By : The word “feminism” was coined by French philosopher, Charles Fourier, in 1837.1 It is perhaps ironic that the term was coined by a man, but he was in fact a man who was interested in the plight of women. Fournier, therefore, could be called the father of modern feminism and the first feminist man. Feminism existed before Fourier, but it got is name and began its formal history after Fournier.In one form or another, and under one name or another, feminism has existed in other cultures going back to ancient times. Kenneth Minogue2 noted the existence of something akin to feminism during the waning periods of both the Roman and Greek empires, when lesbianism and women’s rights could be seen in the writings of the Greek poet, Sappho, who came from the island of Lesbos, and in classical Greek plays, as, for example, in the character, Lysistrata, who convinces the women of Greece to withhold sexual privileges from their husbands as a means of forcing the men to negotiate a peace treaty. A form of feminism also existed at the end of the ancient Roman Empire.
Feminist-like movements fluctuated over the centuries, at times seeing women lauded as objects of chivalric devotion and romantic love, or conversely burned at the stake for having “notions” or thinking or acting in ways that were considered dangerous.
However, the formal beginning of feminism was a loosely connected movement of women in the nineteenth century, when writers such as Susan B. Anthony began to write of women as second-class citizens to men and advocated for women’s suffrage.
Modern feminists have divided feminist history into three waves (and sometimes four), so we will keep to their organization of feminist history, but we will be telling it from a man’s (one man’s) point of view.
The First Wave
The first wave of feminism was a time of political protests or campaigns that occurred during the 19th century and early twentieth century. Who first used the word “waves” and why they used it, one can only speculate. Perhaps they were referring to the waves of troops in a battle, and so perhaps the waves of feminism were waves of feminist protest and revolt against patriarchy. The assumption of these early feminists, who formed a fringe group of discontented women, was that men were and had been for thousands of years treating women unfairly. This was the core of early feminism (and feminism since then as well): women were marginalized citizens who were treated badly (and sometimes horribly) by men.
Sigmund Freud was around during the first wave; he first became famous at the end of the Nineteenth Century, when his book, The Interpretation of Dreams, was published.3 The modern feminist movement had started during his time and feminists began bashing him from the beginning. The theory that they took issue with most strongly was his theory of the female castration complex, the essence of which was what he called “penis envy.” He posited that when little girls first discovered that little boys (and fathers) had penises and they didn’t, they felted cheated. They saw that their brothers and maybe their fathers had a body part they didn’t have. It is akin to a brother getting a shiny new toy for Christmas while the sister gets nothing. Freud thought that penis envy was central to the formation of feminism. If unresolved, it remained forever in a woman’s unconscious. Women who were most likely to be feminists were those who had the severest case of castration complex and therefore the most penis envy toward men.
Many of the leaders of the first wave were women who had negative feelings toward men and a feeling of unfairness that went back to their childhoods. Gloria Steinem, an early feminist icon of he 1960s, was one of them. Although she never mentioned penis envy as her motivation (it would be unconscious) she did describe her feelings that men were unfair (biased) toward women. She emerged toward the end of the first wave and at the cusp of the second wave. She came from a family in which women’s suffrage was prevalent; her paternal grandmother was on the committee of the National Women Suffrage Association. Before Steinem was born, her mother Ruth had a nervous breakdown, which left her an invalid with delusional fantasies and violent fits. Ruth spent long periods in and out of facilities for the mentally ill. Steinem was ten years old when her parents separated in 1944.
