The Other McCain

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Feminists Lie: Why @WendyDavisTexas’s Dishonest Personal Narrative Matters

Posted on | January 26, 2014 | 32 Comments

Professor William Jacobson points out that Democrats now claim it is sexist to criticize Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis for her dishonesty, even though “she made her parenting a critical part of her political narrative.” Professor Glenn Reynolds adds:

When women say that Wendy Davis is being treated more harshly than a man, I wonder if they aren’t really reflecting just that it bothers them more when a woman is criticized this way than when it happens to a man?

All Democrats habitually lie — John Kerry’s Christmas in Cambodia, anyone? — so Wendy Davis is not really unusual in that regard.

What makes Wendy Davis a special case is that in 2013, as part of the Democrat Party’s plan to continue their 2012 “War on Women” theme in attacking Republicans, she led a filibuster against a bill in the Texas legislature that would limit abortion, from 24 weeks to 20 weeks of gestation. In other words, Davis made her debut as a national figure in support of late-term abortion, and she did so in the immediate aftermath of the Gosnell “house of horrors” revelations.

You can be pro-choice and still agree that late-term abortion — butchering an unborn child that is already at or near the point of being able to survive outside the womb — is a grisly atrocity.

It was in defense of such atrocities that Wendy Davis became a Democrat “star,” and her personal narrative was a crucial factor in her stardom. So when it turned out that she had been dishonest in describing her “single mom” status, this was important.

Many people are mystified by the Democrat strategy of running “Abortion Barbie” as their candidate in Texas — where polls indicate a 2-to-1 pro-life majority — but this was part of a national strategy, and if Davis was doomed to defeat, so what?

What Democrats want is to promote a victimhood narrative to women voters, to portray pro-life Republicans as extremist bullies, and Wendy Davis was happy to volunteer as national poster girl for their partisan propaganda campaign. This much is obvious, but what many people don’t understand is that the feminist crusade for the past half-century, specifically including the embrace of abortion by the so-called “women’s movement,” has been built upon a foundation of deliberate deception.

We need only mention Betty Friedan’s Communist Party connections as a reminder that feminism is a species of Marxism, whose leading advocates in the 1960s and ’70s were all part of the anti-American, pro-Soviet radical Left. In this sense, feminism is merely a stale Cold War leftover, like the “anti-imperialist” views of foreign policy that Barack Obama learned from his Communist mentor Frank Marshall Davis. Yet while feminists today usually conceal the fact that they spent decades cheering for freedom’s deadliest enemies, they meanwhile are mostly ignorant of how their support for abortion was purchased by male capitalist plutocrats with decidedly non-“progressive” objectives.

The effort to legalize abortion wasn’t led by women seeking a “right to choose,” but by neo-Malthusian population control fanatics:

The population control movement . . . was largely the brainchild of John D. Rockefeller III. Rockefeller funded much of the movement himself and through a number of family trusts and foundations, and he encouraged other foundations (Ford, Scaife, Carnegie) to do the same. . . .
[B]etween 1959 and 1964 one organization alone, the Population Council, got more than $5 million from the Rockefellers, $8.4 million from the Ford Foundation and $2.1 million from Scaife. So that’s $15 million in five years, back when a million dollars was a lot of money.

Historian Donald L. Critchlow chronicled this phenomenon in his excellent 2001 book, Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Goverment in Modern America:

[T]o raise the public’s consciousness about the threat of overpopulation . . . the population movement undertook a concerted public relations campaign through a steady stream of books, pamphlets, and magazine and newspaper articles. This campaign was aided by the involvement of key publishers and editors who were actively involved in the movement, including George Hecht, editor of Parents Magazine. The drumbeat around the population crisis reached crescendo by the early 1960s. Readers of popular magazines were faced with a barrage of articles warning of an impending population crisis . . . Women readers were inundated with articles like “Are We Overworking the Stork?” (Parents Magazine, 1961), “Why Americans Must Limit Their Families” (Redbook, 1963), “Intelligent Woman’s Guide to the Population Explosion” (McCall’s, February 1965), “Overpopulation: Threat to Survival” (Parents Magazine, 1967) and “Population Increase: A Grave Threat to Every American Family” (Parents Magazine, 1969).

