The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

What No One Can Say on Campus

Posted on | October 28, 2015 | 33 Comments

“So what is feminism? What do feminists believe? Namely, that American women are oppressed by a patriarchy hell-bent on keeping women down, and that men and marriage are expendable. . . .
“What feminists want is to make men and women interchangeable. . . .
“I am not a feminist because I don’t believe feminists have an accurate understanding of human nature.”
— Susanne Venker

Great minds think alike, and Suzanne Venker sees the problem with feminism exactly as I see the problem with feminism. It is a War Against Human Nature aimed at using the coercive power of government to bring about an androgynous “equality” that ignores the actual differences between men and women. Feminism is a totalitarian movement to destroy civilization as we know it — and feminists say so themselves.

In her recent book Beauty and Misogyny, feminist Professor Sheila Jeffreys cites Andrea Dworkin as authority for indicting “the notion of beauty” as a “cultural practice . . . damaging to women,” an expression of “woman-hating culture.” Professor Jeffreys quotes Dworkin’s 1974 book Woman Hating, specifically this sentence from Page 26:

“We recognize that it is the structure of the culture which engineers the deaths, violations, violence, and we look for alternatives, ways of destroying culture as we know it, rebuilding it as we can imagine it.” [Emphasis added.]

On the very first page of that book, Dworkin declared feminism a “fundamental revolutionary commitment,” explaining that the purpose of her “analysis of sexism” was “transformation of the social reality on every level . . . the development of revolutionary program and consciousness.” Feminism is a revolution to destroy “culture as we know it,” and can only be understood in terms of its essentially destructive purpose. It is too seldom mentioned nowadays that modern feminist movement emerged from the radical New Left of the 1960s. Shulamith Firestone used a mailing list of women involved in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to help organize what became known as the Women’s Liberation Movement. They staged their first major national protest at the 1968 Miss America pageant, an event they said served “to further make women oppressed and men oppressors; to enslave us all the more in high-heeled, low-status roles.”

This claim that women are oppressed and enslaved by men remains the essential premise of feminist ideology and, as Suzanne Venker says, feminists insist that all women are victims of a “patriarchy hell-bent on keeping women down.” Feminism is a revolutionary movement to destroy this alleged oppression, “to make men and women interchangeable” in such a way that men would become “expendable” and irrelevant to women’s lives. How could this be accomplished?

“Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse have written about the sexual dilemmas of modern civilization and proposed solutions combining aspects of Freudian theory and Marxian economic analysis. . . .
“Reich’s analysis introduces the theoretical insight that women and gays have known instinctively: that civilization in its present form was designed for heterosexual men, and that its structure guarantees their authority within it. Thus, to change society by ending sexual suppression does not mean the end of civilization, but rather the end of civilization as we know it. . . .
“It was Herbert Marcuse who saw the critical function of homosexuals in ending repression. . . . Marcuse sees homosexuals as having an important place in history in helping to free sexuality, since he feels gay people have a more natural, totally erogenous sexuality.”
— Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love, Sappho Was a Right-On Woman: A Liberated View of Lesbianism (1972)

If you buy this weird mix of Freud and Marx, if you believe that sexual “repression” and male “authority” are the root of all evil, and that “gay people have a more natural, totally erogenous sexuality” — well, if you believe all that, congratulations, you’re a feminist.

However, if you disagree with that — if you think Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse were a couple of dangerous kooks and are skeptical about a plan for “the end of civilization as we know it,” to bring about a society controlled by the authority of “liberated” lesbians — well, you’re never going to be allowed to speak at Williams College:

Williams College students invited Suzanne Venker, a writer and longtime critic of feminism, to speak Tuesday night, but changed their minds and took back the invite for her talk, “One Step Forward, Ten Steps Back: Why Feminism Fails.”
Venker had been invited to participate in a student-run, alumni-funded speaking series at Williams called “Uncomfortable Learning.” The program’s purpose is to expose students to controversial voices and opinions they might not otherwise hear. Many of the speakers tend to be conservative or people whose views don’t square with those of most students.
The students who run the series decided to cancel the event, co-president Zach Wood explained, after its Facebook page began to attract acerbic comments and “things got a little out of hand.” . . .
The concern, Wood explained, was that “people would get riled up while she was speaking,” maybe even throw things, and there wasn’t time before the event to organize security. “You never know,” he said. “We’re just trying to think ahead here. The last thing we wanted to do was do something destructive.”

