The Feminist Road To Totalitarianism

     Aidan Rankin

I.  Compulsory Niceness And The Failure of Nerve

The unquestioned acceptance of feminist goals has become almost universal in European political and intellectual life.   That is not to say that the populations of European nations have been converted to feminism en masse.  On the contrary, feminism and feminists themselves are probably more objects of revulsion and ridicule than ever before.  That revulsion and ridicule is now accentuated by fear.  Fear stems from an awareness of the power that feminist ideology exerts over academics, educators, policy-makers and the media, over those who make intimate decisions about other people’s lives, such as doctors and social workers, or those who interpret and enforce the law.  It explains the tendency of institutions, including highly traditional institutions, to give in to feminism and become vehicles for dogmatic social engineering.  ‘I am a feminist,’ protests the conservative commentator.  ‘I am not a sexist,’ the Anglican traditionalist assures his critics.  ‘Of course “equal opportunity” is a good thing,’ declares the Infantry officer, defensively.  Such protestations effectively neutralise moral arguments for the traditional family, theological arguments against the ordination of women, or the case for the all-male regiment, with the pride, stability and  esprit de corps that it engenders.  Thus important and valuable arguments are being lost before they even begin.  This has nothing to do with whether they are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’.  For each of the arguments I have listed raises distinctive questions, moral, social and in one case theological.  They can be resolved, therefore, only as individual problems on a case-by-case basis, not in the context of an abstract, all-embracing doctrine of ‘equality’.   But as soon as the word ‘equality’ is mentioned, feminism’s opponents suffer a failure of nerve.

That failure of nerve has several powerful cultural and political causes.  One of these is feminism’s manipulation of the ideal of male chivalry, although they decry it as chauvinistic and outdated.   At a personal level, feminists play shamelessly upon a man’s wish, both natural and nurtured, to treat women with politeness and respect, and to concede graciously to their interests or requirements.  The impotence of many men in authority when confronted with feminist demands for change stems from those very traditions of male courtesy which feminists disparage.  When a man of tolerant disposition is browbeaten into believing that feminists ‘represent’ all women, and that failure to ‘include’ women or give them preferment over other men is hurtful or downright cruel, then he is more or less destined to surrender.   This is why many of feminism’s most effective opponents have been women rather than men.  They know from their experiences and observations that feminist ideology is laughably out of tune with most women’s priorities and needs.  Unfettered by male chivalry, they can opposition clearly and logically, or give vent to their anger without constraint.^[1]

The significance of the abuse of chivalry should not be underestimated.  It informs decisions made every day in business, politics, the media and institutions of learning at all levels.     In personal terms, therefore, feminists profit from the survival of traditional patterns of behaviour and thought.  They benefit, too, from having a ‘total’ view of the world, which their opponents generally lack.  That is to say, they believe that all aspects of life are intimately connected and that these connections are all entirely political.  The opponent of feminism, by contrast, is likely to draw distinctions between his working life, his family life and his private hobbies.  There might be overlaps, but they are nonetheless distinctive parts of his life and are judged by different criteria.  The feminist draws no such distinctions, her world view pithily encapsulated in the assertion that ‘the personal is political’.

The fear of being different is another powerful deterrent to opposition, and is perhaps especially marked amongst intellectuals.  Part of this is cowardice.  When George Orwell  described his contemporaries as ‘the pansy left’, he was not referring to the sexual orientations of his literary colleagues, as much as their lack of intellectual virility.   They had refused to open their eyes to the totalitarian nightmare that was Soviet Communism because it was easier and more convenient to ‘fellow travel’.   Yet there is more to it than that.  One aspect of the Western intellectual tradition has always been reductionism,  the desire to level man, society and nature to a series of simple formulae and so ‘resolve’ the human predicament.   This explains the recent popularity, amongst modern intellectuals, of totalitarian movements, just as inflexible religious dogmas prevailed amongst their scholarly forebears and Idealist schools inspired the learned men of antiquity.

Opposed to this is a rival, parallel tradition of critical thought, questioning and fearless, unfettered discussion.   Although never wholly secure, this tradition of freedom has given European culture its dynamism.  It has been the source of our great literature and art, of our exploratory instincts, scientific inquiry and capacity for reasoning, achievements now denigrated by feminist ideology as ‘patriarchal’ and ‘male-dominated’.   The European sense of freedom is rooted in respect for the community.  As such, it acknowledges the complexities of the human experience and opposes all forms of fanaticism.   It has stood, with varying degrees of success, between European man and those grand designs that threaten the balance between the individual and society,   tradition and change, reform and continuity.

