist movement started, in the early 1970's, America was completely male dominated and a great many men treated women like not very bright children. The accepted wisdom was that women couldn't make important decisions, hold responsible jobs, or be trusted with any real measure of independence. Worse, many women were routinely abused by their spouses, or other family members: abuse that often took place openly and was considered "a man's prerogative." So there were ample reasons for women to form an equality movement.
Since that time I've always considered myself pro-feminist, but recently I've had growing reservations.
In the current zeal over feminism (sparked in part by the "Me Too Movement"), it's worth considering how feminism might be co-opted to advance a regressive agenda, thus rendering it a tool for social oppression rather than liberation, and creating a backlash against the women's movement. We should examine that possibility and interrelated issues very seriously, because when one considers the key role of women in society, what's at stake is the fate of civilization.
Along with racism, feminism has been constantly in the news for almost a decade now, and in that same decade we've witnessed a culminating effort on the part of a few wealthy, powerful, individuals, to establish oligarchy in the United States. Our democracy is now gravely imperiled. Yet we hear relatively little about that in the media. That story, the story of oligarchy itself, has been relegated to the back pages if it's mentioned at all.
The point here is that feminism and racism are being used by the media as diversions, to cloak the defining story of our times. That is the establishment of a wealthy, ruling-class, in place of our democracy, and if we the people lose our democracy it will no longer matter what we think about racism, or sexism, or any other aspect of American society, because expressing opinions is the privilege of a free people, and we will no longer be free people.
That's why the issue of class trumps that of racism and sexism in America in our era! This is particularly true in an election year, when we desperately need to unite around a candidate who can lead us out of the long nightmare of cutthroat capitalism, that has economically brought the vast majority of Americans to their knees. And that's why the corporate media (the tools of oligarchy) endlessly publish stories about racism and sexism, while saying little to nothing about the uniting and much more dangerous issue of class. They are fostering a lie by omission, the preferred method of doing so in our times.
When all Americans have prospered, tensions between the races and sexes have been greatly improved. Indeed, general prosperity may be the only really effective tool we have to promote social equality. We see this clearly from our own recent history. The widely prosperous era of the 1950's 60's and 70's, saw the greatest social gains for women and minorities in our history, the simple reason being that hate is to a great degree the outcome of fear, and people don't feel as much fear and anxiety in a prosperous era.
So if not for altruistic reasons, then out of simple expediency, those in favor of free society should remember that the numerical majority of poor and oppressed people in America are White. Indeed, it may be said that the majority of Americans are oppressed poor and lower class whites, and their grievances are very legitimate. Yet they are routinely ignored, or worse, laughed at by the supposedly liberal, corporate-owned, media; and also by the New Democrats, who've abandoned a policy to improve the lot of the great majority of Americans, of all races and sexes, thus leaving us effectively, with one pro-corporate political party that goes by two names - Democrats and the Republicans.
I'll cite an example of how feminists are being manipulated by the media, or are simply evolving in ways that may ultimately damage their own cause, taking the case of Senator Al Frankin as a example. Before being brought down by allegations of sexual misconduct, Frankin was the most popular Democrat in the Senate, winning re-election to a second term by a margin of over 60%. This, along with his name recognition as a popular comedian, made him a tremendous potential asset to the Democratic party. Then, in a shameful display of targeted rumor and innuendo he was pressured to resign to atone for vague and unsubstantiated allegations of sexual misconduct,
by fellow Democrats! My own Senator, Mazie Hirono, a colleague of Frankin's, spearheaded this effort to pressure him into resigning, without any evidence that would have stood-up in court.
(This point regarding a court of law is very important, because the extra-legal nature of actions like those against Frankin - this sort of trial by rumor and innuendo - leaves feminists open to the accusation of conducting witch hunts.)
