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The Radical Feminist Plague

Posted by Bernard Chapin On January - 24 - 2006

Across the span of human history, men and women have joined together, in complementary roles, to produce a species that is arguably the most successful on earth, yet victory can result in the creation of powerful enemies. Few adversaries have been more potent or destructive in a shorter period of time than radical feminism. With its open hatred of men and complete disrespect for the choices of women, it is unique among the various “isms” currently defiling our culture. It makes a victim out of every female, brings about an element of barbarism to our daily relations, and has conjured up a war between the sexes.

Considering that the media constantly refers to the main feminist organizations as “women’s groups” and that pusillanimous politicians pretend that these leftist extremists are representative of the average woman, it is not surprising that there has been such a frenzied response to the publication of Kate O’Beirne’s Women Who Make the World Worse And How Their Radical Feminist Assault is Ruining Our Families, Military, Schools, and Sports.

Activists are so threatened by this rather slim volume that they have waged a campaign to downgrade the author’s Amazon ranking and fomented considerable madness on the net (which Kathryn Jean Lopez documented in an excellent article).

With O’Beirne’s masterful detailing of the feminist defilement of both human dignity and culture in general along with her pervasive use of logic–the feminist kryptonite–perhaps hysteria was the only way in which the faithful thought they could keep the general public from discovering the true extent of their contempt for the citizenry.

One of the non-response response methods used to deal with O’Beirne’s critique will be familiar to conservatives who lived through the taffeta days of sperm and innuendo otherwise known as the Clinton Administration. It consists of repeating things like, “are you still dwelling on that? Isn’t it time to moveon.org?” Such a tactic was on full display in the New York Times review:

Sure, she tosses invective at some specific (and predictable) targets, but for the most part the women in her book are less a real threat to the contemporary conservative project than a history lesson. Her salvos against such dusty icons as Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda and Catharine MacKinnon do all these women the enormous favor of making them relevant again.

While it is true that these individuals no longer adorn the covers of Newsweek, their ideas, once revolutionary, now reign supreme as conventional wisdom. This aftereffect was far too obvious for the sophistos at The Times to consider. The complaints, recriminations, mental breakdowns, and paranoid fantasies of the feminist avant-garde were given a free pass by hordes of people smart enough to know better because they cloaked their harangues under the protective cover of femininity. To defy them was supposedly to hate women on the whole. The upshot is that contemporary judges view divorce hearings as a mechanism for punishing men, child custody hearings reflect a considerable bias in favor of women, employers now hire on the basis of chromosomal characteristics, and the workplace, thanks to the sexual harassment industry, is an environment hostile to males.

In these pages, the incompetence and inferiority of the feminist mind is readily evident to the reader as O’Beirne gives us a comprehensive tour of their advocacy and opinion. The Equal Rights Amendment is revealed to be a legal absurdity as its vagueness, should it have passed, would have ensured either tyranny or meaninglessness. The egregious Violence Against Women Act (1994) was designed not to protect women, but, rather, to guarantee female supremacy by elevating them in the eyes of the law. Measures like the Equity Pay Act were proposed to allow women to be highly paid for work which matches their personal interests while ignoring the need of consumers. That the root of radical feminism is actually an attempt to procure jobs for the unemployable is a perspective I had never thought of, but it is extensively–and devastatingly–developed here by the author.

The text lives up to its secondary billing by carefully explaining in individual chapters the way in which feminists have denigrated the family, the armed forces, every form of education, and sports. I figured that my favorite chapter would be “Mother Nature’s a B–tch,” but it wasn’t because the introduction, albeit quite short, dismantled the jaggedy bricks of this Jacobinism as if they were stones atop Monte Cassino.

