Feminism’s Greatest Achievement

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by PJ Media on November 11, 2024. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.

The destruction of Western Civilization is coming not from the scimitars of rampaging Islamic hordes, or from the goose-stepping Nazi thugs, or the fanatical Soviet or Chinese communists. Rather, it has come, partly intentionally and partly stupidly, from feminism. How did feminism achieve this momentous feat, at which Muslims, Nazis, and Communists had failed?

Like most political ideologies, feminism suffers from narrowness of vision, focusing on one factor, one dimension of human life, to the exclusion of all others. The sole focus of feminism is the alleged paucity of female power. For many feminists, although they camouflage their objective with the more benign idea of gender equality, their true goal is female supremacy. Talk of females being as good as males is eclipsed by the conviction that females are superior to toxic males: more socially adept, more intelligent, and more kind. Radical feminists plot for a world without males. But most feminists appear to be content with males being subservient to females.

In its obsession with its one narrowly defined goal, feminism disregards others and consciously or negligently destroys other goals and values. Individuality, on which Western democracy and morality rests, is set aside in favor of membership in sex categories. Equality before the law, based on individual behavior, is canceled in favor of sex category membership. The family and reproduction, the foundation of Western society and the survival of society, is rejected in order to advance female supremacy. It is indicative that a feminist obsession is “reproductive health,” which means in feminist-speak the ability to kill one’s own babies through abortion and infanticide.

Feminists explained their situation to themselves and to those who they wanted to influence as all females being innocent and vulnerable victims of the oppressive “patriarchy,” which consisted of all men. They rejected the liberal model of social life in which many individuals and voluntary groups cooperated or competed with one another, their affiliations shifting as circumstances and opportunities changed. Rather, they adopted Karl Marx’s collectivist model in which society consisted of two classes, one of which was superordinate and controlling, and the other subordinate and exploited, serving the needs of the superordinate class.

In Marx’s analysis, modern society in the West consisted of an oppressive capitalist class exploiting the proletarian workers by taking what should belong to the workers. This theory was never popular in North America, due to the high standard of living for workers and the social mobility through which many rose to wealthier positions and higher statuses. But the idea of class conflict was attractive to feminists of the 1960s and ’70s, as long as the classes were defined by sex, with cruel male oppressors and vulnerable female victims.

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In its more general form, the feminist model of society was evil oppressors versus innocent victims. Other identity groups with grievances found this to be an attractive way to express their complaints and to mobilize for conflict on behalf of their group. The gay alphabet defined themselves as innocent victims of heterosexual, or “straight” oppression. Those with racial grievances, the race alphabet—BIPOC (black, indigenous, people of color)—placed themselves as victims of white oppression. And so Marx’s class conflict model was adopted widely among disaffected minorities, or whoever could be convinced to be disaffected.

The grievance panoply was conceptualized in feminist intersectionality, a hierarchy of multiple victim roles, with greater prestige going to those who could show the most number of combined victimhoods. Conversely, those in oppressor categories—males, whites, straights, Jews—were deemed “privileged” sexists and racists who actively discriminated against those of victim categories. As we shall see, any disparity of benefit between classes was viewed as proof positive of active evil oppression on the part of the “privileged” classes.

Through much of the 20th century, the criterion for selecting people for the many different roles of industrial and post-industrial society was merit, the assessment based on an individual’s past achievement and potential for future contributions. The underlying idea was that picking the best people for the job was the best guarantee that the job would be done well.

But merit was an impediment to the feminist goal of increasing female power. For the feminist, females must occupy at least fifty percent of the jobs at every level because females make up half of the population. This new criterion, “representation” based on percentage of the general population, was taken up by blacks and BIPOC generally. If members of any gender, racial, religious, or sexual category were present in any school, university, specific departments, business, political organization at a level lower than their presence in the general population, then the “underrepresentation” was deemed the result of racist or sexist discrimination. Criteria such as merit of individuals were disregarded as unjustified excuses for racism or sexism.

The demand for “fair representation” applied only to members of categories deemed under-served, marginalized, and victimized. It is seen as a problem if females are less than 50 percent at all levels, but not seen as a problem if they are anywhere overrepresented, such as in the general population of university students and professors, or in specific schools or departments. But even with general female overrepresention, any unit with male “overrepresentation” is targeted for forced feminization through false accusations of sexism, special programs to recruit females, and special preference and benefits for females. Criteria for suitability, for example in the military and in first responders, were watered down so that females could pass the entrance tests.

