The Red Pill Heresies: The Feminist Heresy Continued
Yes, there's MORE stuff you never knew about the feminists.
I know it sounds nuts that I’m skipping over massive amounts of feminists, their ideas, and their effects on our culture. After all, this is the third LONG article in the series devoted to feminism. I really am, though. There’s so much to cover. Recall that feminism is very old. As old as at least the 1790s, possibly older than that. It’s got a long history, and women like to talk and write. (Like me! Well, I prefer writing to talking, mostly.) There have been volumes and volumes of books and articles and treatises written by feminists over the last couple centuries delineating feminist theory. My source material is vast. The Red Pill, in contrast, is pretty young and not as organized. So, not as much source material there.
Hang tight, I’m going as fast as I can, and I shall make it as entertaining as I possibly can.
If you missed any pieces in this series, here are the links in the order they were written:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
What is feminism?
Well, according to the feminists you get a lot of puppies and rainbows answers with a side of glitter and unicorn poop. Emma Watson, perky little gal that she is, lights up like a Christmas tree when asked and says, “Feminism is about giving women choice.” Google presents pretty much the same answer: “the advocacy of women's rights on the basis of the equality of the sexes.” When I say anything dismissive of feminism online like, “I have no need for feminism,” a hoard of matrons descend upon me wagging their fingers and shaking their heads, asking how dare I? “You have the choice to live your life the way you please because of feminism, you ungrateful strumpet!”
It would appear that Mrs. Banks of Mary Poppins fame was incorrect in her prophetic utterances when she sang, “Our daughter’s daughters will adore us! And they’ll sing in grateful chorus, ‘Well done! Sister suffragettes.’”
I am ungrateful. You see, feminism is not really about choice or the equality of the sexes. I am a stay at home wife, not due to the good graces of our fearless feminist leaders, but in direct opposition to their wishes.
Today, we will discuss the direct line from second wave feminism straight to the transgender social contagion we’re now beleaguered with, feminisms vengeful misandry, and feminism’s approval of all choices of women…except mine.
Transgenderism
Simone de Beauvoir was a nasty piece of work. She was a French philosopher, writer, and activist who lived through the Nazi occupation of France and wrote her greatest contribution to feminist thought in 1949, The Second Sex. She was also a long-term lover to Jean-Paul Sartre and a long line up of other men and women, including some of her young female students. In a short article by Madison Whipple called, Simone de Beauvoir’s Controversies and Contributions on Feminism, we learn the following:
…Beauvoir was also accused of sexual abuse of her female students, many of whom were minors. Another aspect of the abuse was Beauvoir’s supposed grooming of young women for Sartre. The couple spoke of their “conquests” of young women in discovered letters. The letters coldly speak of their lovers, describing lies they told them and their discarding of the women after they had “finished” with them. These letters, of course, leave more of a stain on Beauvoir as a seductress and groomer for Sartre, who was seen as merely a macho womanizer. Meanwhile, formal charges were brought against Beauvoir for seducing a 17-year-old student, and she was stripped of her teaching license, though it was later reinstated.
She was also one of the first feminists to introduce the notion of biological sex as distinct from gender identity, crystallized in her now famous line from The Second Sex, “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.” In other words, womanhood, in Beauvoir’s view, was not something dictated by biology, but was a performance based off cultural scripts.
In my searching for more information about feminism’s influence on the transgender craze we’re awash in, I discovered a brief essay by Meriel Colenutt creatively titled, One is Not Born, but Becomes a Woman. She argues that Beauvoir’s thinking did not go far enough for her tastes, but that she did, nevertheless pioneer the whole idea of gender as social construct. She writes:
De Beauvoir states that although there are biological differences between the sexes, women only become women because of the circumstances of their society, leading her to the conclusion that the facts of biology take on the values of social norms. Therefore, it is not nature that defines women, rather she defines herself by dealing with nature on her own account in emotional life.
Here radical and Marxist feminists within the feminist third wave diverged with the previous premise, demonstrated by Butler who postulates that if gender is socially constructed and not a direct result of one’s sex, there can also be multiple interpretations which have the result of gender becoming an artful skill. Furthermore, gender can be seen as a discursive means by which one's sexed nature is produced, making it prior to culture suggesting that our bodies are passive media on which cultural meanings are inscribed.
