Thursday, March 24, 2005

The Real Goal Of Feminism: Transforming Society by Antonia Feitz

1. The Problem
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Ladies and gentlemen, my topic is feminism and some of you may be wondering why, given our country's parlous state. Our national sovereignty is being destroyed by the overriding of our domestic laws and the signing of UN treaties — with no consultation and with no public or even parliamentary debate.

So why feminism? Because feminists are at the vanguard of the phalanx of fools, the useful idiots, the ideologues, who are destroying our hard won rights and our national sovereignty.

We live in an age of ideology. God has been pronounced dead, and Chesterton's witticism has proven true: when people no longer believe in God, they'll believe in anything. And the post-Christian people of the West are proof, holding beliefs which their grandparents would have dismissed as absolute nonsense, and contrary to all common sense, let alone morality.

Take extreme environmentalists. Apart from literally worshiping trees, they exalt the welfare of frogs and even insects over that of people. Believe it or not, there's even a Voluntary Human Extinction Movement [1]. Homosexuals demand their relationships be accorded equal status with marriage, including the "right" to adopt children. And under the banner of multiculturalism, Australian children are either kept ignorant, or taught to be ashamed of their own heritage and history, while simultaneously being taught to value ethnic and especially indigenous cultures. But arguably, feminism is the most pernicious of the ideologies that plague us, simply because the relationship between men and women affects all of us.

I must stress that modern feminists are not the heirs of the suffragettes who fought for equal rights such as the right to vote and property rights. Modern feminists are not seeking equal rights for women. They want to transform society, and that's no conspiracy theory because they freely admit it.

Take CEDAW. It's the acronym for the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women. (You can discriminate against men till the cows come home). This convention's goals are not reformist, but revolutionary. It openly calls for the elimination of traditional sex roles, and the re-writing of text books to purge them of alleged sexual stereotypes. The UN's call for the total disarmament of the world's people is embedded in CEDAW's preamble.

According to the feminists who constitute the CEDAW Committee, until nations achieve a 50-50 sexual split in everything — in occupations, in public life, and even in the domestic sphere — they are discriminating against women. Now that might sound far-fetched, but article 5 of CEDAW advocates "a proper understanding of maternity as a social function." Note the socialist bullying in the word, "proper." This "proper understanding" demands that child-rearing — universally! — should be "a fully shared responsibility...by both sexes." It also insists that society has an obligation to extend child care services to "allow individuals to combine family responsibilities with work and participation in public life."

The message to women is: you will participate in work and public life whether you want to or not. In a now notorious interview with Betty Friedan, Simone de Beauvoir said: "No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one." [2]

So much for freedom of choice. These bully-girls demand "a change in the traditional role of men as well as the role of women in society and in the family...to achieve full equality of men and women." Their version of equality is complete identity. It's reminiscent of communist China in Mao's time. The communists were all feminists too. Remember?

To achieve the goal of sexual identity, Article 10c mandates the revision of textbooks, school programmes and teaching methods with a view to eliminating stereotyped concepts. This must be why one of my children's French textbooks showed Dad in an apron washing the dishes while Mum, dressed in a chic suit and carrying a briefcase, waved ta-ta to the baby in the high-chair. A French textbook! Textbooks in all subjects are being used to indoctrinate children in our schools. It's just too bad if individuals prefer the traditional roles when they have young children — as most people actually do.

According to CEDAW's Preamble, all nations are "obliged to work towards the modification of social and cultural patterns of individual [emphasis added] conduct in order to eliminate prejudices and customary and all other practices which are based on...stereotyped roles for men and women."

These intolerant ideologues who so loudly criticize Christian evangelists are far worse. At least religious conversion is voluntary! But incredibly, the CEDAW Committee has instructed Libya to re-interpret its sacred book, the Koran, in ways that are permissible under CEDAW. The Algerian government was castigated for "using religion as an excuse" for failure to comply with CEDAW. The Committee has also instructed China to legalize prostitution. [3]

Whatever happened to national sovereignty? And how hypocritical is the UN? On the one hand it supposedly values the diversity of the world's nations and cultures. But on the other hand, with CEDAW, it demands that the world's nations and cultures must conform to the deranged and frequently immoral opinions of Western feminists who themselves are a minority in their own countries.

If you think CEDAW is bad news, the Optional Protocol to CEDAW drafted in March 1999 is even worse. If governments want to maintain any vestige of national sovereignty, they'd better not sign it. Previously, nations signing or ratifying international treaties could add RUDs — reservations, understandings and declarations. These are statements limiting or modifying the effect of the provisions of a treaty; or of giving notice of matters of policy or principle; or of simply clarifying matters. But true to feminist tyranny, the Optional Protocol to CEDAW will forbid any reservations.