If people are to be judged and convicted in the court of public opinion, then every sexually active man, or woman, could be smeared with such allegations and forced to resign in disgrace, if only the establishment wants to get them badly enough! Senator Hirono's excuse for subjecting Frankin to this farcical trial by allegation was that she did so to gain moral credibility, in order to then force the resignation of Brett Cavanaugh from the Supreme Court, in light of the much more serious and more substantiated charges of rape, leveled against Cavanaugh. And whether that argument, on Hirono's part, makes sense on the face of it, or not, she failed to carry it through, for Cavanaugh remained in office. All she, and her associates, managed to do was ruin the career of a colleague - a hugely popular fellow Democrat who was one of the most genuine public servants in Washington!
Along with the Me Too Movement (the motives of which I believe are sound, if not always the methods) there's a more hard-core outlook developing among certain Feminists these days, which is far more suspect in my mind, and this is to see men as the problem in the world; in that men are more aggressive, warlike and violent than women, while women are more nurturing, loving and socially responsible. Therefore women alone should rule society.
We, in America, are the victims of our own myths. Take the myth of the rugged individual who doesn't need anything from anyone, but can get by on his own, by "pulling himself up by his own boot straps." It's a myth, of course, because it's impossible in modern society. Everyone in modern society depends on the efforts of thousands of others to obtain the necessities for survival. The most remote rancher needs thousands of people, to make necessities like clothing, cooking utensils, barbed wire, medicine, transportation, communications, etc., etc. So what is the point of this myth? What is its effect on society? Does it make us stronger and more independent, or weaker by enshrining in our culture a misapprehension, in turn fostering hatred for the dependent and the social safety net? And now, just as we have the dubious myth of the rugged individual, we are developing a feminine myth. The myth of the "Earth Mother," presenting women as all-wise, all-loving and uniquely tied to the cycles of nature; whereas men are, in contrast, comparatively ignorant, violent, and loveless. In this view women are not seeking equality with men, but asserting superior to men, morally and spiritually. We have come full circle.
So, what of the claim that women are more loving, nurturing, and moral than men? First, for the sake of argument, let's assume women really are endowed to be more nurturing. Then, since the world outside the home is
inherently competitive, when women enter the workforce this impulse toward self-effacing sacrifice may become counter-productive. The precipitous fall in the American standard of living coincided with women entering the workforce, in large numbers, in the 1970s, largely because the size of the workforce suddenly doubled, lowering everyone's wage earning potential, but it may also be true that women have proved less able to withstand the intimidation targeted towards employees by employers. The fall of the trade union movement (the one remaining social institution that has fairly reliably stood for workers, against management) coincided with women entering the workforce. In my own working experience I've known women who adopted a role of self-sacrifice towards their employers, and were proud of it. They felt that it made them good employees. Whereas (again, in my experience), men tend to be instinctively more adversarial with employers. Which of these stances is more likely to net collective gains for workers?
Yet to what degree is it really true that women are more inherently civilized than men? For at bottom that is the assertion here. The answer is, maybe not as much as might be supposed. What, for example, became of the high hopes for social regeneration promised by women's suffrage? Has it materialized?
As voters, women have proven little more socially conscious than men, if at all. Where is the more compassionate society we were promised as the dividend for woman's suffrage. If you asked a radical feminist that question today, she would likely find a way to blame men! I've had that conversation myself, and been told that their husbands have intimidated them into voting for the usual megalomaniacs and fools of American politics over the last 75 years, right alongside men. Well, do their husbands follow them into the voting booth and twist their arms?
And what of women in politics, here and abroad? Those who have come to prominence have stood behind the reactionary status-quo at least to the same degree as have men in comparative rolls. Indeed, since women got the vote, we've had some of the most socially regressive governments in our history, culminating with those in power right now, including Donald Trump, Mitch McConnoll and Brett Cavanaugh. Clearly something is askew here! Some gulf exists between the rhetoric of the woman's movement and the reality of women's nature.
