How to Argue With a Feminist

Posted on | May 10, 2018 | 1 Comment

 

Rule One: Never argue with a feminist.

This is the only rule you need. There is no point trying to persuade a feminist that she’s wrong. If she were intellectually honest (and thus capable of admitting error) she would not be a feminist.

Because feminists never argue in good faith, nothing is to be gained by engaging in a back-and-forth discussion with them. What must be done instead is to call attention to their errors and lies, so that honest and intelligent people can see for themselves what’s wrong with feminism.

Yesterday, I called attention to Robyn Pennacchia, associate publisher of Wonkette, whose views on “toxic masculinity” struck me as both unusually offensive and easily refuted. The commenters had a field day picking apart Ms. Pennacchia’s errors, although none of them aimed at the point that seemed most obvious to me: The subject of Ms. Pennacchia’s rant against “toxic masculinity” was a March school shooting in Maryland in which the 17-year-old gunman murdered his 16-year-old ex-girlfriend, Jaelynn Willey, and then killed himself.

School shooter Austin Wyatt (left); his victim Jaelynn Willey (right).

By basing her anti-male arguments on this incident, Ms. Pennacchia was engaged in the Atrocity Narrative method of propaganda: Making negative generalizations on the basis of extreme examples.

In 2016, according to the FBI, there were 15,070 homicides in the United States; 11,821 of the victims (78%) were male. To put it another way, males were 3.7 times more like than females to die by homicide. Furthermore, 52.3% of homicide victims were black and nearly all of these black victims were killed by black perpetrators — black-on-black violence accounts for more than half of all U.S. homicides.

The murder of Jaelynn Willey was statistically anomalous. Females account for slightly more than 1-in-5 homicide victims and only 12.6% of 2016 homicide victims (about 1-in-8) were white females.

By making an anomalous incident the basis of her attack on “male privilege,” “male entitlement” and “toxic masculinity,” Ms. Pennacchia was using the same sort of hate propaganda tactics by which Nazis demonized and scapegoated Jews. It is a gross misrepresentation to imply that law-abiding men are somehow responsible — simply by their membership in the category “male” — for a violent crime. Feminists seem incapable of understanding what’s wrong with this dishonest method of argument, and apparently they can’t see why men find it insulting to be falsely implicated as responsible for such atrocities.

So, typically, what happens is this: A feminist makes arguments that amount to a categorical slander of men. Naturally, men feel insulted by these arguments, but do not engage in a rational analysis of the feminist’s rhetoric. Instead, men become angry, and respond to the feminist insults with epithets and slurs, or with amateurish efforts at a rebuttal. The feminist then responds: “See? I told you so — men are awful.”

 

That’s why I say, never argue with a feminist — do not allow yourself to be baited into an emotional response that will only serve as fodder for her next argument about how awful men are. (They have only this one predictable theme, you see.) A man cannot win an argument with a feminist by acting in ways that tend to validate her worldview.

One typical mistake of the amateur anti-feminist is the Equality Error: “Well, yes, men do this particular awful thing, but what about this terrible thing that women do?” Or: “Yes, women suffer from this terrible problem, but what about this typically male problem?”

The error here is in assuming that the feminist actually cares about “equality” and that the key is to appeal to her sense of fairness.

Feminists are essentially sociopaths. The feminist’s characteristic traits are selfishness, dishonesty, and cruelty. She lacks the capacity for empathy, she will tell any lie which suits her purpose, and the raison d’être of her career is to inflict the maximum damage on males.

 

Feminism Is a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It. Bad causes attract bad people and, as Friedrich Hayek observed in The Road to Serfdom, “the worst get on top.” The most “successful” feminist writers are invariably the most dishonest feminist writers, and the same principle applies to feminist politicians. Feminists have been at a loss to explain why American voters in 2016 rejected their chosen champion Hillary Clinton, and the frustration of this failure has made them even less rational than they were before Donald Trump got elected.

If stupid men would just shut up and stop making bad arguments, the feminist movement would discredit itself. Merely quote feminists, call attention to their lies and errors, and permit people to judge the case accurately. Most women are not feminists, and men should reject the premise that criticizing feminism (a movement devoted to a destructive radical ideology) is the same as being “anti-woman” or “anti-equality.” What is fundamentally wrong with feminist ideology, after all, is the belief that “equality” is always the solution to any problem women face. Yet despite decades of feminist activism, and indisputable advances toward “equality,” women have problems today that their grandmothers never imagined. How many kids died in school shootings in 1968? It is an error to think of “equality” as the summum bonum, an inherent good so desirable that everything else may be sacrificed to achieve it, and thus to presume that a more equal society will be a better society.

“One dishonest rhetorical trick feminists use is modifying an extreme statement by a phrase like ‘in Western society’ or ‘in our culture,’ as if there were some other society or culture that is violence-free and egalitarian. No, ma’am, there isn’t, but hey, good luck in your search for it.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Feb. 14, 2017

As I explain in the very first paragraph of my book, the reason many people are confused about feminism is that they think when feminists say “equality” they mean it in the sense of basic fairness. However, a process or system that is fair may yield results that are unequal. For example, on Sept. 23, 2017, the University of Alabama football team defeated Vanderbilt 59-0. A week later, the Crimson Tide beat Ole Miss 66-3. Both games were played according to the rules, as enforced by league-certified referees, and Alabama’s program is governed by the same NCAA regulations that apply to Vanderbilt and Ole Miss. Yet the results of these two games were so lopsidedly unequal that, as a feminist might say, ’Bama oppressed these two opponents. Do these two games mean that Alabama is morally superior to these other schools? Well, Crimson Tide fans would perhaps like to think so, but putting points on the scoreboard in football is not the only possible metric of human value.

What feminists often do is to find some metric — e.g., the number of women in Congress, or the difference between average salaries of men and women in particular career field — and claim that this numerical inequality proves women are victims of oppression. Yet this is an invalid and illogical way of assessing the fairness of processes. There are many possible explanations for why women would not pursue careers in computer science, or not advance as far in those careers as their male peers, without claiming that a pay disparity in high-tech companies reflects sexist discrimination in the computer industry. And why should this particular metric need explaining, rather than some other statistical disparity? Complaints about “inequality” are almost always based on a cherry-picking approach to data that is essentially dishonest, an attempt to prove that someone (e.g., Silicon Valley employers) is treating employees unfairly, simply because members of certain groups are “underrepresented” in the work force. However, numerical inequalities can be found in all sorts of career fields where no one claims that discrimination explains these disparities. Has anyone ever asserted, for example, that the paucity of Korean-American NASCAR drivers reflects an anti-Asian bias in stock-car racing? Or do feminists complain women are “underrepresented” in low-wage jobs in the construction field?

Only because feminism is based on a zero-sum-game mentality do they believe that male success in certain occupations is evidence of discrimination against women, and the feminist “solution” to such statistical inequality involves a scapegoating rhetoric — “male privilege,” “misogyny,” etc. — that demonizes men for their success, a rhetoric quite analogous to the way Nazi propaganda demonized European Jews.

Robyn Pennacchia is a hate-monger who should be ashamed of herself, but if she had any sense of shame, she wouldn’t be a feminist, would she?

And that, my friends, is how you argue with a feminist.

 

 

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