These events had a formative effect on her personality: while her father, a traveling salesman, had never provided much financial stability to the family, his departure aggravated their situation. Steinem concluded that her mother’s inability to hold on to a job was due to general male hostility towards working women. She also concluded that the general indifference of doctors towards her mother was also evidence of an anti-woman bias. Years later, Steinem described her mother’s experiences as having been a leading cause of her understanding of social injustices. These experiences resulted in her focusing outside at politics, rather than looking inside at the inner demons her childhood wrought, and convinced Steinem that women lacked social and political equality.4
During the first wave of feminism women campaigned for basic things. In the UK and eventually the US, the movement focused on the promotion of equal rights, marriage rights, parenting, property rights for women and voting rights. By the end of the 19th century, feminists had succeeded in passing of much legislation such as the UK Custody of Infants Act in 1839, which introduced the Tender years doctrine for child custody arrangement and gave British woman the right of custody of their children for the first time. All these new laws were brought about by this fringe group of discontented women, many of whom were not married.5
Other legislation such as the Married Women’s Property Act, first created in 1870 and then extended in the UK in the 1882 Act also advanced their cause. These acts became models for similar legislation in other British territories. Victoria passed legislation in 1884, New South Wales in 1889, and the remaining Australian colonies passed similar legislation between 1890 and 1897. Therefore, with the turn of the 19th century activism had focused primarily on gaining political power, particularly the right of women’s suffrage, though some feminists were active in campaigning for women’s sexual, reproductive and economic rights as well.6 This fringe group of women looked for unfairness and looked to blame men, and they found it. “Seek,” goes the biblical saying, “and ye shall find.”
This feminist political activity, which remained peaceful, went around the world. During the late Qing period reform movements such as the Hundred Days’ Reform, Chinese feminists called for women to be liberated from traditional roles and Neo-Confucian gender segregation. Later, the Chinese Communist Party, led by Mao Zedong, created projects designed to put more women into the workforce, and claimed that the Cultural Revolution had successfully achieved women’s liberation. In reality young women were imprisoned by this Cultural Revolution, which ordered them to be sent to the country to become unpaid workers for the Communist party, during which females were exploited and many atrocities occurred to young men and women.7
In the Middle East, Arab feminism was closely connected with Arab nationalism. In 1899, Qasim Amin, who was called the “father” of Arab feminism, wrote The Liberation of Women, which led to social and legal reforms for women. He associated what he saw as women’s lower position in Egyptian society and nationalism, leading to the development of Cairo University and the National Movement. In 1923 a woman named Hoda Shaarawi founded the Egyptian Feminist Union, the chief women’s organization of the period, and became its president and a leader of the Arab women’s rights movement.8
As previously mentioned, this first wave of feminism was mainly comprised of peaceful protests aimed at attaining equality between men and women. Women then did not, for the most part, voice the bitterness toward men that would come later.
Toward the end of the first wave, in the middle of the twentieth century, women began setting up the core values of what was to become a revolution that would totally change Western culture for the worst and bring about the decline of civilized culture. These feminist writers modeled themselves after Karl Marx, who saw the newly industrialist world as a class struggle between the capitalists (owners) and bourgeoisie (workers). In capitalism, this manifests itself in the conflict between the ruling classes (the bourgeoisie) that control the means of production and working classes (the proletariat), the workers who are exploited by he bourgeoisie. Hence, it was Marx who began the idealization of the victim that encouraged feminists to likewise search for ways to view females as victims.
In addition to previously mentioned issues such as women’s suffrage, which galvanized women into forming peaceful protest groups, a few women were now emboldened to begin setting up an actual revolution against men, characterizing men as victimizers who had subjugated women from time immemorial. Simone de Beauvoir, a French feminist of the early Nineteenth Century, wrote a book called, The Second Sex, which cast females as an oppressed gender and viewed marriage as a kind of domestic slavery in which women were like slaves.