That sense of freedom Tocqueville rightly described as ‘the sacred flame of liberty’.  In the Europe today, it is more ‘scared’ than ‘sacred’ and it is remarkable that it continues to burn even faintly.  Free thinking can take place only in an atmosphere of confidence.  That means confidence in the underlying values of a society and the confidence which the individual has in himself.  The former is under attack from the ideology of ‘multiculturalism’ which, turning old-fashioned prejudice on its head equates the pursuit of truth, freedom and thought with white supremacy.   In the political sphere, multiculturalists abolish the idea of equality for all individuals under the rule of law and replace it with special privileges for groups: reverse racism, known as ‘affirmative action’ and ‘hate crime’ legislation, which amounts to a form of ‘affirmative lynch law’.  Academic multiculturalists, where possible, impose curricula based on a know-nothing, think-nothing egalitarianism that regards the slogans of Algerian terrorists and the thoughts of Greek philosophers as equally ‘valid’, but brooks no opposition to egalitarian doctrines.  This mentality is typified by Reverend Jesse Jackson leading a band of student activists around Stanford University in the early 1990s chanting ‘Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civilisation’s got to go!’^[2]  Jackson’s own career has been built on the continued existence of black poverty.  As Blake, expressed it, in an awful prophecy of state socialism:

Pity would be no more

If we did not make somebody poor.^[3]

Feminists ally themselves with multiculturalists in their generalised attack on freedom of thought and freedom of speech.   Like multiculturalists, they attack ‘European culture’^[4] for valuing reason over intuition and for pursuing objectivity rather than merely accepting subjectivity.  Where multiculturalists interpret these qualities as ‘white’ and inferior, feminists interpret them as ‘male’ and unconscionable.   However, feminism itself quickly assumes racist, indeed imperialist, overtones in its overt contempt for non-European societies and the role of women within them, in its insistence that there is only one path to ‘equality’ and that it is secular, materialistic and careerist.   Feminism soon sheds its ‘multicultural’ rhetoric when it confronts traditional structures such as arranged marriages and the extended family, or cultures which revere motherhood over work outside the home.  Women from traditional societies are not asked whether or not they wish to be ‘liberated’ by feminist social policy.  It is believed, by the new missionaries of ‘reproductive rights’ and paid employment that they must change, whether they want to or not.  Feminist values, therefore, play a pivotal role in the process of ‘globalisation’, economic and cultural.  They seek to abolish traditional attitudes towards the family and work, and with them patterns of behaviour that challenge corporate dominance and uncritical consumerism.

Allied to the multiculturalist attack on freedom and cultural confidence is a system of education which increasingly favours conformity over individuality, sociability over idiosyncrasy and passive ‘socialisation’   over original thought.  Although allegedly ‘progressive’ and centred upon the individual, the overwhelming thrust of modern mass education is towards persuading the individual to conform.  Unlike more traditional educational methods that are defamed as oppressive, it favours levelled-down consensus and replaces discipline and moral guidance with therapy and counselling.  The superficial freedom afforded by the modern school or college - absence of uniform, dress code or rigid rules; stress on sexual egalitarianism - conceals a more ‘censored’ environment than that of a traditional boys’ boarding school.  There is little institutional ethos, but there is peer pressure supported by a perpetually benign yet stifling authority structure.   There is no organised religious observance - at least not with any dangerous spiritual content - but the gospel of equality is preached assiduously at all levels.   Eccentricity, that great force, is discouraged, amongst educators and educated alike, for ‘tolerance’ is a virtue only when extended to victim groups, not to people who think differently.  There are few formal rules, but a system of values that encourages quiet obedience (educational and behavioural), memorising rather than thinking for oneself, co-operation rather than discovery. 

