21/12/01

The Real Goal Of Feminism

Transforming Society

Antonia Feitz

Speech delivered at the Inverell Forum 2000, 2/3/00

1. The Problem

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 the over-riding 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 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." [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 customs and all other practices which are based on ... stereotyped roles for men and women."

These intolerant ideologues who so loudly criticise 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 legalise 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 high jacked 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 US has not.

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

2. The Theory

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 un-interrupted 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 which 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.

3. The Achievements

1. The Sexual Harassment Industry: 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 hoisery 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.

2. The Affirmative Action Rip-off: 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 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, promiment feminist Gloria Steinem responded by saying such research should be banned.

2) Secondly there's the experience of the kibbutzim. 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 unjustifed, 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.

3. The Law: 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 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.

4. The Military: Australian women have played an honourable role in the nation's defence forces. Currently, under a Sex Discrimination Act exemption, the 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.

According to David Hackworth, one of the US's highest decorated retired soldier, some U.S. Army infantry divisions have a battalion-equivalent of pregnant 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 per cent 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 jetison its military heritage and join the Americans in having women in combat.

5. Education: 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 emphasises men and women in traditional masculine and feminine roles" is outlawed [20]. Along with Superman and Cinderella, favourite authors like Hans Christian Anderson and CS 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 re-written to give women an importance they simply didn't have in pre-contraceptive ages. In one popular science text, a 19th 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.

6. Religion: 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 classism." 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 recognised 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 commited to "work towards the transformation of the consciousness and structures in our society, especially within the Church's sphere of action" [23]

Their inaguaral 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 de-construct, re-interpret, 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 the personification of Wisdom, but a name of the Goddess. The sisters' Outreach programme is spreading the feminist word and has reached a 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.

7. Language: 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 shonky scholarship. It thrives only in academia, government bureaucracies, the ABC and religious orders. That list says it all - there's your classic herd of independent minds!

Finale

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 re-think 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.

************ 

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. http://members.tripod.com/~adviser1/medusa/ch07.html 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. Bettina 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", 15/11/99 20. (Sydney) Sun-Herald, 18/5/97. 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, 18/11/91, p. 46.