Part 29
This sub chapter is called "History Lesson"
While the radical feminists are a small and rabid cult, the majority of modern equal right
advocates, the true heiresses of the cultural revolution of the 60's and 70's, never really
lost sight of their commercial goals. These "liberated" women couldn't afford to hate men
(at least not openly)-it would be like biting the hand which was writing out the check that
fed them.
In 1963, when Betty Friedan (who, twenty years later would champion Dustin Hoffman's
"Tootsie" as the masculine ideal) published her seminal book The Feminine Mystique,
she lit the fuse on a time bomb of social controversy. Friedan moaned that women had
been "forced" into "dreary" lives as wives and mothers (Gloria Stemem termed the home,
unbelievably enough, a "pink-collar ghetto"), wasting their brains and talents by being
excluded from the business world. She was hardly an inspired emancipator, howeverliberation
of all sorts was already stirring in the underground, like new shoots pushing up
in the spring. In the south, blacks were campaigning for civil rights, and hippies had
begun to challenge the Leave-It-To Beaver mythology of suburban comfort and security.
Notwithstanding, The Female Mystique touched a raw female nerve; for women, it was
as if someone had suddenly turned on all the lights in a huge, abandoned mansion.
Friedan told them that they could have their cake and eat it, too: while their husbands
labored to pay the mortgage, housewives could go back to school or take a glamour job
or work for a charity to convince themselves of their productivity and worth.
And this was the problem in a nutshell. Entranced by her own militantism, Friedan had
neglected to factor feminine delusional systems into her equation: it's easy to be liberated
when someone else is paying your bills. All at once women wanted to crusade for
equality, but not at the expense of their comfortable lifestyles. Whether Friedan realized
it or not, The Feminine Mystique was pointing a very indirect finger at dishonest
whoredom, and sowing the seeds of the most brazen hypocrisy which was to come.
The 60's housewives had amused themselves with setting up the props and the scenery,
but it fell to their idealistic daughters to act out the proper roles in the play. These young
women were open-hearted revolutionaries, who shook off inherited "truths" and seized
the new zeitgeist by the throat. By the early 70's women were stampeding into
universities. Bras came off, drugs were mind-expanding, and the commercialization of
the birth control pill banished any fears of pregnancy. Freed from the puritanical
restraints of their mothers' "morality", for the first time women allowed themselves to be
uninhibited and unmercenary about their sex drives suddenly they were demanding
orgasms instead of cash. A true New Age of female honesty seemed to have begun: they
had ripped the mask off their self-deception and exposed the fraudulence of their
whoredom. It was an era of unransomed freedom and hot-blooded exploration. It was the
foundry of true feminism (which doesn't hate or use men), untainted by greed, a
philosophy which furloughed women to educate themselves and pursue careers, while at
the same time pleasuring their bodies without selling them. Waving their banners of
peace and love and unqualified sexuality, the young women of this generation had
stumbled across the great secret of successful relationships: partnership instead of cash.
But as glorious as it should have been, this "New Age" was doomed, almost a stillborn
child. Its tragic mistake lay in overlooking women's venal history, believing, in a
Camelot like moment, that the female soul could exist unsullied by greed, and that
women were capable of being tutored by the natural rhythms of the human heart. By the
mid-70's the buoyant idealism of youth had been rubbed a bit raw: thousands of new
graduates were having their eyes opened to the reality that college life was a false image
of the real world-it had granted them freedom without the chains of responsibility. Young
men and women were matriculating into the marketplace, and were surprised to learn that
they could no longer get away with partying all week, then cramming at the last minute to
fulfill their sales calls. Men, indoctrinated by their mothers to be workhorses to support
women, reverted to this lethal brainwashing; and as soon as they saw the college partyers
earning money, women scurried to swap their baggy sweatshirts for plunging necklines.
When nobody had any money, it was fine to give sex away, but now the old adage rang
clear and cold in their minds: why should a man buy the cow when he can get the milk
for free? Prostitution was back, and free love, the sexual revolution, had all wisped away
to a fading memory, like the remnants of an hallucinogenic dream. These young
liberationists, rebellious though they were, had internalized their mothers' messages too
well. No longer were they burning their bras-now they were stuffing them. No man was
going to sneak a peek without first paying the admission fee.
Cultural change does not proceed in quantum jumps, but evolves at a much more erratic
pace, often encompassing times of transition. The Disco era was one of these transitional
stages, arising from the social disintegration and scattering of forces which was the wake
of the 1970's. Directionless young people were searching for a hook upon which to hang
their lives; they stood poised between the dying vestiges of innocence and a surging new
riptide of materialism. The riptide swelled, and Disco emerged, pointing like a flashing
neon arrow at the brutal avarice which belonged to the future. Like the hippies, Discoers
wore costumes to assure themselves of their identities: they traded in love beads for gold
chains and tie-dye for polyester dripping with dancing sweat. But whereas the hippies had
celebrated lovemaking as a wholesome and natural act, now the campfires of the
communes were electrified into the dazzling lights of the city, and a new sensuality was
throbbing through the urban nightclubs. The beat of Disco music was deliberately
syncopated to the pulse of the human heart; women's dresses were slashed to display
thigh and breast; and men's pants looked shrink-wrapped to their crotches. When they
danced, partners interlaced fingers and caressed bodies, just as their parents had, 20 years
ago. But the cult of materialism put a price tag on such contact. Women were once again
baiting men with their sexuality and selling it to the highest bidder. The sexual revolution
had emancipated females to express their sensuality, but love was no longer free-Disco
had snapped its fingers and awakened a hypnotized greed.
