WOMEN ON THE LEFT

by Alex Kurtagic

The topic of women on the Right has led to many a heated discussion, and it is one that commentators on the Left have gleefully joined in their efforts to promote their cause and discourage opposition.

One of the favourite tropes of the Left is that its opponents offer women nothing except serial pregnancy and household chores. Another is that their opponents are angry, hate-filled, pension-age misogynists. Yet another is that, because of the above, none but a tiny minority of deluded, sociopathic women support them.

The implication is that the Left offers women emancipation; that proponents of the Left are happy, loving, youthful people with enlightened attitudes; and that, because of the above, the sane majority of women support them.

But—is this true?

And if all or at least some of it is true, is it true without qualifications?

So far no one has pointed the electron microscope toward women on the Left.

This is an omission that needs correcting, for in a culture that is materially dominated and regulated by the ideological Left, and/or where the cultural hegemony has been defined by the ideology of the Left, the topic is certainly worthy of investigation.

The Left as a Force of Emancipation

The Left’s cosmology derives from Freudo-Marxian scholasticism, the closed matrix into which fit their insidious abstractions and incestuous analytical frameworks, and which drives their various so-called "emancipatory" movements.

Generally, Leftists believe women to have been oppressed by—as they would so characteristically phrase it—"the patriarchal White male capitalist superstructure."

Yet, capitalism is founded on classical liberalism, hardly a traditionalist ideology, so the Left’s own feminist narrative should be taken as self-criticism.

Also, while it is true that social reforms were needed because the role and opportunities for women had become too limited (this is what drove Betty Friedan’s critique), this was not due to an excess of tradition, but to a lack of it. As I argued in a previous article, traditional Western cultures accorded women high social status, even divinity, and conceived them not just as wives and mothers but also in a variety of high-status, even sacred roles.

By contrast, what the Left has done for women is trade one form of slavery for another. So now, instead of being dependent on husbands, whom in most cases they married out of love, women, having become wage slaves and debt slaves, are dependent on anonymous corporations, banks, and the government, who regard them purely as sources of money or labour, and who certainly love no one.

That is how gender equality has been achieved, because men are also slaves.

We cannot even say that the Left has given women the option of choosing their enslaver, because nowadays enjoying a good middle- class lifestyle without having to do odious work requires either a very high income, two incomes, and/or going into debt, particularly since earnings are so heavily taxed.

Some women certainly enjoy sacrificing everything for a remunerative career, and some even achieve those careers, but they comprise a minority. Most women, like most people, work only to pay the bills, and only tell themselves they enjoy their work because that is the only way they can stand it: most women, like most people, are bored by it and spend their weeks longing for the next weekend and dreading the following Monday.

Is that freedom?

Or is it living death?

Love, Leftie Style

When we think of the Left in the context of love, we imagine nude long-haired youngsters cavorting in the mud at some outdoor Rock music concert. But, of course, that image is from over 40 years ago. And it hardly reflects the universal reality of triumphant Leftism, since it is subcultural and belongs to a point in time and space, as opposed to ordinary people’s everyday reality.

And what is that reality?

We know the Left has devastated the family. Radical feminist agitation, and media depictions of women informed by extreme Leftist ideologies, have produced a breed of women who are harsh, overbearing, loud, aggressive, muscular, even hirsute. They possess litigious dispositions, thermonuclear tempers, and hair-trigger hypersensitivity. They wear horizon-spanning shoulder pads, gurn on furious treadmills, bake themselves on tanning beds, have perpetual headaches, wear suits and baggy jeans, slash upholstery with their bones, and dream of corporate careers involving ball-busting, misandristic revanchism, and fist-slamming brinkmanship.

Feminism has also produced an alternative breed of liberated women, more prevalent than the first, whose archetypical specimen swarms city centres every evening of the week. They stand perched atop vertiginous heels, bleach their hair, spray-tan their skins, starve their bodies, muscle their abs, whoop drunkenly, smoke while pregnant, and frequent brainless nightclubs, in whose pulsating interior they signal their availability for easy sex, right then and there, in the privacy of a toilet stall. The most educated and intellectual among them read romance novels, the love of whose heroes they subsequently seek at the bar or on the dance floor. In some cases they even affect a taste for football. These women are not feminists, although some may have picked up feminist attitudes from television sitcoms and romantic comedies, but they are nonetheless a product of feminism.

Such is the proliferation of these breeds that some men in the West have declared marriage strikes and/or sought more amiable companions in Asia and Eastern Europe.

Divorce has also exploded as a result of Leftist ideology, not only because it has promoted a thoroughly unpleasant archetype for modern women in the West, but also because it has devalued marriage, promoted casual sex, normalised dysfunction, and made divorce a lifestyle choice.

Since this environment is their creation, made in their image, one has to wonder, then, how many Leftists can boast of happy life-long marriages?

Where are their women?

They are with their lawyers, angry, disillusioned, and filing for divorce!

Women on the Left

Leftist ideologies seem to attract a very particular type of woman. By looking at the Left’s women intellectuals, we learn about their character.

For starters, we find out from Ti-Grace Atkinson why the Left are so interested in the whereabouts of our women. In Amazon Odyssey (1974), she wrote:

The price of clinging to the enemy [a man] is your life. To enter into a relationship with a man who has divested himself as completely and publicly from the male role as much as possible would still be a risk. But to relate to a man who has done any less is suicide.... I, personally, have taken the position that I will not appear with any man publicly, where it could possibly be interpreted that we were friends.

