Stay well. Me
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Why do positive changes generally get hi-jacked by extremists?
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How Feminism Got Hijacked
The movement that once declared “I am woman, hear me roar” can no longer define what a woman is. What happened?
By Zoe Strimpel
Bella Abzug on the 50th anniversary of women winning the vote in the United States. (Keystone/Getty Images)
“Pregnant people at much higher risk of breakthrough Covid,” The Washington Post recently declared. This was in keeping with the newspaper’s official new language policy: “If we say pregnant women, we exclude those who are transgender and nonbinary.”
“I’m not a biologist,” Ketanji Brown Jackson, the next Supreme Court justice and a formerly pregnant person herself, told her Senate inquisitors while trying to explain why she couldn’t define “woman.”
“It’s a very contested space at the moment,” explained Australian Health Secretary Brendan Murphy—a nephrologist, a doctor of medicine—when he was asked the same question at a hearing in Melbourne. “We’re happy to provide our working definition.”
The meaning of “woman,” the Labor Party’s Anneliese Dodds, in Britain, observed, “depended on context.” (Never mind that Dodds oversees the party’s women’s agenda.)
“I think people get themselves down rabbit holes on this one,” Labor’s Yvette Cooper added the next day, March 8, International Women’s Day. She declined to follow suit.
What were normal people—those who did not have any trouble defining woman, those who found talk of “pregnant people” and “contested spaces” and “rabbit holes” baffling—to make of this obvious discomfort with “women”?
Jackson, Dodds and Cooper—and, no doubt, every individual formerly or currently capable of becoming pregnant on the masthead at The Washington Post—would call themselves feminists. Champions of women’s rights. (So, too, one imagines, would Dr. Murphy.) Once upon a time, it was women like them who proudly declared, I am woman, hear me roar. It was women like them who stood up for women and womanhood.
But now these exemplars of female empowerment—educated, sophisticated, wielding enormous influence—seemed to have forgotten what “woman” meant. Or whether it was okay to say “woman.” Or whether “woman” was a dirty word.
It wasn’t simply about language. It was about how we think about and treat women. For nearly 2,500 years—from Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata” to Seneca Falls to Anita Hill to #MeToo—women had been fighting, clawing their way out of an ancient, deeply repressive, often violent misogyny. But now that they were finally on the cusp of the Promised Land, they were turning their backs on all that progress. They were erasing themselves.
How we got from there to here is the story of an unbelievable hijacking. Two, actually.
It was only five decades ago, in the 1970s, that women—mostly white, middle-class and from places like New York, Boston and north London, and fed up with being sidelined by their comrades on the left—forged a new movement. They called it Women’s Liberation.
At the start, Women’s Liberation was seen as the domain of women with money—like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem and, in the United Kingdom, Germaine Greer and Rosie Boycott. But soon it became the movement of everyday mothers, daughters, wives, working women, poor women, and women regularly beaten up by their boyfriends and husbands.
They embodied a politics of action: protesting, writing, lobbying, setting up shelters. They formed sprawling, nationwide organizations like the National Organization of Women, the National Abortion Campaign and the National Coalition Against Sexual Assault.
And at the center of their politics was an awareness of their physicality, a keen understanding that the challenges women faced were bound up with the bodies they had been born into. Exploitation at home and at work, the threat of sexual violence, unequal pay—all that was a function of their sex.
Nothing better summed up the ethos of Women’s Liberation than “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” which was published in 1973 by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. Every women’s studies major in most every college in the United States has a copy, probably tattered. It sold something like four million copies. It was a bible. That’s because “Our Bodies, Ourselves” rejected the old, Puritan discomforts with female sexuality that, feminists argued, had prevented women from achieving themselves, and empowered women by educating them about their own bodies.
By the 1980s, women had won several key victories. Equal pay was the law (if not always the reality). No-fault divorce was widespread. Abortion was safe and legal. Women were now going to college, getting mortgages, playing competitive sports and having casual sex. In the United States, they were running for president, and they were getting elected to the House and Senate in record numbers. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher was prime minister.
