Feminist Follies

Posted on April 16, 2015 by Martin van Creveld

Fifty-two years have passed since Betty Friedan with her book, The Feminine Mystique, jump-started the great feminist revolt against oppression, discrimination, and any other number of horrible things those bad, bad, creatures known as men have been doing to poor deluded women. Looking back, has women’s situation improved? Or has it deteriorated? Here are some of the facts:

* Today as ever, the higher one climbs on the slippery pole of power, richness and fame the fewer women one meets. Only about five percent of the world’s countries have female presidents or prime ministers. From the late Ms. Gandhi down, even many of those got their jobs mainly because they were the relatives of male ones. The percentage of top level female executives in Fortune 500 companies is considerably smaller still. The highest-paid female executive in America is Marillyn Rothblatt of United Therapeutics Corporation, ranks 20^th on the relevant Fortune Magazine list. Interestingly enough, “she” was born a man.

* About two thirds of all working women in advanced countries are still employed in a small number of vast, low-paid, female ghettoes where there are few if any men: whether as teachers, nurses, social workers, communicators, administrators—the last two, euphemisms for what used to be called secretaries—or bank- and supermarket cashiers. As if to add insult to injury, many of those who head the relevant professional associations are men. A phenomenon sufficiently common to have acquired a name, “the glass elevator”.

* Starting as far back as the Roman Empire, and other things (beauty, sex appeal, education, etc.) equal, a female slave, owing to her lesser ability to do hard labor, has always been assessed at about two thirds of the price of a male one. In today’s developed countries, that is almost exactly the rate of female to male earnings.

* Most women, by joining the labor force, have failed to improve either their own economic situation or that of their families. That is because, as Senator (Massachusetts, D.) Elizabeth Warren in The Two Income Trap (2003) has shown, working mothers inevitably incur extra expenses. Such as an additional car; clothing; help in taking care of the household; and all kinds of people and organizations to look after the children either in the afternoon or during the holidays. As a result, and taking inflation into account, in many, perhaps most, cases their discretionary income, i.e. that part of it they are free to spend as they like, is actually less than it used to be.

* Another reason why going to work has failed to improve the economic situation of many, perhaps most, women is taxation. First, imagine a—much simplified, to be sure—situation where two women decide not to mind their own children. Instead they swap them and pay each other for doing what has to be done. As a result, both will start having to pay taxes. Second, many countries do not allow spouses to file separately. As a result, two incomes may well move a family into a higher tax bracket. Either way, the only winners are the statistics on one hand and that insatiable beast, the treasury, on the other. No wonder each time more women start working the lords of the latter boast of it as a feather in their cap.

* Interestingly enough, almost all of those who take the place of working women in any of the above capacities are themselves women. In other words, for every “successful” woman there are now several others whose “careers” consist of doing the kinds of work she no longer wants; such as cleaning, laundering, serving food, cooking, looking after children, and the like. Other women, mainly elderly family members, do the same work without pay. Either way, feminism has failed to liberate women from housework and childcare. Instead, what has happened is that “successful” women are exploiting less successful ones to an extent that has no precedent in history.

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* Before World War II, it was often thought that the ability of most married women not to work was “God’s gift” to them. Now, since most young men can no longer support a family on their own, most women have to work outside the home whether they want to or not. Losing their freedom, they have been turned into wage slaves” just as their fathers, brothers, husbands and sons are. To say nothing about the famous “double burden;” which has resulted in any number of books that advise women how to manage their time to appearing on the best-seller lists.

* It is true that women are making gains in education. However, that is primarily a reflection of inflation in the field. As the number of students grew, the social prestige diplomas and degrees conferred on their holders went down. Especially since the start of the 2008 economic crisis, a situation has been created where a college education no longer necessarily translates into a good job. Meanwhile, thanks to their stronger bodies, blue collar men with considerably fewer years of school behind them can often make as much or more money as “pink collar” women who do have such an education. That indeed is one reason why more boys than girls are dropping out of school. Furthermore, at the highest levels men still dominate, and by a huge margin. Since Marie Currie early in the twentieth century there has not been one female scientist whose name has turned into a household word.

* Today as ever, the most “successful” women tend to be childless or, at any rate, have far fewer children than the rest. So much do they seem to hate themselves that they are waging war on their own genes! Many other “successful” women are postponing childbirth until it is too late. Indeed it could be argued that the greatest beneficiaries of the feminist revolution are not women, who have to fork out and undergo all kinds of unpleasant and often unsuccessful procedures, but adoption agencies on one hand and fertility clinics on the other.

* As the most cursory look at women’s magazines and department stores will confirm, feminist attempts to convince women to stop pandering to men by dropping high heels, cosmetic surgery, makeup, and every other kind of beauty aid supposedly forced on them by men have been a total failure. Women undergoing cosmetic surgery, always at the cost of money as well as some pain and suffering, also outnumber men by a huge margin. Now as ever, the Biblical saying applies: “unto your man your desire and he shall rule you” (Genesis 3.16).