 The truth about this is something I’ve mentioned before:

Like the facts about feminism’s Marxist origins, it is not really difficult to discover the truth about Rockefeller’s funding of this population control campaign — which connected abortion to the feminist cause  — once you are aware of its existence. But as with so much else in our culture, liberal hegemony in academia and journalism results in the suppression of this important truth.

Do you remember when feminist Meg Lanker created a hoax at the University of Wyoming by threatening to “hate-f*ck” herself? Her fictional victimhood was typical of the lies that feminists tell routinely, a phenomenon I began to notice about 15 years ago in examining a series of feminist memoirs that were a vogue with publishers in the mid- to late 1990s. What caused that trend? My surmise was that publishers figured out the institutionalization of feminism in university Women’s Studies programs had created a certain baseline level of demand. College libraries would more or less automatically buy any book about feminism, and if an author had a few friends who were professors that would assign her book as required reading for students, even the most tedious and badly-written memoir could sell thousands of copies.

Whatever the inspiration, in the 1990s there issued forth a number of books by middle-aged feminists whose life stories tended to follow a certain narrative arc: They grew up in suburban middle-class homes, got involved with the anti-war movement in the 1960s, endured a series of failed relationships with men, had a feminist “epiphany” at some point, and ended up as radical lesbians.

After reading about a half-dozen of these books, I noticed that their theme was usually at odd with their narrative, and that many elements of their narratives were “just so” stories, i.e., unverifiable anecdotes that — coincidentally! magically! — just happened to prove whatever political point they were trying to make.

When I say there was a conflict between the themes and narratives of these memoirs, what I mean is that the oppression they claimed to have suffered was not generally perpetrated by reactionary right-wing forces. No, these women left behind their bourgeois homes, got involved with the anti-war Left and then were treated abusively by left-wing men in the movement who, if you take these feminist memoirs at face value, were all insensitive monsters with a knack for turning women into angry lesbians.

While I’m willing to believe the worst about hippie peacenik creeps, however, the tendency of feminist memoirists to use unverifiable anecdotes to form their indictment of oppressive patriarchy struck me as inherently suspicious. If “the personal is political,” as feminists insist, why did it seem that the “personal” always involved a male victimizer known only by a pseudonym, so that there was no way to check the facts or learn the other side of the story? Unless you’re an angry lesbian whose confirmation bias predisposes you to believe such tales, at some point you begin to notice how these victimhood anecdotes serve the narrative function of providing male scapegoats whose alleged villainy relieves the author of responsibility for her own choices and decisions.

“The patriarchy made me do it!”

Victimhood tales are to feminism what success stories are to capitalism. Just as no entrepreneur would start an independent business if not for the belief that success was a possibility, so no woman would become a feminist unless she thought she could parlay sympathy for her tales of victimhood into career opportunities. Organized feminism provides a ready-made audience of credulous listeners for these victimhood narratives, and the Democrat Party’s political investment in women’s victimhood provides an incentive for the partisan publicity machinery of left-wing blogs and liberal media to promote such feminist myth-making.

If Wendy Davis’s single-teen-mom-in-a-trailer story is not as complete a fiction as Meg Lanker’s rape-threat hoax, the deception is not really a difference of kind, but merely a difference of degree. And if feminists are crying foul about Wendy Davis’s disgrace, this is only because feminism as a movement is implacably hostile to truth.