The left has tried to dismiss this work as a Coulter-esque rant, but this is clearly not the case. More than anything else, Women who Make the World Worse is a scholarly review of the literature surrounding the discrepancy between feminist positions and reality. O’Beirne is not detached from the discussion, however, but she refutes and responds to her opposition far more than she insults them. It would be easy to isolate a quotation like, “A woman being brutally killed alongside men is a long-awaited dream of equality,” and pretend that O’Beirne is polemicizing; yet, such a sentence would be taken out of context because it was preceded by a quotation from a retired female general reading, “There’s been an acceptance of the fact that women…are in harm’s way and they are being killed. That is defining to me.” The author’s remark was well-justified in light of the situation.

Perhaps the best reason for the left’s outraged reaction to this text is that it exposes the totalitarian foundations of political correctness, an ideology of which feminism is irrefutably a subset. PC has eroded the value of a university education due to its outlawing the search for truth. Indeed, as one psychologist O’Beirne cited remarked concerning daycare: “Psychologists must refuse to undertake any more research that looks for the negative consequences of other-than-mother care.” Why? Well, the outcomes might not be favorable to the points of view of today’s politicized pseudo-scholars, so the findings must be buried when they don’t meet the demands of theory.

Radical feminism, with its Manichean outlook and attempt to subjugate men in the name of equality, is a malignant and vile influence upon our society. We should all be thankful that Kate O’Beirne has the courage needed to stand up to these fanatics. It is now time for all of us to stare down these vindictive bullies and prevent them from ruining the lives of any more people than they already have.

Bernard Chapin

Bernard Chapin is a writer in Chicago.

Vox Populi

Morphing Bush into Mahogany

Posted by Bernard Chapin On January - 16 - 2006

Out of the many conservative politicos on television, Fred Barnes of Fox News is perhaps the most talented and savvy. His arguments are often the clearest, and he is a formidable opponent even on those occasions when his talking points are obviously beaten. In his new book, Rebel in Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush, Barnes puts forth a thesis which would occur to few Americans. He regards our current President as a maverick who stands outside and above the establishment, and one who, in the spirit of the Starship Enterprise, has boldly gone where no scion of an incredibly fashionable family has gone before.

My first reaction upon completing the opening pages was, “Surely he’s doesn’t really believe this?” Ah, but Barnes does believe it or at least he appears to for the purposes of political expediency. We find that despite our President’s family spending decades in the nation’s capital, Bush the Younger is “an alien in the realm of the governing class.” The author gives a plethora of reasons for why this is the case such as the President’s refusal to wear a tuxedo to social events more than once a year, and the way in which he called a terrorist a terrorist by delegitimizing the authority of Yasser Arafat. Some of Barnes’ contentions are persuasive. Certainly, one can buy that George Bush is assertive in his interpersonal relationships along with his not being an intellectual captive of his cabinet. That he never had any desire to be part of the beltway “in crowd” is also convincing, but concluding that he is a rebel is a non sequitur.

Bush rules by traditional means and there is precious little turbulence to be found in his submissive habit of affixing his name to pork-laden bills promoting economic stagnation and adamantine bureaucracy. A rebel would not mistake socialism for compassion; a rebel would veto budgets and curtail spending; a rebel would stand for his convictions, but in George W. Bush we have not a rebel but a politician. Even if this is readily discernible to most pundits, it has not prevented Fred Barnes from pretending otherwise, perhaps as an attempt to secure a favorable legacy for our 43rd President—a legacy which he assuredly does not deserve.

There have been many unusual things about the Bush presidency but perhaps the oddest is why the political left hates him so. It is rather bewildering for those of us who see that, aside from foreign policy, he is more Jimmy Carter than Calvin Coolidge. He is the big spending liberal your parents warned you about. He even stands out within a Republican Party filled with “95 percenters”—meaning guys who self-righteously denounce the Leviathan while eagerly embossing their names to 180 billion dollar “Republican” federal ventures which are reportedly far more liberty friendly than the Democrats 190 billion dollar versions of the same bill. Many of these Nixonians have never seen an airport flunky they didn’t want to pin a badge to, yet W, a 105 percenter, makes them look like Ron Paul. Our President stares down the Democrats with steely determination while announcing, “I’ll see your 12 expanded district offices and raise you 70 new Directors of Diversity.” Bush may not be a Washington society man, but he certainly is a government man. Barnes spins against such conclusions by attempting to contrast him with another devotee of state coercion:

“There was a thread running through FDR’s scheme: big government in Washington as the answer to America’s economic and social problems. And there’s an idea that unites Bush’s package: individuals acting responsibly, not big government in Washington is the answer.”