Man in his sovereignty indulges himself in sexual caprices, among others – he fornicates with slaves or courtesans or he practices polygamy. Wherever the local customs make reciprocity at all possible, the wife takes revenge through infidelity – marriage finds its natural fulfillment in adultery. This is woman’s sole defense against the domestic slavery in which she is bound; and it is this economic oppression that gives rise to the social oppression to which she is subjected.9Susan B. Anthony is another feminist of the first wave who began to view women as a second class and as victims of male tyranny. She stated, “I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old Revolutionary maxim. Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God”.10 Anthony, as well as de Beauvoir are viewed as heroes by feminists, as underdogs who fought against the oppression of men. Anthony and de Beauvoir, among many others, set up the framework for the demonizing of men and the revolution that was to occur in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Apart from the mostly peaceful protests that gained voting rights for women, this First Wave of feminism didn’t have much impact on mainstream culture. Early feminists were considered extremists and were viewed, for the most part, as strident kooks. They were able to choose obvious disparities such as the fact that men could vote and women could not, and make them the basis of their protests and thereby gain a degree of respect. They were the feminist pioneers and they were the first to talk and write of unfairness of men toward women. They made moral judgments about men, but not themselves.
I often thought that these same women, if they looked at so-called lower animals—or even plants–would make moral judgments about them as well. For example, they might see lions attacking antelopes and would find unfairness in the interaction. They would see a Venus flytrap devouring a helpless insect and judge that as abusive. If feminists looked at the universe, they would view black holes as victimizers and the planets sucked into the black holes as victims. They would impose their moral view on something that was simply a natural event. Lions aren’t evil because they chase down antelopes. This is just their natural behavior. History on this planet is not replete with evil men and innocent women. It is an evolutionary process that obeys natural laws. During most of human history, men’s superior physical strength led to their being dominant, just as a lion’s physical strength led to its eating antelopes.
The Second Wave
In the 1960s, when the second wave of feminism began, America was a happy place. America had just succeeded in becoming known as “the defender of freedom,” and was regarded as crucial to winning World War II in 1945. America was somewhat conservative in the1950s (the time of McCarthyism and his Communist witch hunt), then became liberalized in the 1960s. The 1960s were strange and idyllic years when hippies emerged (men growing their hair long and wearing beards; women letting their hair grow longer and wearing flowers in their hair), their motto being, “Make love, not war.” At the same time the “sexual revolution” blossomed. Young people began experimenting with drugs and sex and anybody over thirty was considered “out of it.” You would see psychedelic posters on light posts weekly calling for a “love-in” in Central Park or a Smoke-In (pot, that is) at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge.
At such events strangers would gather to have mass sex and/or smoke marijuana. Skirts were short and nudity (skinny dipping) was all the rage. You could attend a concert and someone would pass a vile of acid around. “Tune in, drop out,” was a phrase coined by one of the many philosophers of the day. Young people dropped out and joined mystical cults. It was like a dream, and like all dreams it had to end. Feminists were biding their time. It was, in a way, the last hurrah for male sexuality.
All of a sudden, militant feminists emerged at the end of the 1960s, almost as if they had stored up anger while young men and women were making love so freely and the latent feminists and their militancy were left out of the party. They seemed pop out of nowhere, hell-bent on revenge. I was a young man at the time, so I will provide a first-hand account of what happened during this period. Feminists who write about this period view the feminists who led the second wave almost as saints. I do not. I regard them as a group of angry, extremist militants who zeroed in on America’s post-war relaxation to begin an uprising built on hysterical and irrational logic that would shake the Western world.
The first task of this new movement was to “raise the consciousness” of women. Minogue notes that such consciousness raising “exploits indignation and cultivates righteousness”.11 Feminists suggested that women were in a prison (actually most of the second-wave feminists were upper class women who lived lives of leisure) and it identified happiness with being able to work for wages, the same as men. They saw domesticity (being housewives and having children) as a form of oppression imposed on them by men. As Freud had suggested, unresolved penis envy seemed to cause them to constantly look negatively at their situation as being disadvantaged compared to men. As Minogue explains, “What radical feminism essentially did was to deny complementarity between the sexes and set men and women up as competing teams playing exactly the same game”12 Feminists, in their leisure, looked for reasons men had it better and suggested men were exploiting them by making them take care of the home and have babies.
