"Feminism" means so many different things that it appears to mean very little. Its theoretical advocates constantly contradict each other and themselves. Rather than damaging feminism, its incoherence offers an easy defense against all criticism: whatever the complaint, the response is that it misses the mark because feminism is really something else.
A system as complex and subtle as human life cannot be reconfigured in fundamental ways merely at will. Nonetheless, opposition to gender as a principle of social order - to what is called "sexism" - is what unifies the things called "feminism." Since the opposition is absolute and categorical, feminism is in no way reformist. It treats a fundamental and evidently necessary principle of all human societies, sex-role differentiation, as an oppressive arrangement that must be abolished at whatever cost.
The aim of feminism, therefore, is to create a new kind of human being in a new form of society in which age-old ties among men, women and children are to be dissolved and new ones constituted in accordance with abstract ideological demands.
The objections to anarchist and communist theory apply with yet more force to feminism, because what the latter seeks to eliminate touches us far more deeply than private property or the state. Like the other two theories, feminism can be presented as a lofty and necessary ideal set up in opposition to a long history of dreadful injustice. After all, things like gender that are implicated in all social life are necessarily implicated in all social injustice.
Nonetheless, the practical implementation of feminism, especially by force of law, can only lead to catastrophe. Like anarchism it calls for categorical opposition to distinctions and patterns of authority people find natural, and like communism for ceaseless radical reconstruction of all aspects of life, and consequently for absolute bureaucratic control of everything. Both tendencies are thoroughly destructive, and their mutual opposition does not render them harmless.
The result of the victory of feminism has been a combination of disorder and state tyranny cascading from America throughout the world, from the most immediate personal relationships to high culture and international politics. Feminism has meant suspicion and hostility where mutual reliance is an absolute necessity. It has meant growing deceit, heartlessness and brutality in daily life, resulting in particular suffering for the weak. It has meant confusion and misery for the young, who have been deprived of stable family life and concrete ideals of adulthood. It has meant the destruction of local and popular institutions by ever more powerful and irresponsible state bureaucracies. It has set women free mainly to be low level employees and unattached sexual commodities.
It is not surprising that feminists, who misconstrue so much, misconstrue the nature of the opposition to them. Since their position requires a comprehensive and minute system of ideological regimentation they assume antifeminists must also be aspiring tyrants. They thus recreate their opponents in their own image.
The power of feminism despite its evident irrationality shows the strength and pervasiveness of the institutions, interests and ways of thinking that support it. Its triumph has been part of the triumph of state and market over all other social powers, the culmination of a trend that has been sweeping all before it for centuries and become horrendously destructive. Government and business are now uniformly feminist, ultimately because family life hems them in by establishing a principle of social order not reducible to money and state regulation. The media, the educational system, and even organized scholarship take their lead from government and business and are therefore feminist as well. No significant social authority takes an opposing view. Without exception the articulate and powerful benefit from absorption of the functions of the family by formal public institutions.
In the end feminism cannot win because it radically undermines any stable and productive ordering of private life. By disordering reproduction and childrearing and the most basic human connections it puts long-term social survival in question. It has done a great deal of damage, however, and will do much more before it destroys itself.
-- Jim Kalb (condensed; full essay at
http://turnabout.ath.cx:8000/node/2)