In the wake of all these breakthroughs, the movement began to lose steam. It contracted, then it splintered, and a vacuum opened up. Academics took over—hijacked—the cause.
There was an obvious irony: It was women’s liberationists who had successfully made women a topic worthy of academic scholarship. But now that the feminist professoriat had the luxury of not worrying about the very concrete issues the older feminists had fought for, feminist professors spent their days reflecting on their feminism—exploring, reimagining and rejecting old orthodoxies.
“As soon as the academics got hold of feminism, they ruined it,” said Kathleen Stock, a feminist philosophy professor formerly of the University of Sussex and the author of “Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism.” “It should be and is a grassroots movement about women and their interests. Academics just took it away from them.”
It wasn’t just that these academics took it upon themselves to develop fiendishly complex theories about women, dressed up in a fiendishly complex language. It was that this hyper-intellectualized feminism, by embracing this hyper-intellectualized language, excluded most women. It transformed feminism from activism to theory, from the concrete to the abstract, from a movement that sought to liberate women from the discriminations imposed on them by their sex to a school of thought that was less interested in sex than gender.
Sex, to the academics, was outdated. It was seen as crude, fleshy, obvious—the stuff of everyday women everywhere. Gender, on the other hand, was fascinating—the starting point for an endless theorizing that, with each passing paper or book or conference, became more abstruse, more removed from the daily challenges faced by ordinary women.
There was Belgian theorist Chantal Mouffe, who argued that women were mere “nodal points” in a gender “discourse.” And UCLA law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who argued that the female gender was simply a nexus of interlocking oppressions, or “intersectionality.” And Cambridge anthropologist Henrietta Moore, who insisted that the idea of woman was not a universal category, that it was limited to certain cultures, that it was smaller than previously thought. And gender theorist Judith Butler, whose seminal text “Gender Trouble” was published in 1990 and asserted that biological sex was a fiction.
The new, abstracted feminism had little interest in changing political or economic reality, as the older, grittier feminism had. It was like a fancy garment that only the well off—those who had gone to college and lived in big cities and were fluent in the new vernacular—could afford. Or knew to buy. “It’s the upper middle classes trying to control the language of people they consider to be below them,” Stock said.
Julie Bindel, the radical feminist activist and author of “Feminism for Women” put it this way: “Posh bastards have subverted everything to support their cotton wool existence, where individualism is everything, where class has been completely destroyed—and replaced by the most meaningless identities.”
For the next quarter-century, this Post-Feminist Feminism, which had, at best, an attenuated connection to real living, breathing, working, menstruating, breastfeeding women, remained mostly confined to campus. Then, in the 2010s, the transgender movement happened.
It is not an accident that the rise of gender ideology coincides with the long anticipated petering out of the feminist cause.
That’s because the rise of the one and the decline of the other are closely linked with our fetishization of identity. The fight for transgender rights over and above that of biological women’s rights, just like the war on systemic racism, jibes perfectly with our new identity politics.
Unfortunately, identity politics cannot content itself with simply defending women’s rights or LGBT rights or the rights of black people to be treated equally under the law. It must persist indefinitely in its quest for ever-narrowing identities. (The ever-expanding acronym of gay and gay-adjacent and vaguely, distantly, not really in any way connected communities, with its helpful plus sign at the end, neatly illustrates as much.) Everyone is entitled to an identity, or a plethora of identities, and each identity must be bespoke—individualized—and any attempt to rein in the pursuit of identity runs counter to the never-ending fight for inclusivity. Even if that inclusivity undermines the rights of other people. Like women.
This dynamic, with the most marginal interest trumping all others, easily took over a feminism long primed by whacky postmodern ideas like Butler’s—paving the way for its second, related hijacking. This one by biological males.