Betty Friedan13 is credited as sparking the second wave with her book, The Feminine Mystique (1963). In her book, Friedan suggested that women should escape the oppression of domesticity by finding personal fulfillment outside of their traditional roles, that is, but having careers like men. She also helped advance the women’s rights movement as one of the founders of the National Organization for Women (NOW). And she advocated for an increased role for women in the political process, starting a caucus that fought for legal abortion, which came later when the Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that abortion was legal. Her book proved highly successful, almost becoming a bible for feminists as well as a spur for political activism. The book’s success also meant that Friedan could lecture her views while she was on tour in 1970 and within ten years, after Friedan’s successful book, women made up more than half of the total percentage of the workforce. For the first time, careers were more important to women than raising children.
Minogue, writing in The New Criterion, about how cultures fall, refers to the effect of feminism on that decline (as in America):
Consider a civilization based upon a court in a thriving city— Baghdad, for example. Arts and the intellect flourish. But over several generations, as the great Islamic philosopher of the fourteenth century Ibn Khaldun put it, the civilized become decadent with luxury. They lose their sharpness and think only of the good and the beautiful. And then some tribe of fierce Bedouin, smelling out weakness, come thundering in from the desert and storm the city. As barbarians, they do not understand the usages of civilization. They stable their horses in the libraries and use sculptures as doorstops, pictures for target practice.14Minogue uses this story as an analogy of what has happened during the feminist revolution in the West. There has been a revolution, he notes, but a silent one. “It has taken place with such stealth, and so gradually, that people have become accustomed to it little by little.” He is reminded of the famous Chinese executioner whose ambition it was to be able to cut off a head so that the victim would not realize what had happened. For years he worked on his skill, and one day he cut off a head so perfectly that the victim said: ‘Well, when are you going to do it?’ The executioner gave a beatific smile and said: ‘Just kindly nod.’”15
The feminist revolution may have seemed subtle and smooth to Minogue, but to me it was brutal. From the late 60s onward I witnessed an almost total assault on males and masculinity. After the first wave had set the stage for viewing men as oppressors, feminists now demonized men with words like “sexist,” and “misogynist,” and were blamed by Phyllis Chesler in her book, Women and Madness (1972) as the cause of almost all female illnesses.16
In the early 1970s The National Organization of Women began to hold women’s rap groups. These rap groups soon spread across America and were an essential stage of the feminist revolution. I was not privy to what happened in these groups, but I was a witness to what happened in America afterward. Women had now become revolutionaries, revolting against men at every opportunity. They seemed to have developed an entitled attitude as a result of the rap groups, an attitude and conviction that men were all unconscious sexists and that therefore they needed to be attacked and humiliated until they saw the light. The rap groups were in reality training programs for the revolution. They indoctrinated women on how to revolt, how to handle complaints men threw at them, how to handle complaints by other women, and how to always get in the last word and put men in their place.
Toward the mid-1970s one saw advertisements in local papers like the Village Voice, a weekly forum for increasingly militant liberalism, about coed rap groups. Men came to these groups thinking they’d meet a nice woman and have a relationship. Little did they know that these groups were indoctrination groups designed to entrap men and lecture them about feminism. Any man in the group who expressed honest feelings about wanting to have sex with a woman or who differed with any aspect of the feminist doctrine was quickly shouted down as a “sexist” or a “typical man” or a man who wanted his “male privileges” or “cock privileges.” Any woman who said she didn’t agree with feminism was likewise shot down. These coed rap groups were held for the sole purpose of spreading the gospel of feminism and training men to either get with it or be scorned.
I attended one of these coed rap groups that, as I said, were held all over the country, and made the mistake of saying I didn’t agree with some of the tenets of feminism. I thought that was a perfectly reasonable thing to say, but I was immediately pounced on by all of the women in the group. They all turned to me and began to interrogate me. What did I mean? Which tenets could I possibly find fault with? Why? How come? When? Where? The questioning continued even after we took a break for lunch, lasting three hours in all. Soon my resistance ran out and I couldn’t answer any more questions and I broke down and giggled. I expected maybe the other men in the group would come to my aid, but they didn’t. The feminists all smiled and turned away, satisfied that they had broken me.