Modern education, in short, provides a system that seems to favour traditionally female values of restraint over traditionally masculine values of exploration, independence and physical energy.   This is indeed ironic, given that one of the purposes of ‘progressive’ education was to break down differences between the sexes, which were thought to be culturally conditioned rather than influenced by biology.  Feminists tend strongly to support this education in sentimentality, largely because they believe that it will have an emasculating effect on men.  Rewarding passive conformity and imposing pacific values certainly has the effect of alienating large numbers of physically and mentally healthy young men, along with a good number of spirited young women, too.  The energies of these young people are, from an early stage, diverted from the pursuit of knowledge and towards less fruitful ways of questioning authority.  Young men who lack male mentors and are offered ‘counselling’ in place of more traditional forms of character training will tend to rebel against this tyranny of Compulsory Niceness.  With the decline of manufacturing industry and the growing ‘political correctness’ and loss of status of the Armed Forces, they have fewer constructive outlets for their naturally rebellious energy.  This vacuum is filled increasingly by bullying, crime, alcoholism and drug abuse.  Further education - and academic life in general - becomes attractive to young people whose instinct is to absorb and accept, rather than argue and think.

In The Lonely Crowd, David Riesman and his colleagues describe the educational impact of the social transition they identify in American society: from ‘inner-direction’, where the individual draws upon his inner resources, and ‘other-direction’, by which individuals derive their values from their peers.  They show that ‘progressive’ schooling in American cities has proved instrumental in that transition.  As the emphasis shifted from formality to informality, single sex to ‘co-ed’ classes, pure academic education to ‘nurturing’, a new pattern of conformity was imposed, one more extreme than the old because rebellion against it was well-nigh impossible^[5]:

The effort is to cut everyone down to size who stands up or stands out in any direction.  Beginning with the very young and going on from there, overt vanity is treated as one of the worst offenses, as perhaps dishonesty would have been in an earlier day.  Being high-hat is forbidden.

Temper, manifest jealousy, moodiness - these, too, are offenses in the code of the peer-group.  All ‘knobbly’ or idiosyncratic qualities are more or less systematically repressed.  And judgment of others by peer-group members are so clearly matters of taste that their expression has to resort to the vaguest phrases, constantly changed: cute, lousy, square, etc. ...

But to say that judgments of peer-groupers are matters of taste, not of morality or even opportunism, is not to say that any particular child can afford to ignore these judgements.  One the contrary, he is, as never before, at their mercy.  If the peer-group were - and we continue to deal here with the urban middle classes only - a wild, torturing, obviously vicious group, the individual child might still feel moral indignation as a defense against its commands.   But like adult authorities in the other-directed socialization process, the peer-group is friendly and tolerant.  It stresses fair play,  Its conditions for entry seem reasonable and well meaning.  But even where this is not so, moral indignation is out of fashion.  The child is therefore exposed to trial by jury without any defenses either from the side of its own morality or from the adults.   All the morality is the group’s.^[6]

The Lonely Crowd was first published half a century ago.  Since then, the ‘progressive’ ethos of Compulsory Niceness has pervaded higher, as well as primary and secondary, education.  It is the system of values against which most public policies are measured.  Compulsory Niceness is an institutionalised failure of nerve.  Its quest for bland consensus does not favour genuine moderation, which is intellectually rigorous and uncompromising.  Instead, it provides a backdrop of messy compromise, against which totalitarian fanatics can play out their ideological dramas.  It is marked, too, by a diminution in the importance of the autonomous individual, with a resulting shift of emphasis from individual freedom to group rights.  Government is seen, increasingly, as a mediator between groups claiming rights at the expense of other groups, or the rest of society.  Where these groups are presented as ‘disadvantaged’, or having suffered in the past, opposition to their demands is seen as a form of bad manners, or as an implicit act of cruelty.  It is, quite literally, ‘not nice’ to be against feminism, when it is assumed that feminists speak for all ‘women’.   It is not nice to be against ‘gay rights’, if gay activists speak for all homosexuals, or against ‘multiculturalism’, if we accept that multiculturalists speak for all black people, or indeed all ‘ethnic minorities’.  That all these propositions are manifestly untrue is a matter of inconvenience and irritation, which ‘nice’ people don’t mention.  They assume that individuals fit neatly into groups which act en bloc, and if for some reason they fail to do so, they must be persuaded, then coerced.^[7]

