One of the things about the MRM in the mainstream media that gives me the biggest eyeroll is the whole “Elliot Rodger killed more men than women because he hated women and was an MRA” whack of horsehit that every clickbait “journalist” repeats ad nauseum. I’m not even going to bother debunking the myth as plenty of people have already done so, and really it makes no difference.
Haters gonna hate.
Facts are just a conspiracy of the patriarchy.
It makes the comments on this Thought Catalog piece even more hilarious. These horrid witches actually were feminists. Imagine a world without those early feminists, the feminists encourage me. Imagine a world if the feminists got to carry out all their plans.
Yikes.
No thanks!
judgybitch 
Have you read “The Suffragette Bombers”? It’s eye-opening.
Pankhurst and her cronies were really not nice people.
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I completely agree with you about the awfulness of these women’s agendas, and your following statement really resonates with me:
“To be honest, I’m a lot more grateful those early feminists didn’t get the opportunity to roll out their whole program of ideas.”
I feel this way about not just those particular ideals, but also every zealous ideal promoting some program that proponents think will make everything as it should be. I feel very lucky to live in the U.S., where every new plan gets amended and compromised on till it ends up somewhere in between what people at each end of the spectrum would like to see.
I know what I’m talking about is one of the gripes that a lot of people have about our government, but I much prefer this scenario over some fascist dictatorship where the vision of one or a few people can actually run its full course and come to fruition.
“It’s easy to romanticize the past, but dangerous to do so.”
Absolutely, and that’s why I really like the neo-traditionalist philosophy that you turned me on to. A lot of traditions developed simply because they made sense for most people at the time, and some of these traditions, or individualized variations of them, continue to make sense for many people today.
When everyone’s free to draw from those aspects of their traditions that can help them, as well as from the helpful aspects of the modern world and modern options, then everyone will be able to live as they “should” be living, and I think lifestyles are going to be even more diverse than they are today. And yet I think that diversity will undergirded with a much greater social cohesion than we could ever imagine — not because any one person’s vision is being enacted, but because the majority of people will have finally realized that there’s room for each of us to have a vision and live out that vision, and also to care about and help our neighbor.
A couple of my heroes are the writers Louisa May Alcott, who wrote Little Women and the Little Men series, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote the Little House series. Both women placed a high value on home and family life, and both had their own ideas about how they wanted to live their lives and spoke their own minds. Wilder decided not to include the “obey” clause in her wedding vows, and her husband supported her in that. I see women like this as the ones who did the most to improve things for women, because they simply went about living their own lives rather than trying to organize everyone else’s.
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How did you limit yourself to just five? hehe
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From what I have read, eugenics was very popular until the horrors of Nazi Germany were revealed in the wake of the war.
JB, I don’t know if you have the ability to edit your Thought Catalog post but, there’s an error about the KKK being down on Protestants. They’re down on Catholics.
I have to agree with The Real Peterman, it had to be tough to stop at five. Perhaps you should do a follow up exposing paedophilia and all else among them. That will make them howl, especially when it it fully admitted or documented.
Why is it that I am reminded of Germaine Greer?
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I was expecting axe murderesses or cannibalism. Most of the horrors mentioned are deemed so only through the lens of time and social progress. Racism and eugenics were perfectly accepted premises by most Western people. Just as there is the recognized bias of ethnocentrism, there is a bias in what I think of as era-ism or temporal-ism.
We cannot judge previous eras with our standards, just as you wouldn’t want people a hundred years from now judging our norms by their standards.
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This is very true — and the checkered history of the birth control movement reminds me a lot of the checkered history of the United States. Just as feminists would like to “whitewash” what the younger generations learn about the early feminists’ motivations behind promoting family planning, so some extreme conservatives would like to whitewash what the younger generation learns about U.S. history — i.e. they’d like to minimize what’s taught about our history of slavery, racism, and attempts to exterminate the Indian people and their culture.
Not to be tongue-and-cheek, but I really see it as a matter of deciding whether the history of something is so evil that, in order to be good people, we need to “throw out the baby with the bathwater.” With regard to my country, there were certainly some evil seeds sown in along with the good, but I still see a lot of good, in that many people are still coming here in search of a better life. So I vote for keeping the “baby” and just working to improve the conditions for its continued growth.
With regard to birth control, I believe it has been lifesaving and marriage-saving for some couples who’ve reached the point where it’s not a good idea for them to keep having children, whether for medical or economic reasons. And I think many husbands would agree with me that being able to get surgically sterilized and continue enjoying a sex life with their wife is immensely better than feeling like they have to be celibate or risk killing her — or, in a less extreme situation, risk taxing their limited resources of money or energy.
But of course there are some extreme conservatives who say that a woman who really loves God should be willing to place her life in His hands and be open to Him using her to bring more souls into the world — even if this means that she must pass out of this life, she should trust that God is more than capable of raising another woman up to fulfill her responsibilities. And they also teach that couples need to trust God to provide what they need to be able to raise all the children He gives them. These people see birth control as something that grew up out of evil roots, and as something that will therefore taint with evil everyone who takes part in it.
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Your comments are always the best, Susan. You know what the difference is between a liberal and a conservative?……. “Oh, fifty, sometimes 100 years.”
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Isn’t a feminist basically just a woman with an opinion? Doesn’t that technically make you a feminist?
I once saw a girl who claimed to be an anarchist condemning feminism too, and as I watched her complain I was thinking to myself, “This feminist girl hates other feminists. Weird.”
I think feminists can be good or evil, like the witches in the “Wizard of Oz”. Remember when Glinda asked Dorothy if she was a good witch or a bad witch? That’s the question I feel like asking any woman who ever claims to be a feminist. “Are you a good feminist or a bad feminist?”
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Didn’t she write a book celebrating the sex appeal of boys?
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