While radical feminism in the 1960s called for challenging existing gender roles and abolishing what the feminists saw as the pervasive patriarchy that permeated social institutions, churches, politics, and schools, today’s radical feminists call for the elimination of men.
In an offshoot of the #MeToo movement, the #YesAllMen campaign rejects the goodness of all men. Sociologist, Suzanna Danuta Walters, a lesbian gender studies professor at Northeastern University, published an op-ed in the Washington Post last month titled: “Why Can’t We Hate Men?” Walters advised men to “Step away from the power…Pledge to vote for feminist women only. Don’t run for office. Don’t be in charge of anything…And please know that your crocodile tears won’t be wiped away by us anymore. We have every right to hate you.”
Related: Here’s Why Campus Feminists Try to Take Down Men
Walters believes that gender is a social construct—one that privileges men unfairly. To remedy this, she suggests that gender be simply eliminated. In an interview published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Walters said that “the world would be a better place for men and for women if we did away with gender altogether—gender nouns, gender binaries, and so on. And God knows men would be happier and better people if we did away with that.” Believing that we can “break apart the binary oppositions” to create more “fluidity,” Walters concludes that “gender demeans, constructs, produces power, constrains.”
Rejecting any criticism of her thesis that all men deserve to be marginalized, Walters has attacked those who voiced some concerns about her proposal to eliminate gender—and men. When Atlantic Monthly’s Conor Friedersdorf responded negatively to the Walters op-ed, she mocked him claiming that: “Some guy at The Atlantic is going to mansplain me the principles of feminism? A feminist professor of 30-plus years, who has written four books? I mean, seriously? It’s the ultimate in hubris. I read that, and I cracked up. It is Exhibit A of mansplaining drivel.”
Friedersdorf simply concluded that “It is always illogical to hate an entire group of people for behavior perpetrated by a subset of its members and actively opposed or renounced by literally millions of them.” But, Walters is certainly not the first (or the last) radical feminist on campus to lobby for the elimination of men.
For more than 30 years, the late Boston College feminist theologian Mary Daly refused to allow male students to even enroll in her undergraduate and graduate courses on the Catholic Jesuit campus. Author of The Church and the Second Sex, an analysis of what she viewed as the misogyny of the Catholic Church, Daly claimed that her classroom had to be maintained as a male free “space on the boundary of a patriarchal institution.”
A strong proponent of abortion rights, Daly viewed the continued Catholic prohibition of abortion as part of the sexual “caste system” and warned of a situation in which open war is declared between feminism… and official Roman Catholicism.” Her later books claimed to long for the day when “men are eliminated from the planet. If life is to survive on this planet, 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.”
Related: Why Are So Many Campus Feminists Anti-Male?
Resisting reprimands in 1974, and again in 1989 from Boston College administrators concerned about her women-only stance, the self-described “radical feminist, lesbian and post-Christian scholar” finally met her match in 1999 when a male student initiated a lawsuit after he was locked out of Daly’s courses. Daly finally retired and died a few years later.
Whether Daly and Walters have actually defined the “outer limits” of radical feminist theology remains to be seen. In a rational world, Daly and Walters would be censured. But, so many of us are unable to see beyond the surface issues to the real issues that are driving the male animus on campus. As Austin Ruse recalled in a recent essay on the moral panic surrounding #MeToo, David Horowitz, the former leftist writer, once said that “the issue is never the issue…The issue is always the revolution.
The Issue is Always the Revolution.
Tearing down the patriarchy and the institutions of the West has always been the real goal of the progressive left. The animus toward men inherent in #MeToo is just one more effective way to gain ground in the long march. Radical feminists know that tearing down the loving relationships that can exist between men and women is what is necessary for the real revolution to succeed. Walters and her comrades know that destroying marriage and the family is the real goal. In fact, before Walters published her hateful op-ed in the Washington Post, she was denigrating the institution of marriage itself in her 2014 book, The Tolerance Trap: How God, Genes and Good Intentions are Sabotaging Gay Equality. Calling same-sex marriage “the Trojan Horse for the tolerance trap,” Walters understands better than most the need to destroy the institution of marriage itself.
Walters has indeed come to democratic socialism deeply. Claiming that “love is not more legitimate or good or valuable if the state makes it official,” Walters decries the fact that people now see a division between the “good marrying gays who deserve tolerance and those recalcitrant gays who are pushed even further outside the field of respectability.”
Walters is just one of many radical feminist academics denigrating the institution of marriage itself. But, even the destruction of marriage is not really the end goal—the goal is empowering the state to regulate all relationships. In 2017, Clare Chambers, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, published Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defense of the Marriage Free State—a book that is increasingly being used in college classrooms here and abroad. Chambers argues that in the “marriage free state, marriage would have no legal significance. The state would not regulate the term, nor would it provide laws that dealt with the creation and dissolution of marriages.”
Still, as expected when the surface issue is just the starting point, Chambers sees an important—and expanded—role for the state to regulate relationships to achieve equality. She states clearly that “The marriage-free state would not recognize or endorse marriages, nor would it leave relationships and families unregulated.” Chambers writes that “the marriage free state starts by working out what would be the just way to regulate relationships between unmarried people and then applies that regulation to everyone.” She concludes that “society is deeply gendered in a way that harms women…marriage is an institution that has been both the cause and the result of profound inequality: a mechanism for entrenching structures of privilege and exclusion, power and oppression, hierarchies of gender and race and heteronormativity.”