Social science and humanities departments, where females are the vast majority, are not seen as a problem to be corrected to ensure equal representation of males. In the final anthropology senior seminar that I taught, there were eighteen females and no males. As for the professorial staff, my female colleagues demanded that, henceforth, only female professors be hired. And female candidates were rigorously interrogated to ensure that they were sufficiently feminist in their views. As regards scholarship, a reader assessing my article for the Oxford Encyclopedia of Anthropology complained that I cited fewer female than male authors, and should add more citations of females, whether or not additional works by females were appropriate or suitable.

The acceptability of overrepresentation for minorities is true for race. Every school, university, business, government agency, and military unit must have BIPOC at least to equal their percentage of the population (in the US: blacks 13 percent, Hispanics 18 percent, indigenous 2 percent, Muslims 1.4 percent). People in these categories, all deemed to be victims of oppression, are “protected” and favored. In academic fields, admissions and achievement criteria, e.g. levels required on standardized tests, were lowered to allow admittance of minorities. That in certain fields, some are highly overrepresented—up to 80 percent—in prestigious and lucrative positions, such as blacks in National Basketball Association and National Football League, is never a cause of concern.

What is a cause of concern is the overrepresentation of successful minorities in business, education, and government. Asians have been disparaged as “white adjacent” and Jews as “hyper white,” and therefore are part of the oppressor class. Asians can perhaps slip by as people of color, but Jews (2.4 percent), no matter what skin tone, must be excommunicated and excluded, as they increasingly have been.

But it is not only from jobs and posts that whites and males have been excluded, but also the results of their creativity and work. Almost all of Western literature and art, technology, and architecture were produced by white males. But now that white males have been excommunicated as oppressors, so the books and poems, paintings and sculptures, inventions of machines, and the design of buildings of Western culture must be excluded from study and admiration. There are no more courses in our “higher education” about Western civilization, and its great works are no longer studied by students. Political history, constitutions and governments cannot be studied because anything produced by the King and Parliament or the “Founding Fathers” is sexist and racist. We can no longer study the Greeks and Romans, because they were white, which is now unacceptable. In movies and tv series, we now pretend that throughout history Europe was filled with blacks at every level of society.

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The feminist program of inserting an equal number or a majority of females into every institution of society precludes females’ participation in the one institution that truly needs them: the family. Feminists have disdained family life and motherhood, which is deemed demeaning rather than rewarding. Feminists wish to be freed from their bodies, which explains their enthusiasm for the justification to kill their babies. In 2020, there were 930,000 abortions in the US.

From a feminist perspective, to be a mother is to be an unpaid subordinate, and must be avoided for the rewards of the professional or corporate ladder. But with the family disparaged by feminists, a large number of women who do have children have no partner (no toxic males needed), and their child or children grow up in a single parent home, which usually is associated with serious risks of poverty and disabilities such as truncation of education and the likelihood of incarceration.

The effects of feminist anti-procreation ideology has been a major factor in the population decline and approaching death of Western and developed Asian cultures. Replacement level reproduction is 2.1 children per woman in developed countries. The native populations of all European countries have fallen well below that, and some far below that. US is 1.7, UK is 1.6, Canada and Switzerland are 1.5, Greece is 1.4, Italy and Spain are 1.3, as are Ukraine and Japan, South Korea is 0.9. This means that these populations are dying out, and are probably too far gone to recover. In a matter of decades, there will be no more native British, Greeks, Italians, etc. Instead, there will be Muslim immigrants, 2.54 reproduction rate, living in what used to be the UK, Greece, Italy, etc. Western languages and cultures will have disappeared. In the US and Canada, Hispanic and Asian immigrants tend to assimilate, so American and Canadian culture may be carried on to some degree, if feminists allow us to learn about it.

But it will be a culture of anti-white racism, anti-male sexism, and antisemitic Jew-hate. Feminists have been greatly aided in this cultural transformation by national leaders of trivial enthusiasms and superficial understanding, thus throwing the weight of the government behind simplistic and destructive measures.

The intellectual lightweight Joe Biden in the US and the empty head of beautiful hair Justin Trudeau adopted extreme versions of the Marxist oppressor-victim models, Biden pronouncing that America was “structurally racist” and imposing reverse racism and sexism in an all government efforts, while Trudeau used government muscle to impose DEI on all Canadian institutions, effectively erasing individual merit as a consideration and transforming universities and research funding agencies from Enlightenment inquiries into truth, into purveyors of “social justice” ideology through social activism. Now ads for professors and administrators say that only marginalized minorities would be considered: females, BIPOC, LGBTQ2S++, disabled; no straight white men or Jews should apply.

Feminism is not the sole cause of the decline of the West, but it is a major cause. It is at heart a hate movement, and has devastating deleterious consequences for Western society. It is time to recognize what a malicious and destructive force it has become.

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