02/03/05

Feminist Mush

Carey Roberts

NewsWithViews

Ever notice how radical feminism has become a parody of itself?

Case in point: For years, feminists scolded us for the mere mention that some women might be too emotional to handle top leadership posts.

Ironically, those same women forgot to tell us that leading feminists thinkers were actually discouraging women from thinking logically. The reason: gender feminists have long regarded logic and rationality as patriarchal tools for the baleful oppression of women.

No, this is not a joke.

Feminist Elizabeth Minnich scornfully traces the source of rationality to a “few privileged males…who are usually called ‘The Greeks.’” Historian Gerda Lerner denigrates the great liberal tradition of sound thinking as “the rape of our minds.” And here’s my favorite: Charlotte Bunch concludes feminists must attack the problem of “phallocentrism” by “reconstructing the world from the standpoint of women.”

So what happens when we do away with rationality, and substitute it for a “woman’s way of knowing,” er, feeling?

Ten years ago, 50,000 persons gathered in Beijing for the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. There, the keynote speaker stepped to the podium to make these shrill but dubious claims:

“Women are 70% of the world’s poor…Women are most often the ones whose human rights are violated …A leading cause of death worldwide among women ages 14-44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes.”

Seventy percent of the world’s poor are female? I have traveled to some of the most remote and poverty-stricken areas of the developing world – and I saw just as many men as women.

Violation of human rights – did anyone notice that almost all the victims of Sadaam Hussein’s odious torture chambers were men?

And that claim about all those women dying “in their own homes”? Take a look at the most recent mortality report from the World Health Organization – death from domestic violence doesn’t even appear on the list.

That rant, long on raw emotion but short on objectivity and fact, was delivered by then First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. Maybe she was still working on the applause lines for her upcoming presidential campaign.

A few days later, the conference delegates approved the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. Taking their cue from Madame Hillary, the Beijing Declaration reads like a Stalinist harangue. It is replete with lamentations about the plight of women, and repeatedly, hysterically urges women to become “empowered.”

If the Beijing Declaration is what Charlotte Bunch had in mind about “reconstructing the world from the standpoint of women,” then I say it’s time to bring back the Patriarchy. The report’s utter lack of factual grounding on topics such as health, poverty, and domestic violence inevitably raises the question, Have these women lost their basic capacity to think?

This week and next, thousands of ever-angry feminists descend like locusts on the United Nations headquarters in New York City for a 10-year reprise of Beijing.

These women, who lend a whole new meaning to the words “raging hormones,” would do well to ponder the recent Los Angeles Times essay, “Feminist Fatale.” Author Charlotte Allen asked: “Where are the great women thinkers?” Her conclusion: “The vast majority of women who might otherwise qualify as public intellectuals would rather recite the feminist catechism or articulate some new twists and refinements on it.”

Others began to agree with Allen’s thesis.

One female blogger commented, “Seems to me the best way for you to advance women into positions of prominence…is to get the women to take hold of themselves, and their teeming emotions.”

Vox Day chimed in with this observation about college students: “While men are listening to professors lecture on history, economics and engineering, far too many women are yammering on and on about their feelings in Women’s Study classes.”

Six weeks ago Harvard president Larry Summers said the once-unthinkable. He suggested the under-representation of women in high-end science positions might be due to a “different availability of aptitude.” That comment still roils the ultra-liberal faculty at Harvard.

But now we know there is at least one other reason for the shortage of brainy women. Thanks to all those Women’s Studies programs, the reason, fairness, and compassion of far too many women have been sucked out, and replaced by an ideological, narcissistic, and vindictive mush.