Consider the sad, telling case of Lia Thomas, the 22-year-old transgender woman who recently won the NCAA Division I 500-yard freestyle championship.
The NCAA’s decision to let Thomas compete on the women’s team was a clear signal: It was choosing transgender women over the biological women the team was created for. It was saying it agreed with all the trans activists and “feminists” that there was no real difference between trans women and biological women, especially after a year or two on testosterone blockers, a position scientists have shown to be false. It ignored the yowls of dismay from biological female athletes and their parents.
Nor did the NCAA run into much, if any, interference. The women’s groups that, not long ago, would have vociferously opposed the sidelining of women athletes were silent. That included the most prominent of them all, the National Organization of Women, which has traded in its tireless campaigning on behalf of women for advocacy for policies that “promote an anti-racist and intersectional feminist agenda.”
Nancy Hogshead Makar, an American swimmer who won three gold medals at the 1984 Olympics and is the CEO of Champion Women, which fights for equality in sports, said, “A lot of women feel very abandoned by women’s groups.”
And so Post-Feminist Feminism has morphed into a dark, strange Anti-Feminism. Anti-Feminism borrows from the language of liberation, but it’s not about liberating women. It’s about pushing women out of college sports. It’s about telling girls they aren’t lesbians or tomboys, but in fact men struggling to find themselves.
It is the madness that led a storied American newspaper to run an anti-woman (or de-woman-ed) headline—garnering roughly 1,400 comments (almost all negative) before shutting down the comments section. It is the trap that ensnared a Supreme Court nominee, who had acquitted herself with great aplomb and suddenly found herself at the end of an ideological cul de sac. To attempt an answer, any answer, to the question—Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?—would be to re-center women, biological sex, the concrete, mundane experience of ordinary, boring, bourgeois and working-class and very poor women the world over. It would be to attempt to undo the hijacking of the feminist cause and to return it to the people for whom that cause was created so many decades ago.
Returning the cause to the people for whom it was created is the only way to save it, and to mitigate the many discriminations that girls and women still face: domestic violence; the economic and psychological penalty of having babies; the manifold hurts and crimes visited upon countless women in non-Western countries simply for being women. For now, doing anything about all of that is a fantasy. First, we have to decide that words mean things. We have to insist that those meanings are important. We have to go back, again, to first principles. That is the only way forward.
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Ukraine claims a huge military win as Russian ship hit by missile
Headline: 'Huge blow': Crew evacuates 'seriously damaged' Russian flagship
The First take: Russia says the ship was evacuated due to a "fire." We wonder if the fire was caused by a missile or two?
| READ IT ALL HERE ++++++++++++++++++ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ |
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Iranian Spies Impersonated Federal Agents
Law enforcement is looking into the possibility that two individuals, Arian Taherzadeh, 40, and Haider Ali, 35, who stand accused of posing as federal agents, have ties to Iranian intelligence including to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Read More
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Pulitzer Prize Winner David Mamet: Teachers 'Are Abusing Kids Mentally and Using Sex To Do So'Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and celebrated filmmaker David Mamet said if there is no community control over the schools, then many kids will be indoctrinated and groomed by teachers who are "sexual predators," people who abuse the children "mentally" and use "sex to do so."
Mamet, a former leftist-turned-conservative, also said that not a few "teachers are inclined, typically men, because men are predators, to pedophilia," and that's why strict community control of the schools is necessary.
Mamet, whose screenwriting credits include The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Verdict, Hoffa, and The Untouchables, made his remarks on Fox's Life, Liberty & Levin, hosted by author and talk-radio host Mark Levin.
During a segment about Mamet's new best selling book, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch, Levin said, "David, I want to read something that you wrote, so the American people hear this and then I'd like you to comment further on this.
