In Saturday’s blog [below] I explained how a feminist politics was undermining women’s and families’ interests, contributing to a top heavy political system and eroding participatory mechanisms. Today I will explore what we should do about this.
First, politicians should be held more accountable to us, becoming less loose cannons ever ready to inflict their latest policy whims on us, and more like cogs in our political machine. We need to focus on the processes by which our needs are identified and transmitted. There is a massive technical capacity for collecting and crunching data about the conditions which maximise health and wellbeing. There is also a fantastic capacity for communication through social media. All these technical facilities should be harnessed to maximise the efficiency of the political system so we are less reliant on individuals, whatever their sex.
We also need to dismantle ideologies that might have an undue influence on those individuals. And feminism should be the first to go. We need to make feminism history, a thing of the past, which we can dispassionately talk about and analyse, without gainsaying positive changes that it may have achieved.
Feminism is responsible for the damaging belief that anything less than a numerically equal representation of women in all areas is a result of discrimination. It is not. It is a product of the different choices that men and women make as a result of their different reproductive roles.
The assumption that we should achieve numerical equality, not only fuels feminism but provides the ideological justification for the economic policies driving women into work. Without this ideological legitimacy the greed behind the policies would be laid bare.
We need en masse to get our priorities right and recognise that the private realm of family, friends, home and community is central, and that the economy along with other areas of public endeavour such as politics, science and art are there to serve and protect and enrich the lives of our families. And it won’t matter if men are more influential in public life because this is the secondary sphere.
It is the wellbeing of our families and communities that should be the arbiter and yardstick of social policy. Instead our families are in the service of the economy, producers of GDP.
But perhaps the most insidious and lethal aspect of feminism is the way it persistently, invidiously, poisons women’s understanding of, and attitude towards, men. While the whole machinery of ‘rape culture’ or the Everyday Sexism Project are perhaps the starkest examples of this, we are continuously ‘reminded’ that we need protecting from men in a drip, drip, drip which damages relations with our nearest and dearest and harms the quality of our everyday lives.
This is the context that takes for granted that a quarter of mothers of dependent children are on their own. As men are regarded as redundant, unreliable and feckless, it is never necessary to ask why single parenthood occurs.
Single parenthood has very concrete causes. It can be traced back to boys left behind in education, men lacking of qualifications, and lack of decently paid working class jobs. It can be traced back to male unemployment which we have persistently, since deindustrialisation under Thatcher in the 1980s, turned a blind eye to because we can score political points by giving employment to women rather than men. It can be traced back to the lack of roles we have for men in society, leaving them at the whim of whatever women need them to do. It can be traced back to a culture that tells men they are unimportant and unnecessary, a drag on the efficient functioning of society as a whole.
Yet we all know the grim statistics about single parenthood. What we may not know and what Dench’s analysis of British Social Attitudes shows us is that single mothers, whether working, inactive or housewives are unhappier than mothers with partners.
Yet it is middle class women with all the benefits of a helpmate, who in their supine acceptance of feminism, help to keep the institution of single parenthood in its place.
Finally, as women we need to take responsibility for the damage that feminism has wrought on society and help create something better in its place. We need to welcome interdependence in place of independence. We need to replace self-interest with altruism and self-fulfilment with self-sacrifice. Once we start doing these things we won’t need safe spaces or self-esteem classes. We won’t be fragile flowers ready to collapse at an insult to our egos. We will be strong because we will know our worth.
Source
The State Has Become The Forbidding Guardian Of The Family
Many detractors rightly see links between feminism and Marxism. However, because feminists attach such importance to the workplace, feminism has actually become the handmaiden of capitalism in its rawest form. As feminists have prioritised participation in the workplace over family and the community their ideology has been easily co-opted into the government’s economic concerns.
As feminism has become ever more deeply embedded in government so it has provided our ministers with the rationale and justification for getting ever increasing numbers of women out to work. Over the past few decades women moved from being housewives with a peripheral economic role, to the majority being in employment, and while this was initially part-time there are now ever increasing numbers of women in full-time work. The housewife is almost extinct.
The main thrust of our Government’s policy in relation to women has been to provide more and more childcare; this also dominated the Labour party manifesto. Furthermore, the tax and benefits system is structured in a way that prevents a main breadwinner from being able significantly to increase his income; financial thumbscrews are in place that force women out to work.
Yet in 1998 the government conducted a postcard campaign to find out what women’s concerns were. They received 30 000 responses which showed that work-life balance was women’s primary concern. There have been numerous surveys, all of which have shown that women would prefer to spend less rather than more time at work. However government policies steered successfully by feminist pressure groups have ensured that women spend less time at home with their families and ever increasing amounts of time out at work.
