Natasha Walter spoke with dismay of the young women stigmatised as prudes for recoiling from unwholesome sexual practices. And those of us who campaigned hard for women not to be ranked by appearance or sexual availability, feel only sadness when a clutch of undressed, shrieking drunks staggers down the street in shoes designed to cripple. The Pill has, since the Sixties, brought unprecedented freedoms, but the equality of opportunity to behave badly was not on the gender agenda.
Rather we had in mind the liberation of men and women alike ”“ for defining women primarily by their sexuality is limiting for males too ”“ by a new set of values that would respect and benefit from women’s intellect and achievements. It got off to a good start: there were more female undergraduates, often outperforming their male counterparts. And then it simply fizzled out. Women in Britain were not only largely excluded from the boardroom, the Cabinet, the judiciary, the power lists, those few who made it through the glass ceiling were examined minutely for signs of physical imperfection, often by a press still dominated by male editors.
Even now, barely a week passes without an account of a woman humiliated in the workplace. And yet, there are brilliant women scientists, entrepreneurs, artists in all media, academics who are quietly getting on with their innovative work, probably raising children with the other hand. It’s just that they are invisible and, often, inaudible.
… it’s almost like someone cut the rope to a deeper moral anchor. Hmmm… how’s that secularization of culture working out?
The rise of feminism is filled with unintended consequences – like their radical abortion advocacy leading to the rise of sex selective abortions. But it is their antipathy towards motherhood that made it a necessarily finite time proposition.
[blockquote]those few who made it through the glass ceiling were examined minutely for signs of physical imperfection, often by a press still dominated by male editors.[/blockquote]
Still victims after all these years.
[blockquote]If the erosion of feminism happened on Labour’s watch, imagine its fate under a Conservative government.[/blockquote]
Whatever happened to “I am woman, hear me roar?”
Don’t get me started on how the MSM and Madison Avenue portray men. If women are unfairly portrayed as sex objects, men are portrayed as irrelevant, stupid, adolescent, beer drinking, sports cultists controlled by women.
“men are portrayed as irrelevant, stupid, adolescent, beer drinking, sports cultists controlled by women.”
if you look closely, you’ll notice that it’s always white men who are so portrayed – the advertisers are too afraid of Al Sharpton or La Raza to do it any different. as Dennis Miller likes to say, we’re everyone’s (word that starts with a).
Feminism seems to these eyes to have always suffered from two fatal flaws:
1. It cannot seem to avoid the overwhelming temptation to combine the deadly sins of pride, anger and envy into self-pity, which it then preaches as a virtue.
2. It doesn’t understand liberty, which as Lord Acton pointed out, is not license to do as you wish, but freedom to do as you ought.
Feminism’s embrace of the sexual revolution constitutes one of the great unintended betrayals in human history. The sexual revolution has been an unmitigated disaster of incalculable cost that can boast three achievements: it has turned men into cads, women into trollops, and children into corpses. Articles like this one are all the sadder, then, as they sound like the junkie lamenting, not that he got addicted, but that the withdrawal pangs hurt. As one famous Marxist put it, “when will they ever learn?”
The sexual revolution, which feminism embraced has used as one of it’s tenets, has led to women and children increasingly living below the poverty line with men being less and less involved.
Daniel Muth, you might be interested in this excellent article from First Things, Her Choice, Her Problem: How Abortion Empowers Men by Richard Stith. From the article:
Concur with the above.
Also, at some points Natasha Walter seems to be defining “feminism” as meaning “anything which sounds good for women”.
If I am allowed to define communism any way I like, I will quickly make most of society into “communists”, but that doesn’t mean anything!
I don’t remember where I heard this but it was said that feminism only gained women the right to go “dutch treat” when eating out.