Antonia Feitz
1/6/99
There's no doubt that feminism is illogical. On the one hand feminists demand equality with men. To achieve it they have embraced and promoted the traditional male life pattern of un-interrupted full-time work as the norm for women. According to feminists, women only achieve 'liberation' by pretending their infants have made no difference to their lives. Creches and more creches are demanded to 'free' women from domesticity. As their guru Simone de Beauvoir said in an interview with feminist Betty Friedan: "No woman should be authorised 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." [1]
It doesn't get clearer than that. There you have feminism in all its arrogance and contempt for people, especially for mothers, fathers and children. Never mind that de Beauvoir was herself childless and therefore absolutely ignorant about motherhood. Never mind she was also a total hypocrite to boot in that she fawned and waited on an odious man, Jean-Paul Sartre. The likes of her have the ear of government and policy-makers.
Seeing as ignoring babies doesn't go down too well with most mothers as survey after survey has clearly shown, the feminists have changed tack. They are now strident in calling for men to avail themselves of the 'opportunity' of part-time work and to do more domestic work out of 'fairness'. Articles are published in scholarly journals bemoaning the fact that men don't avail themselves of such 'opportunity', but perversely persist in seeing themselves as providers for their families. Worse still is that most women surveyed are content with the 'unequal' division of housework. The feminists are frustrated that women fail to recognise the 'injustice'.
It's got so loopy now that Germany has amended legislation to force men to do their fair share of the housework [2]. Needless to say there was no mention of whether women will be forced to do their fair share of chasing off burglars in the middle of the night, fixing blocked toilets, shovelling snow, mowing lawns, burying the dog etc.
Simultaneous with this demand for 'equality', feminists illogically claim that maleness is some sort of pathology in need of a cure, and that women are superior creatures. Men must change, is their mantra. We see the disastrous effects of that claim in the confusion and rising depression rates of young males who are made to feel ashamed of their sex and to despise the traditional manly virtues. As well, boys are increasingly being drugged with Ritalin to make them more tractable in the classroom because some feminist-corrupted teachers are hostile to boys' natural exuberance. Boys are being forced to behave like girls. It's not good.
In the feminist lexicon, the word 'equality' no longer means equal rights and equal opportunity as it did for the suffragettes at the turn of the century. In the closing decade of the twentieth century, 'equality' means something very different: equal outcomes. Hence the setting up of affirmative action bureaucracies to enforce the social engineering necessary to achieve the feminist goal.
Australian feminists such as academic Fay Gayle insist that any 'imbalances' in the occupational choices of men and women are somehow 'proof' of ever more ethereal 'discrimination'. But many people have noticed that feminists never demand equal representation on the dirty jobs. No, the feminists' middle class, privileged bias is clearly shown in the fact that they have only the bureaucracy, the judiciary, big business and parliament in their sights. All are clean, well-paying and prestigious jobs. Oh yes, there are grants to 'encourage' girls into engineering, but not into the abattoirs, or the sewer trucks. Funny that.
In fact, the notion that women are 'socialised' out of occupations such as mining, molecular physics, the law or even parliament is both offensively patronising and ideological hogwash to any truly independent woman. True equality of opportunity will never produce equality of outcomes because it will respect the choices made by individuals. In denying individual choices, and in its crude social engineering agenda, feminism clearly gives away its socialist game. It's socialism by the back door.
It's revealing and amusing in a very droll way that the Australian Labor Party (along with the Democrats and Greens) pays lip service to feminism. At its national conference the party annually agonises over the lack of women in parliament. So it sets quotas for women to be pre-selected . Meanwhile out in Les Murray red-neck reality-land, the supporters of One Nation have no trouble accepting women as candidates let alone leaders. Marvellous stuff. Calling David Williamson!
In any case, it seems incredible that feminist ideologues have ignored all the scientific research into the very real differences between the sexes - especially in the way their brains process information. It is surely an indictment on the intellectual life of the late 20th century that most of this research has been done by women because the topic is too 'hot' for men. According to Robert Pool, the majority of women studying sex differences - such as Janice Juraska, Camilla Benbow, Christina Williams, and Sheri Berenbaum - do so "not out of curiosity about why men and women are different but because sex differences are a powerful tool for studying the mind in general." [3]
But it's not just research. Feminists have assiduously ignored a vast, well-documented, social experiment into affirmative action which proved its futility. I refer to the kibbutz movement.
In Israel, three generations have now grown up in the kibbutzim. They were founded in the 1920s by European Jews on staunchly held socialist and feminist principles. Women were liberated from all traditional duties. Even marriage was deemed unnecessary and you can't get more hip than that. From 2-6 weeks of age (poor babies!), children were raised in dormitories to free their mothers to work alongside the men in the fields. Women did not have to cook, as people ate in communal dining halls. Washing, ironing and mending were also done in communal shops. In feminist ideological purity, women eschewed make-up and jewellery and dressed like men. By 1975 despite indoctrination from birth into these ideologies, the adults in the kibbutz had reverted to the old ways.
Most members married. While children were still raised communally, mothers pushed for more time, even to lobbying that children be allowed to spend nights in parents' apartments. Most occupations became 'men's work' and 'women's work'. Eventually women wore skirts and perfume. As Robert Pool notes: "... from an ideologically unisex beginning, the kibbutz has developed a sexual division of labour almost identical to what is found in most societies. Furthermore, the family unit - husband, wife and children - came to take on more and more importance as time went on." [4]
So was it a failure for the goal of sexual equality? The answer is a resounding no. It was a victory for the human spirit and commonsense. Again from Pool: todays kibbutzniks "have changed their ideas about what constitutes equality. In place of the original 'identity' vision of equality, which insisted that men and women should do exactly the same things, [they] now subscribe to an 'equivalence' view, where equality is assumed to exist if men and women have equal opportunities and are perceived to contribute equally, even if they make different choices and play different roles. The second- and third- generation members of the kibbutz no longer expect men and women to perform the same jobs, or think that role identity is necessary for the sexes to be equal." [5]
I recently heard on radio that the last kibbutz had folded. I've not verified it though, so don't quote me.
Sex differences are real, and only a tyrannical ideology ignores them. Let me finish by quoting Robert Pool's summary of his talk held at Steve Gaulin's dining table. Gaulin is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Pittsburgh: "There is a reason, a purpose for the differences between men and women, those things that make life so interesting, but the reason lies in the distant past. Long ago it made sense that men and women should have different abilities and different psychological traits, but we inhabit a modern, industrialised world now. As Steve Gaulin says, 'Evolution prepared us for yesterday, but we have to live in today.' There is no need for men to have an easier time reading a blueprint than women, but there it is. There is no need for women to speak more fluently or have an easier time learning to read, but there it is. There's no need for men to be more aggressive, women to be more nurturing, men to be more attuned to hierarchies and dominance, women to see relationships more in terms of a web of friendships. In fact, it sometimes seems as if things would be a lot more comfortable if some of these differences didn't exist, but we're stuck with them." [6]
Like Gaulin and Pool I believe we are stuck with sex differences. Surely it's more intelligent and better social policy to recognise them rather than pretend they do not exist as feminists demand. Vive la différance!
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