As there are fewer and fewer people at home to protect our young and old and families, this provides justification for government bureaucrats to meddle and pry ever more deeply into our private lives. So for example we now have domestic violence laws which take into account emotional and psychological abuse, new rape laws which will influence how we conduct our sex lives or in Scotland the Named Persons Scheme, which heavily undermines the parent’s role.
Instead of shoring up and supporting what remains of the family a feminised government ever more deeply intervenes. They focus on surrogacy, donor conception, transgenderism – these are all extremely minority concerns, the outcomes of which risk damaging our children and further destabilising family life.
A top heavy political system
The result is that the mechanisms required to watch over the diets of our children, educate them about the ever increasing complexities around sex and gender, monitor the social care of our elderly, provide wraparound childcare for our children, follow our Twitter accounts – all of these require bureaucratically heavy top-down mechanisms. This makes it increasingly difficult for processes of political representation to work bottom-up. This is before we factor in that the organs in place to encourage 50:50 representation will inhibit the organic processes through which selection occurs.
The utter corrosion of bottom up mechanisms
However, all political change of any value starts from the desire to look after and protect our homes, our families and our communities. It starts from bottom up. It is not self-interest in female representation that motivates activity but declining schools standards, the waiting lists in our local hospitals or neighbourhood deterioration, which provide a catalyst for women’s concerns.
It was ever thus. The most effective social reformers, social movements, and even revolutions start with anxieties about feeding our children, the health and wellbeing of the workers who do this, and other concerns around health and home. For example, Mother Jones, “the most dangerous woman in America” helped establish the United Mine Workers Union so that men would “get a wage which would allow women to stay at home and care for their kids”.
We have much to worry us in contemporary society. However, the increasing employment of women, which is a product of feminism, means that the State is increasingly becoming the appointed guardian of the family. When it comes to identifying, defending and protecting the interests of our men, our elderly our children – there is nobody, except the conservative woman, at home.
Feminism has also resulted in women becoming increasingly alienated from the political process as a whole. Research conducted by Geoff Dench into British Social Attitudes has revealed that since BSA first started in 1986 there is an increasing proportion of the population who don’t support any political party. This has doubled among working women, trebled among housewives and quadrupled among single mothers. The women who feel that no political party represents their interests have significantly stronger pro-domestic values – across a whole range of variables – than any other group.
This is devastating for grassroots political activity, for bottom up participatory mechanisms, for processes of interest representation.
In my next blog I will look at what we should be doing about this.
Source
First, politicians should be held more accountable to us, becoming less loose cannons ever ready to inflict their latest policy whims on us, and more like cogs in our political machine. We need to focus on the processes by which our needs are identified and transmitted. There is a massive technical capacity for collecting and crunching data about the conditions which maximise health and wellbeing. There is also a fantastic capacity for communication through social media. All these technical facilities should be harnessed to maximise the efficiency of the political system so we are less reliant on individuals, whatever their sex.
We also need to dismantle ideologies that might have an undue influence on those individuals. And feminism should be the first to go. We need to make feminism history, a thing of the past, which we can dispassionately talk about and analyse, without gainsaying positive changes that it may have achieved.Feminism is responsible for the damaging belief that anything less than a numerically equal representation of women in all areas is a result of discrimination. It is not. It is a product of the different choices that men and women make as a result of their different reproductive roles.
The assumption that we should achieve numerical equality, not only fuels feminism but provides the ideological justification for the economic policies driving women into work. Without this ideological legitimacy the greed behind the policies would be laid bare.
We need en masse to get our priorities right and recognise that the private realm of family, friends, home and community is central, and that the economy along with other areas of public endeavour such as politics, science and art are there to serve and protect and enrich the lives of our families. And it won’t matter if men are more influential in public life because this is the secondary sphere.
It is the wellbeing of our families and communities that should be the arbiter and yardstick of social policy. Instead our families are in the service of the economy, producers of GDP.
But perhaps the most insidious and lethal aspect of feminism is the way it persistently, invidiously, poisons women’s understanding of, and attitude towards, men. While the whole machinery of ‘rape culture’ or the Everyday Sexism Project are perhaps the starkest examples of this, we are continuously ‘reminded’ that we need protecting from men in a drip, drip, drip which damages relations with our nearest and dearest and harms the quality of our everyday lives.
This is the context that takes for granted that a quarter of mothers of dependent children are on their own. As men are regarded as redundant, unreliable and feckless, it is never necessary to ask why single parenthood occurs.
