Back when I was in college (sigh, the years are weighing heavily on me!), one of the things I remember young women lamenting in late night dorm room conversations was, "But I don't want to be a lesbian!" This has always been one of the real stumbling blocks that radical feminism laid in its own path.
While reading that book sounds sad and tedious, I am looking forward to your review.
I do wonder, just how do feminists propose to prevent the human race from dying out if they get their way and women universally reject heterosexuality?
The "knowledge of good and evil" is the knowledge of cause and effect.
With leftists wanting to "regurgitate the apple" (as Evan Sayat put it in his book) they are wanting to cease their awareness of cause and effect. They want to be like babies and animals, just little bundles of desire with no care beyond the current appetite.
One of the worst things that ever happened to lesbians was the phenomenon of the "political lesbian," which became a thing in the early 1970s. A "political lesbian" is a woman who is basically heterosexual but who creates an artificial lesbian identity for herself as a political statement. Here those of us who were lesbians because of our romantic and sexual attraction to other women were just getting the chance to build aboveground communities, and were minding our own happy business, but here come these heterosexual Puritans saying lesbianism was a political identity and only a political identity, and trying to tell us how to live our lives—and run our relationships. Talk about "colonization."
Many of them who attempted to pair bond with each other would have relationships that would run out of sexual steam, and they'd be happy and relieved about that. Not that they'd stop trying to tell those of us in happy, vital lesbian relationships what behavior in our relationships was proper, including what sexual behavior was proper (too much passion was oppressive!).
There was a "women's community" that blossomed, but the lingering effects of political lesbianism made it too much of a monoculture, sad to say.
Do I believe in female heterosexuality? As Mark Twain replied when asked if he believed in infant baptism, "Believe in it? Hell, I've seen it with my own eyes!"
It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it (she said, facetiously).
The mainstreaming of homosexuality has had effects that were not anticipated by those who advocated in the pre-"liberation" era. One of the things that Phoebe Maltz Bovy addresses in her book is the weird increase in the number of young women identifying as "bisexual" or "queer," "nonbinary," etc. She speculates (and I think this is fair) that most of these women are basically straight, but it is now unfashionable to be seen as such. One opinion I share with my lesbian friend Cynthia Yockey is a profound suspicion toward the category of "bisexuality," although our shared suspicion arises from different points of view.
I believe she is absolutely correct. As I recall, Andrew Sullivan came up with stats that the majority of these (cough, cough) bisexual women had never had the kind of interaction with another woman one might consider qualifying. He opined that, on this basis, a majority of "LGBTQ" (gag, retch) people were actually heterosexual.
There was also a thing in the early 90s of straight people calling themselves "queer," when that word was gaining traction as a positive self-label, for the very same reasons of thinking that made them "cool." (As if.)
20% of Gen Z self-identifying as LGBT... ridiculous. Three quarters at least will end up with heterosexual life partners. The desire of children to be "special" is overwhelming and too many adults are indulging them.
Stats predict far fewer will have life partners. Not disagreeing with your statements re: faggotry. Just pointing out that few Gen Z will get married if current trends continue.
I've not looked closely, but a number of the Scandinavian countries (possibly only Sweden?) are predominately unmarried partners (whether life-long or otherwise). I'd qualify the US case as: social trends are hard to predict, as trend reversals do occur just as fads and fashions whither and die.
Back in the '90s, my husband & I had a lesbian friend (fantastic burlesque dancer, we hosted her lesbian wedding (which ended in a vicious divorce)) tell us we were the "queerest people she knew." It was meant as & we took it as a compliment.
How times have changed!
PS. after the ugly divorce, she starting dating men again.
Liberals ran out of a conception of a phenomenon as "morally permissible, but decidedly abnormal." We wanted to tolerate a wider range of lifestyles and modes of thinking - that's fine. But we forced ourselves to pretend everything is normal, that everything is equal, that there is no standard.