Feminists have been frustrated that too many countries included RUDs when they signed CEDAW — precisely to protect their cultures, religions and sovereignty. The Optional Protocol will forbid any such reservations. It is an unprecedented and massive assault on national sovereignty and if signed, will set a terrible precedent for the signing of other treaties.

Maybe the ancestor of CEDAW — the 1946 UN Commission on the Status of Women — had good intentions. But those good intentions have been highjacked by CEDAW. Instead of improving the welfare and securing basic rights for women in the poorer nations, CEDAW's main game is transforming society in the West. The Optional Protocol will be used by individuals and NGOs in the West to achieve radical social change that national parliaments would never dare consider, because their members have to face voters. It's through UN treaties such as CEDAW and the UN Charter of Human Rights that homosexual relationships will achieve the legal status of marriage.

The most cursory glance over the countries that have signed and ratified CEDAW makes the whole thing a sick joke. The first three are Albania, Algeria and Angola, hardly well-known for their equal treatment of women. Burundi — where people regularly hack each other to death with machetes — has signed. So has Cambodia, of the killing-fields fame. China has signed too, even though it performs third trimester "abortions" — read "infanticide" — on unwilling women.

Needless to say, Canada and Australia, both of whose governments are heavily feminist influenced, have signed. To its eternal credit, the United States has not.

So, that's the overall picture. Now let's look at what's behind feminism.


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2. The Theory
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Modern radical feminism is founded on contradictory lies. The fact that they're lies doesn't matter, because truth is always secondary for ideologues. The fact that they're contradictory is no source of shame, because feminists believe that logic is just a tool of the patriarchy to oppress women and that women have other, and superior, ways of knowing [4].

The first lie is that men and women are interchangeable, and that there aren't any differences between the sexes apart from anatomical ones. In fact, feminists claim that there aren't two sexes at all but at least five genders, which are socially constructed. They regard heterosexual men and women as being hopelessly repressed in gender stereotypes forced upon them by society. Their life's mission is to liberate us from these imposed stereotypes.

To achieve the interchangeability, feminists at first tirelessly promoted the traditional male life pattern of uninterrupted full-time work as the norm for women. Creches and childcare were demanded to free women from domesticity, whether they wanted to be "freed" or not. In Australia, groups such as the Women's Electoral Lobby fought to change Australia's tax system from a family-friendly one to a profoundly unjust one where a married man with a family pays virtually the same tax as a single man. They won, and their victory clearly shows the contempt for ordinary women that is the hallmark of feminism.

But seeing as ignoring babies doesn't go down too well with most mothers, feminists have changed tack. If they can't force women to be like men, then they'll force men to be like women. The sexes must be interchangeable for their gender theory to work. This is behind the increasingly hectoring calls for men to avail themselves of the "opportunity" of part-time work and to do more domestic work out of "fairness." Australian academic Ken Dempsey deplores the fact that most of the women in his surveys on domestic work perversely fail to see they're oppressed [5].

These academics can't even see how absurd, let alone insulting they are to the men and women of Australia. What business of theirs is it how couples organize their domestic life? In any case, their concern is hypocritical: feminist high-flyers don't share the domestic chores as they exhort the lower orders to. No, they employ household help. They don't have part-time work either. No, they have well-paying full-time careers [6].

The first lie was that there are no differences between the sexes. The second and contradictory lie is that women are in fact superior to men. Increasingly, feminists claim that maleness is some sort of pathology, in need of a cure. And so there is a widespread demonization of men in our culture, with disastrous effects on young males who are made to feel ashamed of their sex and to scorn the manly virtues. And then politicians, academics and social commentators have the hide to express concern about male suicide rates.

Increasingly men are being regarded and treated as second class citizens, being freely discriminated against in employment via affirmative action programmes. Feminists contemptuously dismiss the achievements of Western civilization as the product of "dead white males." And they're doing their best to overthrow it and replace it with their own socialist hell where every facet of life will be regimented, even down to doing the housework. It's already happened in one German state [7].

There are some chilling prospects in store for men if they win. For instance the president of the Center for Advancement of Public Policy in Washington DC, has proposed that men's fertility be controlled by mandatory contraception beginning at puberty. Boys would be forced to have contraceptive implants along with compulsory DNA fingerprinting. Doctors would have to report anybody who refused the implants or sought medical attention after trying to remove them himself [8]. This is not sci-fi, folks, this is now.