In a perverse way, the radical feminists were more committed and loyal to their doctrine
because, even though their innate bigotry presumed more sexism than the claims
imagined for their "oppressors", at least these women were flying the flag of solidarity
and not relying on men to support them. Their hate was virulent enough to strangle down
normal female avarice. But with the dawning of the 80's-the Yuppie era-a new brand of
feminism had emerged: the pseudo feminist. In a milieu of designer labels, power lunches,
corporate raiders, and soulless consumerism, these women forged their ideology with a
viperous will. They dissected the feminist manifesto with their manicured talons and
culled whatever suited their best interests. Their amended version of equal rights was
gimmee, gimmee, gimmee. Men were making money-lots of money-and women wanted
it, and the message they had harvested from the hard-core feminists was an excuse to
plunder male bank accounts. "Empowerment" was translated into a license to steal. Their
mothers might have been bothered by a suspicion of inner deception, or perhaps even
wrestled with their consciences because they were living off the fat of the land while their
husbands sweated over deadlines and cursed their lost dreams; but these newly-created
hypocrites were tossing out even these proprieties-they expected to be handed everything
free of charge. At least their mothers would have rolled over on their backs once in a
while, but these women weren't even bothering to lure men with the promise of sex-they
just wanted and took and held their hands out for more. The only bulge in a man's pants
they were interested in was the bulge of his wallet.
Drunk with power, calculating and self-centered, the false feminists trampled men into
peonage, and sexually famished males doled out anything these harpies grasped for.
Women had become true oppressors, and they were scavenging male flesh with red tooth
and claw. But in order for a tyrant to most ruthlessly exploit her victims, she must first
depersonalize them into "things", so what little conscience she has will never bother her.
Thus the pseudo feminists borrowed the hate and blame cards from the radicals' nasty
deck. With shrill, venom-laced voices they began to vilify men as "pigs" and "liars", to
label them as sex-crazed seducers worthy only of scorn. Such depraved creatures could
hardly be thought of as sex objects; instead women degraded them into "money objects".
And when these women weren't handed a job or a promotion, they put the blame on mennever
on their own incompetence or inexperience. If no one asked them for a date, it was
because men were "intimidated" by their intelligence or position, not because their
arrogance and bad attitudes betrayed them as unpleasant companions. And if they weren't
married, the reason was that men "can't make a commitment", not because no man would
relish a lifetime of living with a cold-hearted bitch.
The Yuppie empire was built on the shifting sands of an artificial economy, and when its
infrastructure began to crumble, social theorists happily predicted a New age for the 90's,
which was supposed to be an era of diminished materialism and enhanced intergender
relationships. Shirley MacLaine had already tried to blaze a trail with her silly pastiche of
19th century spiritualism and modern pseudoscience: crystals, pyramids, and channeling
touched off a worldwide fad for the supernatural because these sophistries provided an
antidote for the yawning emptiness of the "greed is good" 80's. MacLaine preached antimaterialism
(although she made a fortune from seminars and book sales) and "going
within". Sheep-like women followed her in herds. They may have taken a journey inside
themselves, but apparently there wasn't much to be found, because when they came back
out again, their mercenary attitudes had not been channeled away. Somebody-men-had to
be paying the rent while these women were off seeking harmonic convergence or running
with the wolves. Shirley MacLaine's "New Age" was more of a whim than a renewal-it
takes more than mumbling a few chants over a shard of rock to make a woman relinquish
her whoredom.
The 90's were supposed to be the "we" decade. But such idealism does not take into
account the voraciousness of female avarice. Like sharks sensing blood in the sea,
women had been gorging themselves in a feeding frenzy of lust for masculine earning
power, a hunger which, once awakened, would prove impossible to slake.
It is crucial to understand that nowhere in the separatist gospel of the radical feminists, or
in the mercenary gluttony of the pseudo feminists is there any conviction of a true desire
for social equity. The hard-core feminists despise the male gender so much that they
believe that a man's only possible redemption would be to become a woman; and the
false feminists, besotted with their self-serving doctrine of predation, seek only societal
permission to take men for everything they have. But attacking or objectifying men are
just childish shortcuts; this is not aiming at a solution, but focusing full attention on me,
me, me, and consigning blame to everyone but yourself. These women want to alienate
themselves from men, and use them, but they are working at cross purposes. What they
don't realize is that their third-rate philosophies are ultimately dependent upon men, not
only to define themselves, but also to subsidize their duplicity.
A true feminist-and there are very, very few of these likes men. She revels in their
company, just as men revel in the company of an honest woman, not for monetary gain,
but simply for the excitement and mystery which glamorizes the opposite sex. She lives
with the profound belief that men and women can exist in a spirit of harmony and
partnership. This, of course, is the point which the dishonest feminists shut their eyes and
ears to (and couldn't care less about): that men and women are fundamentally different,
both physiologically and intellectually, and that nature has designed them this way so that
they will complement and reinforce each other, so that each gender will contribute its
own remarkable strength to a successful relationship.
But the pathetic reality is that the false feminists care only about themselves. They are
their own worst enemies. Without even a glimmer of insight or understanding, they are
diligently erecting the gallows which will hang them all.