There is a striking similarity between the meaningless phrases uttered by the children in Riesman’s survey and the slogans of politicians and activists fifty years later.  Peer group pressure defines what is ‘cool’ or ‘neat’ amongst adolescents.  Amongst intellectuals, it defines the meaning of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’, two of the buzzwords of Compulsory Niceness.  Diversity becomes a euphemism for conformist acceptance of group rights, and hostility to those who emphasise tradition instead.  Inclusion is taken to mean favouring members of acceptable groups (women, ethnic minorities, homosexuals) at the expense of unacceptable groups (men, ‘white Europeans’, heterosexuals) and ritually denouncing anyone who questions this process.^[8]  In the name of diversity and inclusion, some ideas are placed off-limits, others accorded a superstitious reverence.  To of the latter are ‘progress’ and ‘equality’.   As ideas, they are intimately connected, for one is deemed to lead logically to the other.  They are both defined, in Looking-Glass terms, as whatever their supporters ‘choose them to mean’.  Progress can mean curtailing freedom of speech, if that speech is deemed ‘racist’ or ‘sexist’.  Equality can mean its opposite, inequality, provided that it is inequality for groups disliked by egalitarians.   To oppose progress is to be a ‘reactionary’, which the modern intellectual fears more than almost anything else, except being a ‘bigot’, which is his fate if he opposes socially engineered equality. 

Feminism is the ultimate group rights ideology.  Its supporters claim that they are the natural representatives of all ‘women’.  They present ‘women’ as an oppressed minority, when claiming special rights.  When asserting themselves politically, they stress the numerical majority that ‘women’ actually make up.  On behalf of ‘women’, they seek legal reparations against the collective ‘enemy’ (men) through skewed divorce laws, reverse discrimination in employment and special privileges in political representation.^[9]   At one level, they demand the right for women to do exactly the same things as men, in every sphere of life.  At another, they claim for ‘women’ special insights of a spiritual or ecological nature.  A movement founded on double-think, feminism thrives in a political climate where its is considered ill-mannered (or, in old-fashioned terms, ungentlemanly) to question the demands of single-issue movements.   It is sustained by a culture in which equality has acquired totemic status and support for equality is a condition of entry to the intellectual peer group.   Compulsory Niceness deters consideration of what kind of ideology feminism really is.

II.  Marxism With A Human Face-Lift?

It is tempting, indeed almost compelling, to view feminism as a left-wing ideology, or as a movement that has evolved from Marxism.  Many on the left believe this, which is why they capitulate so easily to feminist demands even when their instincts cry out against it.  It explains, too, why it is difficult to elicit opposition, or even mild criticism of feminist ideology from the political left.  For surely, the principled leftist will argue, the aims of feminism are good ones, although its methods are sometimes wrong.  Surely the intention of feminists is to uplift the status of women, and so we must support them, even when we disagree with their methods.   To such left-wingers, accession to feminist demands is akin to support for ‘progressive’ dictatorships, because their authoritarian methods are merely ‘instruments of transition’, or because ‘imperialist aggression’ makes them necessary. 

For left-wingers of the Marxist or Fabian schools, which have more in common than is widely realised, feminism offers rich opportunities for collectivist solutions, for ‘bringing the state back in’ to the individual’s life.  For ageing New Left radicals, is the latest stage in the sexual revolution.  Along with its illegitimate offspring, ‘gay liberation’^[10], feminism provides a virulent critique of family life which rationalises past selfishness and present disappointment.  Association with its triumphs conveniently compensates for political failure.  Left-wingers of a green, decentralist or more liberal bent see in feminism, and single-issue campaigns more generally, a humanitarian alternative to the centralised, class-based politics of the orthodox left.  They believe the rhetoric of ‘non-hierarchical structures’ and ‘leaderless coalitions’ and willingly mouth sentimental slogans about ‘reclaiming herstory’ (as opposed to male-imposed history), ‘celebrating queer culture’ (homosexuals as an ersatz ethnic group) and ‘embracing diversity’ (patronising tokenism).  To such jaded idealists, the tawdry reality of these movements is of little consequence.  They fulfil a wish, perhaps a need, for continuous agitation, and they hold out faint hopes for the transformation of mankind.  Critics of feminism accept its quasi-marxist credentials.  The American ‘neoconservative’ Michael Levin, for instance, described campaigns for ‘equal pay for equal work’ as ‘the feminist road to socialism’.^[11]  Erin Pizzey, who was censured, even threatened by feminists when she pointed out that women as well as men commit domestic violence, has spoken of ‘radical feminists’ as Marxists who have ‘jumped ship’.^[12] 

This interpretation of feminism is understandable, given its promise of an egalitarian Utopia and its successful mimicking of marxist rhetoric.  In practice, too, feminist agendas require a vast amount of state intervention in the economy and society, with the enforcement of ‘equal opportunity’ laws becoming a vast, unproductive nationalised industry.  Feminist assumptions have certainly been built into Marxist political thought from the beginning, despite Marx’s own apparent conservatism on such matters.^[13]   As early as 1854, Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, in which he identified relations between the sexes with the ‘antagonism’ of class struggle, rather than with the human qualities of affection, loyalty or passion: the first class oppression that occurs in history coincides with the development of antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage. and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male.^[14]