It used to just be okay for something unusual to just be okay - tolerable. Something we can work with. Something that can be accommodated. Now we must maintain the fiction that "default" includes some very unusual things, and can't conceive of saying "okay, that's kind of weird" without it being a form of horrible bigotry.
Homosexuality occurs naturally in nature. There are theories that it survived because having a mate's sibling who could contribute to feeding the children without competing for resources via one's own child was an evolutionary advantage.
That said, people who consider it immoral can exist in society alongside those who disagree, and for whom that disagreement is personal. And vice versa. It's the unnecessary demands for endorsement that cause backlash Acknowledging that there won't ever be 100% endorsement used to be a sign of maturity and an understanding of how to exist happily in the world.
I have one of these and she hasn't talked to me in 4-5 years (I hear about her through the grapevine). She's a Pretendbian...... a they/them trans-masc, gender queer, man hater. She always had boyfriends (as a teen) and she still does occasionally date young men, but she was recently asked out on a date by a lesbian and was kind of insulted that this young woman thought she was a lesbian. If you go around acting like, talking like, walking like, dressing like a man, then I guess that comes across to lesbians as being a lesbian? It's ALL weird to me!
I happen to think that men and women are complimentary to each other. We are not always equal in what we can do, but we have to rely on the strengths of the other to make life work.
Interesting as always! I just think that of my wife and her college friends that are married, the three who still talk have more normal guys as husbands who respect their wives’ friendship, while the other is married to a possessive wimp. I have to wonder, did these authors have social contact with possessive wimps who said they supported various women’s groups?
Anyone who has studied women's behavior understands how important a role friendship plays in their lives. A wise husband recognizes this. Especially if she is at home raising children, your wife needs to have girlfriends nearby, just to keep from feeling so isolated. The possessive/controlling husband, desiring to monopolize his wife's attention, is not really doing himself any favors. He will only make his wife unhappy, and reduce the amount of social support available to his own children.
I believe Mark Steyn originated the expression, “the future belongs to those who show up”.
As an individual matter, affectional preference is a triviality. But as a cultural revolution, there is a tipping point after which it’s the end of your people.
And, not for nothing, the genetic history of humankind shows that the invaders always kill the men and take the women. That’s nature at work.
Whether the men are killed with weapons or with words may not actually matter.
So, there are kinds of feminism other than radical feminism, or you wouldn't need the 'radical' modifier.
Liberal feminism says the laws need to be changed so women are equal, but doesn't say you can't sleep with men if you want to.
Socialist feminism says the problem's capitalism anyway.
Those are the major formal schools; increasingly you just have new waves.
They do kind of oscillate between a 'women should be able to do whatever they want' and a 'women should be protected from the dangers of men', which conflict sometimes.
As for the sado-masochistic dynamic--the second is much more common behind closed doors. Ask me how I know. ;)
It already is! A lot of women vote Republican because they (a) want to stay home and raise kids or (b) find the misandry of the left offputting. Or (c) the girl's sports issue.
The catch is the right does its own share of unpopular stuff--they keep trying to shut down popular programs like the ACA, for instance. Or ban abortion altogether. Or, lately, put big tariffs on everything and start pointless wars.
The lesser-of-two-evils nature of American politics is a huge issue.
Everybody who talks about politics online thinks the answer is always big ideological splashes. In reality, I bet a candidate who came out and promised to not pass any major programs without a majority of both parties on board - that is to say, committed to doing basically nothing except competent administration, like a Republican governor in a blue state - would win in a landslide.
And we can see with the current housing bill on Trump's desk that even restricting things to true bipartisanship doesn't mean the government has to do NOTHING, exactly. Hell if you take partisan fights off the table, who knows what kind of stuff they might come up with, just to keep busy. (Well, maybe not all of it would be good.)
Yes but it seems like large numbers of women also consider themselves to be “feminists” but not really appreciative of the socio-political implications of that. So they end up voting for “feminists” and then wonder why there are dudes in their public restrooms and locker rooms.
