Tag: feminism

Is feminism compatible with progress? Reactionary feminist Mary Harrington thinks not. In this interview, she discusses the history of feminism, her own journey from proponent to radical opponent of progress, the impact of technology on women and society, and, of course, her new book, Feminism Against Progress (Regnery, 2023).

Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd and widely-published essayist. You can her book, Feminism Against Progress here.

On Womanhood: A Personal Perspective

 

I’ve been formulating a post in my head for some time that reflects my thoughts on some of the topics raised in various posts around Ricochet about women. Former posts, which I can’t find, where we discussed whether women having the right to vote was a good thing. @susanquinn excellent recent essay on feminists. I thought I would try to write one, although I don’t think my thoughts are fully formed. But generally, writing and discussing helps bring your thoughts into focus, so here it is.

Womanhood is under assault, it seems. Not women — we ceased to be oppressed, at least in the West, a long time ago. But womanhood: the state or condition of being a woman. If one forms impressions of womanhood from Hollywood, the feminine ideal is masculine. Women are warriors, don’t you know, and it is only the patriarchy that has kept us from taking up arms against each other all these millennia. Not inferior physical strength, not hormones, not children. Masculinity is only toxic if it is exercised by men. Then again, it often seems these days that so-called feminine traits are only celebrated when displayed in gross parody by men. Would Drew Barrymore have bowed down to an actual sorority girl giggling in a bubble bath?

Amidst fraught debates about what gender is, and how it fits into feminism, Annika sits down with Dr. Abigail Favale, an English professor specializing in gender studies and feminist literary criticism turned Catholic convert. Dr. Favale is now a professor and writer at the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame, and the author of “The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory.”

More about Dr. Favale: https://abigailfavale.wixsite.com/home

Suffer the Women

 

In the push for trans rights, inclusivity,  and tolerance, one group is expected to sacrifice and kowtow more than any other: biological women. Both straight and lesbian women — the language they use to identify themselves, their safe spaces, their dating preferences — are all under attack in ways we do not see happening to men.

This week, the Randolph High School girls’ volleyball team was punished for speaking out against a transgender student in their locker room. This student, who is unnamed, allegedly made inappropriate remarks to the girls as they were changing. When the girls spoke out, they were not only put under investigation for “harassment” (under Vermont law, a student can go into whatever bathroom/locker room that matches their “gender identity”) and the team was relegated to change privately in a single bathroom stall.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade has led to a flurry of commentary, and wondering, “Where next?” But, it also begs deeper questions: what is the history of abortion and sex-positivity within the feminist movement, and how did Roe affect our views on sex? Feminist legal scholar Dr. Erika Bachiochi is the founder and director of the Wollstonecraft Project at the Abigail Adams Institute and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Here, she discusses these questions as well as her recent book on Mary Wollstonecraft, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision.

Her book may be purchased here: https://www.amazon.com/Rights-Women-Reclaiming-Catholic-Secular/dp/0268200815

My Dear Friends on the Left: What Happened to You?

 

Half a century ago, when I was a young man, you were the ones celebrating individuality and anything-goes self-expression.

Back then, you were the ones burning the draft cards and defying authority. Today you’re a masked lump sitting on an airport bench, scolding with narrowed eyes anyone who delights in the air touching her face. What happened to you?

Back then, you were the ones demanding to be heard, saying the things the establishment didn’t want to hear, speaking truth to power. Today the phrase “free speech” terrifies you, and you offer a dozen excuses why we’re better off muzzled and restrained by those in power, like some kind of pet.

Men, Women, and Workplaces

 

June 1949. The American Medical Association’s annual convention was held in Atlantic City, filling the run-down seaside town’s parking lots with out-of-state Cadillacs. One of the main events of the weekend was demonstrating a new tool for training doctors, medical color television, a futuristic-seeming replacement for the tiers of ringed seats of the traditional operating room surgical amphitheater. But TV was too poor a teaching substitute until color came along. After an elaborate luncheon was over, a spokesman for the manufacturer, Smith, Kline, and French, strongly suggested that the doctors’ wives leave the hall, as the live images would be very graphic.

To his surprise, most of the ladies stayed and watched, most of them impassively sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes. (I mentioned it was 1949, right?) Someone explained to the SKF man that the women were, or had been nurses, and had seen far worse. “They met their husbands on the job”. In 1949, that was as common a fact of women’s lives as hats, white gloves, and handbags. For women, getting ahead in life generally involved marriage, with the goal of marrying “up”. It had always been the way of the world.

Ayaan speaks with Helen Joyce about her new book, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality. They discuss the rapid rise of gender-identity ideology, the differences between the US and UK, and much more.

Helen Joyce is The Economist’s Britain editor. She joined the paper in 2005 as an education correspondent, and between 2010 and 2013 was the Brazil correspondent, based in São Paulo. Since then she has edited the paper’s International section and Finance and Economics sections.