It was Judith Butler, mentioned in the quote above, who took Beauvoir’s idea and ran with it, so to speak, lionizing herself as chief rationalizer, defender and champion to trans men and women everywhere. Not sure if she realized little kids would be getting in on this action as I can only stand to read so much of her ideas before my eyes go cross. She writes in her paper, Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex.
“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” - Simone de Beauvoir’s formulation distinguishes sex from gender and suggests that gender is an aspect of identity gradually acquired. The distinction between sex and gender has been crucial to the long-standing feminist effort to debunk the claim that anatomy is destiny; sex is understood to be the invariant, anatomically distinct, and factic aspects of the female body, whereas gender is the cultural meaning and form that that body acquires, the variable modes of that body’s acculturation. With the distinction intact, it is no longer possible to attribute the values or social functions of women to biological necessity, and neither can we refer meaningfully to natural or unnatural gendered behavior: all gender is, by definition, unnatural.
We are all just playing a part, according to Butler. This is why the drag queens at the kiddies story hour down at the library aren’t dressed in business casual, trying to do their best to pass as female. No. They wear wild costumes, clownish makeup, and use exaggerated “feminine” movements. They are playing a part on a stage, leaning into the joke as hard as they can.
Butler continues:
Moreover, if the distinction is consistently applied, it becomes unclear whether being a given sex has any necessary consequence for becoming a given gender. The presumption of a causal or mimetic relation between sex and gender is undermined. If being a woman is one cultural interpretation of being female, and if that interpretation is in no way necessitated by being female, then it appears that the female body is the arbitrary locus of the gender ‘woman’, and there is no reason to preclude the possibility of that body becoming the locus of other constructions of gender. At its limit, then, the sex/gender distinction implies a radical heteronomy of natural bodies and constructed genders with the consequence that ‘being’ female and ‘being’ a woman are two very different sorts of being. This last insight, I would suggest is the distinguished contribution of Simone de Beauvoir’s formulation, “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."
What a dreadful word salad.
Judith Butler is an inspiration for trans activists the world over, including the ones which think small children should be able to change their gender expression at will and modify their bodies to match at younger and younger ages.
In an op-ed for Advocate, called Transgender Dinosaurs, Part Deux: The Revenge of Judith Butler, Riki Wilchins writes:
It was Gender Trouble and other writing by Judith Butler that first ignited my thinking about gender and made me believe a transgender politics that transcended both the binary and the demands of cis-gendered people was possible.
Riki writes about the social isolation experienced in the 70s as one of only a handful of transitioners in a city of a million. It seemed to Riki, that Butler’s ideas of “gender activism” seemed lackluster and somewhat toothless.
…small, individual acts of insubordinacy that parodied and upset gender norms, while celebrating genderqueerness. WTF?…Fast forward 20 years and we have the rise of a whole generation of transgender kids who understand their bodies as a place of pride, identity, power and yes, celebration.
Riki lists all the kids and celebrities who are proof positive that what Butler recommended actually worked.
Or Sadie, the 11-year-old girl who wrote an open letter to President Obama complimenting his mentioning gays and lesbians in his Inauguration speech, but reminding him to mention transgender children like her.
Riki concludes with this hair rising thought,
Yet even as I remain deeply committed to traditional political organizing I realize, that every time a parent stands behind their openly transgender daughter, every time an out transgender child writes an open letter to the President, every time a celebrity transgender son comes out--that together all these small, isolated, individual acts of personal insubordinacy are challenging the binary, overturning gender oppression, and -- yes, even undoing gender.
Thank you, feminism.
Hate the Man
If a movement spends most of its first wave making the case that one half the human population has held the other half in subjugation for all of human history via a vast conspiracy of layers and layers of systems, contrivances and social codes (The Patriarchy), it would only be a matter of time before the half believing itself under subjugation would begin to hate the half guilty of this supposed subjugation. The earliest feminists made this case as I’ve covered in the last two pieces in this series. They also made the case that women were superior to men when it came to ethics and morality. Men were like children and could not control their lusts and passions. They could not contain, much less overcome, the degenerate influences of the Devil’s brew until women got involved and saved the men via The Women’s Temperance Union. And then marriage, that vile institution, was the catalyst for further oppression of women, where they were enslaved by their husbands, mere drudges doomed to clean the house, bear the children and give way to their husbands’ every sexual demand.