It was far easier to repudiate Feminism (meaning the radical Marxist Theory variant, as opposed to the Suffragettes like my great-grandmother--that's part of the motte & bailey issue with feminism) altogether.
As I did in 1976, when, as a paid usher at the Wisconsin Union Theater in Madison, WI, I stood in the back of the auditorium & listened to one of the leading lights of Feminism, whose name I can't even recall, although I had read Dworkin, Brownmiller & others. What she said (including the heterosexuality cowshit) was so absurdly inconsistent, so untethered from biological reality (thanks evopsych!) so authoritarian & so dogmatic that I decided to having nothing to do with it going forward.
I'm mordantly amused (& actively allied with them) that lesbians are now fighting off a troonie invasion, which merely takes crazy Theory to the next level, bearing down on the untethered from biological reality part.
Back when I was in college (sigh, the years are weighing heavily on me!), one of the things I remember young women lamenting in late night dorm room conversations was, "But I don't want to be a lesbian!" This has always been one of the real stumbling blocks that radical feminism laid in its own path.
While reading that book sounds sad and tedious, I am looking forward to your review.
As a child, I noticed that Feminism(TM) treated my mother like shit, so I wanted nothing to do with it.
I do wonder, just how do feminists propose to prevent the human race from dying out if they get their way and women universally reject heterosexuality?
Consequences -- how do they work?
The "knowledge of good and evil" is the knowledge of cause and effect.
With leftists wanting to "regurgitate the apple" (as Evan Sayat put it in his book) they are wanting to cease their awareness of cause and effect. They want to be like babies and animals, just little bundles of desire with no care beyond the current appetite.
Why would they care about that?
One of the worst things that ever happened to lesbians was the phenomenon of the "political lesbian," which became a thing in the early 1970s. A "political lesbian" is a woman who is basically heterosexual but who creates an artificial lesbian identity for herself as a political statement. Here those of us who were lesbians because of our romantic and sexual attraction to other women were just getting the chance to build aboveground communities, and were minding our own happy business, but here come these heterosexual Puritans saying lesbianism was a political identity and only a political identity, and trying to tell us how to live our lives—and run our relationships. Talk about "colonization."
Many of them who attempted to pair bond with each other would have relationships that would run out of sexual steam, and they'd be happy and relieved about that. Not that they'd stop trying to tell those of us in happy, vital lesbian relationships what behavior in our relationships was proper, including what sexual behavior was proper (too much passion was oppressive!).
There was a "women's community" that blossomed, but the lingering effects of political lesbianism made it too much of a monoculture, sad to say.
Do I believe in female heterosexuality? As Mark Twain replied when asked if he believed in infant baptism, "Believe in it? Hell, I've seen it with my own eyes!"
It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it (she said, facetiously).
The mainstreaming of homosexuality has had effects that were not anticipated by those who advocated in the pre-"liberation" era. One of the things that Phoebe Maltz Bovy addresses in her book is the weird increase in the number of young women identifying as "bisexual" or "queer," "nonbinary," etc. She speculates (and I think this is fair) that most of these women are basically straight, but it is now unfashionable to be seen as such. One opinion I share with my lesbian friend Cynthia Yockey is a profound suspicion toward the category of "bisexuality," although our shared suspicion arises from different points of view.
I believe she is absolutely correct. As I recall, Andrew Sullivan came up with stats that the majority of these (cough, cough) bisexual women had never had the kind of interaction with another woman one might consider qualifying. He opined that, on this basis, a majority of "LGBTQ" (gag, retch) people were actually heterosexual.
There was also a thing in the early 90s of straight people calling themselves "queer," when that word was gaining traction as a positive self-label, for the very same reasons of thinking that made them "cool." (As if.)
I recall the phenomenon of "LUGs". Lesbian Until Graduation. There were many at Mills College.
