Recovering feminists

[Sir Jessy of Anti]

Ilana Mercer lambastes the lack of journalistic attribution while blasting feminist 'turncoats' for their lack of originality...

http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=35968

Posted: December 5, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern

© 2003 WorldNetDaily.com

It's now all the rage to be a recovering feminist. Just about every
such 12-stepper who writes a mea culpa book exposing feminist follies
is celebrated as a groundbreaker. The "revelations" and "insights"
offered by this new crop of feminist turncoats may be a welcome change,
but they are neither new nor original.

For example, the rapturous reception given to reformed feminist Linda
G. Mills for her book, "Insult to Injury: Rethinking Our Responses to
Intimate Abuse," is completely overwrought. One intoxicated libertarian
reviewer even heralded the thing for being "full of heresies."
According to this review-lite, among the "heretical" conclusions
expressed by Professor Mills is "that the conventional feminist
paradigm of domestic violence as a form of patriarchal oppression
is woefully inadequate."

"Woefully inadequate" in the Mills book implies that the predominant
problem with that paradigm is that it doesn't work well in practice
for all couples - that to be useful, the concept of society as a
patriarchal system needs to be supplemented. Far from being heretical,
this theme is not even praiseworthy - it is philosophically limp.
Like Marxism, feminism doesn't work not because it's "woefully
inadequate," and needs some tweaking, but because it's false, it's
a lie - it's a deliberate attempt to rape reality, to impose a false
consciousness on others.

As I wrote in 1999, "in reality it [feminism] is nothing but a
theoretical understanding. Its take on wife assault is just one of
many competing perspectives. The feminist orthodoxy, moreover, appeals
to carefully selected studies that support its view and overlooks,
discounts or ignores those studies challenging it."

In support, I cited Terri Petkau's truly radical analysis. This
Canadian sociologist provided both an analytical evisceration of
feminist constructs (such as "cycle of violence") as well as an
empirical invalidation - evidence for which she culled from research
with patrol constables. The officers rejected outright the feminist
account of wife assault because they found it inconsistent with what
they encountered on the beat.

In other words, the feminist theory collided with reality.

But struck by historical Alzheimer's, our reviewer (and many others
who have been similarly afflicted) goes on to glorify Mills for
uncovering "years of research, which mainstream feminism has glossed
over or ignored," and which "shows that ... like men, women are
frequently aggressive in intimate settings."

This is news?

This column has also highlighted the trailblazing work of Professor
John Fekete in "Moral Panic: Biopolitics Rising." The book, hailed by
noted philosophy professor Agnes Heller as "a masterpiece of critical
theory," exposed the collection of single-sex, violence-against-women
surveys that formed the sham case leveled at all men by American and
Canadian feminists. Problems of unrepresentative samples, reliance on
anecdotes, and use of over-inclusive survey questions represented just
the tip of this methodological heap of trash.

In the early 1990s, Fekete and philosopher Ferrel Christensen at the
University of Alberta also uncovered and exposed dozens of well-controlled
two-sex surveys conducted over the past 30 years in Canada and in the
U.S., all of which revealed that women assault their partners as often
as - or more often than - men do. Gender symmetry in "intimate abuse"
is as well documented as it is well concealed by government and
special-interest number crunchers.

These pioneers seem to have been forgotten by Sally-come-lately,
retreaded feminists, and their reviewer cheerleaders.

And with her 1997 book, "When She Was Bad," Patricia Pearson completed the
picture. I previously described Pearson's impressive piecing of "chilling
real-life examples and scholarly research to show that violence committed
by women is every bit as vicious, albeit different, as violence
perpetrated by men." Pearson's message: The fact that women are more
likely to be injured in domestic altercations points to differences
in physical strength between men and women, not in culpability.

Again, none of this should be big news.

Now the popular TV show, "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" has geared
up to spread the feminist line about one of the grisliest crimes imaginable:
so-called honor killings. You know the drill: bad man, good woman - Arab
men refuse to let go of patriarchal privilege and power; Arab women are
the besieged political class who desperately want to - but can't - protect
their daughters from this fate. But does this represent what is really
going on in Arab cultures?

Here's what a "Palestinian" woman, Amira Abu Hanhan Qaoud, did to her
child, after the girl - who had been raped and impregnated by her
brothers - refused to commit suicide.

Plastic bag, razor, and wooden stick in hand, the mother entered her
sleeping daughter's room. "Tonight you die, Rofayda," the wicked witch
announced, before wrapping the bag tightly around the girl's head. The
murderess Qaoud then spent the next 20 minutes slicing away at Rofayda's
wrists, ignoring pleas of "No, mother, no!" Just to be sure, this
alleged mother struck her daughter on the head with the stick after
the poor child passed out.

Yet members of Qaoud's community are nonplussed - they see the woman
as driven by devotion to both community and family.

That is something my stepfather would confirm about this culture. He
was a dedicated Israeli government doctor who worked in the "occupied"
territories, specifically in the villages of Tira, Tulkaren and the
Jenin neighborhood. One of the activities he undertook (but didn't
have to) was to surgically stitch up the hymens of young girls so as
to prevent their barbaric mothers and fathers from slaying them. He
was always very sad when his secret patchwork failed to convince the
family, and the girl was found the next day with the traditional axe
in her spine. Sometimes a virgin was slaughtered if she didn't bleed
"sufficiently" on her wedding night.

His experience was confirmed by anthropologist Ilsa Glaser's eye-opening
(but also not new) work on female aggression in the Palestinian
Authority. Glaser found that women's gossip and nagging played a causal
role in the events leading up to these butcherings. By spreading rumors
about the targeted woman, and by putting pressure on the men to act,
women were instrumental in instigating the murders.

It may be too much to ask the nouveau anti-feminist punditocracy to
also remember intellectuals like Christina Hoff Sommers and Camille
Paglia, who brought down the feminist house of cards with unparalleled,
savage sophistication.

If they can't recall the history of the ideas and those who went
before them, perhaps the various reviewers and writers on menstrual
affairs can at least be persuaded to burble less about the originality
of the burgeoning breed of lapsed feminists.