Single parenthood has very concrete causes. It can be traced back to boys left behind in education, men lacking of qualifications, and lack of decently paid working class jobs. It can be traced back to male unemployment which we have persistently, since deindustrialisation under Thatcher in the 1980s, turned a blind eye to because we can score political points by giving employment to women rather than men. It can be traced back to the lack of roles we have for men in society, leaving them at the whim of whatever women need them to do. It can be traced back to a culture that tells men they are unimportant and unnecessary, a drag on the efficient functioning of society as a whole.
Yet we all know the grim statistics about single parenthood. What we may not know and what Dench’s analysis of British Social Attitudes shows us is that single mothers, whether working, inactive or housewives are unhappier than mothers with partners.
Yet it is middle class women with all the benefits of a helpmate, who in their supine acceptance of feminism, help to keep the institution of single parenthood in its place.
Finally, as women we need to take responsibility for the damage that feminism has wrought on society and help create something better in its place. We need to welcome interdependence in place of independence. We need to replace self-interest with altruism and self-fulfilment with self-sacrifice. Once we start doing these things we won’t need safe spaces or self-esteem classes. We won’t be fragile flowers ready to collapse at an insult to our egos. We will be strong because we will know our worth.
Source
________
The State Has Become The Forbidding Guardian Of The Family
As feminism has become ever more deeply embedded in government so it has provided our ministers with the rationale and justification for getting ever increasing numbers of women out to work. Over the past few decades women moved from being housewives with a peripheral economic role, to the majority being in employment, and while this was initially part-time there are now ever increasing numbers of women in full-time work. The housewife is almost extinct.
The main thrust of our Government’s policy in relation to women has been to provide more and more childcare; this also dominated the Labour party manifesto. Furthermore, the tax and benefits system is structured in a way that prevents a main breadwinner from being able significantly to increase his income; financial thumbscrews are in place that force women out to work.
Yet in 1998 the government conducted a postcard campaign to find out what women’s concerns were. They received 30 000 responses which showed that work-life balance was women’s primary concern. There have been numerous surveys, all of which have shown that women would prefer to spend less rather than more time at work. However government policies steered successfully by feminist pressure groups have ensured that women spend less time at home with their families and ever increasing amounts of time out at work.
As there are fewer and fewer people at home to protect our young and old and families, this provides justification for government bureaucrats to meddle and pry ever more deeply into our private lives. So for example we now have domestic violence laws which take into account emotional and psychological abuse, new rape laws which will influence how we conduct our sex lives or in Scotland the Named Persons Scheme, which heavily undermines the parent’s role.
Instead of shoring up and supporting what remains of the family a feminised government ever more deeply intervenes. They focus on surrogacy, donor conception, transgenderism – these are all extremely minority concerns, the outcomes of which risk damaging our children and further destabilising family life.
A top heavy political system
The result is that the mechanisms required to watch over the diets of our children, educate them about the ever increasing complexities around sex and gender, monitor the social care of our elderly, provide wraparound childcare for our children, follow our Twitter accounts – all of these require bureaucratically heavy top-down mechanisms. This makes it increasingly difficult for processes of political representation to work bottom-up. This is before we factor in that the organs in place to encourage 50:50 representation will inhibit the organic processes through which selection occurs.
The utter corrosion of bottom up mechanisms
However, all political change of any value starts from the desire to look after and protect our homes, our families and our communities. It starts from bottom up. It is not self-interest in female representation that motivates activity but declining schools standards, the waiting lists in our local hospitals or neighbourhood deterioration, which provide a catalyst for women’s concerns.
It was ever thus. The most effective social reformers, social movements, and even revolutions start with anxieties about feeding our children, the health and wellbeing of the workers who do this, and other concerns around health and home. For example, Mother Jones, “the most dangerous woman in America” helped establish the United Mine Workers Union so that men would “get a wage which would allow women to stay at home and care for their kids”.
We have much to worry us in contemporary society. However, the increasing employment of women, which is a product of feminism, means that the State is increasingly becoming the appointed guardian of the family. When it comes to identifying, defending and protecting the interests of our men, our elderly our children – there is nobody, except the conservative woman, at home.
Feminism has also resulted in women becoming increasingly alienated from the political process as a whole. Research conducted by Geoff Dench into British Social Attitudes has revealed that since BSA first started in 1986 there is an increasing proportion of the population who don’t support any political party. This has doubled among working women, trebled among housewives and quadrupled among single mothers. The women who feel that no political party represents their interests have significantly stronger pro-domestic values – across a whole range of variables – than any other group.
This is devastating for grassroots political activity, for bottom up participatory mechanisms, for processes of interest representation.
In my next blog I will look at what we should be doing about this.
Source
No comments:
Post a Comment