Atkinson was influenced by Simone de Beauvoir, author of the seminal feminist treatise, The Second Sex. In an interview for the Saturday Review, published on 14 June 1975, de Beauvoir provides a possible answer as to why the Left has pushed so hard to force women into wage slavery while also pushing for predatory taxation (because, note, if the Left were about giving women autonomy, they would have pushed for vocational employment and tax-breaks, rather than forced labour and tax-hikes):

No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.

De Beauvoir was a firm admirer of Soviet Communism. Some feminists, like Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Professor Emerita of Ethnic Studies at California State University, have expressed sentiments congenial with that movement. In her 1969 essay, ‘Female Liberation as the Basis for Social Revolution’, she wrote:

How will the family unit be destroyed? . . . the demand alone will throw the whole ideology of the family into question, so that women can begin establishing a community of work with each other and we can fight collectively. Women will feel freer to leave their husbands and become economically independent, either through a job or welfare.

In true Soviet style, Prof. Mary Jo Bane, Thornton Bradshaw Professor of Public Policy and Management at Harvard Kennedy School, offers a solution for the pesky problem of what to do with the children:

In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them.

Other politically sinister women view the problem from a spiritual, rather than materialist, perspective. In Women and Madness (1972), professor and psychotherapist Phyllis Chesler wrote:

[M]ost mother-women give up whatever ghost of a unique and human self they may have when they ‘marry’ and raise children.

Sheila Cronan, of NOW!, supplies additional insights concerning marriage:

Since marriage constitutes slavery for women, it is clear that the Women’s Movement must concentrate on attacking this institution. Freedom for women cannot be won without the abolition of marriage.

Because, obviously,

[t]he simple fact is that every woman must be willing to be identified as a lesbian to be fully feminist.

Particularly because, as expressed by Catharine MacKinnon, Professor of Law at the University of Michigan:

All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman.

Indeed, some Left-leaning women conceive the situation to be so dire that the only solution is to dispense with men altogether. The likes of Cheryl Clarke, infuse their brand of politics even into their most intimate affairs:

Heterosexuality is a die-hard custom through which male-supremacist institutions insure their own perpetuity and control over us. Women are kept, maintained and contained through terror, violence, and the spray of semen . . . [Lesbianism is] an ideological, political and philosophical means of liberation of all women from heterosexual tyranny… (“Lesbianism, An Act of Resistance,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color).

Andrea Dworkin, a woman whose inner and outer beauty was truly in the eye of the beholder, did not want to dispense with men without first getting some satisfaction from them:

I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig. (Ice and Fire, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1987.)

In interviews, she made her sentiments clear:

Q: ‘People think you are very hostile to men’. A: ‘I am’.

Her hostility was committed to print in her books, like Our Blood, where she wrote in 1976:

Only when manhood is dead—and it will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it—only then will we know what it is to be free.

Unsurprisingly, her second husband (still alive), is a radical feminist, who has written books like Refusing to be a Man, and The End of Manhood: A Book for Men of Conscience.

Dworkin also said, "Men use the night to erase us."

Which is perhaps why there are Left-leaning women who take a root-and-branch approach to the problem of manhood. Triple-PhD holder Mary Daly, former professor at Boston College, said in 2001:

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.

Perhaps the most exquisite example of women on the Left is Valerie Solanas. Her iconic, The S.C.U.M. Manifesto, was the foundational text for the Society for Cutting Up Men. She wrote:

Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex.

Because, after all,

To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo.

But of course, it need not be that bad. Jilly Cooper, S.C.U.M. member, still thinks there is a role for men in the world:

The male is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness . . . can be trained to do most things.

It would be naïve to think that such views result from experiences with traditionalist males, because, as everybody knows, a person tends to socialise with people who share his or her values. Thus the views of women luminaries from the Left-wing intelligentsia may perhaps say more about their male counterparts on the Left than they do about their enemies on the Right. They may also say something about their lack of experiences with men, period; with men whom traditionalists would class as scum; or with men who are from non-Western cultures, where women are accorded low social status.

For example, Andrea Dworkin became a radical feminist after being severely abused by her first husband, Cornelius Dirk de Bruin, a fellow radical activist involved in the Vietnam War protest movement.

Mary Daly had no real experiences with men, being a lesbian: 

‘I don't think about men. I really don’t care about them.’

Valerie Solanas came from a dysfunctional family.

And Phyllis Chesler cites her experiences in the early 1960s with her Afghani husband in Kabul as inspiring her to become an ardent feminist. As was the custom for foreign wives in Afghanistan, she was required to surrender her U.S. passport to the authorities and lived a virtual prisoner at her in-laws’ polygamous household.

And, of course, it is these women that the Left has exalted as experts in gender, manhood, and womanhood, posting them at leading universities, dedicating them entire departments, and publishing and promoting their psychotic diatribes.

The only reason the Left can portray itself as enjoying the support of women is it that it has feminists—which is just as good as not enjoying the support of women at all, particularly when some of them want to wipe out the male sex from the face of the Earth.

This is no doubt something to consider next time male commentators on the Left obsess about our women, who are very different indeed.