Modern feminism can also claim with good reason to the child of the 1960s New Left.  For Herbert Marcuse, the student movement’s eminence rouge, believed that the revolutionary dynamic had shifted from the white working man of the West, who was swollen with affluence, and towards those who were ‘marginalised’ by the system: black people, women, students and Third World revolutionaries.  It mattered little that  black communities were for the most part conservative and religious, that many women felt anything but ‘marginalised’, that students were a privileged caste who could evade the draft and that Third World revolutionaries terrorised their own peoples. 

Much as the Viet Cong, Pathet Lao and Khmer Rouge commanders claimed to be the voice of Indochina’s peasants, as they were terrorising them, today’s feminist ‘spokespersons’ claim to be the only true voice of that women have.  They aim to impose their vision of equality on women who reject it as much as on men who resist it, through methods which include state coercion, vilification of critics and efforts to indoctrinate children and students against traditional values.  The hostility of feminists towards traditionalist women is, if anything, more virulent and ideologically charged than their hostility to men.   Betty Friedan, supposedly American feminism’s moderate or liberal face, described mothers who stay at home with their children as ‘obsolete’.  More extreme still, but with refreshing Gallic honesty, the childless Simone de Beauvoir proclaimed as early as 1975 that: "No woman should be authorised to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.^"[15]

In the same dialogue with Friedan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s consort defines feminism’s central goal as ‘freedom of choice’.  To view this position as inconsistent is to misunderstand feminist ideology.  For the choice of a woman to stay at home with her young children, or to put her family life before her career, is not an authentic choice according to feminists.   It is based on traditionalist prejudices about the role of women, which she has ‘internalised’ and from which it is the duty of feminists to ‘free’ her.  For feminists, by definition, represent ‘women’ and interpret their interests for them, just as an earlier Marxist generation interpreted the will of ‘the working-class’.  Feminism is quietly rejected by many women and so depends on male support, much of which is achieved through emotional blackmail, such as the threat of being called ‘sexist’, which few ‘sensitive’ male liberals appreciate.   In the much the same way, state socialism depended on middle-class support, because it was often deeply unpopular amongst working class communities. 

Male supporters of feminism are, but for a few extremists, self-conscious and uncertain.  To follow feminism’s correct line, they tie themselves in complicated ideological knots.  When this author observed, in correspondence with a socialist, pro-feminist man, that poverty amongst women had increased dramatically after two decades of feminist social policy and the resulting family breakdown, his reply was as crisp as it was honest.  ‘They may be poorer,’ he told me, but at least they are free from chauvinist men’.  Such a romantic association of poverty and freedom seems odd for a socialist ‘moderniser’, resembling a certain strain of conservative thought, or a rustic anarchism long scorned by the ‘progressive’ left.  And it fails to explain how a new morality that accepts the desertion of women by men, leaving them to bring up their children alone and in poverty, can be anything other than ‘chauvinistic’.  Pro-feminist men denounce traditional masculine attributes with the same zeal that some white liberals denounce ‘European civilisation’ and all that flows from it.  They apologise, as if on behalf of all ‘men’, for oppressions past, present and yet to come.  They pay ritual tribute to ‘the women’s struggle for rights, which has a long and valorous history’^[16].   They make a point of saying ‘his or her’, or ‘her or his’, refusing to use the word ‘man’ (although ‘woman’ is still acceptable, for some reason) and drooling like Pavlov dogs whenever ‘women’s issues’ are mentioned.  Most do this for purely self-serving reasons, or through the failure of nerve discussed above.  A few, however, display a virulent hatred of their own masculinity.  Were they homosexuals, they would be denounced for ‘self-hatred’ by shrilly intolerant gay activists.  As Robert Bly explains:

[Male feminists] put forward the view that traditional masculinity authenticates itself through oppressing women.   Masculinity to them is essentially toxic, like a poison.

Traits traditionally imagined as masculine, such as competitiveness, wildness, and aggression, spring, they believe, from culture, not genetic inheritance.  Since masculinity is made, it can be remade.   They want a new man, and they want him now.