Let’s consider this for a moment. If big government is not Bush’s answer then why did spending grow by 33 percent during his first term? Does anyone know of a large scale program that Bush slashed? Barnes acknowledges that many conservatives desire the termination of the Department of Education, but he claims that the 43rd President has used the federal department as a means to promote testing and establish accountability within our public schools. It’s hard to not laugh after reading such blatant spin because our schools are by no means more accountable today than they were ten years ago. No Child Left Behind is a boondoggle which has enacted no substantial reform of the system. The teachers unions are as resilient as cockroaches, and, in many states, have already made a mockery of the bill’s intentions. The real question is how could Bush not have anticipated the uselessness of the aforementioned act after Ted Kennedy gave his buzzed endorsement to this “historic reform.”

George W. Bush is the greatest boon that the Libertarian Party has ever had. His fiscal profligacy has made conservatives like myself alter our self-descriptions from conservative or conservative-libertarian to libertarian alone. It’s hard to stand behind a man whose increases in discretionary spending surpass those of Lyndon Johnson. You knew the true extent of Bush’s contamination of the right when John Kerry campaigned under the sober auspices of government having to let the people know what they could and could not afford. Far worse, this “rebel-in-chief,” has enabled Washington to play “daddy” to our states and localities by allowing bureaucrats to intrude on community practices.

Barnes concedes that Bush does not meet everyone’s definition of conservative. He figures that on a 1 to 3 scale of conservatism W rates a 2 as he supports traditional values and a hawkish foreign policy but is a promoter of obese government. Yet, this is a very skewed way in which to rate conservatism. No conservative worthy of the label would ever think that officialdom promotes the public good which is exactly the view Bush endorses when he bloats the budgets of the civil service.

Furthermore, one traditional value in America is that a person can fulfill their dreams if they have talent and apply themselves. Yet these are the types of dreams quashed by pernicious federal policies like affirmative action. Despite his personal convictions which he so eloquently put forth in January of 2003, Bush came out in support for the racist practice after the Supreme Court announced their decisions in Grutter and Gratz. His turnabout was a disappointment to everyone who believes in equality. The President’s flip-flop made a liar out of him, traduced the American dream for a plurality of our people, and announced that for the foreseeable future there will be: “Political correctness today; Political correctness tomorrow; Political correctness forever.”

Bush is not a conservative in any real sense of the word. To corrupt that famous phrase by William F. Buckley, he jogs alongside history and yells, “If we hurry, we can get in another mile before sundown.” He has done more to level differences between the two major parties than any other politician in recent memory. It is becoming progressively more difficult to argue with the opinion that there’s not “a dime’s worth of difference” between them.

There was one more aspect to Barnes’ fantasy-based initiative which made one feel that the text was more PR than historical analysis. The author’s favorable comparison of Bush to Reagan was absurd and manages to offend. The current President—a glad-handing, all-things-negotiable, former cheerleader—is as close to the 40th President as Cold Duck is to Veuve Clicquot. Had Reagan led between 2000 and today, his desk would have large indentations on it from stamping a veto upon Congresses’ porcine expenditures of the public’s wealth. That Reagan was unsuccessful in stopping legislative spendthrifts of his era is more reflective of Democratic supremacy in both Houses than it was due to Bushian delusions about the efficacy of government intervention.

Once one finishes the book, they must acknowledge that Fred Barnes deserves a modicum of credit. I can’t think of any other conservative who would have the audacity to lionize a RINO leader in the way that he has. George W. Bush will be remembered in the decades to come not as a rebel, but as a politician.

