Posted on 06/01/2003 11:12:35 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
Feminism is about choice.
Feminism is actually about having your choices made for you. Feminism is nothing more than a gender-based form of fascism, attempting to control the behavior of individuals through government fiat. Fortunately, feminists have not been able to amass the power required to send unrepentant males and recalcitrant gender-traitors to the pink gulag. In the words of feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir: "No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such choice, too many women will make that one."
The reason that women have accomplished very little of note throughout history is primarily due to male oppression.
There is an element of truth to this, as the vast majority of women were denied access to the higher levels of education, then again, so were most men. However, it is also true that those women who did obtain excellent educations often chose to engage in light intellectual amusements instead of contributing anything of significance to the arts or sciences. There was nothing to stop the educated hetaerae of Greece from writing a "Metaphysics" or a "Republic," nor anything preventing the mistresses of the famed Parisian salons from compiling, like Diderot, their own "Encyclopedia"; the fact remains they did not.
But the most damning argument against this myth is the appalling behavior of the leading female pseudo-intellectuals over the past 30 years. Instead of taking advantage of their intellectual freedom and unprecedented access to education, the feminist vanguard has embraced an anti-intellectual dogmatism that imprisons the current generation of young women in the academic convent of Women's Studies, robbing them of both foundational knowledge and the capacity for rational linear thought, thus ensuring that this generation, like its foremothers, will also fail to accomplish anything worthy of historical regard.
Women entering the work force has been good for America.
The entry of women into the work force accomplished only one thing. It significantly lowered wages by doubling the size of the work force. According to the iron law of supply and demand, increasing the supply of X while demand remains constant means that the price of X will fall. The primary impact of women entering the work force in quantity has been to lower the price of labor so that two people must now work in order to maintain a household instead of one, as before.
While America does realize the benefit of the contributions of women whose talents might have otherwise been wasted, it pays a heavy price in terms of children who are abandoned to be raised by day-care centers, the state schools and television. And those many women who would like to make the choice to remain home with their children cannot, since their husband can't earn enough money to support a family alone due to his wages having been lowered because of the increased supply of labor.
Anything men can do, women can do better.
This myth raises the question of how the nefarious Patriarchy could possibly have come to be established in the first place. Were the women of yore less intelligent, less aware, or otherwise less able than their modern counterparts? A lovely example of nonlinear fifth-stage thinking.
The Sexual Revolution liberated women.
It actually freed men from the responsibilities that traditionally accompanied access to sex. Whereas a man once needed to all but promise marriage before taking a lover, he now can freely expect a woman to satisfy his desires on the third date, if not the first. The real revolution was the wholesale transference of power in the male-female dynamic from the women to the men, and now any reasonably handsome young man can effortlessly rack up more sexual conquests in four years of college than did the legendary Casanova in a lifetime.
A woman has a right to control her own body.
This baseless assumption flies in the face of hundreds of long-standing American laws. A woman can be jailed for putting certain unapproved chemicals into her body, for failing to put certain required chemicals in her body (military vaccinations), for selling portions of her body – be it on a temporary or permanent basis – or for displaying her body in public in an unapproved manner. The fact that some of these laws are, in my opinion, ill-founded, does not matter; they still serve to demonstrate the fallacy of this particular pro-abortion gynomyth.
Workers must, in the nature of a free market, produce more value for their employers than they're paid. So, outside of government employment and charity work, women entering the workforce would logically lead to more production and a more rapidly expanding economy. That the large-scale entry of women to the workforce was in part dictated by feminist exhortation and in part by government devaluation of the currency is largely irrelevant to this effect.
The only counter-proposition to this line of reasoning would be that the costs imposed on families by the two-income pattern exceed the gains from the second income. However, if that were the case, I can't see why women would go to work at all; it would be a losing proposition.
All the same, an incisive and thought-provoking article.
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
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