The strategies used to demonize men are stereotyping and disinformation, or in plain English, labelling and lies. Men are so routinely stereotyped as "violent" now, that the slander is rarely challenged. And the lies keep being disseminated by governments, the bureaucracies, the schools, the media, and even to their shame, the churches.

Take rape. Organizing their annual "Reclaim the Night" marches, Australian feminists claim with a straight face that one in four women have been raped. But this is where the lies come in: "rape" doesn't mean the same thing for feminists as it does for the rest of us. The feminist researcher's definition of "rape" included women who simply had second thoughts in the morning because they'd been drunk or stoned at the time. As well, only a quarter of the women she regarded as having been raped agreed that they had been raped! [9]

Yet Australian feminists continue to feed the media with this arrant nonsense that one in four Australian women has been raped. And the lies continue, though I'm beginning to think they originate in stupidity more than malice. For instance, one feminist academic wrote the following nonsense to me after I politely chided her for slandering all men as violent.

She wrote, "The Women's Safety Survey, a national survey conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (most recently 1996) of 6,880,500 women aged 18 years and over, found that in the twelve months prior to the study almost half a million women had..." Blah, blah, blah. I replied saying: "This defies belief. I doubt that there ever was a survey of 6,880,500 women aged 18 years and over. I think you probably meant to say there was a survey of X numbers of women, from which researchers then extrapolated those figures from ABS statistics. A bit different."

She didn't have the grace to reply.

Domestic violence is certainly an evil, but the feminists have both grossly overstated its occurrence and denied the facts of female violence. For example, it is well documented that there is a high rate of domestic violence among lesbians [10]. Yet all governments uncritically accept the feminist propaganda that domestic violence is simply a matter of violent males abusing helpless women and children. Not so. There is now an abundance of research, including recent Australian research, which shows that most abusing men are in abusing couple relationships and that women instigate acts of violence more frequently than men [11]. Erin Pizzey, the founder of the women's shelter movement in England, has been saying the same for years but has been studiously ignored by feminists and bureaucrats. Feminists have no interest in the truth. They even deny it exists. Objective truth, logic, standards of evidentiary proof, linear thinking are all dismissed as the "White Male System" of rationality that is in no way superior to other ways of knowing.

At the institutional level, feminism has been spectacularly successful. I'd now like to look at a few specific areas.


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3. The Achievements
3.1. The sexual harassment industry
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Until recently, the workplace was one of the traditional places for making romantic attachments. But now it's a no-no, thanks to the feminists. They've generated a climate of hysteria about any expression of the normal sexual interest between males and females at work. In today's workplace, male interest — not boorish behaviour — but just interest, may be perceived as sexual "harassment" if a woman chooses to regard it as such.

In response to this legal minefield, feminism has generated yet another parasitical growth industry: anti-harassment training is now big business costing millions a year, billions in the US.

But there is an acceptance of double standards. Adult men, even in all-male workshops, or the all-male crew of submarines, aren't allowed to put up girlie pictures as they have traditionally done on the grounds that it demeans women and reduces them to sex objects. But a Kolotex hosiery ad of a naked woman perched on a bound, naked man was "fun" — because it was created by an all-woman advertising agency.

The irony in all this sexual harassment nonsense is that before all the legal machinery was set up, women were much more independent, psychologically speaking. Any woman worth her salt could stop a man's unwelcome advances with a look that stopped him in his tracks from ten feet away. Girls smooched with boys in the back row of the cinema or at the drive-in, and they usually had the last word on "how far to go." Compared with those self-confident young girls, today's adult "victims" are pathetic specimens of womanhood.


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3.2. The affirmative rip-off
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In the feminist lexicon, the word, "equality" doesn't mean equal opportunity; it means equal outcomes. So AA bureaucracies have been established to enforce the social engineering necessary to achieve equal outcomes.

But affirmative action has been premised on false assumptions.

1. Firstly, the claim that under-representation of women in certain occupations is proof of discrimination is intellectually very shaky and even dated. Australian academic Faye Gayle has said that "...universities could not, by definition, be led by the best brains since they had not achieved a 50-50 gender balance across all classifications...especially in areas such as physics, chemistry and engineering..." [12]

But she's simply wrong. There's now an embarrassment of research into sex differences which clearly shows male and female variation in aptitudes and interests — which doesn't mean that girls can't become scientists. It's an indictment of intellectual life that most of this research has been done by women as the topic is too "hot" for men. It's an indictment of feminism that when confronted with the evidence, prominent feminist Gloria Steinem responded by saying such research should be banned.

