Читать книгу Feminism: The Ugly Truth - Mike J.D. Buchanan - Страница 10

Four legs good, two legs bad.

George Orwell 1903-50 English novelist: Animal Farm (1945)

Feminism springs from the same intellectual tradition as Marxism, both sharing a core belief in dualism. There’s an oppressing class (the bourgeoisie, in the case of Marxism, and men, in the case of feminism) which is by definition always in the wrong, and is to be overthrown; and there’s an oppressed class (the proletariat and women respectively) which is by definition always in the right, and must overthrow its oppressors. Adherents are taught and encouraged to see the world through the lens of this dualism, and of course it’s possible to make some sense of the world in this way. Carefully selected examples could be found to prop up any creed based on dualism.

But why, you have to ask yourself, might anyone want to think in this way? In the case of feminists the answer is obvious: misandry. They hate men. Feminists are angry so they wish to bring men down, which requires less effort than beating men on the grounds of merit. Any strategy or tactic is permissible, indeed laudable. Adverse consequences are acceptable even if it’s women in general who suffer (as it often is).

I’ve all but given up trying to debate with feminists. They have well-prepared scripts they stick to through thick and thin, and seldom engage their brains. On occasion I’ve said to a feminist (or written in an email), ‘You really believe this crap, don’t you?’ The line always goes down well, I find.

The sequence of events when one tries to engage with feminists is invariably the same, and differs only in how far along the road you manage to travel. The most common response is no response at all; as I was to discover, even invoking the law in the form of The Freedom of Information Act to obtain the prospectuses and reading lists of Women’s Studies and Gender Studies courses generally produced no response.

The few feminists who respond to people challenging them will almost invariably be rude and condemn them as sexist, misogynistic, blah, blah, blah. They fly into rages when you calmly try to engage them in any sort of nuanced arguments. My theory is that many feminists are profoundly stupid as well as hateful, a theory which could readily be tested by arresting a number of them and forcing them – with the threat of denying them access to chocolate – to undertake IQ tests. My suspicions on the matter are only reinforced by the lengthy terms with which feminists pepper their conversations. Normal women don’t employ terms such as ‘epistemological advantage’ or ‘patriarchal hegemony’, do they?

Perhaps the most curious feminists are feminist academics, which is ironic because they’re so incurious. They’ve built their castles in the air, and are busily adding to them. Not one of the feminist academics I contacted had the slightest interest in engaging in an exchanges of views. They appeared to me to be propagandists of the worst sort.

Feminists often refer to the process of indoctrinating people with their creed as ‘raising their consciousness’. Dualism has an immediate appeal for people seeking a simple explanation of the world’s ills, at least for people unable or unwilling to accept that nuances exist and are inevitable in a complex world: broadly speaking, in the case of feminism, that explanation is, ‘Women good, men bad’. This reduction to absurdity is surely an example of consciousness lowering rather than raising, and is an assault on naturally enquiring intellects.