Читать книгу Feminism: The Ugly Truth - Mike J.D. Buchanan - Страница 8

I listen to feminists and all these radical gals – most of them are failures. They’ve blown it. Some of them have been married, but they married some Casper Milquetoast who asked permission to go to the bathroom. These women just need a man in the house. That’s all they need. Most of the feminists need a man to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home. And they blew it and they’re mad at all men. Feminists hate men. They’re sexist. They hate men – that’s their problem.

Jerry Falwell 1933-2007 American Baptist cleric, televangelist and conservative commentator

Countless words have been written – almost all of them by women – about the meaning of the words ‘feminism’ and ‘feminist’. I read a number of books about feminism and concluded there are as many definitions of the words as there are writers on the topic. And when words have many meanings, they arguably have no useful meaning. We return to a useful distinction used by Christina Hoff Sommers, the author of Who Stole Feminism? (1994).

Ms Sommers is an American former professor of philosophy, and a self-described ‘equity feminist’. Wikipedia has some interesting material on Ms Sommers including the following:

‘Sommers uses the terms ‘equity feminism’ and ‘gender feminism’ to differentiate what she sees as acceptable and non-acceptable forms of feminism. She describes equity feminism as the struggle for equal legal and civil rights and many of the original goals of the early feminists, as in the first wave of the women’s movement. She describes gender feminism as the action of accenting the differences of genders for the purposes of what she believes is creating privilege for women in academia, government, industry, or advancing personal agendas.’

Throughout this book (unless stated otherwise) I shall use the terms ‘feminism’ and ‘feminist’ in the same sense that Ms Sommers refers to ‘gender feminism’ and ‘gender feminist’. After all, we’re all equity feminists now, aren’t we? Ever since Margaret Thatcher did such a tremendous job as prime minister of the United Kingdom over the country’s golden years of 1979-90, anyway…

The great irony in the modern era is that feminist thinking is coming under unprecedented levels of criticism, not least from women themselves; yet the power this small band of determined women exerts has never been greater. We shall see that feminists prefer to wield power by operating in the shadows, not emerging into the light where their arguments would be exposed as reflecting extreme left-wing ideologies.