"'Margaret Sanger believed in euthanasia and sterilization of 'unfortunate' and mentally challenged, and Blacks. She was the founder of Planned Parenthood, which, like all organizations expanded its brief, (originally one of control of sub-humans) in the control of all conception. Her insights were taken up in the 60s with 'hygiene classes,' which became 'sex education,' educators holding that because perhaps the children were not taught at home, the higher orders needed to take charge, and now we have kindergartens trained in a bizarre catechism of sexual identity politics.'"
"This is what I want to discuss with you briefly," said Levin. "Sexual identity politics, five-year-olds to eight-year-olds. Florida says, no, no, no, no, we're not going to get into this. Parents are in charge of raising their babies and we are not going to use the educational bureaucracy and the various specific desires and politics of individual teachers to promote an agenda.
"And all of a sudden it's called 'Don't Say Gay,'" Levin continued. "Disney gets involved. The former CEO of Disney gets involved, Iger; corporations get involved. The governor of Maryland, a Republican, Larry Hogan denounces what DeSantis is doing. What do you make of all this?"
Mamet replied, "... If there is no community control of the schools, what we have is kids being not only indoctrinated, but groomed in a very real sense by people who are, whether they know it or not, sexual predators. Are they abusing the kids physically? No, I don't think so. But they are abusing them mentally and using sex to do so."
"This has always been the problem with education is that teachers are inclined, typically men, because men are predators, to pedophilia," he said. "And that's why there were strict community strictures about it. Thank, God."
"So this started to break down when the school said: You know what, we have to teach the kids about sex. Why? Because what if they don't do it at home?" continued Mamet. "This comes right out of Margaret Sanger and it is coming right out of the Jane Addams in the Hull House and the Community Help Movements, they originally started to help immigrants who didn't know the American ways."
"And of course, like anything which is successful, when the problem goes away, the bureaucracy increases, because they don't want their jobs to go away," he said. "So we go from we have to teach the kids to wash their hands, to we have to teach the kids what's the difference between male and female genitalia and how people have babies. Unless the idiots at home don't do it."
"Two, we have to teach the kids at kindergarten age about transsexual -- they don't even know what sex is," said Mamet. "You're putting these bizarre ideas in their head, and as the Jesuits taught us correctly, you give me a kid until he is seven, he is mine for life."
"So these kids are raised in a sick society of sexual indoctrination," he added. "They don't realize that that's an opinion, that's their life, and it is going to be awfully -- it's going to be damn near impossible to get them out. So what we need to do is take back control of the schools."
"... We've got to take back control, and the best way to do it is through school choice, and that's why the Democrats oppose it -- right?" said Mamet. "Because school choice means I get the right to raise my kids. And, as you say, the Marxists want the state to raise the kids, in fact, they insist upon it."
David Mamet, 74, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for his play, Glengarry Glen Ross. His screenplay for The Verdict, starring Paul Newman, was nominated for an Academy Award in 1982. His Amazon bio states that the "HBO film Phil Spector, starring Al Pacino and Helen Mirren, aired in 2013 and earned [Mamet] two Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Writing and Outstanding Directing. He was co-creator and executive producer of the CBS television show The Unit and is a founding member of the Atlantic Theater Company."
Mamet is married and has four children.
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These are my updated market thoughts:
Investors already know interest rates are going higher as is inflation. They don't know how high in both cases.
Second, some of this, therefore, has already been discounted.
Third, investors know if interest rates and inflation are going higher then they already know it will reflect itself in lower corporate earnings. Again this is already somewhat discounted.
Fourth, what investors do not know is which companies will be able to maintain their margins, either by cutting costs, raising prices or doing more business. These three factors are more difficult to determine and therefore, to discount.
Finally, the Fed has a difficult road ahead because the reduction of their own balance sheet and rise in interests could cause a recession and no one can predict how severe, how long or if The Fed can maneuver and escape causing a recession. History is against a Fed soft landing.
That said, I believe, even if there is a recession looming on the horizon, the economy, corporation balance sheets and consumers are in better shape financially to cope and this is more unusual than generally is the case.
