What is Feminism?

Here is a random rant from social media. We shall have a read and see whether the rant has any basis. The author :

Chani Randazzo

Feminism is a gender marxist approach to the issues of gender inequality that were first highlighted shortly after the French Revolution. Indeed, the first feminist declaration, “The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen”, was modeled by Olympe de Gouges on the declaration that came out of the French Revolution.
Feminists essentially sought to continue the class warfare by recasting men and women into a class struggle, with men as the oppressor bourgeois and women as the victim proletariat.
Instead of removing inequality via anti-discrimination laws that seek to remove distinctions (as the French and American declarations did), feminist ideology declares one gender as unworthy of power and rights and sets about justifying the transference of that power and those rights on the basis of gender alone.

The vocal feminists claim that this is a myth. You only need to look at the females that were used as the mouthpieces of feminism to see that hate for males was encouraged:

“As far as I’m concerned, men are the product of a damaged gene.”
Germaine Greer, one of the icons of modern feminism.

Or:

Robin Morgan: “I feel that ‘man-hating’ is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them.”

Or:

Mary Daly: “There must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males.”

Or:

Germaine Greer: “I think that testosterone is a rare poison.”

Or perhaps listen to Brian Simpson:

I’ve been a supply teacher for 20 years in every subject area, K-12 in over two-hundred schools and in over one thousand classrooms in a large Canadian city. I can report that the education system has been taken over by feminists and lesbians who preach a daily diet of hate, violence and discrimination against males despite pretenses of “tolerance” “non violence” and “inclusiveness.”
It’s moderately common to find girls wearing anti-male, hate clothing. Slogans on T-Shirts include: “Stupid Factory: Where Boys are Made;” “BOYS ARE STUPID, THROW ROCKS AT THEM!” … Others include “WHO NEEDS BOYS WHEN YOU HAVE CREDIT CARDS?” and “I LIKE BOYS WHO ARE SENSITIVE AND CRY, WHEN I HIT THEM;” and “… Did you ever notice how all our problems begin with MEN.”

Esssentially feminism is a gynocentric if not gynosupremacist standpoint. It’s mostly applicable within conflict theory (hence the association of feminism with Marxism, as Marxist theory is a conflict theory) but it can also be the gynocentric standpoint within liberalism too.

Feminism is a complicated beast because it has two distinct strains which shape what we call its ‘waves’; the main ones are American feminism, but more accurately Anglophone feminism, and French Feminism-but more accurately European feminism.

French feminism began as the auxiliary to libertarian and Utopian socialism and anarchism IN EUROPE (Fourier, Owen, Proudhon, Bookchin et. al.) and was thus compatible with classical liberal-progressives in Europe and US (Paine, Locke, Mill, etc.) and also Marxist-socialists (Marx/Engels obviously.) I include Mary Wollstonecraft within French feminism as well as European feminism, because although she was English she was aligned heavily with revolutionaries like the Girondins in fin-de-siecle France. For all intents and purposes she was not a fan of English constitutional monarchy nor English conventions, particularly matters of gender or rather, sex.

For reasons that have been a major source of my research enquiries for the past 2-3 years, over the course of about 1848 to 1980 it went from the auxiliary to THE dominant strain. Feminism now effectively controls ‘the left’, particularly the social sciences which means it gets to play with all the data that form our public policy decisions, although intersectional feminism did not win out until the 2000s.

This auxiliary perspective was basically trying to work out women’s role in the great proleterian revolutions against whoever were the ruling class at the time; Church, monarch, bourgeoisie. Around the time of the war there was an accelerationist shift from towards a gynosupremacist perspective, i.e. that male dominance had been the cause of most inequality and suffering.

The US had rejected anarchism and socialism in favour of liberalism, by a mixture of popular consensus and institutional force. There were practical reasons such as geography (huge landmass) for why unionism and revolution as much more difficult, but the deciding political factor was its absence from the bloodiness of 1848, which literally tore Europe apart. Of course the US had its own battles to fight, in particular the Civil War and the slavery question.

So instead the first people to establish feminism in US were white middle class women; Elizabeth Cady Stanton read Das Kapital when first published in US and was influenced by it,as evidenced by everything from Declaration of Sentiments onwards framing coverture as class oppression of women-but was at her heart and at contradiction with Marx, anti-worker’s revolution. It remains dominated by wealthy white middle class women and very much a weapon of the state. Bear in mind the suffragettes first got their platform through being auxiliaries in the Abolitionist movement, and got most of the credit for this while erasing many black Abolitionists-even though strictly speaking Sojourner Truth was just as if not more important in the early fight for civil rights. (Truth had escaped indentured servitude through fighting for custody of her son from her former slave-owner.)

I’m not trying to diss the amazing achievements of women philosophers and activists, but if you notice, feminism mostly doesn’t come up with anything original; it takes a pre-existing radical movement and then injects (ostensibly) female-centred perspectives into it. But that’s in its name; the philosophical system/epistemology (ism) of womanhood (fem). This goes across the board. Black feminism took the civil rights movement and decided black men were chauvinistic patriarchs. Lesbian separatism decided that the gay rights movement had chauvinistic patriarchs, just as heterosexuality was misogyny by nature. Socialist feminists argued that leftists were…chauvinistic patriarchs. And of course liberal feminism…well we’re seeing that occur with the constant arguments about the pay gap, women needing more executive positions and so on. Indeed I would say that the MRM is near exclusively fixated on various manifestations of liberal feminism.

The thing they all have in common is “what about women?” and “the world would suck less if women had more power.”

Please note also I am not trying to say that French feminism is ‘better’; in fact there is the case for conservatives to argue that it was mid-20th century Europe who are responsible for feminism morphing from a ‘liberal’ (questionable) to a ‘post-modernist’ movement. However it is important when considering Feminism globally to understand that historically its roots come from two different points, which has worked to its advantage but also led to seriously heated conflict within the left. Feminists have usually tried to hide this from the public through motte and bailey fallacies or raising Feminism to some sort of abstract principle to liberation politics beyond question if one believes in democracy. ….
I kind of got lost in my own history of ideas there, sorry.

So: it went from being the auxiliary of liberalism and radicalism alike, to controlling both.

Wollstonecraft and Stanton started off as challengers to liberalism; now feminism is the default for centrists.

Engels and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (but more famously the Women’s Liberation movements we now call radical feminism, which followed after the war) transformed it from auxiliaries in ‘the left’ to THE VOICE OF the left.

They both united in the belief the world would be better with women included in the franchise, although the latter believed that for Utopia to be achieved masculinity had to either be destroyed or displaced from corridors of power and made secondary in culture to femininity (which they regarded as default virtue, to spite classical liberalism that characterised virtue as mostly masculine traits.)
Tomas Edward Ramsay