Brilliant, saw similar things at Agnes Scott
Also UC Santa Cruz was crawling with LUGs
I lived in Oakland for 27 years. I knew many of these women.
To nobody's surprise ...
20% of Gen Z self-identifying as LGBT... ridiculous. Three quarters at least will end up with heterosexual life partners. The desire of children to be "special" is overwhelming and too many adults are indulging them.
Stats predict far fewer will have life partners. Not disagreeing with your statements re: faggotry. Just pointing out that few Gen Z will get married if current trends continue.
I've not looked closely, but a number of the Scandinavian countries (possibly only Sweden?) are predominately unmarried partners (whether life-long or otherwise). I'd qualify the US case as: social trends are hard to predict, as trend reversals do occur just as fads and fashions whither and die.
Back in the '90s, my husband & I had a lesbian friend (fantastic burlesque dancer, we hosted her lesbian wedding (which ended in a vicious divorce)) tell us we were the "queerest people she knew." It was meant as & we took it as a compliment.
How times have changed!
PS. after the ugly divorce, she starting dating men again.
Liberals ran out of a conception of a phenomenon as "morally permissible, but decidedly abnormal." We wanted to tolerate a wider range of lifestyles and modes of thinking - that's fine. But we forced ourselves to pretend everything is normal, that everything is equal, that there is no standard.
It used to just be okay for something unusual to just be okay - tolerable. Something we can work with. Something that can be accommodated. Now we must maintain the fiction that "default" includes some very unusual things, and can't conceive of saying "okay, that's kind of weird" without it being a form of horrible bigotry.
Homosexuality occurs naturally in nature. There are theories that it survived because having a mate's sibling who could contribute to feeding the children without competing for resources via one's own child was an evolutionary advantage.
That said, people who consider it immoral can exist in society alongside those who disagree, and for whom that disagreement is personal. And vice versa. It's the unnecessary demands for endorsement that cause backlash Acknowledging that there won't ever be 100% endorsement used to be a sign of maturity and an understanding of how to exist happily in the world.
That's ironic given the original meaning of queer.
I have one of these and she hasn't talked to me in 4-5 years (I hear about her through the grapevine). She's a Pretendbian...... a they/them trans-masc, gender queer, man hater. She always had boyfriends (as a teen) and she still does occasionally date young men, but she was recently asked out on a date by a lesbian and was kind of insulted that this young woman thought she was a lesbian. If you go around acting like, talking like, walking like, dressing like a man, then I guess that comes across to lesbians as being a lesbian? It's ALL weird to me!
I happen to think that men and women are complimentary to each other. We are not always equal in what we can do, but we have to rely on the strengths of the other to make life work.
We live in interesting times, indeed.
When I was in college back in the late 1970s, there were women in school who were referred to as “LUGs,” meaning “Lesbians Until Graduation.”
Don’t forget the ‘LUGs’ of the ‘90s and ‘00s…the college girls at elite (often women’s) colleges who were ‘lesbians until graduation’…
And now lesbians are dealing with the invasion of men pretending to be women!
Interesting as always! I just think that of my wife and her college friends that are married, the three who still talk have more normal guys as husbands who respect their wives’ friendship, while the other is married to a possessive wimp. I have to wonder, did these authors have social contact with possessive wimps who said they supported various women’s groups?
Anyone who has studied women's behavior understands how important a role friendship plays in their lives. A wise husband recognizes this. Especially if she is at home raising children, your wife needs to have girlfriends nearby, just to keep from feeling so isolated. The possessive/controlling husband, desiring to monopolize his wife's attention, is not really doing himself any favors. He will only make his wife unhappy, and reduce the amount of social support available to his own children.
I believe Mark Steyn originated the expression, “the future belongs to those who show up”.
As an individual matter, affectional preference is a triviality. But as a cultural revolution, there is a tipping point after which it’s the end of your people.
And, not for nothing, the genetic history of humankind shows that the invaders always kill the men and take the women. That’s nature at work.