The case has been made so well, that most women today still believe that because marital rape laws weren’t on the books until the 1990s, that this was not only a common but accepted practice, and that women subjected to this kind of brutality had no recourse at all. This is not true. Though this act was not called a “rape” in the past, a husband could be found guilty of an “indecent assault.” Janice Fiamengo wrote about the societal attitudes about and court cases dealing with this topic in her piece, Could Men Legally Rape Their Wives in the 19th Century? I would encourage you to read it.
Second and third wave feminists built on this foundation of generalized mistrust of men, their characters and sexual drives, an edifice of increased disgust and hatred of men, escalating to outright calls for their extermination.
The most recent example of this is feminist, Mona Eltahawy. In her essay on Substack titled How Many Rapists Must We Kill?, she asks:
Imagine an underground movement called F—- the Patriarchy (FTP), which would claim responsibility and warn that it was putting the world on notice that it would keep killing more and more men until the patriarchy sent a representative to talk. We do not want money, it would say. We do not want a new president or prime minister to replace the current one, this imaginary claimant of responsibility would say. We do not want a few more seats in parliament. We do not want a pay raise. We do not want men to promise to do the laundry or to promise to babysit their own children. We do not want a few more crumbs. So send your representative, patriarchy, this imaginary claimant of responsibility would demand …
How many men would have to be killed -- for absolutely no reason whatsoever other than they were men -- for the world to wonder: “What the f—- is going on? Who is behind this madness? Who do we talk to so that this savagery can stop? Who do we invade, who should we bomb? What did men ever do to deserve this barbarity?”
Eltahawy has had a ring side seat to the brutality of the middle eastern world. From what I understand, she was arrested during protests in Egypt and not only brutally physically assaulted by police during interrogation, but sexually assaulted as well. Her extremism can be understood through that lens. However, those who are not well, should not be in charge of healing the world, but I digress.
At any rate, she seems like an outlier, doesn’t she? There are so few feminists who actually believe it’s laudable to kill even some innocent guys to prove a point, right?
Have you heard about Valerie Solanas and her SCUM Manifesto? Solanas was a friend of avant garde artist Andy Warhol, and then she shot him and just about killed him. Here’s a word on men from Solanas’ manifesto:
The male is a biological accident: the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene, that is, it has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.
SCUM, by the way, is acronym for the Society for Cutting Up Men. In an article by Sarah Pruitt called Andy Warhol Was Shot By Valerie Solanas. It Killed Him 19 Years Later, we learn Valerie’s master plan:
It [manifesto] envisioned a world without men, calling on “civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females” to “overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and eliminate the male sex.”
Remember, folks. Feminists merely want the equality of the sexes. That’s why they have to reduce men to animal status.
At any rate, Valerie Solanas, got in a tiff with Andy Warhol over a play she had written, so she went to his beatnik digs at the Factory in New York City and shot the place up. Warhol nearly died. You can read the whole sad story in the above article by Sarah Pruitt.
To this day, however, feminists laud Valerie’s SCUM Manifesto while saying nary a word of condemnation for her attempted murder. Janice Fiamengo does a fine job of rounding up the ways SCUM Manifesto lives on in feminism:
The SCUM Manifesto has been taught in women’s studies courses and reprinted by a boutique press in 2004 with a lengthy, bombastic introduction by postmodernist professor Avital Ronell, who praised the book’s prescience, stating of Solanas that “Maybe she was put here to speak the unspeakable or, less dramatically, to sound the wake-up call […] to encourage the dialectics of female empowerment” (24).
In 2014, Breanna Fahs published an admiring biography that cast Solanas as both abused innocent and resistance warrior. Fahs records an exchange between Solanas and a friend Jeremiah Newton, who asked her if her manifesto was to be taken literally. “I don’t want to kill all men,” she had allegedly replied “I think males should be neutered or castrated so they can’t mess up any more lives.”
In 2020, a celebratory article calling Solanas “an important LBGTQ figure,” was published in The New York Times as part of a series called Overlooked, about “remarkable” people whose deaths had not been reported in The Times. The article noted her “daring arguments in SCUM Manifesto, her case for a world without men” and seemed to regret that the attack on Warhol had come to “define her life.”
It’s impossible to imagine the online manifesto of Elliot Rodger, who killed six people in Isla Vista, being read in university classrooms and published with a glowing introduction by a super-star academic.