2. Secondly there's the experience of the kibbutzim [in Israel]. Despite indoctrination in socialist and feminist principles from birth, and despite the highest personal motivation, the kibbutzniks failed utterly to achieve a 50-50 society. The third generation reverted to the sexual division of labour along the lines found in most societies. There were few women in trades such as carpentry and plumbing, but they outnumbered men 9 to 1 in teaching. Even then, there were virtually no men in pre-schools, but 40% in high schools [13].

So was it a failure for the goal of sexual equality? No. It was a victory for common sense. Ideology gave way to reality: The kibbutzniks changed their ideas about what equality between the sexes means. They totally rejected the feminist idea that the sexes must be identical.

3. A third false assumption is that all women want be in full-time paid work. Because of feminist propaganda, most people are very surprised to learn that the participation rate of women in full-time work has hardly changed in thirty years. From 1966 to 1998, it rose by just 0.4% [14]. Most mothers still opt out of the full-time workforce during their peak child-bearing years. And it's not for lack of childcare either. Survey after survey shows that the majority of mothers and fathers still think that home care is best care, for babies in particular. It's not hard to see why. Australians standards specify one carer to every five children under two. That's not quality care in any man's language.

With AA being based on these false assumptions, the discrimination against men is unjustified, particularly when men are the main providers for their families. And who benefits from AA? Overwhelmingly young, tertiary-educated women. The 50-50 workplace won't happen without massive social engineering and massive discrimination against men. That this is unjust is immaterial. Yes, according to feminists, justice too is a tool of the patriarchy to oppress women.


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3.3. The Law
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Speaking of justice, feminists have had enormous success in transforming society by transforming the law. According to them, the problem with the law is the male focus on universals, principles, rules, distinctions, and consistency. Their goal is "to rid the law of individual rights and transform it into a bundle of group rights." [15]

Canada and Australia are at the vanguard of feminist jurisprudence, and, just as in indigenous land rights, the two countries' activists feed off each other. For example, in 1990, Canadian Supreme Court Justice Bertha Wilson called for the transformation of the law along feminist principles, and for the re-education of her male colleagues in "summer schools on sexism." But Australian judges already attend such re-education courses.

Demonstrating a blatant bias against men, Wilson is on the record as saying that, "women are...less concerned than men with abstract notions of justice, less preoccupied with what is 'right' and 'wrong'." [16]. Imagine the furore if a male Supreme Court judge spouted such sexist rubbish. She has even castigated her fellow judges for relying too much on the evidence of a case instead of entering "into the skin of the litigant and making his or her experience part of your experience and only when you have done that, to judge." [17]

No wonder our countries are in decline: this feminist fruitcake is a Supreme Court judge! The law as we understand it, and the rights of individuals which have been so hard won over centuries of struggle, are being destroyed by feminism. Feelings and perceptions — but only of women — are becoming more important than facts and evidence. If a man is accused of rape, his belief that the woman consented is dismissed, because women never tell lies according to feminist ideology. Yet if a wife murders her sleeping husband, her belief that she was in danger of death is accepted as self defence.

The blindfold has well and truly been ripped from Justice. She is no longer impartial; she is a feminist with a mission to transform society.


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3.4. The military
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Australian women have played an honourable role in the nation's defence forces. Currently, under a Sex Discrimination Act exemption, the Australian Defense Force (ADF) is allowed to limit women in combat roles. Women mustn't be put in a position where they would be likely to engage in hand-to-hand combat. This is common sense, but feminists still demand full combat roles for women because the armed forces are just another arena in their relentless goal to transform society. Men and women are interchangeable and consequently every institution of society must reflect it. The US experience should warn us not to go down this road.

In October 1994, a female US Navy Lieutenant was killed on an approach-landing to an aircraft carrier. While the Navy publicly said it was engine failure, privately it acknowledged it was pilot error. The poor woman was allowed to continue training despite recording seven crashes in combat conditions during (simulated) training. Why? Because an admiral under political pressure announced he wanted women in combat roles. Quickly. A male pilot would have been disqualified well before his seventh crash [18].

Career officers who see difficulties arising from feminist demands are silenced through a high-ranking official Committee on Women's Issues, which has recommended that any disagreement with the "women in combat" policy disqualifies officers from positions of leadership. Excellent male officers' careers have been sacrificed for expressing, even privately, reservations about women in combat.