Most feminist men hate the concept of “deep masculinity”.  The feminist writer Tim Beneke says:   “There is no such thing as deep masculinity because there is no such thing as masculinity.”  Whatever comes out of the masculine soul is, in their view, wrong by essence.^[17]

Such ‘feminist men’ have much in common with middle-class radicals who ostentatiously renounce the bourgeois culture that sustains them and adopt fake working class accents.   Indeed, like ‘female’ feminists, they believe that they know ‘what women want’ better than most women know it themselves.  Feminist ideology inherits from Marxism the theory of ‘false consciousness’.  Put simply, this is the notion that the worker is oppressed, even if he does not know it, or even if he is actively hostile to the idea.  Those loyalties that give his life meaning, such as to a church, a regiment or a football team, are false loyalties, as is his sense of patriotism or pride in his local community.  Part of the revolutionary process is to ‘demystify’ him, so that he becomes conscious of his oppression.  For in Marxist terms, he is defined by his relationship to the means of production, not to his fellow men.  For feminists, the means of production are replaced by the means of reproduction.  A woman’s loyalty to her sex comes before her personal tastes and preferences, her religious or moral beliefs and the relationships that give her life meaning.   Feminist ideology assumes, for example, that a mother in the North of England will be more interested in ‘opportunities for women’ than the fate of her unemployed husband (displaced by the decline of manufacturing) or the fate of her sons in an education system that is increasingly anti-male.  Her love for her husband and sons is a form of ‘false consciousness’, which prevents her from ‘asserting her rights’.

Also inherited from Marxism is the idea of an underlying struggle.  For Marxists, that is the economic struggle between worker and capitalist, the class struggle, for feminists, it is a sex struggle, or ‘gender war’, in which the individual is required to take sides.  And just as the class struggle culminates in the classes marxist society, so the sex struggle must culminate in the unisex society.  Unisexism takes as its starting point two ideas.  First, it insists that differences between the sexes are culturally conditioned  and owe nothing to biology, which is also seen as an artificial ‘construct’.   Secondly, those differences are always wrong and must always be ‘challenged’ and broken down.  It would be mistaken to conclude from this that unisexism was about giving men and women the freedom to ‘be themselves’ and express their true natures as individuals.  On the contrary, it seeks to impose on both sexes a revolutionary imperative of change.  Males are expected to apologise, concede and repress their ‘aggression’, females to overthrow ‘gender stereotypes’.  As in marxist political programmes, the state is looked to as the agent of change and education is seen as a means to indoctrinate the young.  Thus the state has a duty to enforce unisexist precepts, to ensure that women are encouraged, or compelled, to perform the same social functions as men.  Where this does not happen, ‘positive action’ must be taken, because the revolution has been betrayed.  The married woman who stays at home is a counter-revolutionary.  She and her husband should be penalised financially by the state until she makes the politically correct choice.   This is why institutionalised discrimination against the stay-at-home mother has been built into government policy in Britain, the logical conclusion of years of state-directed change.  In taxation, the married couple’s allowance has been replaced  by a ‘working families tax credit’, the working family defined as one where both ‘partners’ work.  Low income single mothers, meanwhile, are compelled to seek work outside the home.  This means that a mother who leaves her own children and is paid to look after someone else’s, is considered a better citizen than one who stays with her offspring.

Feminist social policy does not discourage single motherhood, because of the relative poverty - and lack of opportunity - that it tends to produce.  On the contrary, it is presented as one amongst many ‘lifestyle options’, along with cohabitation, ‘serial monogamy’ and lesbian motherhood.  All these options are morally equivalent, but some are more equivalent than others.  The most equivalent of all are those which demonstrate that women can live independently of men, even where that independence is artificial and leads to a form of forced marriage to the state, or dependence upon a sweatshop employer.   Thus, in the true forked-tongued manner of modern pseudo-liberalism, it is politically correct to dismiss traditional marriages as reactionary, but incorrect in the extreme to criticise artificial insemination for single women.