The feminist revolution now had now reached a fever pitch. There were no more peaceful protests. Second-wave feminists saw women’s cultural and political inequalities as one and the same and called for all women to understand aspects of their personal lives as deeply politicized and as reflecting the power struggle with the sexist male patriarchy.
The feminist activist and author Carol Hanisch coined the slogan “The Personal is Political”, which became synonymous with the second wave. Books such as Alice Echols’, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America (1967), Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), and Susan Faludi’s Backlash: the undeclared war against women (1992), along with thousands of other books of a similar nature, began to appear.17 Meanwhile men stood on the side, letting it happen thinking, as one of my acquaintances at the time commented, “Let them vent their anger, it’ll pass.”
It didn’t pass. The second wave became a full-scale war against men. Women appeared everywhere, in scholarly meetings, on TV shows, in crowded restaurants, in the middle of concerts, on subways and buses, in parks, on the street, with the aim of militantly spreading the gospel of feminism and knocking down men who “acted like men.” You would go to any gathering—say a string ensemble concert by a group of women. In the middle of the concert the women would stand up and start lambasting the men in the audience. “For thousands of years you men have been running things and doing it badly. All wars are the result of men. Masculinity is a sickness that must be stopped.” The audiences would begin fighting among themselves, which is what the militant feminists wanted. Women in the audience were fighting with men, men with women. Some men took the women’s side. If the male organizer of the concert stood up and called for order, he was shorted down, “You’re being just like an entitled, privileged male!” The men at such events just stared like deer in the headlights. They were confused and overpowered.
These women knew that deep down women are psychologically more powerful then men. Women’s hysteria is powerful; mass hysteria is even more powerful. None of the men had ever experienced anything like it. Women and men had always treated each other with some respect. But now came these revolutionaries screaming at them like zombies, with a “my way or the highway” attitude. These women despised men and they were everywhere and they were relentless. Neither the men nor the women of that period knew what to think or do about it. Eventually everyone realized that this was a force that couldn’t be stopped, and they just gave in.
I attended a doctoral seminar in the late1970s. Attendees were supposed to meet to discuss their ideas for doctoral theses. Soon after arriving at the seminar I found that there was a group of feminists who had different ideas about the seminar. Before it had even begun, these feminists sat in groups in the cafeteria, putting down men, talking loudly and angrily about sexism here and sexism there, deliberately wanting the men at nearby tables to hear them. When the seminar started and we all took turns describing our ideas for doctoral theses, the women’s ideas for theses all turned out to be diatribes against men, delivered in angry voices. A group of us men took exception to what we thought was an inappropriate disruption of the seminar, but the leader of the seminar, an effete feminist man, caved in to the feminists.
The group of men that opposed them began to dwindle as the feminists confronted each man individually and broke each down. I was the only one left who objected to their shenanigans. When it was time to present our final idea for our doctoral thesis, I changed my title to “The Effect of Feminism on Psychology,” giving a very derogatory view. The feminists attacked me after my talk and went to pay a visit to the leader of the seminar in his room in the resort where the seminar was held. They objected to my thesis and saw it as a deliberate attack on them, and they demanded a special meeting in which they could air their grievances and force me to apologize. The leader, of course, granted their demand and came to my room to state in no uncertain terms that I was required to come to this meeting. The implication was that I would be kicked out of the program if I didn’t. At the meeting the feminists spoke one after another about how “women have been abused for hundreds of years” by men like me. I ended up crying, despite all my efforts to maintain my composure but did not apologize.