 

 


Category: Abortion, Feminism, Texas

Comments

32 Responses to “Feminists Lie: Why @WendyDavisTexas’s Dishonest Personal Narrative Matters”

  1. Feminists Lie: Why @WendyDavisTexas’s Dishonest Personal Narrative Matters | Dead Citizen's Rights Society
    January 26th, 2014 @ 2:39 pm

    […] Feminists Lie: Why @WendyDavisTexas’s Dishonest Personal Narrative Matters. […]

  2. RS
    January 26th, 2014 @ 3:07 pm

    All Progressive movements attempt to eliminate the personal responsibility component from everyday life. Thus, various taxonomies of “Victims” are created to provide cover for refusing to deal with the vagaries of life and the consequences of our own decisions. Being a victim is a sweet gig: it’s not your fault and somebody else has to clean up the mess. Thus, if one’s story does not demonstrate sufficient victimhood, you gotta make something up. And you’re correct. There is a ready-made and, with respect to the various “Victims’ Studies” departments infesting Academe, captive audience for these stories. Thanks to the internet, however, those narratives are much, much easier to check.

  3. tahDeetz
    January 26th, 2014 @ 4:07 pm

    RT @smitty_one_each: TOM Feminists Lie: Why @WendyDavisTexas’s Dishonest Personal Narrative Matters http://t.co/n3M98oCU2J #TCOT

  4. smitty
    January 26th, 2014 @ 3:12 pm

    My question on @DaTechGuyBlog’s radio show yesterday, Stacy, was: “If Dinesh D’Souza drops $20K into Wendy Davis’s campaign, does he get the David Gregory treatment?”

  5. cmehusky
    January 26th, 2014 @ 3:14 pm

    Next ,She will be under sniper fire at the Texas Capital!

  6. Adjoran
    January 26th, 2014 @ 3:15 pm

    I understand that Wendy Davis lied about being a single mom when she went to Harvard Law, and lied about “struggling” when her children were being cared for a nanny, and that she presents a false narrative and why that’s important.

    BUT I can’t understand why this is being ignored: the judge in her custody case ordered her to stay off alcohol and drugs for 24 hours before her scheduled visitations. If he felt he had to issue that order, there must be a reason. Do Texans want a substance-abusing Governor? Does the Texas Bar Association have no ethical standards on that?

    It seems to me this should be the headline, the phony life story secondary.

  7. RS
    January 26th, 2014 @ 3:33 pm

    Some of those are standard orders given to all litigants. It’s a form thing, not related to actual facts.

  8. Zohydro
    January 26th, 2014 @ 3:58 pm

    The second paragraph… I hadn’t heard about this before!

  9. Zohydro
    January 26th, 2014 @ 4:02 pm

    Did St Wave Riders have other issues?

  10. richard mcenroe
    January 26th, 2014 @ 4:15 pm

    Part of Wendy’s use to the Democrats is to distract from the LIEUTENANT Governor’s race. The Dems are hoping to sneak Leticia Van De Putte, Assemblywoman from San Antonio, into the office, particularly as there are several GOP candidates running against incumbent David Dewhurst.

    Lt. Governor is a powerful office in Texas, with great potential for upholding a conservative, free philosophy of government… or impeding it.

    As for representing San Antonio, well, you’re talking about the burg whose City Council recently voted to exclude anyone holding “extreme” Christian views from city office or city contracts, so you know what kind of folks sent her to Austin.

    It’s important not to give the Democrats one damned inch in Texas, because if you go to their own website (http://www.txdemocrats.org/) their own material shows you how they intend to govern, with their campaign promises quite clearly intending to make Texas the next California.

  11. richard mcenroe
    January 26th, 2014 @ 4:18 pm

    There was also a very interesting TRO filed against Davis during the proceedings. http://www.scribd.com/doc/201176359/Wendy-Davis-Temporary-Restraining-Order#fullscreen
    Funny the press don’t seem interested.

  12. richard mcenroe
    January 26th, 2014 @ 4:19 pm

    The TRO’s a different matter though.

