Excerpt from The Feminist Crusades
This is probably the best summary of the feminist attack on our culture I have ever seen. Have a look and see what you think. It is the Intro to Frank Zepezauer's The Feminist Crusades book and will give you an idea of the book's content. It was written in 2007, long before many had awakened to the evil and one-sided nature of femimism. Zepezauer refers to the essay by Minogue and if you are interested you can find that original essay here (2001)
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2001/4/how-civilizations-fall
The intro gives you an idea of how things got started and the damage they have done. The remainder of the book details each feminist crusade and includes very detailed analysis. Here's a listing of the crusades he includes:
Chapter 1 The Crusade Against “Sexist” Health Care
Chapter 2 The Crusade Against Sexist Schooling
Chapter 3 The Crusade Against Workplace Inequality
Chapter 4 More Crusades, More Myths, More Bureaucracies
Chapter 5 The Great Anti-abuse Crusades
Chapter 6 The Witch Hunt Continues
Chapter 7 The Crusade Against Sexual Assault
Chapter 8 The Crusade against Sexual Harassment
Chapter 9 The Crusade against Wife-Battering
Chapter 10 The Crusade against Fatherhood
Chapter 11 So?
Appendix A The Feminist Establishment
It is truly an amazing book.
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Introduction
Referring to radical feminism’s huge success, Kenneth Minogue, a renowned authority on the nature and influence of ideologies, made an astounding declaration. He said that “the radical feminist revolution is nothing less than a destruction of our civilization…We are no longer what we were. The West has collapsed.”[1]
Feminist radicals, Minogue continued, brought about this catastrophe by managing to impose on society a quasi-religious “fundamentalism.” It rested on the “false and eccentric assumption of male and female isomorphism” and sought to “create a totally androgynous (and manipulatable) world where men and women would become virtually indistinguishable.” At that point men and women would, it was believed, be equally distributed at every level in every field of endeavor both private and public. To help realize this brave new world they persuaded a significant number of educated, middle class women that such a goal represented what women in general desired. As Minogue observed dryly, these women succeeded, “(as they usually do) in getting what they wanted” which was to “replace achievement by quota entitlements.” Because the key to modern Western Civilization “is its openness to talent wherever found, the feminist demand for collective quotas has overturned the basic feature of our civilization.”
In addition to rallying support from educated women, feminists were able to get what they wanted by maneuvering support from the government which has now become a relentless force “bent on destroying the autonomy of the institutions of civil society.” Consequently, “a network of powerful bureaucracies” emerged that brought “radical doctrines to bear on all areas of government concern.” Among them was the internal affairs of American universities which had previously enjoyed a high level of independence from political influence. However, coercion applied by feminist-friendly government agencies combined with intramural feminist demands often expressed “with almost samurai displays of fearsome aggression,” caused one university administration after another to yield. It was a surrender that betrayed “the trust in the scholarly vocation.” Most severely affected have been the liberal arts faculties which under the quota system–a demand for 50-50 equality–have admitted many women who are “indeed very able” and many “who are not” and “they have prospered by setting up fanciful ideological courses (especially women’s studies) which can “hardly be academic at all.”
At the conclusion of his essay, Minogue said something equally astounding: that, for the most part, this highly destructive feminist achievement was “accomplished by stealth.” What many of us considered the noisiest and most visible of the 20th Century political movements was primarily a covert operation. Minogue illustrates this point with a concluding anecdote:
There has been a revolution, then, but a silent one. It has taken place with such stealth, and so gradually, that people have become accustomed to it little by little. I am reminded of the famous Chinese executioner whose ambition it was to be able to cut off a head so that the victim would not realize what had happened. For years he worked on his skill, and one day he cut off a head so perfectly that the victim said: “Well, when are you going to do it?” The executioner gave a beatific smile and said: “Just kindly nod.”
Such a dramatic essay inevitably provokes questions among the first of which is “How did radical feminists do it?” How could so few do so much to so many? If you gathered the hard core radical militants in one place, they would scarcely fill Yankee Stadium. Yet these few, these unhappy few, this band of sisters, have, in Kenneth Minogue’s opinion, caused the demise of Western Civilization, the cultural home of over a billion men and women most of whom never realized what was happening. If so, how so?
We therefore confront a mystery whose solution can best be found by reviewing late 20th Century feminism’s tumultuous history. What first comes to notice is the fact that the feminist movement has not been one but many movements. Radical feminism is a totalitarian ideology. It sees a civilization corrupted at its roots by a tenacious evil called the “Patriarchy,” a male dominated system which assigns social duties and status according to gender, and it favors in all cases the male gender. Because this evil contaminates all aspects of society–the government, the church, the justice system, the educational establishment, the media, the kinship system, the moral code, social customs, rules of etiquette, the symbol and language systems, even the construction of the individual consciousness–all must be changed. Thus the feminist revolutionary army divided itself into specialized battalions each of which was commissioned to transform a particular aspect of society.