The feminist war infiltrated all aspects of life. As I stated before, feminists appeared out of the blue at all kinds of gatherings. Because they were so fierce and shocking, they were always in the news. They were invited on television shows where they would attack the male hosts and any female hosts who were not feminists. Male hosts were called “sexists,” and female sympathizers with male hosts were called “sexist dupes.” Feminists broke into government committee meetings to shout down the men conducting the meetings; the showed up at lectures at the New School and began shouting down the male lecturer; they showed up at psychological conventions and totally disrupted them and attacked whoever was leading the convention.
At a meeting of a prominent New York psychoanalytic institute there was a seminar on “The Erotic Countertransference.” The term “erotic countertransference” is a psychoanalytic phrase for when a therapist has sexual feelings toward a patient. At the beginning of the meeting a male therapist, thinking that this was a scholarly convention in which he could express his honest feelings, admitted having countertransference feelings toward a one of his patients and began discussing his techniques for handling his feelings.
He talked for only a few minutes, seeking help with this problem. Suddenly a woman in the back began to scream, “I can’t take this! I had a therapist who raped me and I am still traumatized by it.” This woman carried on to he point where the man who had spoken about his patient felt totally humiliated, and the seminar, run by a woman, had to go on to other less controversial subjects. I was thinking that this woman should be asked to leave, as she was obviously not able to tolerate an open and honest discussion of the subject. Instead of throwing out this woman, the leader allowed the woman to disrupt it and carefully guided speakers from then to make sure that they didn’t talk about anything personal. “Let’s not talk about our personal experiences, let’s limit our discussion to broader aspects of the erotic countertransference,” she said.
I wrote papers in journals that criticized aspects of the feminist movement and its effect on psychoanalysis, and my papers were totally panned in reviews. The arguments in my papers were simply ignored and I was labeled a sexist, misogynist and white male dinosaur. I was not alone. All male writers from Freud to Tolstoy to Mark Twain to Shakespeare to Dostoyevsky to Hemingway to Tennessee Williams, etc., were now dismissed as sexists. New revised versions of “Streetcar Named Desire,” were performed in which Blanch Dubois was portrayed as a victim of sexism. It became clear that the feminist war against men would not be over until the last man standing would be smeared and discredited.
Men and women were either willing to accept feminism as the new religion or their reputations and livelihoods were at risk. This succeeded in preventing any serious scientific experiments, movies, TV shows, or novels that went against feminist doctrine. There were movies that pretended to deal with feminism in an honest way, such as Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), depicting a woman leaving a man after eight years of marriage because she didn’t want to be a housewife anymore. She comes back to take her son and they go to court to fight over custody. She wins, but in the end she leaves the son for him to care for, since he has now become a feminist man. This is of course the reversal of roles that feminists have fought for. So the movie, which on the surface tried to be empathetic to both sides, was deep down just more feminist propaganda.
There were periods of almost ridiculous activism, such as the period in the late 1960s when women all over were burning their bras, considering bras as a symbol of female oppression. There were times when feminists were proclaiming that “rape is rape,” which eliminated any distinctions about whether it was a brutal and violent rape or consensual sexual intercourse in which a man didn’t hear, or didn’t want to hear, his girlfriend say “No.” They proclaimed that “a woman should be believed,” when she complains of rape or any type of sexual misconduct, which led to women being able to say anything they chose about men, sometimes anonymously, sometimes lying, sometimes getting revenge because of feeling rejected by a man, sometimes simply being mentally disturbed and proffering trumped-up charges. This in turn gave rise to incidences such as the Tawana Brawley case in upstate New York in 1987, in which a young black woman covered herself with feces and tied herself in a sack on the side of the road and claimed some local white men, including an attorney, had raped and abused her. Since, according to feminism, women had to be believed, she was immediately believed. A lynch mob atmosphere erupted about this case and the reputations of the men she accused were destroyed before the grand jury realized she had made it all up, and they subsequently dropped the case.18
Second-wave feminism was a movement that began in the early 1960s and continued in some ways up to the present; as such, it coexisted with third-wave feminism. Second-wave feminism largely ramped up the war against men and looked for sexism and issues of inequality everywhere. Since this was a revolt against men, men were left out of the discussion. They were only admitted as participants if they had become feminist men and had sworn their allegiance to the feminist cause. Any detractors, any men who were the least bit critical of feminism or the militant, anti-male and dictatorial manner in which feminists communicated, were dismissed as misogynists. At no time was the feminist revolution a democratic endeavor, and at no time was anything that resembled constructive communication or a genuine male-female dialogue in evidence.