For Chambers, Walters, and a growing number of radical feminists in academia, #MeToo, and #YesAllMen may be important issues, but the real threat they pose is that they provide momentum toward empowering the state to regulate every aspect of our lives—including our most intimate loving relationships.
As Grove City Professor Paul Kengor points out in his book, Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage, Lenin and the Bolsheviks immediately went after marriage and the family, as well as religion, and all private property. They radically liberalized all divorce and abortion laws: “You weren’t free in Bolshevik Russia to have freedom of religion, press, assembly, speech or property, but if you wanted a divorce or an abortion, you were the freest person on the planet.”
Kengor understands better than most the totalitarian end game—a game that radical feminists and their allies have been working toward for decades. Destroying men and marriage—and our loving relationships with each other—are just the first steps.
I am always confused when the logic of fight fire with fire is employed to solve a problem as complex as this one. Since when has combating hate with more hate ever worked out? I feel relatively sure that history has repeatedly shown that hate unbridled only ends in more suffering. I will be among the first to say that men have made many mistakes have mistreated many people, women especially. But not all men are bad. And women are not the only victims. I am a man, I have been sexually abused by men; I have also had women deal the most damage to my family than any other abuser I have ever met. I don’t hate women, I don’t suggest we destroy them. Neither do I suggest the same for men. I will, however, like to question this part-to-whole fallacy that radical feminism falls into. If their logic is flawed from its origin why should so much credence be granted to it? Furthermore, Oglilivy referenced Aristotle in the response above and I would like to add to that. By leaning on credentials the way that Walters has, she effectively says, “I am the only voice that deserves to be heard.” She, in essence, sets herself up as God. She decides who should be listened to and who should have a say. What she means to say, is not that she wants the greater good, but that she wants to determine what is good for others -She wants all the power. Consider, our country is guilty of institutionalized patriarchy, Walters suggests institutionalized matriarchy. What is the difference exactly? She sets up a new word order which not only repeats the mistakes the worst have men have made but seeks to exceed them in depravity. If she has her way, it will only be a matter of time before men will respond as she is now. She intends to start a legacy of hate and war and division. Any sane society has recognized these voices and not silenced them, but recognized them as inane, detrimental, illogical, and dangerous. In the end, the heart of the question is really this: War or Love? There is a reason that since the dawn of language that the human race has recorded stories of love and its fidelity, its desire for goodness-because love is the greatest gift a human can experience. Do we want her to steal the greatest treasure imaginable from our posterity?
If gender is eliminated, then society, especially schools, will not be permitted to encourage women into STEM. They won’t be allowed to notice. We will have to default to meritocracy. The number of what we used to call “women” will plummet in those fields. If we actually go all neutral on race, sexual orientation, and ethnic descent, it’s not going to go well for the groups we call marginalised. It will work out great for the talented ones, of course.
good. If you think that women need coddled to go into one field that no one was stopping them from going into anyways, that just means you are sexist. Real women don’t want coddled or given extra privileges like we always get. Just treat us the same as men. If a man can do it and we cant then why should the man be punished?
The American university system should be treated in the same fashion as Scipio Africanus treated Cathage in about 149 BC, viz., burned down and the ground seeded over with salt. Once that’s done, we can decide whether and how to start over.
When Atlantic Monthly’s Conor Friedersdorf responded negatively to the Walters op-ed, she mocked him claiming that: “Some guy at The Atlantic is going to mansplain me the principles of feminism? A feminist professor of 30-plus years, who has written four books? I mean, seriously? It’s the ultimate in hubris. I read that, and I cracked up. It is Exhibit A of mansplaining drivel.”
Let’s assume that a feminist professor has some understanding of what she would describe as “patriarchy.” And then, as a matter of ethical consistency, being opposed to it, she would avoid all of its trappings. Is there any name more associated with patriarchy than Aristotle? And yet, whom is Walters deploying here?
She is claiming moral and intellectual superiority based on her credentials, or, if you prefer, “reputation.” Never mind the question-begging; this is pure ethos: “I’m better because I’m an expert.” In section two of the Rhetoric, dead white man Aristotle observes, “Unlike some experts, we do not exclude the speaker’s reasonable image from the art as contributing nothing to persuasiveness. On the contrary, character contains almost the strongest proof of all so to speak.” (Ok, so Aristotle actually does warn against relying on credentials earlier in the same passage, but everyone pretty much ignores that.)
I mean, is there anything that smacks more of patriarchy than brow-beating someone with your supposed expertise? Generations of auto mechanics have terrorized women with this very ploy.
When I read that, I cracked up. Literally.
These insane people have become a danger to all of higher education. Not only are they taking control of more and more of what goes on inside academia, they are also contributing to the impression that about half the population has that academia has gone completely bonkers. It is damaging the reputation and support for higher ed, with practical consequences that are becoming evident. It is unfortunate, because this image does not represent what higher education is really like. The insane people are there, but they are far less numerous than the public thinks. At least, that is how it seems to me. Somehow, they have mesmerized the sane majority in academia and to an increasing degree, in the idea-driven portion (increasingly, the important part) of the commercial world. Somebody has to break the spell, or it is not going to end well.
Jonathan: I have read the assertion that the relatively sane academics defer to the loudmouths and crazies through fear of PC-motivated attack. This seems accurate to me.