* Women’s attempts to make a significant impact on the military have been a miserable failure. Rather, what we got is a host of uniformed female medical personnel, public relations advisers, “organization experts” (who needs those?) and secretaries. As the fact that only about 2.5 percent of the casualties in America’s “war on terror” have been women shows, female combat soldiers remain as rare as water in the Sahara. Where there are bullets there are no women, and where there are women there are no bullets. And fortunately so; in all countries that tried to train women to male standards without exception, the outcome has been a very large number of injuries, some of them incapacitating.

* Finally, the first period in history when large numbers of women in Western countries started living longer than men was the early nineteenth century; precisely the period when the ideal of the non-working, stay-at-home woman was born. In both the US and Britain, the greatest gap in life expectancy between people of both sexes prevailed around 1975. Since then, as more and more women entered the labor force and took up what was long seen as a typical male activity, i.e. smoking, it has been cut by almost half. Feminism, in other words, is literally killing women.

Women, it is claimed, are as intelligent and as able to form their own opinions as men are. Therefore, how countless women around the world allow themselves to be led by the nose by a relatively small coterie of extreme feminists is by no means clear. But who cares? Certainly not I. If women, other than my wife of course, want to ruin their lives by trying to emulate men and become second-rate men, who am I to stand in their way?

Reining in the Macho

Posted on December 10, 2014 by Martin van Creveld

In a recent speech, Swedish foreign minister Margot Wallström expressed the hope that, by adopting a “feminist foreign policy, Sweden would help rein in Mr. Putin’s “macho aggression.” It is, however, much more likely that the opposite will happen. Directly or indirectly, Putin’s macho aggression will put an end to feminism. In Sweden and abroad, the least it will do is to prevent it from spreading its tentacles more than it already Feminism is, and always has been, a peacetime luxury. Come war, or even the threat of war, and it disappears like raindrops off the back of a duck.

There are several reasons for this. It is not for nothing that, with some rare exceptions most of which merely prove the rule, women have never worn armor or uniform. Physically they are just not suitable for the task. In terms of strength (especially upper-body strength), robustness, aerobic capacity, running speed, endurance, and the ability to throw things only a few of the strongest women can keep up even with the weakest of men. To this must be added the fact that, for obvious anatomical reasons, men’s bodies are much better adapted for leading rough, filthy, unwashed lives in the field.

Here and there attempts have been made to ignore these facts by making women train as hard as men do. The outcome has been a rate of injuries much higher than that which men undergoing similar training sustained. Quite some of the injuries damaged the women’s ability to have children more or less permanently. A few proved deadly.

Partly as a result of this weakness, partly because somebody must look after hearth and children (or else waging war would be pointless to begin with), historically whenever war broke out women have remained at home. Or, else, in case the enemy was near and the opportunity still offered itself, they were evacuated as were the Athenian women in front of the Persian invasion. Staying at home, the last thing they had on their minds was feminism, here understood—and the number of different definitions is as large as, if not greater than, that of feminists—to mean the idea that women should be independent of men.

Again, there are a number of reasons for this. First, women were kept too busy doing all kinds of heavy, dirty, and sometimes dangerous work men normally do to get all kinds of ideas into their heads. Second, with the enemy ante portas even the dullest, man-hating women understood well enough that only men could protect them against conquest, subjugation, and rape (sometimes said, in my view wrongly, to be “a fate worse than death”). Third, with the men gone to the front, some never to return, women did much as they pleased in any case.

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Surely it is no accident that Sparta, the most militaristic Greek city-state of all, was also the one where women enjoyed greater freedom and more rights than in any other. Indeed this freedom and those rights may not have been altogether unconnected to the famous Spartan woman order to her son, “come back with your shield of on it.” After all, the more Spartan men were killed in action the richer Spartan women became. Aristotle claims that women ended up by owning most of Sparta’s land. Enough said.

Too, the inverse link between the occurrence of war on one hand and the spread of feminism on the other has other implications. It helps explain why women apparently enjoyed greater rights in the large, massive Hellenistic monarchies than they did during the classical period when all city-states were constantly fighting all the rest. It also explains why the shift from republic to empire was accompanied by an improvement in the status of Roman women. It is no accident that Sweden, as perhaps the world’s leading feminist state, has not engaged in even one war for the last two hundred years.