  13. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    January 26th, 2014 @ 4:48 pm

    Are these Democrats saying Wendy Davis is treated more harshly than men (which of course is nonsense), the same Democrats who saved Sarah Palin?

  14. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    January 26th, 2014 @ 4:51 pm

    Well we of course know why Adjoran, it is being ignored because there is a (D) after her name. And because the supposedly opposition party (GOP) is afraid to be accused of conducting a “war on women” by merely pointing out the truth of Wendy Davis’s lies.

  15. McGehee
    January 26th, 2014 @ 5:09 pm

    It’s only a matter of time before the city council changes the name of the city to Antoniograd.

  16. concern00
    January 26th, 2014 @ 5:11 pm

    I really get sick of the whole cult of victim-hood. Don’t they realize how dis-empowering it is to play the victim? I am sure those that are manipulating these useful idiots know exactly how dis-empowering it really is. The whole voting majority of the Democrats relies upon it.

  17. Dana
    January 26th, 2014 @ 5:27 pm

    The obvious question is: is the lovely Mrs Davis being treated more harshly than other politicians? Sarah Palin might have something to say on the subject, but, of course, the criticism of her came from the left, so it doesn’t really count.

    What about male politicians like Eliot Spitzer or Anthony Weiner? Their problems had little to do with the offices they held and sought, but they were excoriated nonetheless. As far back as 1994, a Reader’s Digest article pointing out exaggerations in Oliver North’s personal story helped him to lose the Senate race to Charles Robb.

  18. Proof
    January 26th, 2014 @ 5:28 pm

    Do Texans want a substance-abusing Governor? I dunno. How many are Obama voters??

  19. Dana
    January 26th, 2014 @ 5:31 pm

    The feminists have achieve their goal: female candidates are being treated just like male candidates. And now some of them are whining about it!

  20. K-Bob
    January 26th, 2014 @ 5:54 pm

    Abigail Adams and Susan B. Anthony were “early feminists.”

    The Marxism crept in, it didn’t “originate” anything.

    By Marxism’s very nature it is incapable of originating anything.

    Despite the creeping marxism, modern feminism didn’t become the loathsome creature it is today until it was overtaken by homosexual activists and adopted as a front group by the Democrat party to help keep black voters in line (through Planned Parenthood).

    This is why the Republican party is in trouble. They have begun to be more of an arm of the state and not the voice of the people. It’s failing for the same reason feminism failed.

    But the origin’s of feminism were not leftism. Not unless someone decides that feminism started in the late ’60s and early ’70s. The earliest feminist writers were far more concerned with women’s health than politics.

  21. DaveO
    January 26th, 2014 @ 6:17 pm

    Ayn Rand started out as a Marxist Feminist at a time and place where dissent was fatal. After arriving in the US, Rand shed the Marxism and Feminism like one sheds Gogol’s Shinel to become a hedonist. Betty Friedan never got the joke.
    We’re addressing the Wendy Davis and War On Women narratives as men would address them: facts, philosophy, and furor.
    Why not address it as women would address it? ‘Wendy Davis is blonde, tanned, toned, and after using 3 men to get where she is, gave them away to other women, and did the same to her daughters. She’s not all that, with her botox, facelift, and roots showing. And her cornpone accent? Puhleeez! Of course she’s pro abortion – she hates her daughters like hot lava, and probably sleeping around with whomever will get her ahead, the little gold-digging b*tch. Her legs may have held her up, but who hasn’t she spread them for before and since?’
    And throw in Amy Glass’s blog whenever possible – to remind women of every party that they were criminally stupid for being biologically correct. But don’t address the War On Women as men do, never never never!
    TEA Party: hire some women who have PMS and an excellent vocabulary and turn ’em loose on the Dems War On Women.

