Feminism: dissecting concepts and picking and choosing

**Lady Catherine** · 27th-April-2011

No. I am not promoting feminism wholesale and I am not suggesting that we work with feminists. The arguments in that thread were convincing. The purpose of this thread is to criticize feminism on an intellectual level and on another note address ways we can empower humanity by also empowering men, instead of solely women.
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I think Percy says something I agree with best:

Quote from from the thread Chasing Concepts!

This under the heading "What makes a man Effeminate"?

The initial 'constructive purpose' is (to my mind) a good one but undermined by a question that asks us to look in the wrong direction.

Bugger what makes a man effeminate. What makes him a Man, is more to the point. There are a thousand directions to avoid going toward and effeminacy is merely one.

What makes a man, a man?

I have no predetermined template in my mind as to what a man is - or 'should' be. Feminazis tell us continually what a man 'should be'. Women, from mothers moments after giving birth, are constantly telling men how and who and what they 'should' be. To my mind, if he is a man, he can be whatever he damned well chooses and if he wants to don a dress and lippy, that's his friggin' business. It might even be his 'nature'.

I have met Great Men in my time. Worked with great men. They were all different. One great man I met was a Colonel, a bemedalled warrior, a leader of men, whose leadership and Character was so strong that he could wear a cocktail dress to a Dining-In night in the Mess and no-one turned a hair.

Was he effeminate? I doubt anyone here would say it to his face and walk off without a broken nose.

What we need is to find, discuss, analyse, men who rise above mere gender 'models' to seek higher order characteristics, issues of Character. Issues of Humanity.

The effeminate man who understands and revers Truth and Justice, sweat and tears to achieve for Good, is far more of a Man than the weak rager who cannot even control his thoughts let alone his mouth.

Why?

Because Truth and Justice and sweat and tears to achieve for Good is a common acquisition / aspiration for masculine men and feminine women and all in between - if they care to rise to it.
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This person or that may have a 'model' for 'effeminate traits', but that is their personal, small, petty issue and I have no need for it to become a 'model' for anyone else, let alone for the MRM.

The MRM seeks Men's Rights.

To my mind, Men's Rights are Everygoddamnedbody's Rights.

I am a Man. I seek no special rights for men. I seek Truth and Justice and heavenstoBetsy, strighforward Equality of all adults before the Law.

I seek Freedom to be whoever I friggin' choose to be, rather than conform to what someone else chooses for me.

The choice that a fully functioning, adult man usually wants to make, but all too often is cajoled out of, is discovering and honouring his own deep nature - who he is - and the determining of who is is to grow into tomorrow.

I'll admit that I am still a Betty Friedan fan(The Feminine Mystique, is pretty inspiring ^^

, despite becoming a non-feminist, and when I hear about the feminist movement of the 60's and 70's, I think the femnist movement was really attempting to make positive changes to lives of women who wanted more than to be a house-wife. But like everything, things get tainted with hyperbole and fanatical hatred, and has turned into a reverse of the thing they claim to oppose. I have also learned many things since I have joined this board, and there are other things I plainly disagree with. I agree that men are getting the shaft in legal matters, but I also think that men haven't had a thing that allows them to break beyond stereotypes. Some of what Percy mentions are parts of feminist ideology like this gem:

I seek Freedom to be whoever I friggin' choose to be, rather than conform to what someone else chooses for me.

Feminism is supposed to be all about breaking stereotypes about gender. But I also note that feminism does not do this. Feminism also makes sexist conclusions about cisgendered men's roles. My father is a cisgendered heterosexual man and is probably one of the most mellow and awesome guys I know.(I admit that I have a tight relationship with my father).

**Richard** · 27th-April-2011

Many of the leading 1960 and 1970's feminists (such as Nancy Friday) turned their back on feminism which began from the 1990s. If you have not read Nancy Friday's "The Power of Beauty", get it. She argues that feminism from the 1990s turned from being a liberation ideology to a repressive one, and her excellent book attacks feminism on how it has become a centralised ideology with orders coming from what she calls "feminist HQ".

