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Feminists want the power of men, the privileges of women and the responsibilities of neither. – Anu Mathur
Gloria Steinem died last week. Days later, Lindsay Clancy nearly avoided responsibility for deliberately killing her three children. The two offer an interesting bookend to modern feminism. Steinem started it. Clancy may be ending it. Both perfectly illustrate what Anu Mathur means in this quote.
Take a look at Steinem's life—she spent it seeking power and privilege. She glorified abortion, stating she believed that if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament, so she set about turning the procedure into a holy ceremony for the feminist left. She really seemed to believe men had it all while women had nothing. Then she set about switching that state of affairs.
In many ways, she succeeded. Today it is a woman's world, with education and human relations dominated by "the fairer sex." Even fire and police departments are more concerned with filling slots with women than filling them with competent firefighters and police officers, especially in leadership.
As for Lindsay Clancy? She is the poster girl for power and privilege without responsibility. She admitted to brutally killing her three children, arranging things so she could do so uninterrupted. Yet tens of thousands of women feel she should be given a pass...because feelings.
With power and privilege comes responsibility. Unaccompanied by responsibility, power and privilege lead to tyranny.
Where will contemporary feminism lead? If unchecked, it could lead to the abyss of a new Dark Age, one made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Alternatively it could lead to the counterreaction predicted in the clip below:
Or, perhaps we could develop a society where people again begin accepting responsibilities that accompany their power and privileges—because this cannot go on forever.
Stein's law applies: If something cannot go on forever, it will stop. Often unpleasantly.
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Discussion (25)
CHARTER MEMBER
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There are feminists I admire, although I may disagree with them in many respects. One such is Camille Paglia, perhaps Rush Limbaugh's favorite feminist. Of course, she's now often characterized as an "anti-feminist" because she didn't toe the Steinem "victim" line.
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A lot of dictators would love to have sympathy for killing innocent people.
CONTRIBUTOR
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I consider Paglia a humanist rather than a feminist. She always favored equal treatment for all, not special treatment for some.
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I think we had this, or something very close to it, around 1950. In 1959, both my parents passed and I was left with no immediate family that I would spend time with so I went to Washington, DC, and lived 7 years there alone as a normal bachelor man. Things were changing. Two major changes were taking place that changed the direction of events, civil rights and feminism. Civil rights did much to change conditions to stop wrongs that had existed since America's founding and feminism, assisted by new birth-control pills, began changing how many women behaved. American economic prosperity was a big factor in all this. I personally experienced much of this that keyed my awareness that major changes were taking place even if I could not exactly figure out what that meant. I see things better now and I think bad moves that were made in civil rights giving preferential treatment to minorities were folded into social behaviors to do the same for women and it has given us disastrous results today.
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