In the interests of socially engineered equality, feminists and their supporters are obsessed with eliminating male bastions.  These range from professions and professional organisations, such as Working Men’s Clubs, gentlemen’s clubs, sports clubs and even clubs or societies for male homosexuals.  Methods vary from emotional blackmail to recourse to the courts, from invocation of ‘anti-discrimination’ laws to the refusal of public funds.  The destruction of male bastions is considered an ethical goal in its own right, more important than the true aspirations of women.^[18]  In England and Wales, for example, the Fire Service has been set a ‘recruitment target’ of fifteen per cent more women, purely for ideological reasons.  The same government report grudgingly admitted that the Service was efficient, well-lied and trusted more than any other public agency, but then attacked it for its ‘male’ ethos and ‘militaristic culture’.  Similarly, the Armed Forces are increasingly forced to take account of feminist preoccupations in their recruitment policy, their training and their disciplinary structure.  The Ministry of Defence has a ‘Gender Unit’, the very title of which implies profound ideological bias.  Its brief includes expanding areas of ‘gender integration’ and pressing for women to be sent to the front line.  Operational efficiency has nothing to do with any of these considerations.   On the contrary, it is subordinate to the dogma of ‘equality’, so that the very structures and traditions which have made for cohesion are wilfully undermined.   The following recommendations, issued by the anti-discrimination industry to a compliant government, express well growing demands for ‘feminisation’:

The Equal Opportunities Commission urges that it should be made easier for women to join the Services.  The Army should recruit more of them to a wider range of posts, said Julie Mellor, the commission chairman.

“We believe that the Armed Forces are missing out on many good quality potential recruits.

“Training initiatives to equip women to work in jobs traditionally done by men would help to boost the number of women applying.”

The commission says that the culture within the Services must change, so that attitudes towards women, especially those with children, do not stop them applying for jobs.^[19]

The United States provides much evidence that ‘gender integration’ is unpopular in the Forces, and becomes a source of indiscipline and litigation.  There, the process of feminisation has advanced much further than in Britain, to the extent that group rights are routinely placed above the needs of a fighting force.  This makes it the model for British feminists, who loathe successful masculine cultures more than they dislike ‘male violence’.  The politically correct administration of the US Armed Forces is personified by Lieutenant General Claudia Kennedy, the highest ranking woman officer dubbed ‘Hillary Clinton’s favourite General’ and centre of a high-profile ‘sexual harassment case’.  Criticised for her alleged closeness to the Democratic Party, General Kennedy is remembered for proclaiming to West Point cadets in falsetto voice: ‘This is not the Army your fathers joined’.^[20]

On both sides of the Atlantic, the Armed Forces are used increasingly as a social laboratory,  the aim of the experiments is to prove to the wider society that the traditional roles of the sexes can be transformed or reversed.  Unlike a genuine scientific experiment, there is little attempt at objectivity.  The response to failure is not to abandon the project, but to return to it with renewed zeal, to conclude that more ‘equal opportunities training’, or more ‘anti-discrimination’ edicts are required.  In civilian life, as well as the Forces, unisex feminism seeks education as the key to ‘progress’.   Education, in this context, does not mean the quest for knowledge, but propaganda techniques that call to mind the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe and China under the ‘gang of Four’.  Amongst these are the censorship of traditional and much-loved children’s books for alleged ‘sexism’, alongside other bugbears such as ‘racism’, ‘imperialism’ and ‘militarism’.  More proactive - a word beloved of social engineers - are ‘social education’ classes.   These propagate ‘anti-sexist’ doctrines, and other ‘politically correct’ shibboleths, as if they were truths, and as if no other views of the world could ever exist.  Sex education, also, is presented in increasingly in terms of crude bodily functions rather than complex moral choice, with children of both sexes taught to ‘role play’ and some cases to experiment.  They are encouraged to question the values of their parents, if they are conservative, but the permissive, hedonistic approach is held to be beyond criticism.

Such methods are justified in terms of promoting ‘safer sex’ or preventing teenage pregnancies.  These claims are belied by statistics, which show continually rising pregnancies in girls under sixteen, along with an epidemic of sexually transmitted disease amongst young people in general.  It might seem that the real objective of ‘sex education’ is less to inform and promote free discussion, more to break down the barriers of discretion and reserve between males and females, along with the civilisation, courtesy and mutual trust that they engender.  There is also the intention that the ‘patriarchal’ family should disappear,  because it is the originator of ‘inequality’.   British parents cannot withdraw their children from ‘personal and social’ education, even where it is a vehicle for propaganda, but they can withdraw them from religious instruction.  Those teachers who oppose religion in schools, and wish to banish prayer from morning assemblies, tend also to be the strongest advocates of ‘anti-sexist’ or ‘anti-racist’ education, or instruction in ‘value-free’ sex - not value-free at all, but far more ‘judgmental’ than traditional censure.  The classroom is not the place to consider anything transcendent, but it can and should be used for ‘talking gender issues’ or ‘eliminating sexism’.