Some U.S. Army infantry divisions have a battalion-equivalent of pregnant soldiers. According to David Hackworth, one of the US's highest decorated retired soldiers. During Desert Shield, the non-deployment of women soldiers was much higher than men because of pregnancy. The different non-deployment rates for the sexes aroused no official concern, despite it being an obvious injustice to the men who can't shirk their duty by getting pregnant.

It's ludicrous, but there were thirty-eight pregnancies on the USS Eisenhower after the crew boarded. The Navy claimed there was no indication that any of the pregnancies resulted from sex aboard ship. Small comfort to the sailors' wives ashore, especially when one couple, both married to others, videotaped themselves having sex in a remote corner of the ship. There were also eighty pregnancies in the UN (US) peace-keeping forces in Bosnia. Hardly surprising, given there was mandatory integration of the sexes in sleeping quarters. The strong objections of servicemen's wives to women in combat roles are routinely dismissed in any discussion of the matter.

Consequently, the US Army's morale is at an all-time low. Training standards have dropped: at the once prestigious West Point, men don't have to run carrying heavy weapons anymore, because women can't do it. A recent congressional study found 40 percent of officers and 62 percent of enlisted personnel plan to leave military service when their time is up. More than 60 percent of those interviewed cited "work circumstances" as the final straw that broke their commitment to the military. Hackworth's own informal survey of more than 3,000 serving soldiers and sailors a week confirms that "work circumstances" is code for problems with women. He claimed a soldier now in Basic Training told him that "five females in my platoon were so weak they couldn't pull the charging handle back on an M-16 (rifle)." [19]

Only feminist ideologues could fail to see that the presence of women on a battlefield weakens combat readiness. But for feminists, national security comes second to ideological purity. The sexes must be identical, and it looks like Britain is set to jettison its military heritage and join the Americans in having women in combat.


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3.5. Education
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In education, the transformation starts with unsubtle brainwashing in pre-schools. Believe it or not, Australian pre-schools have banned Cinderella and Superman.

Yes, the National Childcare Accreditation Council's handbook states that "anything that emphasizes men and women in traditional masculine and feminine roles" is outlawed [20]. Along with Superman and Cinderella, favorite authors like Hans Christian Anderson and C.S. Lewis have also been given the boot. Staff are discouraged from telling little boys and girls that they look handsome or pretty respectively, and from providing "stereotyped" toys. When the council's General Manager was challenged about promoting views so contrary to community standards she defended the guidelines claiming that they were voluntary. Well yes, I suppose if a childcare centre is happy to risk its accreditation and hence funding, it can choose to flout the "recommendations." Soft totalitarianism indeed.

The propaganda continues through all levels of education. As mentioned previously, school textbooks have all been vetted for gender stereotypes in all subjects. In the US, high school history textbooks have been rewritten to give women an importance they simply didn't have in pre-contraceptive ages. In one popular science text, a 19 th century astronomer called Maria Mitchell who discovered a comet gets more space than Albert Einstein [21]. And we all know, the university is the feminist's natural habitat. Feminism wouldn't have survived outside academia. In too many of them, what were once academic disciplines — such as history and literature — have been transformed into courses which "deconstruct" history and literature for "evidence" of oppression of women and minorities.


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3.6. Religion
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Showing good reasons for their increasing irrelevance, many Christian churches have succumbed to feminist demands. Some, such as the Uniting Church have fallen into line and dispensed with traditional beliefs, even accepting homosexual ministers. The ones who have retained traditional beliefs — orthodox Catholics and the so-called fundamentalist Christians — are loathed by feminists, precisely because they are the last institutions in society to resist the idea that the sexes are interchangeable. As such they are under unrelenting pressure and hostility.

This is the reason the ordination of women is so bitterly fought. Reasonable people would think if women want to be ordained, the sensible thing to do would be to leave the traditional churches for more congenial spiritual pastures. That the dissenters don't do so clearly shows they have no respect either for their own churches or for the diversity they profess to cherish, and that their real intent is to transform the churches according to feminist ideology.

That's not speculation either, they brag about it. At a 1993 conference in Minneapolis, delegates from 27 countries, sponsored by mainstream Christian churches and groups, even orders of Catholic nuns, claimed they were "signalling the dawn of the Second Reformation in a way Luther or Calvin couldn't imagine." [22] Addressing the conference, a bishop said the churches must free themselves from "the grip of sexism, racism, and classicism." The faithful who financed the delegates might have been more appreciative had the bishop condemned sin and encouraged the practice of virtue.

At this Christian conference there was lots of drumming, scribble-writing, Hawaiian chants, Zulu songs, along with belly-dancing and the theology of darkness, the goddess, creation spirituality, midlife transitions, and dreamwork.