You see how it is. Feminists in 1968 could denounce the Miss America pageant, lesbians in 1972 could cite Marxists and proclaim the wonders of “totally erogenous sexuality,” and Andrea Dworkin in 1974 could advocate a revolution “destroying culture as we know it,” but in 2015, no one is permitted to criticize feminism on a college campus.

American college students are living under a regime of intellectual totalitarianism. No one who dissents from this regime can appear on campus because “people would get riled up.”

You can read the full text of the speech Suzanne Venker planned to give at Williams College, but students at Williams College are prohibited from hearing what Suzanne Venker says — it is forbidden and impermissible. The soi-disant student journalists at Williams College declare that “Venker’s views are wrong, offensive and unacceptable.”

Annual tuition at Williams College is $50,070 — parents are paying good money to make sure that their children never have to listen to anyone who might get them “riled up” by telling the truth about feminism.

In her book The War on Men, Suzanne Venker argues that “modern feminism . . . has severed the bond between the sexes, pitting men and women against one another,” that “the sexual revolution was a disaster. Men today have no respect for women and vice versa.” This is so obviously true that only stupid people (or Williams College students) could disagree, much less get “riled up” about it.

If Williams College ever gets nuclear weapons, we’re all doomed.




 

Category: Education, Sex Trouble

Comments

33 Responses to “What No One Can Say on Campus”

  1. SouthOhioGipper
    October 28th, 2015 @ 10:59 pm

    What is really frightening are the comments in the Williams article. One commenter equated questioning the existence of the patriarchy with being a flat earther or a radical anti evolution

  2. robertstacymccain
    October 28th, 2015 @ 11:18 pm

    How can allegedly smart people be so stupid?

  3. Jason Lee
    October 29th, 2015 @ 12:32 am

    They’re profoundly ignorant. They live in a well-insulated fantasy world. They’re like the people who object to modern medicine, having absolutely no idea how awful life was in the recent historical past.

  4. Quartermaster
    October 29th, 2015 @ 5:32 am

    Amy Alkon is being much too kind.

  5. Quartermaster
    October 29th, 2015 @ 5:33 am

    By being “educated.”

  6. M. Thompson
    October 29th, 2015 @ 6:15 am

    The foolish arrogance of youth, and a refusal by the “leadership” to tell them they should have this experience.

  7. Dana
    October 29th, 2015 @ 6:35 am

    Andrea Dworkin is an expert on beauty? 🙂

  8. Dana
    October 29th, 2015 @ 7:02 am

    If Suzanne Venker’s views are “wrong, offensive and unacceptable,” how would the students at Williams College know that if they are not allowed to hear them?

    Of course, the actual result will be that more students at Williams will read her writings, and about her writings, than ever would have heard her speech — such things are rarely well-attended — because the feminists at Williams have given her views far more publicity than they’d have received otherwise.

  9. Ilion
    October 29th, 2015 @ 7:05 am

    Yes; on the principle that them as can, do, and them as can’t, harangue.

  10. NeoWayland
    October 29th, 2015 @ 7:31 am

    “Thou shalt not dissent.”

    Sure sign that someone is afraid that they might be… wrong.

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    October 29th, 2015 @ 7:40 am

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  12. Fail Burton
    October 29th, 2015 @ 7:44 am

    Anyone who believes that reproductive heterosexuality is a fiction is not only nuts but when it comes to lesbian fantasies of nature, leading with their chin so to speak. Judith Butler’s idea is that it is not biology which produces heterosexuality but the patriarchal fiction of heterosexuality which creates and maintains itself by sheer cultural will, as if heterosexuality is an ideology like Marxism. It’s a lovely black hole of a circular argument. It reminds me of the Monty Python sketch where a magician is an architect who can put up a block of high rise apartments in a single day. The catch is the building will only continue to exist as long as the residents continue to believe it’s real. So the madness on top of madness is that lesbian suffrage considers itself a back to nature movement; back before the time of the sinking of Atlantis when the gender binary had more androgyny and lesbians.