You can and should read all of Janice’s piece Second Wave Feminism and Casual Male-Extermination, for the time would fail me to write about Sally Miller Gearhart and Mary Daly, two more prominent male extermination proponents.
I must say that in reading some of Solanas’ work, I had a sudden epiphany. For instance, she writes this:
SCUM will become members of the unwork force, the f—-up force; they will get jobs of various kinds and unwork... SCUM office and factory workers, in addition to f—-ing up their work, will secretly destroy equipment. SCUM will unwork at a job until fired, then get a new job to unwork at.
My epiphany is this: SCUM is alive and well. They have all migrated with their unwork plan to HR departments all across America.
No! You May Not be a Housewife.
Feminism means everybody gets a choice! Except one. You may not choose to be a stay at home wife and mother. I have been told that this is not the case, that feminism, in fact, is the reason I get a choice to stay at home or do anything else I want to do. I always want to ask these people, “Do you ever read the feminists?”
Betty Friedan, a well-known feminist voice in the United States and author of The Feminine Mystique, once interviewed Simone de Beauvoir and put to her all manner of questions concerning women who choose to stay in the home to take care of it, their husbands and children. What should government policies be concerning them and shouldn’t they be paid for their labor in the home? De Beauvoir responded with this abrupt statement:
No, we don't believe that any woman should have this choice. No woman should be authorized to stay at home to 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. It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction.
You can read this entire interview here at unz.com where a copy of The Saturday Review in which this interview was published has been preserved. You’ll find the above quote at the bottom of page eighteen.
When you read the entire back and forth, you realize that these two women weren’t going to go about taking away this choice by lobbying for laws which would remove this choice explicitly by enlisting government force. No. What they wished to do was to undermine and subvert the culture in the United States and the world over, really, such that it would be totally reshaped into a culture which could not sustain a woman staying at home with her children. She would have to leave the home, just to survive.
Looking at our culture now, I’d say they were quite successful. It is extremely difficult for a couple with children to sustain themselves on a single income anymore. It’s well-nigh impossible for all but the most wealthy. In order to have mom home with the kids, there are essentially two options. Option one is a wealthy dad with an excellent job. Option two is that the whole family must live in something equivalent to poverty. Austerity measures, extreme budgeting, no frills, no fancies, old clunky cars, thrifted clothes…basically, my childhood. Which I don’t regard as a bad thing, really. However, I wasn’t the one facing the stress and worry of making the money stretch far enough every month. That was on my parents, and they did it admirably. And they made many sacrifices so that my mom could be at home with us, because it was that important to them. But it was all against the grain of this zeitgeist that feminism manufactured.
Here’s the result of this manufactured new culture: Moms who choose to stay at home live in social isolation, because she’s the only stay at home housewife within a ten mile radius. All the other moms are at work. There’s no one to get together with during the day to help with laundry, or childcare, or canning, or cleaning, or sewing, or organizing. Stay at home moms today have next to no moral support from other moms, much less their families. (Most stay at home wives would love some help from grandma, but she’s off working, putting in her time, counting down the days until her retirement when she can go traveling the world, stopping to see the grandkids at Thanksgiving and Christmas.) Stay at home moms are overworked. Feminism, funnily enough, has probably led to more women losing themselves utterly in the lives of their children, than was ever the case before when the majority of women were at home with their children at the same time, living in close community with each other well before the Industrial Revolution.
So, how did these feminists do this? Well, they told women that their homes and marriages were nothing but glorified concentration camps. I’ll let Ms. Friedan tell you all about it in the following quotes from The Feminine Mystique.
...women who 'adjust' as housewives, who grow up wanting to be 'just a housewife,' are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps...they are suffering a slow death of mind and spirit...
American housewives have not had their brains shot away, nor are they schizophrenic in the clinical sense. But if … the fundamental human drive is not the urge for pleasure or the satisfaction of biological needs, but the need to grow and to realize one’s full potential, their comfortable, empty, purposeless days are indeed cause for a nameless terror…
There is only one way for women to reach full human potential—by participating in the mainstream of society, by exercising their own voice in all the decisions shaping that society. For women to have full identity and freedom, they must have economic independence. Breaking through the barriers that had kept them from the jobs and professions rewarded by society was the first step, but it wasn’t sufficient. It would be necessary to change the rules of the game to restructure professions, marriage, the family, the home. The manner in which offices and hospitals are structured, along the rigid, separate, unequal, unbridgeable lines of secretary/executive, nurse/doctor, embodies and perpetuates the feminine mystique. But the economic part would never be complete unless a dollar value was somehow put on the work done by women in the home, at least in terms of social security, pensions, retirement pay. And housework and child rearing would have to be more equally shared by husband, wife, and society. Equality and human dignity are not possible for women if they are not able to earn.