These transformationist campaigns were conducted with such high purpose and moral fervor that they merit the name “crusades.” As Minogue indicated, feminist crusaders usually operated behind the scenes conducting intensive but little publicized lobbying campaigns to persuade–or subtly coerce—university or government or media officials to endorse their agenda. Occasionally however some situation arose–a high profile date rape case, for example, or the introduction of female favoring legislation–and feminists shifted their strategy and went public. At that point a particular crusade would flare out into a spectacular media event. Like an artillery barrage preparing for an infantry assault, the now intensified crusade would then lay down a fusillade of alarming statistics and impassioned rhetoric. You would then hear, for example, that “one out of four American women” had been raped as part of a “rape epidemic” which was an ongoing phenomenon in a “rape culture.”
The connection between some desired legislation–such as reforms in sexual assault law to include “date rape” crimes—and the opening of a media bombardment was noted so often that observers began to see it as a characteristic feminist modus operandi. Christina Hoff Sommers, who in the mid-1990s emerged as one of radical (or gender) feminism’s most astute critics, reduced this M.O. to a simple three-sentence formula: “Do a study. Declare a crisis. Get the politicians worked up.” Christina Sommers could have added a fourth sentence: Establish or expand a bureaucracy. For in most cases the legislation that the “worked up” politicians passed set up a new female friendly government agency or fattened an existing agency.
Feminism’s role in the exponential growth of government had been noted long before Christina Hoff Sommers and Kenneth Minogue called attention to it. In 1987, Michael Levin wrote in Feminism and Freedom about the extent to which feminism has achieved its effects through the state, particularly unelected officials of the courts and the regulatory agency, and those elected officials most remote from their constituencies….It is not by accident that feminism has had its major impact through the necessarily coercive machinery of the state rather than through the private decisions of individuals. Although feminism speaks the language of liberation, self-fulfillment, options, and the removal of barriers, these phrases invariably mean their opposites and disguise an agenda at variance with the ideals of a free society…. Feminism is an antidemocratic, if not totalitarian, ideology.[2]
Feminist agitation for bigger, more intrusive government was not, however, the only element in its transformationist methodology that was noted. In the early 1990s critics began to demonstrate the degree to which most of the numbers fired out in a statistics barrage were grossly exaggerated. Neil Gilbert, Professor of Social Work at the University of California, Berkeley pointed out that there was a “staggering difference” between feminist figures on rape–such as the one-out-of-every-four women raped number–and official government figures which placed the number at one out of every thousand. Professor Gilbert disclosed this grotesque discrepancy in a Public Interest article with a revealing title, “The phantom epidemic of sexual assault.” [3] With this exposure Professor Gilbert established himself as a pioneer in what would become a literary sub-genre, the debunking of feminist “advocacy numbers.” The term once had a neutral connotation referring to presumably accurate statistics distributed to advance a worthwhile cause such as eliminating poliomyelitis or feeding Third World children. With feminist usage, however, the term came to mean cooked numbers used to advance a partisan socio-political agenda. Advocacy numbers in this sense were either wildly inaccurate–one in four women raped instead of one in a thousand–or cynically decontextualized when, for example, feminists made much of the fact that girls attempted suicide more often than boys but neglected to report that boys more often succeeded in killing themselves, five times more often.
Since feminists employed bogus advocacy numbers in nearly all their crusades, and since these numbers and the accompanying histrionic rhetoric were seldom vetted by an ever co-operative media, radicals were able to permeate our culture with an elaborate mythology which settled like a thick smoke screen between our media shaped perceptions and the reality of our public and private life. In short, the answer to the question Kenneth Minogue raised about how so few could hurt so many could be reduced to two words. They lied.
But why and how? What was there about radical feminist ideology that encouraged so many intelligent, well educated women to employ mendacity and deception to advance their cause? Most of their advocacy numbers were extracted from “advocacy research” conducted in the academy which as far back as 1970 had become a feminist power base. What does this tell us about the radical feminist approach to science and scholarship and what does this tell us about the ideology that governed that approach? Feminists got things wrong so often and so badly that questions inevitably arose concerning their ideologized “consciousness” which, they often boasted, had been suitably “raised.” And once questions were raised about an ideology presumed to explain all of reality, further questions immediately followed, whether for example such a comprehensive ideology was in fact a religion. If so, had radicals and their liberal allies succeeded in driving traditional religion out of the public square while covertly admitting in its place a quasi-religious ideology?
Such questions press forward when you view the proliferating consequences of the feminist crusades which suggests that the best way to find answers is to take a closer look at the crusades themselves: how they started, how they were conducted, how they added to feminist bureaucratic power, and how they helped feminists vandalize our culture.
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Endnotes:
1. Kenneth Minogue, “How Civilizations Fall,” The New Criterion. April, 2001.
2. Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom (Brunswick, NJ: 1987) p.2
3. Neil Gilbert, “The phantom epidemic of sexual assault” The Public Interest, Spring, 1991, p. 54 to 65. g --
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