    Of course, the cure for Butler’s “heterosexual hegemony” is “genderblindness.” That’s where the problem comes in. One gets the sense the vast majority of these young women know the “cure” but not the insane rationalization for it. To them genderblindness is simply some catch-all social justice that will lead to peace, justice and harmony. The insanity of Butler and the goofball French intellectuals which power all this are largely no where in sight. In cases where one can see women are aware of Butler and her lesbian fantasies, one usually sees the mental illness and sociopathy which powers this movement today, just as it did in 1970. And let’s not forget a society which falls below the 2.1 birthrate will cease to exist, which is in keeping with the death wish politicized lesbianism is. For all their talk of Freud and psychology, what’s more obvious than rejecting reproduction – life itself?

  13. Fail Burton
    October 29th, 2015 @ 7:48 am

    Well the obvious answer is the elite few aware of Venker’s views act as gatekeepers to edit the world to keep bad thoughts away.

  14. Fail Burton
    October 29th, 2015 @ 7:55 am

    Yes, the people who believe everyone else is anti-science believe in an ideology which is indistinguishable from witchcraft in its bare essentials. What does this ideology believe in:

    Chanting which changes reality? Yes.
    Symbolic artifacts which act as proxies which bring about reality, e. g., surgery, clothes? Yes.
    An imaginary pre-historic anti-Eden where men stole away androgyny? Yes.

    There is no difference between lesbian ideology and the Macumba/Yoruba magic shops in downtown Rio de Janeiro with their full-size wax limbs and other bins overflowing with such voodoo bullshit.

  15. RS
    October 29th, 2015 @ 8:13 am

    It’s important to remember that the kerfuffle regarding Ms. Venker’s speech is not about suppressing her views. Her views are well-known, and indeed, the Streisand Effect of Williams College’s disinvite might lead to greater exposure of those views on campus. Rather, this controversy is about “virtue” signalling among the young drones denouncing her and about warning others of the dangers of “wrongthink.” Paraphrasing Theodore Dalrymple from a few years back, the purpose is not really suppression of ideas as much as it is to humiliate those who have an open mind or who question the “Party’s” received wisdom. That is, the poor benighted saps at Williams are required to nod along affirmatively even when they know that their “betters” are full of shit.

  16. On appropriate tactics | Something Fishy
    October 29th, 2015 @ 8:25 am

    […] Anyone who argues in favor of restricting free speech should themselves be silenced. […]

  17. Daniel O'Brien
    October 29th, 2015 @ 9:06 am

    revolut9ion?

  18. ChandlersGhost
    October 29th, 2015 @ 9:26 am

    Regarding Shulamith Firestone: do any heterosexual men actually watch the Miss America pageant?

  19. When I was in college, the left were demanding absolute freedom of speech | The First Street Journal.
    October 29th, 2015 @ 10:30 am

    […] What No One Can Say on Campus […]

  20. Quartermaster
    October 29th, 2015 @ 11:47 am

    Only ghey men watch that stuff.

  21. Dana
    October 29th, 2015 @ 12:04 pm

    Thing is, I never heard of Suzanne Venker before today. The wonderful liberals of Williams College have now educated me to her views, which is, I’m certain, exactly what they had intended all along.
    http://www.thepiratescove.us/wp-content/plugins/wp-monalisa/icons/wpml_yahoo.gif

  22. Dana
    October 29th, 2015 @ 12:43 pm

    Our esteemed host wrote:

    In her recent book Beauty and Misogyny,
    feminist Professor Sheila Jeffreys cites Andrea Dworkin as authority for indicting “the notion of beauty” as a “cultural practice . . . damaging to women,” an expression of “woman-hating culture.”

    Let’s be honest here: women who look like Andrea Dworkin are not going to attract many men. Physical attractiveness is something men look for in a mate, but women are just as interested in physical attractiveness in their prospective mates are as men. Elliot Rodger’s combitch was that no women wanted him, because he was noncompetitive against other men. Had he tried to play in his own league, he might have had more luck, but as interested as he was in a trophy girlfriend, those women didn’t see him as much of a trophy for themselves.

  23. Finrod Felagund
    October 29th, 2015 @ 1:31 pm

    “Number nine, number nine, number nine, …”

  24. robertstacymccain
    October 29th, 2015 @ 1:56 pm

    My argument is somewhat different. I gallantly cede that women have many legitimate grievances. The onerous burden that a highly sexualized culture places on women, for example, is as obvious to me as it is to Sheila Jeffreys. Where I disagree — and I believe Suzanne Venker shares this view — is in doubting that “equality” (as radical feminists intend that term) will solve such problems. On the contrary, I contend that many of the problems about which feminists complain now are a direct consequence of previous feminist “success.”