And so, if the stay at home life is a virtual concentration camp, if being just a wife and a mother keeps a woman from her full potential, and if the only way for a woman to reach her full potential is economic independence—a job outside the home… Well, then. Feminism got all of this for us! It got us economic freedom. It got us the tools to reach our full potential. It demolished any societal frown against women in the work place. We can do whatever we want now!. And…woman who choose not to do this are traitors to the feminist cause and deserving of scorn. Yes, they are. You can swear up one side and down another that feminism is just about having choice. But some choices are not acceptable.
I have seen women look at my own mother in scorn. I’ve written about this before. One time, my mom took a lady vacuum cleaner salesman up on a free carpet cleaning. The deal was, the lady got to bring her vacuum over to our house, give us her sales’ pitch, and then we got our carpet cleaned for free even if we didn’t buy the vacuum cleaner. I was about twelve. She came, she gave her demonstration, made her pitch, and my mom politely declined.
You recall that we were poor as church mice. Our vacuum cleaner worked just fine, but the carpet did need a good shampooing. This lady tried every tactic in the salesmen’s toolkit to sell Mom a vacuum cleaner. But Mom wouldn’t budge.
Mom said, “I’m not going to make that kind of financial decision without talking to my husband first.”
And then the knives came out.
“You ask your husband if you can spend money?” dripping contrived shock.
“Of course!”
“What if your child had a cough? Would you seriously wait to ask your husband if you could buy cough syrup?”
“Oh, yes,” Mom replied.
I was simultaneously amused and feeling murderous towards this awful woman by now. First of all, I didn’t like her shaming my mother for her relationship with my dad over this moral dilemma drudged up out of thin air. Secondly, I also know that even if someone gave us cough syrup, it would go straight in the trash. Too much artificial crap in that stuff. Honey and lemon juice did for us quite well, thank you very much.
The woman spluttered in surprise and disgusted indignation at the supposed suffering I would face the next time I had a cough and Mom waited a few hours until Dad got home from work to see if she could buy cough syrup for me.
But it was to no avail. The answer was still no.
Mom did get her free carpet cleaning, though. The lady was not happy about it. I could tell by the way she rushed the job.
“You missed that spot over there,” my mom pointed out, moving furniture out of the way so that she could clean allllllll the carpet.
Because…my mom is a legend. She didn’t begin a submissive wife, but she grew in that submission more and more as the years went by. And though she was a very submissive wife to my dad (God rest him), she was not, nor ever will be, a woman to be trifled with by anyone.
That day, a sour disposition began to grow within me towards the feminism which inspired that vacuum cleaner salesman to put a wedge between a husband and wife to close a deal. As I’ve read more and more from the feminists of the past and present, the more I am confirmed in that hunch begun long ago.
I am concerned with the amount of Christian women calling themselves feminists. That’s why I’ve pointed out past feminist’s sexual predation, their hatred of men, their hatred of our Christian sexual ethic, their hatred of marriage and their work to subvert our society in order to remake it according to their own desires.
Women have been told for decades and have believed, that past feminists were merely altruistic women who wanted equality for the sexes and freedom of choice for women. They were not. They are not. They lie. What I’ve written concerning their lies isn’t even the half of it. I don’t have time to cover the fact that Ayatollah Kohmeini allied with the feminists and other leftists to oust the Shah in Iran, only to turn around and oust the leftist feminists. I don’t have time to show you that feminism is just recycled Marxism/communism and that you cannot have one without eventually caving to the other. (Indeed, socialism/communism/Marxism are well-linked with even the earliest feminists. Most admired Marx and Engels.) I’ve turned my back on feminism. I hope you will, too. If you don’t, I’ll still love you and like you and be glad to see you, but I hope you’ll listen.
Because here’s the problem: when you sew to the wind, you reap the whirlwind. And the whirlwind’s here. More on that in future articles in this series.
That’s all for now. Until next time, folks…
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Thank you for this very thorough article on feminism. I'm watching the effects of this dogma all around me and it isn't pretty.