  22. orbitup
    January 26th, 2014 @ 6:20 pm

    Stolen from http://yourcrazyunclebubba.blogspot.com/

  23. Kirby McCain
    January 26th, 2014 @ 6:42 pm

    Come on, the multi-billion dollar abortion industry doesn’t need all the spokespeople. This is about recruiting and indoctrination. Women are being herded into the local temple of ‘whatever the fuck you do is okay’ to sacrifice their young and become lifelong Democrats.
    Why did any primitive people engage in human sacrifice? To keep the members of its community in line. That’s all this is and they call Christians superstitious.
    Why do all these disparate factions of the liberals’ big tent hate facts? It’s a freaking religion! The godless belief that there is no wrong reigns supreme.
    So ladies line up and give’em your best. It’s all for some greater good you’ll never understand. Just shuffle along, no time to think about it. Come on ladies, it’s not pro choice it’s the only choice. Keep moving please.
    And if at some point the anti-depressants aren’t quite getting the job done and you’re feeling kind of guilty. Please, keep your mouth shut. I don’t want to hear your horror story. And it won’t bother me one bit if you keep voting Democrat. I’ve got plenty of popcorn.
    Wendy Davis, the latest and greatest high priestess of the Neo-pagan Church of Marxism. Pardon me if I don’t bow or kneel or something.

  24. Kirby McCain
    January 26th, 2014 @ 7:44 pm

    I wouldn’t be surprised if she were under something at the Texas State Capitol.

  25. Matt_SE
    January 26th, 2014 @ 8:06 pm

    I agree with K-Bob; original feminism wasn’t loathsome and dishonest until Marxist-elitist mentality crept in. Don’t know if Margaret Sanger was a socialist, but she was being dishonest about her goals way back in the day.

    Another Marxist-feminist liar: Rigoberta Menchu.

  26. Adjoran
    January 26th, 2014 @ 11:59 pm

    Susan B. Anthony and the suffragettes were prohibitionists whose movement promoted banning alcohol. In fact, Anthony began campaigning for the right to vote after she was denied the right to speak at a temperance rally.

    Perhaps they weren’t Marxists, but they definitely wanted to tell others what to do.

  27. bobbymike34
    January 27th, 2014 @ 1:03 am

    Here is the pro-life ad I’d like to run;
    …..you see a woman in a ‘medical facility’ feet in the stirrups husband holding her hand, Dr. says something that infers he is performing abortion ends dialogue with “Are you ready Mary?”
    Camera begins to pan back slowly until you see there is a bright star above the ‘medical facility’ and then slowly down to who can only be The Three Wise Men.
    The Star goes black

  28. K-Bob
    January 27th, 2014 @ 1:27 am

    She made common cause with Frederick Douglass. They did some good work. It was a lot more about “freedom” (which unfortunately is not the same thing as Liberty). This is the problem of freedom fighters in general. And why the American experiment is so unique in avoiding it.

    Prohibition is always hovering over the social-issues advocates, precisely because Liberty is misunderstood. (War on drugs, anyone?)

    But that’s certainly not the same thing as communism/Marxism. It’s a push-pull thing between generic conservative thinking (as opposed to Burkean, Conservative philosophy) and libertarian thinking.

    It’s amazing that the enlightenment produced men like Jefferson and Madison. Our nation could just as easily have turned out to be just another in an endless series of French Revolutions.

  29. K-Bob
    January 27th, 2014 @ 1:31 am

    Camille Paglia and Phyllis Chesler still consider themselves to be feminists. They are definitely not supporters of marxism. I’m not sure how to classify Paglia, but Chesler is at least as Conservative as Ace and Allah Pundit.

    There are others. They just get ignored by the wack-jobs to which the media pays attention.

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  31. CruisingTroll
    January 27th, 2014 @ 7:16 pm

    “As for representing San Antonio, well, you’re talking about the burg
    whose City Council recently voted to exclude anyone holding “extreme”
    Christian views from city office or city contracts, so you know what
    kind of folks sent her to Austin.”

    Citation or reference please.

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