Only in America? Sadly not. At the Sophia centre for women's spirituality at the Dominican convent at Cabra in South Australia, the Sisters have recognized the injustices in the world arising from the oppression of women. So instead of rolling up their sleeves and nursing the sick and teaching the children of the poor, they're now committed to "work towards the transformation of the consciousness and structures in our society, especially within the Church's sphere of action" [23]

Their inaugural biennial conference in 1992 gives the flavour. In the keynote address, Sr. Elaine Wainwright spoke of the superiority of feminine traits; the destructive elements in the patriarchal system; the need to deconstruct, reinterpret, and reconstruct Scripture; the need to rid the world of androcentric bias and replace it with "the weaver woman goddess Wisdom in one of her many manifestations which included Isis, Lilith, Sophia and even Jesus/Christa." [24]

Also at the conference was a self-professed witch called Spider Redgold. She was facilitator for a workshop called: "The Mother of all religions: can Christianity acknowledge the goddess?" The Sophia centre claims to be Christian, but the word "Sophia" is no longer is the personification of wisdom, but a name of the goddess. The sisters' outreach programme is spreading the feminist word and has reached a Technical And Further Education (TAFE) course, community centres, a girls' college, school staffs, the University of Adelaide, and they've even linked with the Office of Women's Adviser to the Premier.


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3.7. Language
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George Orwell knew that those who control the language control the debate, and changing our language was one of the first and major successes of feminism. We let it happen because we thought it was too silly to be taken seriously, but they've had the last laugh. The average Australian who is outside of academia and the bureaucracies would be shocked at the level of linguistic intimidation in this country.

Chapter 8 of the Australian government's Style Manual is titled "Non-sexist Language." It uncritically accepts the feminist assertion that Standard English is sexist, even though as recently as thirty years ago feminists themselves used Standard English.

Nevertheless Femspeak is winning among the elites. They've managed to ban generic "man" along with any words with "man" as a prefix or suffix. There is a three page list of offensive man-words. I'm not joking.

You can't man the pumps, the desk, or the phones any more. The man in the street is now the average citizen. The faith of our fathers and the brotherhood of man get the chop. You can't master a language or a musical instrument any more. Cleaning ladies and housewives are out. The sentence, "A Brunswick mother of four has been appointed to the board" is deemed offensive because it mentions the M word. It says a lot about feminism that to mention the word "mother" is seen as offensive and demeaning to woman. Brave New World indeed.

Language does change over time, but so-called inclusive language is not an organic change to the English language, but rather an ideological assault relying on very shaky scholarship. It thrives only in academia, government bureaucracies, the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC), and religious orders. That list says it all — there's your classic herd of independent minds!


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Finale
Top

To sum up, I'd like to read a quote from Kenneth Minogue who was professor of political science at the London School of Economics. He wrote: "An ideological movement is a collection of people many of whom could hardly bake a cake, fix a car, sustain a friendship or a marriage, or even do a quadratic equation, yet they believe they know how to rule the world." [25]

Too many people who call themselves feminists are uncritical, accepting the ideology because it — like all the others — provides a convenient crutch in life and does away with the need for personal responsibility. Interestingly, the more intelligent ones have tended to rethink their views as they've grown older. Unfortunately, feminists have already done much damage to individuals, to families and to the institutions of society. And as I showed at the beginning, they are the useful idiots who are undermining our national sovereignty.

Thank you.


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References
Top

1. www.vhemt.org

2. Quoted in Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline, New York: Regan Books, 1997, p. 204.

3. Kathryn Balmforth, "The Optional Protocol to CEDAW: an Open Invitation to Radical Attacks on Sovereignty," Endeavour Forum Newsletter, no. 96, October 1999, p.2.

4. Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism: How Women Have Betrayed Women, New York: Touchstone, 1995, chapter 4.

5. Dempsey, Inequalities in Marriage: Australia and Beyond, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1997, p.11

6. The Weekend Australian, 3-4/7/99.

7. Sun-Herald (Sydney), 30/5/99

8. members.tripod.com/~adviser1/medusa/ch07.html (URL no longer valid)

9. Hoff Sommers, p.211

10. Ibid, p.199

11. Karen Brownlee, "Men Can be Victims of Domestic Violence as Well," Regina Leader Post and Saskatoon Star Phoenix, 22 October 1999

12. The Australian HES, 8/6/97.

13. Robert Pool, The New Sexual Revolution, London: Stodder and Houghton, 1994, p. 267.

14. Betting Arndt, "Jobs For the Girls," Melbourne, The Age, 21/4/98.

15. Shirley Robin Letwin, "Law and the Unreasonable Woman," National Review, November 18, 1991, p. 35.

16. Ibid. 17. Ibid.

18. Bork, p. 219-220.

19. David H. Hackworth, Why the troops are hanging it up, November 16, 1999.

20. (Sydney) Sun-Herald, May 18, 1997.