I guess you can say Friday is to the feminism movement what Trotsky was to Bolshevik russia

**christianj** · 27th-April-2011

Friedan was a lunatic as well as a spychotic. Read the book released by it's husband for more truthes you ignore..

The most totemic book of the 1970s wave of feminism, The Feminist Mystique, by Betty Friedan, was written 50 years ago and published in 1963. It became the paradigm of the dubious methodologies and victimologies still being marketed on university campuses under the brand ''feminist''. Friedan was not a scholar; she was a journalist. She was not oppressed; she was privileged. She was not rigorously impartial; she was a hardline leftist. She was not honest, and sought to cover up her early work for the largest Communist-led union in America. She also mined the work of Simone de Beauvoir for her book but gave no credit. Above all, Friedan was a navel gazer. Her feminism was about middle-class, middle-brow white women.

Link..

Change to thinking paradigm required..

David Horowitz has said, “Her whole life is a lie.”

**Lady Catherine** · 27th-April-2011

Meh, I've read Horowitz's book and I have read some other criticisms from both Stephanie Coontz and Joanne Meyerowitz. I agree with some of the criticisms and other ones I have issues with. Stirring the Pot by Coontz was an interesting way to look at the Feminine Mystique(which I own both).

Was she leftist? Yes. Was her book racist? Arguably. Did she lie? Probably.

**Capt. Kirk** · 29th-April-2011

I think the greatest failure - or even crime - of feminism is this preposterous goal of 'sameness': that men and women should be virtually indistinguishable from each other in society. It's been labeled 'equality', and it started with equal opportunity, but now it's become this insane, fanatical pursuit of erasing all the differences between genders, in the sense that whenever it's discovered that man have/do something that women have/do to a lesser degree, well we just have to eradicate that difference completely! First of all, the goal itself is a ruse, because it's pretty clear that the goals of many feminists are not equality, but rather special privileges and advantages for women, because it's nearly always a matter of bringing the women 'up' even if that means tearing the men down. But what's just as bad is that seemingly everything that is considered traditionally feminine has been cast into the pit, because it's 'demeaning', and so what's left is for women to act and be like men! Meanwhile, men are getting more feminine and passive, women are getting more masculine and aggressive - often is seems the only remaining difference is the bits between their legs.

Why on God's green earth would anyone want men and women to be the same?!? What is with this obsession of *forcing* everything to be completely level? I for one an very glad of the differences between genders. There's a Yin/Yang symmetry to the natural male-female dynamic, whether you are religious or pagan it's pretty obvious that it makes sense (unless of course you are gay, but then again you still have to cop to the fact that you would not be here if not for the natural order). Absent politics and agendas, there's a natural fit, and it is NOT characterized by the two parts being identical. I really wish that we could stop this madness somehow.

**shaazam** · 29th-April-2011

feminitism is a self serving heap of specious casuistry designed to lever earned advantage from men either legally eg concocted anti discrimination or by just lies and accusations eg rape Hofstra and Duke !

manginas are the bondsmen of the feminits and are parallel to the commissars of the defunct USSR and as the Kapos in the extermination camps of the Nazis - each gave up their morals for a short term advantage

feminitism is a lie and should not be addressed with intellect rather by a howling derision eg that wimyn have been suppressed by men for 10 000 years etc and so they are not going to take it anymore

notice the ideology developed in the western societies where wimyn were put upon a pedestals by foolish men- the overweening supplicating attitude towards wimyn is reflected in western music which are tantamount to hymns to demi God wimyn -

"you are my special angel" etc these wimyn are by and large bisexual and scorn men but tolerate them to the extent they can access his assets and earning potential but once wimyn perceive his potential has been exploited to the max the next step for butthead is him frogmarched to wimyn's star chamber aka the Family Court for a thorough shake down and expatriation to peonage-ville !typically sans his kids to whom thereafter cupcake denies access