Bernard Chapin is a writer in Chicago.
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Vox Populi

Norways Positive Discrimination isn't Heaven

Posted by artfldgr On January - 13 - 2006

While reading the many forums concerned with men’s issues, I came across a post that typified the current argument that many men and women are having while discussing the new employment law in Norway. In case you haven’t heard yet, a little while back Norway passed another “affirmative action” type law, or as the EU union would put it, a “positive discrimination” law. No matter what you call it a rose by any other name WOULD smell as sweet, and a pile of horse biscuits would smell just as poor.

The new law is simple, and is pretty much a form of blackmail (as most positive discrimination laws are). Basically a company with a board must by a certain time have a minimum of 40% women seated upon it or ELSE! That or else ranges from fines to the dissolution of the firm.

Now Norway is not a large country, and it has some special things going for it, so some social experiments have a clever boost there, that does not make them practical everywhere. Over the past few months there have been various conversations in the background over this subject. Most focus on speculation as what the response would be. In general the response has been pretty much absent. What’s more is that these companies have all but ignored this decree.

In general when the two camps square off on the issue the argument becomes one of business and economics more than gender politics in the pure sense. It boils down to an argument of whether companies and government should fund socialist causes. Of course the person arguing rarely realizes that socialism is what they are asking for, and are quite upset if you point it out (often citing all manor of reasons that that just couldn’t be so. this said as if a socialist country has within it none of the kinds of people she cites).

Another slant to these arguments are ones that assume some odd vague notion of how money gets into corporate hands in the first place. There is a tacit assumption (that once again they get touchy about if pointed out), that the company can just make more money, or people that are there would accept less money, or that the government can just print more money and give it out without raising our taxes to cover the spread, and those are just the more complete ideas that actually even contemplate that money comes from somewhere, and that it might be vaguely connected to what they do at the office.

There are lots of suggestions on the table. Of course no one can assemble all of them, but they usually aren’t too far from the ones you hear most about. They are either what follows or some combination of what follows.

Just put more women on the boards by adding them without removing anyone.
Remove a portion of the men from the boards and replace them with women.
Move your corporate headquarters to another country.
Sell your company to a foreign entity and cash out.
Do nothing and see if the government would really do this, then act.

The first three are expensive and a company may not recover from the action. The third being the most drastic and disruptive, and being that many of the largest firms are oil or energy concerns with majority ownership by government, moving is not easy.

The fourth is a valid option for many smaller companies whose businesses, technology, or IP are easily exportable, and whose owners and operators feel cant support or operate with a drain on their resources.

The last is the action that all the companies seem to actually have chosen. This makes sense. The herd basically dares the predator to attack it. When it does, only a few can be taken care of at a time, and so the others then have time to come into some form of compliance. True to form, they are looking for a sacrifice to let them know how things will pan out. The largest are betting on government wanting to make an example that doesn’t hurt the economy much directly, and so they are pretty safe.

Then here comes the Calvary. The EU declares that what Norway is doing is not allowed. Not because Norway is part of the EU, but because Norway agreed to internalize certain legal principals in exchange for trade rights and such (a form of blackmail perfected by the federal government in the U.S. used as a way to exert federal control over states that should be sovereign, who now through such actions are slaves).

All this is well and good and in general can turn international politics into an odd form of spectator sport, complete with side bets on outcomes. Like any good stakes game the favored don’t remain favored forever. People used to be on the radical feminists as the favored to win. This has depressed the odds in betting on other choices, and saner heads prevailing, for a long time. However, things do change. The EU stepping in and such, is just an empowered political monster (empowered to look at such things by the radical feminists), that in truth always had its own mind and always will. It chooses sides based on how popular something is, and so any ideology that comes in and starts to demand such life changes, tends to annoy a lot of people, and erode their power base. And while lack of breeding will eventually remove such ideas, way before it, and the population will become tired of having to compete with a socialist millstone around its neck.

