Feminism: A Corrupt Seed That Yields A Rotten Crop

Picture from AgFax.com

In my prior post, It Is Not About Getting Rid Of Gender, It Is About Getting Rid Of Men, I argued that the "transgender" and "gender fluidity" movements are mostly about ridding our culture of any actual masculine expression. I also made the statement that I think women are, by and large, not terribly happy today in spite of "feminist progress" and by implication that they would be more happy if the men in their lives acted more like men. In fact it often seems to me that things that are supposed to make women happier, like having more women with careers outside of the home and going to college, are actually conspiring to make women less happy and satisfied. As an example of this I quoted the disproportionate female-male ratio at most colleges in an article, Unequal Gender Ratios at Colleges Are Driving Hookup Culture, but the broader issue of that post was that the shrinking male population at university is actually benefitting the men enormously, at least from a standpoint of sexual promiscuity.

Women at disproportionately female schools talk openly about their frustrations. “Everyone’s self-esteem takes a hit,” a young woman at 75%-female Sarah Lawrence College told me. One reason: Sarah Lawrence men have little interest in exclusive relationships. “Why would they? It’s like they have their own free harem,” she grumbled. “One of my friends was dumped by a guy after they’d been hooking up for less than a week. When he broke up with her, the guy actually used the word ‘market’—like the ‘market’ for him was just too good.” 

A male Sarah Lawrence student offered a similar assessment of life there—though he wasn’t bemoaning the school’s hookup culture but celebrating it. The young man told me he had had sex with more than 20 of his female classmates. “There isn’t really a culture of monogamy or even dating here,” he offered. “Sometimes it feels like you can have anyone you want.”

It turns out that men and women still like to be with each other and when men are scarce, women end up having to or at least feeling like they have to, compromise what they want (monogamous, steady relationships) for what men seem to want (casual sex) in order to have any relationship with men at all. Certainly plenty of academic "experts" will tell you that casual sex with no commitment is healthier than old fuddy-duddy notions of monogamy and relationship but I don't believe that to be true for a second. Having once been an unregenerate college guy, albeit one with a steady girlfriend that I got engaged to halfway through my first year of school, I can say with some confidence that being in a culture where you are having sex with so many different girls that you number your partners in the dozens would be fantastic. Marriage traditionally acted as a civilizing influence on young men, especially young men who are outside of the faith, but now most men can get sex on demand with no corresponding commitment. If you want to see an unclothed woman, you don't have to buy a girlie magazine with a brown paper cover over it from the drug store, you can just click a few buttons and see whatever kind of woman you want doing anything you can imagine and quite a few things you can't even begin to imagine.

I have been working over a post literally for years now that I need to finish one of these days that argues we are living in the Golden Era of Male Irresponsibility. Ironically it is feminism that has made this happen. Very powerful and educated men are doing more than fine in our culture. Lazy, ne'er-do-well young men who want to live at home, play video games and watch porn are doing just fine in their pursuit. The vast majority of men who just want to be a good father and husband and productive member of society are the ones who are struggling.

The struggles of most men is mirrored by the struggles of far too many women. Women from affluent homes are also doing great it would seem. But the majority of women in America seem far from doing just fine. They are pulled in a million directions, told that they don't need a man to be happy but at the same time constantly bombarded with marketing tell them that they need this or that to appeal to men. Women have been told that they shouldn't allow men to objectify them but the culture has led to a situation where teen girls are sending nude photos of themselves to boys that often aren't even steady boyfriends. My experience of decades in the professional work environment was that of a lot of women, I would say the majority of them, were equal parts resigned to "having to work" and longing to spend more time with their kids. Having a picture of your six month old daughter on your desk and texting the daycare is no substitute for being there for her. That may sound judgmental and cruel, and maybe it is, but it is also true. Each successive generation of Western women seems less equipped for caring for their own children but in spite of efforts by some feminists to shame the maternal instinct out of women, it is still there but women today are ill-equipped to respond to that instinct.

A perfect example of this came up this week with the cinematic release of the Fifty Shades of Grey bondage-porn sequel Fifty Shades Darker. In the spirit of full disclosure I have not read any of the books or watched the film but I have run across enough in terms of plot summaries to get the gist of the movie. The series is wildly popular. The first book, Fifty Shades of Grey, apparently sold more than 125 million copies. According to Barnes & Noble (I didn't check at Amazon where I almost exclusively shop for books because I don't want to see what else looking at Fifty Shades would cause Amazon to recommend for me), the hard copy retails for $12.95 and the e-book for $7.99 so taking the average price of the two and multiplying that times 125,000,000 copies means roughly $1.3 billion in sales. That is a pretty big number for a book. The first film adaptation made over $166,000,000 at the box office in America and more than half a billion worldwide according to IMDB. It sounds like estimates are that the sequel will earn almost $50 million during the opening weekend alone.

As you would expect just from the general hype, the book buyers are 80% women. What I found interesting when I looked at the buying profile from Bowker was what kind of women were buying it. The cultural narrative is that it is bought by bored and sexually frustrated soccer moms but that is not what Bowker found in 2012:

Compared to the typical adult fiction consumer, buyers of the Fifty Shades books are more likely to be women, live in the Northeast, and have a significantly higher household income.

Interesting indeed! I think a lot of midwestern soccer mom types tend to consume the "Amish romance novel" genre but why would substantially more affluent, presumably more educated and more "enlightened" women in the Northeast (i.e. Boston to New York to Washington, D.C., our power corridor and where you are most likely to find powerful, "successful" career women) buy a book about a disordered and male dominated sexual relationship?

Why in the world would women in our supposedly enlightened world with decades of feminist indoctrination in the schools and our pop culture, want to spend upwards of a billion and a half dollars to read/watch about what ought to be the nightmare of feminists, a wealthy older White man who apparently uses his wealth and power and *GASP* dare I say privilege to seduce a virginal, younger woman and dominate her? Everything about this storyline seems to run precisely counter to what women are supposed to truly crave. Wouldn't a better story line that would appeal to women like this be something like a professional woman, like a high power lawyer, who has a mutually respectful but open relationship with a guy who is an artist of some sort and works at Whole Foods to make ends meet but who mostly depends on his much smarter, more worldly and far more successful female life partner to pay the bills while he keeps their condo clean, feeds the cats and cleans the litter box and makes cruelty free, fair trade vegan meals and rubs her feet when she gets home?

Curiouser and curiouser.

My theory is probably not surprising. Men and women are men and women and you can market and indoctrinate the crap out of them but that doesn't change their basic nature. The Bible is again proven to be accurate in describing the human condition when it comes to gender (ex. Genesis 3:16 ). When these modern, feminism-saturated, independent, strong women get a few minutes to themselves, one hundred million or so of them read about or watched a movie about a man who sexually dominates a woman. Tens of millions more read various romance novels, including the wildly popular Amish romance genre and the Amish idea of gender is about as counter-cultural as you can get. It is almost like women really are actually craving a strong man who will lead in their relationship instead of some flaccid, milquetoast Nancy-boy that has to ask his life partner to open the pickle jar for him.

Feminism is an agenda driven ideology that really has morphed into a matriarchal religion, a religious worldview that has been mostly destructive to women, to men and to children and families. The ideas that it claims to put forth, like equality of opportunity, have long since come to fruition and what we see now are mostly policies and positions that can only be properly described as anti-male, anti-children and anti-family. The future is not female but to ensure a better future for females we must collectively reject the lies of feminism for the sake of our wives, sisters, mothers and daughters.