21. Hoff Sommers, p.58

22. Kathy Kersten, "A New Heaven & a New Earth," First Things, March 1994, p.10.

23. Margaret E. Mills, Woman: Why Are You Weeping, North Melbourne: News Weekly, 1997, p.106

24. Ibid, p.108 25. Kenneth Minogue, "The Goddess That Failed", National Review, November 18, 1991, p. 46.

Saturday, March 12, 2005

A Separate Crime of Feminist Bigotry - John Hribernick - MensNewsDaily.com�

A Separate Crime of Feminist Bigotry

March 11, 2005



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by John Hribernick

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Yale Law School professor Ian Ayres and Chicago-Kent College of Law professor Katherine Baker want to send men to jail if they don't wear a condom. In a report they recently published they propose to make "reckless sexual conduct" a crime punishable by imprisonment. While some laws already exist to criminalize the intentional or reckless transmission of a disease to a sexual partner, several aspects of their proposal raise serious questions about its academic integrity. Most troubling is the discriminatory way in which only males would be targeted for punishment.

Ayres and Baker leave little doubt that only men would be prosecuted for reckless sex. They state that "...women would rarely, if ever, be prosecuted under such a statute." According to their report: "A defendant would be guilty of reckless sexual conduct if, in a first sexual encounter with another particular person, the defendant had sexual intercourse without using a condom." The punishment could be six months in prison.

Ayres and Baker are not simple misguided do-gooders. They are law professors and seasoned researchers who heavily cloak their argument in statistics, legal concepts and academic jargon. Yet having read their report and discovering what they are actually proposing, the influence of radical feminist ideology and its vicious anti-male bias become easily evident. At a time when there is debate about whether a remark by the president of Harvard (that some say show his gender insensitivity) should cost him his job, it's ironic that professors Ayres and Baker feel free to propose an extremely prejudicial law endangering the social liberties and constitutional rights of only the male gender.

The professors first claim their proposal will reduce or eliminate sexually transmitted disease (STD). No one would disagree that STD causes a great deal of suffering and its elimination is certainly a laudable goal. However, if unprotected sex is to be a crime, a rational approach is to punish consenting males and females equally. This report departs sharply from that fair and just approach. Under this proposal, females are absolved of virtually any legal responsibility to control disease. This fact alone suggests a deep-rooted gender bias that calls into question the credibility of their argument. Given their claim to be protecting the public from disease, and the seriousness of the consequences for men called for in this proposal, it seems this is not an oversight but rather pure and simple academic dishonesty.

Ayres and Baker then claim that their proposal can lead to a reduction in rape. They speculate on how or even whether that would occur but in their view it is a likely outcome. However, their entire argument is overshadowed by what constitutes consent. They appear to take the feminist view that consent can be present at the time of intercourse yet revoked by the female at any time, perhaps hours or days later. In this context the argument for condom use is irrelevant. In fact, the professors are careful to note that not wearing a condom is evidence of non-consent but that wearing a condom is alone not evidence of consent. Where does this leave men? This law leaves them at increased risk of false criminal allegations with fewer due process rights to prove their innocence.

This outcome is exactly what the professors claim is needed even though they have no proof it will reduce rape. They dismiss convictions of innocent men as an insignificant and acceptable problem and propose no corresponding punishment to discourage false allegations. Rape is already a crime punishable by far more serious consequences. It doesn't seem logical that lesser penalties would create greater deterrent.

The true intent of the professors' proposal does not appear to be the control of disease or directly reducing the number of rapes. Rather, it seems to be increasing the conviction rate for accused males. A primary rational given in their report for legalizing discriminatory gender-based prosecution is their claim that "unprotected first encounters are also correlated with coercion." According to an ABA eJournal article on the issue, as in their report, Ayres and Baker firmly link their proposed law to rape prosecutions

Their report states: "The crime of reckless sexual assault will also be a powerful prosecutorial tool for the thousands of acquaintance rape cases that are simply not winnable under current law. It represents a way to partially overcome the "he said/she said" dilemma. Reasonable doubts can remain whether an alleged acquaintance rapist raped, but there is often no question that he engaged in unprotected, first-encounter sex." According to the ABA eJournal article, Ayres says a crime of reckless sexual conduct would be a lot easier to prove than rape and criminalization is needed to reduce the "tragedy of sexual coercion."