Ayaan talks with Christina Hoff Sommers about an alternative to radical feminism: freedom feminism. Christina shares her experiences with radical feminists and how she pushes back against the hysteria.

Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where she studies the politics of gender and feminism, as well as free expression, due process, and the preservation of liberty in the academy. Before joining AEI, Dr. Sommers was a philosophy professor at Clark University. She is best known for her defense of classical liberal feminism and her critique of gender feminism.

ACF PoMoCon #31: Marriage Problems

 

So the podcast’s back after our long election-to-inauguration holiday. America’s still standing, thank God, but the madness continues, which we’ll have to bear the best we can. Today, I bring you one of my scholarly friends, Scott Yenor, who has a wonderful book on the successes and failures of feminism: Choice as far as the eye can see, and unhappiness on its heels. It’s called The Recovery Of Family Life and it analyzes the feminism, sexual liberation, and contemporary liberalism ideas and policies, and their unintended consequences. Scott points out that the great middle-class republic seems to be turning into a different regime because of family problems: Family is rare among the poor–but even though it is dominant among the rich, it is superfluous rather than foundational. Marriage comes last.

Social Isolation and the Superfluous Men

 

I regularly read the journal American Affairs, which is a sophisticated populist journal that wisely strays away from sticking to any politician or political movement but is vaguely right-leaning. The journal is available in print or by online subscription. Marco Rubio has been interviewed for it. There was an article in the Winter 2020 issue called “The New Superfluous Men,” which looked at the increasingly sorry and questionable state of young men in western society. It was written by Alex Glender and there were several aspects of it that I wanted to analyze and then comment on:

As the story goes, by eroding traditional norms of monogamy and family life, social and technological developments such as feminism and the birth control pill intensified sexual competition by giving women more freedom to choose their partners without consequences.

Toxic Traits of Masculinity

 

The more obvious explanation from any outside analysis is that there seems to be a move less intended to improve men than to neuter them, to turn any and all of their virtues around on them and turn them instead into self-doubting, self-loathing objects of pity. It looks, in a word, like some type of revenge.

– Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds

Join Jim and Greg as they cheer President Trump’s selection of Judge Amy Coney Barrett for the U.S. Supreme Court. They also dig into the New York Times story on Trump’s taxes and discuss what might be damaging and what’s just noise. And they discuss the spectrum of attacks Democrats and their media allies are aiming at Judge Barrett – from Obamacare scares to bashing her for being a working mom to why adopting kids from Haiti is somehow troubling.

Member Post

 

Already by March this year the joke had begun to fly: “If 2020 were written as a movie script, it would be rejected as too outlandish.” And that was before progressives across the nation embarked on a curious gambit of furthering minority prosperity by burning minority businesses and neighborhoods to the ground, before the West […]

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Marxist Wokism: The Christian Heresy

 

In my pastor’s sermon today, he talked about America being a pagan and post-Christian society. I certainly agree that we are in a post-Christian one, but “pagan” is not the right term.

Pagan societies, at least the ones we know about, have a few shared characteristics. They were self-perpetuating as societies; that is, they created an ethos that promoted families (even the ones that practiced child sacrifice and exposing infants still made sure they had enough children for a stable population), protected private property (don’t buy the “Native Americans didn’t understand land ownership” fraud), and inculcated respect for order, authority, and defending the tribe/polis/empire. They had, in other words, the virtues necessary to survive.

Libby Emmons and Paulina Enck, joined Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to discuss Harry Potter author and radical feminist J.K. Rowling’s stance against transgenderism. Both Emmons and Enck are contributors at The Federalist, and Emmons also serves as senior editor at The Post Millennial.

Many on the left have recently attempted to cancel Rowling for her recent essay warning against the dangers of the transgender movement. Enck, a long-time Harry Potter fan, defended Rowling’s work as valuable and impactful regardless against Rowling’s personal opinions. Emmons observed there’s a demand for artists and writers to adhere to certain ideological identities, but she argued that their work ought to remain separate. The two also dove into criticisms of cancel culture more broadly.

Whoa, whoa, whoa … Stacy spent how much on her daughter’s haircut? And Teri’s fixing to fight back against the chaos dividing our country, but how? Are Dads the answer? Also, the ladies have some Netflix suggestions, but beware, Stacy’s are a little bit risque!

Member Post

 

Today our Quote of the Day is the result of my stumbling upon a horrible feminist post on Reddit. As you know by now, I am the opposite of a feminist. It triggered me, and I was forced to take to my fainting couch. Haha no not really, because I’m a Conservative and I don’t […]

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Member Post

 

We saw Little Women last night. It was the idea of the ladies, and Jack and I had go along with it. As a Right Thinking American Man, I dreaded it. But, by the end I was charmed. I am sure that if director/screenwriter Greta Gerwig were interviewed by Stephen Colbert, she would present as […]

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