And the future? Nobody knows. Currently, in spite of intensive efforts to recruit more, only about five percent of Sweden’s uniformed personnel are female. That is considerably less than is the case in the U.K (9 percent), Russia (said to be 10 percent, though the real number may be smaller), and the U.S (15-6 percent). It is much less than the Israeli figure which, counting conscripts only, stands around 25-30 percent. Even some countries where feminism is notoriously weak, such as China (7.5 percent) have more women in their armed forces than Sweden does. From Ms. Wallström down, Swedish women seem to be more inclined to claim their “equality” and “rights” than to defend their country, and of course the rights themselves, weapon in hand, against a “macho” enemy.

Such being the case, not a person in the world, perhaps not even Ms. Wallström herself, knows what a feminist foreign policy could mean. In her speech, all she did was utter some vague phrases about the need to adopt a “soft” foreign policy and put more women in charge of it. Whether doing so will greatly impress Mr. Putin with his 850,000 active troops, ballistic missiles capable of turning much of the world into a radioactive desert, and, last not least, black judo belt, is, to say the least, a little doubtful.

Personally I can only imagine one kind of Swedish feminist foreign policy: it is called appeasement. Not to use less polite terms. I wish it much success.

Guest Article by Michael Klonovsky

Posted on November 26, 2014 by Martin van Creveld

Arrows and Maxims

Michel Klonovsky*

One of the achievements of modern art has been to provide even coprophils with a proper aesthetic environment.

What is worse: communication or ex-communication?

When enough zealots subscribe to it, democracy may well turn totalitarian.

The height of hypocrisy; the idea that in every child there is a Mozart or an Einstein.

Had it not been for the numerous men who cooperate with it, feminism would have been limited to case studies in psychology textbooks.

Where there is no enemy, the pariah is needed to create unity.

Only when there are no elites does the term “elite” turn into a swearword.

To be a “politically engaged” artist means dreaming of many engagements.

The more just the war, the more numerous the dead civilians.

One handout to a beggar is worth more than twenty volumes on the origins of poverty.

The cathedrals of feminism are the abortion clinics.

Never do the eyes of the devil shine as much as when he hears the words: liberty, equality, fraternity.

Modern dialectics; a woman works longer and longer hours so as to be able to afford proper child care.

Real cowardice starts at a certain age.

The more committed to an ideology a historian is, the more likely he is to claim his works are “scientific.”

Five Frenchmen, five opinions, Five Jews, ten opinions. Five Germans, one opinion.

No blue-blooded family, however degenerate, could have produced the idiots one finds in any parliament.

I like feminism. It brings good news. Its emergence means that society’s most important problems have been solved.

When it comes to trivia shows, the well-educated fail miserably.

How can one respect a boss who sits behind a computer?

A so-called “creative” person may be recognized by the fact that he has never invented anything.

Chess, considered as a test for the intellect, must be unimportant; or else surely there would have been more female grand-masters.

Gender-equality rests on the idea that one can climb the sea and swim the mountains.

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Not to believe in the effectiveness of prayer, but to cast one’s ballot in elections, does not exactly point to realism.

What I would love to read: a study of the way Greens behave under a dictatorship.

Professors are often blinded by their own theories.

When a woman says no, says the macho, what she means is yes. When a woman says no, say the feminists, what she means is no. Both are right. When a woman says no she may mean either yes or no.

To denounce racial discrimination is part and parcel of a civilized society; to deny the differences between races, sheer hypocrisy.

Literary criticism: the parasite needs the tree.

One outcome of the “sexual revolution” has been to turn Western men and women into slaves of their sexual drives.

Populism is the democrats’ mistrust of democracy.

The height of absurdity: to discuss the limits of freedom of expression within those limits.

As Jonathan Swift wrote, a genius may be recognized by the fact that all the idiots unite against him. Example: Steve Jobs.

Whoever so much as mentions political correctness immediately becomes its accomplice.

My generation was the last which had to discover the secrets of sexuality on its own. Nowadays to have sex is to imitate pornographic actors on screen.

When feminists reach the point where they can no longer find plausible examples of discrimination in their own countries they turn to Africa or else to the ancient world.

Thank God it was good bourgeois scholars who re-discovered classical antiquity. One shudders to think what would have happened if the field had been left to left-wing “social scientists” or to female professors of gender studies.

So high is the quality of modern plastic art that none of its creators has ever produced a single failed work.

Today it is not the Pope who claims to be infallible, it is his opponents

To be a socialist means preferring the unfreedom of the many to the freedom of a few.

Wherever right and left are said to have been abolished, it is the left that rules.

“Adept at multitasking” is what we call those who are incapable of solving an equation or following the thought of a philosopher.

What a wonderful feeling, to despise a person accused of despising others!

He would like to become immortal. She would be content with a nice home of her own.

The nice thing about dying is not having to cope with future technology.

No tourist has ever stopped to admire a building erected by a socialist, an environmentalist, or a feminist.

* Michael Klonovsky is an author and journalists who works for Focus magazine in Munich. The above is a selection from his book, Aphorisms (in German).