    We cannot go back to any Golden Age where everything was wonderful — because no such age has ever existed in human history — but neither should we imagine that all the social, cultural and political changes of the past 50 years constitute “progress” toward an egalitarian Utopia. Rather than thinking in terms of collective progress, I would contend, it would be better if each of us thought whether the pursuit of a collectivist agenda (whether feminism or any other such ideology) is truly the best thing for ourselves, our families, our communities.

    Honestly, I believe my daughters — raised with a quite conservative Christian outlook — are happier and more successful than they would have been if they were raised according to any secular egalitarian ideology. My older daughter graduated college summa cum laude and, so far as I know, avoided the evils of “rape culture” simply because she wasn’t one of those silly let’s-get-shit-faced-drunk-at-a-frat-party kind of girls, to whom these things always seem to happen. Eschewing the “liberated” life as an immoral life, it might be argued, is a better guarantor of women’s safety than any measure advocated by feminists. Yet because feminists are all godless Marxist perverts, they despise my daughter for her virtue, and condemn my wife and I for having taught Christianity to her.

    Young people who are “old-fashioned” generally have better lives than do those who live according to the radical dictates of progressivism, but feminists just won’t admit this.

  25. Augustine25
    October 29th, 2015 @ 2:24 pm

    One of the ironies of being a token conservative at Williams College in the late 1980s is that the same professors who criticized my anti-feminist views, nevertheless lived out my principles in practice. That is, the liberal professors were uniformly engaged in traditional marriages despite their seeming hostility to marriage as a bourgeois expression of a soon to be transcended/overthrown capitalist system.

  26. RS
    October 29th, 2015 @ 2:56 pm

    Young people who are “old-fashioned” generally have better lives than do those who live according to the radical dictates of progressivism, but feminists just won’t admit this.

    The the extent that the social sciences have attempted to quantify outcomes of “traditional” v. “progressive,” three things have occurred. First, the data is strongly in favor of the “traditional.” Simply stated, children of stable, traditional, “mom & dad married” homes are better off in any metric worth considering, i.e. psychological, economic, educational, whatever.

    Second, Progressives cannot abide such outcomes and as a consequence, those studies are pilloried and suppressed.

    This leads to the third result: Academe knows it’s professional suicide to propose or pursue or publish such a study. This is why we’re continually subjected to either studies with horribly flawed methodology or outright fabrications to maintain the Progressive fiction that there is no real benefit to a “traditional” lifestyle, in spite of what our own eyes and experience tells us.

  27. DeadMessenger
    October 29th, 2015 @ 3:35 pm

    Good point.

  28. DeadMessenger
    October 29th, 2015 @ 3:52 pm

    They’re not smart. They test well, which is simply the ability to spew back garbage that other people tell you.

  29. Fail Burton
    October 29th, 2015 @ 5:46 pm

    Dworkin’s Eve approaches. The night when feminist witches honor the time men stole fire and lesbianism from noble women and gave it to the charge of mighty Conan; reaver, freebooter, inexhaustible well of male tears.

  30. Daniel Freeman
    October 30th, 2015 @ 4:36 am

    Intelligence without wisdom just enables them to believe falsehoods that an average man wouldn’t even understand.

    Also, they aren’t really all that smart. More what Vox Day would call midwits — smart enough to get themselves in trouble, but not smart enough to get themselves out.

  31. Jeanette Victoria
    October 30th, 2015 @ 8:18 am

    “Some things are so stupid only an intellectual could believe them.” – George Orwell

  32. The Queering of Feminism: Why Does ‘Equality’ Require Promoting Perversion? : The Other McCain
    October 30th, 2015 @ 9:44 pm

    […] and Barbara Love) and this radical ideology exercises such hegemonic authority in academia that no one is permitted to criticize or oppose feminism on the 21st-century university campus. This is why feminists rant about “rape culture,” in order to demonize heterosexual […]

  33. Feminism: How a Privileged Elite Can Claim Permanent Victimhood : The Other McCain
    November 4th, 2015 @ 8:33 am

    […] But no one is permitted to criticize feminism at Williams College, which is why Suzanne Venker was prohibited from speaking there. […]