The professors practically boast that this law is based on the Kobe Bryant case and that their law would provide a means to convict men of something even when there is no evidence of rape. Their report states: "Indeed, the 19 year-old's accusation *even if false * may have reduced the risk that [Bryant] would spread a disease contracted in Colorado." Here the professors go further than to ignore the sexual behavior of the 19 year-old girl who may be spreading STD to men through her casual sexual encounters. They imply it's permissible for her to commit a crime by making a false accusation. Is this the kind of law they teach at Yale or Chicago-Kent?

It's likely the professors notice that the female in their example also engaged in "first-encounter unprotected sex." However, there is no condemnation or criminalization of her sexual activity because, ideologically, the male is viewed as the problem.

The professors say that it's the male who should bear ultimate responsibility for wearing a condom and thus only the male who should be at risk of criminal prosecution and jail, even when the sex is consensual and he has no STD. They argue that lawful restrictions can be placed on behavior that causes no harm because drunk drivers can be arrested even when they cause no accident. Katherine Baker, appearing on the Glenn Sacks radio show "His Side" used this analogy to defend singling out the male for punishment.

The validity of this analogy would seem to be challenged by the fact that both males and females are arrested and prosecuted for driving drunk. However, let's indulge the professors. Imagine driving drunk is not illegal and two professors propose to make it illegal. Their research indicates that reckless drunken male drivers sometimes injure women. It also shows that when a male and female are in a car together and there is an accident involving alcohol the female tends to have more serious injuries than male. They therefore propose to make it a crime for men to drive drunk. Women are granted immunity from prosecution even if they injure a sober male passenger while recklessly driving drunk. The two professors say they were motivated to propose this unequal treatment because of the legal difficulties of convicting a basketball star accused of rape.

For all its shortcomings, this comparison clearly shows such a proposal would be a sophomoric way to approach the social problem of drunk driving. Its one-sided punishments and its lack of equal concern for the social and physical well-being of both men and women indicate it is driven by something other than academics, science or law.

It therefore seems that the ideological problem for Ayres and Baker is that consensual unprotected sex may involve no male predation and no female victimization whatsoever. To resolve that dilemma they employ a fairly unsophisticated trick. They simply define males as the problem and shift the entire legal burden to men. This, in their view, eliminates the need for any gender-equal criminalization no matter how many diseases or sexual partners the female has and no matter her culpability in enticing the male into unprotected sex or making false allegations after the fact.

They mount a potent but doomed ideological campaign to rationalize their proposal's one-sided punishment of males. They relentlessly expound the culpability of males and continually portray females as victims. The result is an intellectual smokescreen behind which appropriate constraints on the prosecutorial power of the state are eliminated and due process rights of accused men are shredded.

The science they use to get you to accept the ideological view of men as disease spreading sexual predators and potential rapists that need to be regulated and punished can be summarized as follows: 1) The more sexual partners you have the more likely you are to be infected with STD, and 2) rapists don't usually wear condoms. That sounds more like common knowledge than a scientific revelation. Ayres and Baker claim that by "minimally regulating a small subset" of sexually active people (those who sleep around a lot) STD and rape should decline. Since they view females only as victims they require action and punishment only of males. The "small subset" that they propose be regulated includes virtually every male but not one female.

The professors sneak their ideological finger onto the scales of justice in another disturbing way. According to the report: "Consent to unprotected intercourse would be an affirmative defense, to be established by the defendant with a preponderance of evidence." This means that the male is always guilty unless he can prove his innocence. Without witnesses, it would difficult to prove you wore a condom. In fact, condoms do not always prevent pregnancy. The professors' anemic case for turning the constitution on its head in this instance fails as rational scholarship. It's a dangerous step toward the police state marching right into your bedroom and your religion and, as proposed, it's atrocious public policy.

In shifting the legal burden to men, Ayres and Baker propose to have all men regulated as potential rapists and potential public health threats. Their law attaches this legal stigma to men in each of their initial sexual encounters. This very idea fails so many principles of American justice that it should stand as a testament to the ideological corruption that pervades this kind of academic research. Political or ideological propaganda, even when espoused by so-called academics, is rarely the best information on which to base criminal prosecution and broader public policy. These professors' efforts would be better spent increasing unbiased education about STD and rape rather than on demonizing men and building fallacious arguments for anti-male gender discrimination under the guise of sound public policy.

John Hribernick


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John Hribernick is a freelance writer from Edmonds, WA