The sad part is that with this new super hero swooping down on the scene no one really got to address the first two points. Either firing board members or expanding the boards. We forgot that it was the conceptual premise that these things can be done with minimal effect that got them into the position of considering such a drastic move. It seems that feminists are wonderful at seeing a rule change that will immediately give something they are focusing on an advantage, but when it comes to seeing or being able to have a clue as to where or what will happen, they are as blind as someone born with no eyes and no optic nerve. The ideology that gives them the strength to twaddle in everyone else’s business also blinds them from being able to predict with any accuracy the outcome of what they conceive.

As people with socialist ideals (known or not), they totally do not understand the concept of competition. I also quickly realized that one major reason that feminist leaders and the average lady feminist can’t do math. Despite all the flutter over what Larry Summers said or didn’t say, the fact is plain that when talking to, or discussing things that business should or shouldn’t do, that math is not their strong point. What happens next is also another blind spot they never do anything about.

Given all of this the EU stepping in, is at best just a delay in such an action. They will argue the premise that because the boards are not comprised of more women then there MUST be discrimination. We no longer have to prove discrimination, we only have to show by this simple rule and we know that even if cleverly undetectable, we MUST have discrimination. From here the cry goes up to “what will we do about it?”, and then the premise that you can change a rule and not change the rest of the game is ignored, so that they can simplify and get rid of annoying things in their plans. Things that really irk planners, such as intended consequences vs unintended consequences. With their eye on the prize how can anything be unintended?

The board is generally the operative entity of a larger firm. Its structure is not arbitrary, despite what people think. Qualifications are not just on book knowledge. Execution, style and how people regard other people comes into play. So while you can say that a person is qualified by their degrees, this has little bearing on whether they can actually do the job. Business leaders recognize an uncomfortable truth about business. That whatever they think or however they think things should be, they have to be the way the clients want them to be. They are stuck between a proverbial rock and a hard place, and often accepting the yolk of reduced efficiency over no output.

This is clearly evident when you travel and compare American airline companies’ vs. European or Asian airlines. While American companies know that passengers (male AND female) enjoy dealing with an attractive woman, they are forced to pretend that this truth doesn’t exist, and that they suffer no economic hardships for it. perhaps if you don’t want to believe you can trick yourself into saying it makes no difference, though then you would be hard put to explain why they don’t use more ugly people in advertising, and entertainment. The airlines from other countries that don’t do this consistently get higher points in customer satisfaction, and if you still think that this doesn’t have an effect on the bottom line then perhaps this discussion isn’t for you. Given that this is an American thing, feminists must export such business ideas to every other country or else their claim of no effect can be seen as not true. They rely on homogeneity to erase the perception of drag on economic performance (the core reason that socialism doesn’t work is it needs to be totalitarian, and then its problems become phantoms that everyone knows, but can’t see, like the emperors clothes).

If more than two companies fire their male board members you can be sure that they will create a competing firm. They will not be able to walk out and enter a market that is now flooded with upper management expertise. They will not sit still either. They will exercise their shares; depress the firm that fired them to get seed capitol. Create a new company registered in a ‘safe’ country, and then proceed to hire the top execs that before you couldn’t bribe away!!! They will then go head to head against the companies that now have a 40% level of inexperienced board members!!! Note that when the demand is so high, there is no way to assume with sanity that there are enough women who have the qualifications PAST education and such, to command such a position. Carly Fiorina was able to destroy in less than a few years a gigantic and hugely successful technology company that was often at the fore of new and clever technology. She made it a commodity printer company. There will be a whole lot of ladies who will use their new found position to experiment on the companies and peoples dimes. How else will they know what or what not to do, but to try, see what happens and go on? Meanwhile those other competitors know what to do and are not hobbled.