In the United States, where state schooling is rigidly secular, feminist intervention in the curriculum is commonplace and has aroused deep antipathy.  Reassuringly, perhaps, American feminists seem to possess a special talent for revealing their totalitarian instincts and exposing themselves to ridicule.  Alice Rossi, for example, recommended that school outings or field trips be curtailed, for fear that ‘going out into the community in this way, youngsters would observe men and women in their present occupational roles’.  In the late 1970s, the [former] Department of Health, Education and Welfare reviewed children’s books for indications of ‘sexism’.  The intention was that books aimed at children should reflect reality ‘not as it was, but as it will be’.   Demands persist for ‘unisex’ schoolbooks, pointedly showing men and women in identical roles, or better still in roles that have been reversed.  Meanwhile, the feminist commentator Judith Bardwick describes the hostility of children to such attempts at brainwashing as an ‘anti-feminist backlash’:

Another source of resistance to feminist goals is the conservatism of children.  They seem very resistant to changing ideas about what the sexes are supposed to do and be like.^[21]

The ‘conservatism of children’, which Bardwick condemns, arises from an instinctive, and culturally inherited sense of freedom, and a contempt for those who use positions of trust to impose alien ideologies.   To feminists, it is further evidence of false consciousness, requiring more, rather than less unisexism to counter undesirable ‘influences’ from home, society or students thinking for themselves.  Unisexism’s revolutionary imperative to destroy traditional stereotypes means that, for both young women and young men, a preference for those stereotypes is not an option.  If we assume that boys play with soldiers and girls with dolls simply out of  ‘conditioning’, and that such ‘conditioning’ is always a bad thing, then it follows that girls should be forced to play with soldiers and boys with dolls.  If we assume that there is a sex struggle, in which ‘male’ values are inherently oppressive, it follows that young males should be forced to conform to values identified as ‘feminine’.   A good example of this approach is found in a report on the future of outdoor pursuits published in Britain in the early 1980s, which despite (or perhaps because of) an all-male panel is blatantly contemptuous of the ‘traditionally masculine’ associations of outdoor activities.  These activities are no longer seen as hobbies to be enjoyed, but as a means to fit children into unisex moulds:

This may entail a departure from the prevalent male-oriented models of outdoor programmes.  However, there may be substantial gains, not only in enabling and encouraging young women to participate more readily, but also for the young men to experience a different way of living and behaving.   Both boys and girls may become more aware of each other’s capabilities.

Even this level of care in designing outdoor experiences may not be sufficient to encourage some young women to participate.  The appropriate answer may be to provide all-female outdoor experience.^[22]

As always with unisexist programmes, some are more equal than others.  There is no mention of single-sex provision for those young men who benefit more from that approach or find it preferable to ‘mixed’ activities.  Furthermore, it is the ‘young men’ who are required to ‘experience   a different way of living’, as private pursuits are turned into vehicles for social change.  One result of such attempts to politicise outdoor pursuits has been to create a nation of youthful couch potatoes.  The alienation of young men from activities allowing them positively to express their masculinity, and learn from older men, has made anti-social behaviour seem more attractive.  The attempt to tame young men has, like the marxist attempt to banish competitive instincts, failed abysmally.   Meanwhile, single-sex outdoor pursuits become increasingly a privilege, for those who can pay for them, or those who have fathers at home, male relatives close by or inspiring older male friends.

Feminism, especially when expressed through unisexist programmes, has much in common with dogmatic Marxism.  It is based on an abstract vision of women, and of men, which denies both their choice and nature itself.  It attempts, with disastrous results, to transform human nature through the force of the state.  Just as Marxism repudiates class distinctions, feminism denies the value of differences between the sexes, except where those differences can be used to feminist advantage.  Feminists and marxists alike repudiate distinctions between public and private life, and establish no limits to the state’s power to intervene.   Both are offended by, and seek to destroy, those institutions that operate successfully on principles opposed to theirs: hierarchy, difference, all-male membership or, occasionally, all-female membership of a non-feminist nature.^[23]  Yet the totalitarian implications of feminist ideology need not be associated exclusively with the left.  It might be more instructive to see in feminism a mutation from the marxist tradition, rather than a logical development thereof.  In this sense, it bears a striking resemblance to totalitarianism.

Notes:

[From "Authoritarian Liberalism: The Politics of the Forked  Tongue"; Chapter Three]