Another problem with this vision that men are inferior because they are more aggressive, and less civilized, is the law of sexual selection. Just as the peacock gets his plumage from the choices made by the pea hen, so men get their aggression from women's choice of a partner, so if men are overly aggressive it's because women wanted them that way. And here I don't fault women overly much, for it's perfectly understandable. Women have chosen aggressive men as mates because those men have been more effective at carving out a place for themselves and their families in a hostile, competitive world. What is at fault here is the Darwinian nature of survival itself.
If men suddenly disappeared, women would be forced to become more aggressive in order to deal with the inherently dangerous and competitive nature of existence. Nevertheless, it seems a bit self-serving of women to complain about aggressive traits in men that they've fostered themselves, for the sake of their own security. Thus, the myth of the "Earth Mother" is seen to be as deluded as that of the "rugged individual."
That so many feminists are willing to overlook so many aspects of the human condition, including something as fundamental as the law of sexual selection, to promote the idea of their superiority, is a strong indication that they are no different than men when it comes to the desire for power and a willingness to abuse it. We are all human.
The simple truth is we are all very much alike. Our endless desire to push the blame for our collective natures onto some other group merely proves what we all know and won't face, that collectively, as a species, we are pathologically self-deluded and deeply flawed creatures. Human beings share an enormously high proportion of genes in common. Despite our disparate appearances, due to a past die-out that reduced our numbers to a mere 5,000 individuals, we are more closely related then even Cheetahs. Like it or not, we are very similar in our collective behavior as a species, regardless of how different we may appear on the surface, exactly because we are so genetically related. This understanding of our essential similarity is one on which progressive movements have long been based. One must make this distinction here between collective behavior and individual behavior, which among humans is very widely differing and unpredictable. Yet neither aberrant behavior, nor heroic behavior, is limited to a particular race or sex. So when people make the argument that any one group is inherently better or worse than others, they undermine the notion on which all socially progressive movements are based, that of our collective equality.
It's akin to making the argument that all people are equal, but "Some people are more equal than others," as George Orwell put it so succinctly in his novel, Animal Farm. For women and minorities to make the argument is very dangerous for the rights of women and minorities. For if it can be argued that there's a fundamental difference in people's levels of aggression, disinterestedness and evil then that argument will always, ultimately, benefit the strong. The urgent truth is that we need to move beyond this simplistic reasoning, this sort of juvenile, "he said, she said," that plays so neatly into the hands of a self-deluded ruling class who are leading us down a rabbit hole.
The truth is, we're guilty of indulging in many, many, comforting delusions, both in our personal lives and in the larger human society. We may, for example, blame war on fascism, or communism, as if those things existed in the real world, like trees. We project our flaws so routinely on other people and things, one must conclude there's actually something in us effectively blocking out the things we'd prefer not to know. In other words, there's a strong argument to be made for the idea that human beings dissociate in mass, and if one thinks about it that's a very serious problem indeed.
In the end we desperately need to look up from our lives and our own particular troubles to examine what it really is to be human! This world is consumed in misery and the key to our salvation lies within. Socrates said it 2,500 years ago, and his words are still true today. He also said, "The un-examined life is not worth living." We can now one-up that statement by saying that the un-examined life can no longer be lived.
We must stop this endless bickering, own up to the fact that we are deeply flawed, and put together some program to address that fact.
We must henceforward put our primary effort into advancing psychology, philosophy, spirituality and the humanities - into every conceivable endeavor to help us understand ourselves. In order to survive the great challenges of the 21st century we must commit as great a portion of our resources to understanding our own natures as we did, in the 20th, to understanding technology. Above all, we must stop this juvenile shame and blame game. Now is the time to get real! As Willy Lowman said in
Death of a Salesman, "The woods are burning!" And if there ever was a time for Willy to get real it was in the last act, before he finally cracks-up from the weight of his own lies, and everything falls apart. But Willy couldn't get real to save his life. Can we?
Brent Hightower
Copyright 2020 Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com