As far as keeping the employees to avoid that, and just increase the board… well now you just bloated a company’s management at its highest levels. What is accomplished is anathema to successful business: too many bosses, not enough workers doing work. In this scenario, those new people need infrastructure, and need salaries. The company only has a few options to choose from. Most women think that they can lower the board members salaries. Well in the last paragraph I didn’t mention golden parachutes, and that not only does the exodus cost you in a brain drain, but the company can be bankrupted by all the golden parachutes, to which it is still obligated. In this situation it’s put in the position of maintaining the ten million a year salary with bonuses, or has to kick in 100 million in golden parachute dollars (or some such thing).

So the money can’t come from the board if you intend to keep them and not operationally accomplish the first goal. Then they say, take it from the profits. Of course they don’t say how a company is supposed to prop up its stock value (what the owners think the company is worth in conjunction with the market), when now it has to stop disbursing the dividends it used to, so it can support a newly bloated board that contains people of power and not much to do! So you can’t take it from the profits without causing large valuation drops that will force layoffs.

So that means that you have to absorb the expense somehow. This means that you will have to go through the ranks and start cutting personnel. If the inevitable is a layoff, better layoff and preserve than not lay off, lose what you could save, and then layoff anyway. So the company has to find the money for each new board member, secretary, computers, electricity, etc… one board member representing a 10 million salary, actually costs more than double that to the firm! You would have to pare between 500 and 1000, $20k a year positions to do this. Of course then there are not enough workers. So you also have to trim medical before the overworked ones that remain and are fearful don’t cost too much in medical. You have to raid the pensions. Force long term employees to cash out early to save the cash. It’s an expensive process that feels like you are paying $2 to save every 5$.

All this is highly detrimental to the operation and functioning of what was before a healthy company. You can forget companies not on the top being able to absorb such change. There will be a lot of companies that will have to either work around the fines, or sell to larger (possibly foreign) concerns to avoid being taken apart. Often the workers get replaced, and management gets to preserve their structure on many levels and then continue to be able to work. It’s a forgone conclusion that to save their jobs they will decide to be swallowed up by a foreign company and operate as a subsidiary under its protective legal blanket.

All in all we have a classic feminist solution to a classical feminist non problem. of course the solution always seems to be one of “the operation was a success but the patient dies” variety, but hey, at least they are doing SOMETHING, no? I mean in the absence of your support and input, they are the people you want to make policy, decide what your kids are doing, take away your security in work, and all manner of fun adventures waiting those that decide to enter the fun house of feminist ideology.

Unless some people start doing some fancy explaining, we will shackle our companies while looking to Norway, and ignoring its special qualities (like a total population that is less than the city I live in)! Either company are engines of success as created by its founders, the markets demands, its ability to compete, and its employees efforts, or it’s just a tap to some economic maple tree for some socialist system of wealth redistribution. Already around the world fancy lawyers are sitting there trying to figure out how to put such things in place in their country. Not many people are opposing them as they think what they say will happen sounds so great. Perhaps its time that we start saying that these fantasies are not coming true. That these results promised are not what we are getting and demand either the results promised, or start refusing such solutions as our new direction.

We are playing a serious economic game here. To think our position is safe because its safe now and that represents always is not a real way to look at reality. When your king of the hill, you cant hobble yourself and expect to remain standing on the top of that hill. When we fall from that peak, the power, control, and choices that let us hobble ourselves will no longer be a choices of luxury. We will realize that this is something we can’t afford, and we will also realize that we will not be able to just climb back up on top. That we will have to hope that our children or grandchildren will be in a position to climb up again, though if we still continue to raise them this way, their lack of lofty living is a forgone conclusion.

Forcing companies to run races against competitors that are not forced to carry weights is training to lose. It’s always their answer while claiming to win. Perhaps now is a good time to see that they are more interested in power than in doing well, and being queen of a broken land is to them better than not being queen in a whole and productive nation.

So for them, it seems they prefer to rule in hell (of their creation and our tacit support), than serve in a heaven that they have to share power in.

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