By the 1990s radical feminism was mainstream and even moderate feminists were now summarily dismissed. Christina Hoff Sommers,19 who wrote a critique of radical feminism, Who Stole Feminism (1994), was one of those moderates who were dismissed. In her book Sommers argued that, “American feminism is currently dominated by a group of women who seek to persuade the public that American women are not the free creatures we think we are.” She condemns feminists who say “our society is best described as a patriarchy, a ‘male hegemony,’ a ‘sex/gender system’ in which the dominant gender works to keep women cowering and submissive.” She criticizes feminist authors who repeat the same false claims, citing a claim that was made by several notable feminists who were trying to blame anorexia nervosa on male oppression. They claimed that in the United States 150,000 women die of anorexia each year. The actual figure, she notes, is likely to be somewhere between 100 and 400 deaths per year. Sommers demonstrates again and again how radical feminists stretch the truth through bogus statistics or sometimes through outright lies. For example, she points out how feminists popularized the charge that “incidents of domestic battery tend to rise by 40 percent” on Super Bowl Sunday. Sommers concluded after her own research that the claim, which was widely reported by the American media, was unsupported by any study. Sommers’ book was almost universally dismissed by—guess who?—feminist critics. And Super Bowls continued to have government-sponsored messages against domestic abuse.
Eventually almost everybody gave in to the feminist guilt-trip and feminist indoctrination, which meant feminism had now replaced Christianity as the National religion. Male-female relations could only be seen through the feminist lens. Feminism had become sacred. People accepted feminist propaganda as divine truth. Feminism was the law of the land. To understand how this could happen, one must understand how hysteria works. Hysteria is one of the most powerful forces of human nature. Hysteria can be seen in the Crusades, a series of religious wars sanctioned by the Latin Church in the medieval period aimed at recovering the Holy Land from Muslim rule; in the Nazi movement of the 1930s and 1940s, during which eight million people, mainly Jews, were exterminated; and in the ancient Roman Empire when thousands of Christians were thrown to the lions to be eaten while the Romans applauded.
Feminism can also be understood as an aspect of the Stockholm Syndrome, a condition that causes hostages to develop a psychological alliance with their captors as a survival strategy during captivity. These feelings, resulting from a bond formed between captor and captives during intimate times spent together, are generally considered irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims. The Stockholm Syndrome was formally named in 1973 when four hostages were taken during a bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden. The hostages defended their captors after being released and would refused to testify against them in court. Similarly, the Feminist Revolution held America hostage for several decades and during this time women everywhere, as well as men, developed a hypnotic reverence—a kind of feminist Stockholm Syndrome—toward all things feminist. All women and many men identified themselves as feminists, and those who didn’t were demeaned as if they were stupid and beneath contempt.
References:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Fourier
- http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/courses01/rrtw/Minogue.htm
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Interpretation_of_Dreams
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria_Steinem
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
- ibid.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_de_Beauvoir
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism
- http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/courses01/rrtw/Minogue.htm
- ibid.
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17573685-the-feminine-mystique
- http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/courses01/rrtw/Minogue.htm
- ibid.
- https://www.amazon.com/Women-Madness-Revised-Phyllis-Chesler/dp/1403968977
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tawana_Brawley_rape_allegations
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Stole_Feminism%3F
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