Whether the men are killed with weapons or with words may not actually matter.
I mean if you take the worst parts of any movement and assume they are the core then you'll end up thinking this.
Most feminists just define feminism as "women should be treated equally and have the freedom to control their own body".
"(a) all men are oppressors, and (b) all women are victims of male oppression?" is not what feminism rests on - no matter how much you wish it was.
So, there are kinds of feminism other than radical feminism, or you wouldn't need the 'radical' modifier.
Liberal feminism says the laws need to be changed so women are equal, but doesn't say you can't sleep with men if you want to.
Socialist feminism says the problem's capitalism anyway.
Those are the major formal schools; increasingly you just have new waves.
They do kind of oscillate between a 'women should be able to do whatever they want' and a 'women should be protected from the dangers of men', which conflict sometimes.
As for the sado-masochistic dynamic--the second is much more common behind closed doors. Ask me how I know. ;)
Very messed up.
Interesting that we are told homosexuals are "born that way". But here, it is clearly a choice
I shall now go find my old motorcycle helmet. Heck, I might break out (if I can still find them) my old riot gear to cope with the oncoming flame war.
Could this contradiction be used as a wedge between feminism and heterosexual women?
It already is! A lot of women vote Republican because they (a) want to stay home and raise kids or (b) find the misandry of the left offputting. Or (c) the girl's sports issue.
The catch is the right does its own share of unpopular stuff--they keep trying to shut down popular programs like the ACA, for instance. Or ban abortion altogether. Or, lately, put big tariffs on everything and start pointless wars.
The lesser-of-two-evils nature of American politics is a huge issue.
Everybody who talks about politics online thinks the answer is always big ideological splashes. In reality, I bet a candidate who came out and promised to not pass any major programs without a majority of both parties on board - that is to say, committed to doing basically nothing except competent administration, like a Republican governor in a blue state - would win in a landslide.
And we can see with the current housing bill on Trump's desk that even restricting things to true bipartisanship doesn't mean the government has to do NOTHING, exactly. Hell if you take partisan fights off the table, who knows what kind of stuff they might come up with, just to keep busy. (Well, maybe not all of it would be good.)
The problem is such a candidate would never make it out of the primaries.
Right.
> popular programs like the ACA,
Go ahead and pull the other one. That bill was massively destructive.
It's never worked yet, so I'm going to say no.
Most women like the idea of legal equality and are not at all impressed with feminist theory. Especially the bits about being a lesbian.
Yes but it seems like large numbers of women also consider themselves to be “feminists” but not really appreciative of the socio-political implications of that. So they end up voting for “feminists” and then wonder why there are dudes in their public restrooms and locker rooms.
Although the TERFs are the ones who led the pushback against genderwoo.
While reading your article, I kept thinking “the snake is busy eating its tail except without the recreative/rebirth aspect.”
Nothing but destruction here…
It was far easier to repudiate Feminism (meaning the radical Marxist Theory variant, as opposed to the Suffragettes like my great-grandmother--that's part of the motte & bailey issue with feminism) altogether.
As I did in 1976, when, as a paid usher at the Wisconsin Union Theater in Madison, WI, I stood in the back of the auditorium & listened to one of the leading lights of Feminism, whose name I can't even recall, although I had read Dworkin, Brownmiller & others. What she said (including the heterosexuality cowshit) was so absurdly inconsistent, so untethered from biological reality (thanks evopsych!) so authoritarian & so dogmatic that I decided to having nothing to do with it going forward.
I'm mordantly amused (& actively allied with them) that lesbians are now fighting off a troonie invasion, which merely takes crazy Theory to the next level, bearing down on the untethered from biological reality part.
I found your book for $1.99 on Kindle.
Bovy's is $13.99
Looking forward to your review.
Brave of you to enter that den of vipers
All women are feminists, until the bill comes due or something heavy needs to be lifted.
All the philosophical and ideological bullshit comes down to that.