That still leaves the market coping with Putin and Ukraine uncertainties, the potential Biden could take a physical turn for the worse and a multitude of unknowns could come out of left field, as is always the case. Thus, I believe the pressure on the market will remain and the trend for the next 2 quarters for stocks will , at the very least, be choppy and the trend for stocks more likely to go moderately lower (10%) than rise.
I still favor the energy, healthcare, discretionary consumer sectors and companies who can withstand wage increase demands, maintain strong balance sheets and continue to throw off free cash. I have been raising a little cash and am more a sideline observer
Again, having said all that, what do I know.
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Jewish Holidays often bring out the worst in mankind:
It’s time to rethink the Zionist dream - opinion
There is a word for violent, unprovoked attacks against innocent Jews going about their ordinary lives: pogrom.
By Rabbi WARREN GOLDSTEIN, APRIL 14, 2022
The recent murderous attacks in Tel Aviv, Beersheba and Bnei Brak were not acts of terrorism designed to achieve a specific political objective. These attacks had no other objective than to murder Jews.
The jubilant celebrations in the streets of Gaza made it clear that this objective had been achieved. There were no clear political demands that came with these attacks, no calls for negotiations or for a Palestinian state; only the general objective issued in countless public statements and enshrined in the Hamas charter: the eradication of the Jewish state and the elimination of Jews from every inch of Israel.
There is a word for violent, unprovoked attacks against innocent Jews going about their ordinary lives: pogrom. To be clear, the situation couldn’t be more different from late 19th-century Russia, when Jews relied on the czar’s good graces for protection. Today, we can defend ourselves, thank God. CONTINUE
WATCH: Israeli Laser Weapon Zaps Threats Out of the Sky!
Check out this amazing new technology, which was developed to protect the citizens of Israel.
Antisemitic flyers target LA Jews on Passover
By World Israel News Staff, 4/17/22
Residents of heavily Jewish neighborhoods in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills woke up on Saturday morning — the first day of the Passover holiday — to antisemitic flyers on their doorsteps that blamed the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine on Jews.
“Every single aspect of the Ukraine-Russia war is Jewish,” the flyer begins, accompanied by a list of Ukrainian and Russian government officials who are allegedly Jewish or of Jewish heritage. CONTINUE
‘Deadly Screeds Against Jews’ Peddled by Students at NY Law School
By JNS.org 3/17/22
Sacha Roytman Dratwa, CEO of the Combat Antisemitism Movement. said “this is no mere academic matter, but a matter of the safety and security of all Jews whose fellow students read this hate and incitement.”
Eleven student groups signed a statement by the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at New York University School of Law that voiced support for Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israelis and touted anti-Israel conspiracy theories, reported The Washington Free Beacon.
“The Zionist grip on the media is omnipresent,” said the statement, dated Monday. CONTINUE
Iran moves nuclear workshop to safer site after ‘sabotage attacks’ by Israel
Tehran intensifies security measures for nuclear equipment after accusing Israel of sabotage attacks.
By Associated Press, 4/18/22
Iran has confirmed it relocated a centrifuge facility to its underground Natanz nuclear site, state media reported, days after the U.N. atomic watchdog said it installed surveillance cameras to monitor the new workshop at Tehran’s request.
The late Saturday report by the official IRNA news agency comes as diplomatic efforts to restore Iran’s tattered nuclear deal appear stalled. CONTINUE
| China's 'Zero Covid' Has Become Xi's Nemesis | |||||||||
| by Niall Ferguson via Bloomberg Beijing oversold its surveillance-based system of disease control and underestimated the shape-shifting virus. The result is an economic mess — though probably not a political crisis. +++
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Three Ways to Fix America
Are we just going to give up on the greatest country in the history of the world? Or are we going to fight for freedom and a thriving future? For Dave Rubin, the author of Don’t Burn This Country, the answer is obvious. And, even better, he has a battle plan.
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