Potemkin Feminism Imposters betraying women. by Bruce Thornton
https://www.frontpagemag.com/potemkin-feminism/
Remember Christine Blasey-Ford? She is the psychologist whom former California Senator Dianne Feinstein discovered and groomed to be a hostile witness in the 2018 Supreme Court hearings for Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court. Her appearance was carefully timed for the end of the hearings for more impact. But her story describing Kavanagh’s alleged sexual assault of her at a high school party decades earlier was full holes and lacked credible evidence.
Now, just in time for the November election, she’s on a book-tour, garnering screen-time and specious praise for her “bravery.” So far, all the tour has accomplished is to publicize one of her own witnesses, Mark Judge, who she claimed was also at the party. But Judge told Fox News that he wasn’t there. And at the time of the hearings, in a letter to Senators he also said, “I never saw Brett act in the manner Dr. Ford describes.”
These tactics, replete with hoaxes lacking confirmable empirical evidence, are sadly all too familiar. For example, in 2006, the Duke University lacrosse team, three of whom were charged by an incompetent or unscrupulous District Attorney with kidnapping, rape, and first-degree sexual offenses against an exotic dancer. Many corporate media outlets rushed to judgement, wielding stale politically correct clichés that libeled the team––“The Real Face of Duke University,” “Spoiled Sports,” “Jocks and Prejudice,” “Wolves in Blazers and Khakis,” and “Will Duke Take a Look at Itself?” are a few.
By the way, does anyone believe that in this age of radical “woke” prosecutors, those Duke students would have been exculpated because the state bar filed ethics charges against the District Attorney for “withholding exculpatory evidence and making inflammatory statements about the case”?
These politically weaponized tactics have sprung from the hijacking of feminism that was obvious in the Nineties. A movement that had begun in order to ensure the integrity of women’s Constitutional rights, has now become a political weapon for pushing progressivism’s technocratic ambitions for expanding the reach and power both of the government, and of the factions sharing that aim to “fundamentally transform” the United States.
One major tactic is making poorly substantiated charges of sexual harassment and even violent assault. During the Kavanaugh hearings, Democrats used this tactic, which they infamously also employed in 1991 during Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings. Near the end, Senate Democrats produced Anita Hill, who had worked with Thomas in the Department of Education and the EEOC. Hill’s charges of inappropriate and provocative sexual comments were similarly unsubstantiated, which didn’t stop the Dems from conducting what Thomas later called a “high tech lynching.”
In both cases, the low-down partisan politicizing of feminism reflected its descent into incoherence and self-contradiction. On the one hand, feminism had embraced the sexual revolution, which liberated women from sexist “patriarchal” tutelage and control of women’s sexual agency and bodies––“our bodies, ourselves,” as the slogan put it. In the Sixties, Cultural Marxism ideologically interpreted the traditional limits on women’s sexual behavior, which now became the instruments of political oppression and “false consciousness” that perpetuated the capitalist ruling class and its bourgeoise clients.
Breaking sexual taboos, then, and experiencing sexual pleasure thus became acts of political protest and liberation, leading not just to self-fulfillment and personal freedom, but also leftist progressive political power.
Yet this narrative of women’s empowerment through equally exercising sexual agency is compromised by the contrasting narrative of women’s perpetual victimization by “systemic” misogyny and sexist males shaped by “rape culture.” We see this contradiction in sexual behavior codes in universities and in sexual harassment law, which assume that every engagement between men and women is a minefield of sexism and assault perpetuated by men who create “hostile and intimidating” work environments. These subjective agents of sexism can comprise anything from a picture of a colleague’s wife in a bikini, to a clumsy pass by an uncouth suitor.
The unstated sexist assumption is that women do not have the resources for dealing with the consequences of their agency, or just the slings and arrows that come from living among a complex diversity of people. Only men are responsible for the possible contingencies of sexual encounters––boorishness, intoxication, insensitive paramours, carelessness with birth control, creepy innuendos by a colleague or boss.
At the same time that feminists demand unlimited sexual freedom and agency, they treat women like Victorian maidens who lack agency and the resources of character, and so must be defended against sexual cads and bounders. Whereas once fathers, brothers, the precepts of faith, manners, mores, and virtues like prudence and self-control shielded women, now the patriarch is big government and its intrusive laws and state agencies that defend women not just from men, but from the consequences of their own choices.
As the Manhattan Institute’s Heather MacDonald writes, this “new order is a bizarre hybrid of liberationist and traditionalist values. It carefully preserves the prerogative of no-strings-attached sex while cabining it with legalistic caveats that allow females to revert at will to a stance of offended virtue.”
A more recent degradation of feminism has been the rise of transgenderism, the unscientific idea that biological sex is a choice from a whole catalogue of multiple “genders.” Now cross-hormones, puberty blockers, and ghoulish, irrevocable surgeries allow biological males to claim a female identity no different from that of biological females.
In fact, these imposters are direct challenges to biological women and their rights. Potemkin feminists accept these Potemkin “women” for political reasons, as allies in enforcing big-government DEI orthodoxy and extending its reach deeper into our lives. Meanwhile, real feminist women are scorned as “TERFS,” “trans-exclusive radical feminists” who violate the illiberal narrative of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Nowhere is this betrayal of women more evident than allowing biological males to participate and compete in women’s sports. One of the just complaints feminists made about universities was the double standard regarding women’s sports. Title IX ended this discrimination, which led to more universities and colleges creating sports programs for women. Allowing biological males, who on average are much bigger and stronger than women, to compete in women’s sports victimizes women and makes a mockery of Title IX by giving a female athletes’ spot on the roster to men who would be mediocrities at best when competing against other biological males.
Finally, this Potemkin feminism reinforces and aids the technocratic pretensions that individual character, communities, churches, traditional virtues, and families are inadequate for regulating our society and avoiding the malign consequences of our passions and interests. But this dubious assumption carries a moral hazard––that people come to the belief that they are not responsible for their own choices, or accountable for any destructive consequences. Government agencies and programs, funded by redistributing the wealth of others, are now the paternal and patriarchal controlling authority, one more typical of an autocracy than a republic.
Democratic freedom and equality are both damaged without personal responsibility and accountability for our choices and actions. As Alexis de Tocqueville said about the necessity of self-reliance for democratic freedom, “It profits me but little, after all, that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquility of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life.”
Not just some feminists, but many other Americans have accepted the loss of freedom as the trade-off for shedding the burden of being responsible for their own lives. But that is the road to tyranny, not liberation.
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