Feminism and the Janus-Face of Modern Politics

Explaining why Feminism has always been illiberal

Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash

By

James Pew

& Scott Miller

There really should be less confusion about the cause of wokeism and the social degeneracy and division that is literally unraveling society before our eyes. But, it is complicated, and for the most part, the understanding is not there. Not even close.

While it may be true that the mass rejection of traditional religions, like Christianity, or the general lack of citizen involvement in the democratic process, or the general lack of education and gratitude concerning the Western world, are certainly characteristic of and correlated with the problem, they are not the cause of the problem.

The problem may have its complexities and intricacies, however, it can still be correctly and simply identified and explained like this:

The culture war is the result of the deliberate actions of radical progressive activists, who have operated for decades through activism and social agitation. They gain entrance into public institutions and leverage their way into positions of power, where they enact changes that impose their radical leftist agenda. What they do is illiberal and subversive.  

What we are seeing today is the result of a decades-long campaign (starting in roughly the 1960s) to bring about a radical progressive social revolution. The cause of the problem is not that people are no longer praying as much, or engaging in civics as much. The problem is the direct result of the intentional actions of radical activists. This is why we find ourselves in the present moment where we are not sure if grown men should shower with little girls at the local community center or not. 

As Salzman notes, “contemporary anthropologists have rejected essentialism, the idea that members of a cultural category all have the same essential characteristics. But progressive social justice advocates reduce everyone from being unique individuals to being no more than members of gender, racial, ethnic and sexual categories.”¹

The problem is not that consenting adults may or may not choose to use preferred pronouns when referring to a friend that happens to be a trans woman, the problem is that laws have passed that compel people to use those pronouns, and worse, compel people to say that trans women are women. Now the elites in control can’t define what a woman is (and are terrified to even attempt it). Put another way, as a result of the work of the radical activist - laws, human rights codes, internal policies and procedures at public institutions, are increasingly designed to affirm the fantasies of one group, while destroying the rights of everyone else. No one ever voted for any of it. The cause of all of this has been the illiberal and subversive circumvention of democratic norms.

Wokeism is deliberate. It did not magically come about through slippery slopes. It was and is the deliberate work of social agitators. Mis-identifying and mis-understanding the problem IS a problem. It is what makes feminists think that Woke Watch Canada is somehow aligned with them. We are not. We are women’s rights advocates NOT feminists. Feminism is just as bad as trans-activism and anti-racism - all of these things are identity politics frameworks that are incommensurate with a liberal society. The hallmark of ardent supporters of these ideologies is mental illness and personality disorder. In the case of feminism - toxic femininity. However, It isn’t just mental illness that drives the radicals but also naked resentment and adherence to another set of values. (See below).

In order to make the argument that feminist ideology didn’t just become anti-liberal but has always been anti-liberal, it is necessary to insist that the most important distinction one can make about the shape of modern politics is that it is Janus-faced — like the eponymous Roman god of beginnings, Janus, modern politics stands at the gate with two faces, each pointing in an opposite direction. One of these faces points to liberalism, the political and moral philosophy which holds that society should be broken down as individuals protected by individual rights; the other face points to collectivism, which governs socialism and collectivism, and which holds that society should be broken down by groups and advantaged differently according to governmental and authoritarian dictate. 

The above map is sourced from an unscientific source, an internet communities’ attempt to represent which countries have at some point (not necessarily currently) been led by a government with some sort of socialist or communist affiliation (indicated by red or yellow).² User comments point out that the creator of the graphic has left out San Marino, Syria, Austria, Turkey, and Israel. To that I would add the post-war UK under the Labor party 1945-1951 (basically the stooges of the Fabian socialists) and why not add “post-nation” Canada in the present day under feminist-in-chief Justin Trudeau? 

Socialism is far from a fringe idea. For over one hundred years it has been liberalism’s major contender on the world stage, and, for over two hundred years, it has been liberalism’s major contender in the realm of political and moral ideas. In order to situate feminist ideology within the greater socialist worldview, a chronological consideration of the ideas of major feminist thinkers will be considered below:

Mandatory disclaimer: No, the following does not argue that women shouldn’t have rights. It argues that there is a principled and an unprincipled way to advocate for rights.

Mary Wollstonecraft (active in the late 1700s): If we were going to take Sheila Ruth’s word for it, the author of Issue’s in Feminist Studies: An Introduction to Women’s Studies, Mary Wollstonecraft should be taken as a propagator of “Liberal Feminism,” a form of feminism which takes men and women to be of equal worth and deserving of equal opportunity, she says.³ Yes, Wollstonecraft argued for women's rights applying at least a veneer of liberal philosophical argumentation which I agree with; she was, after all, writing several decades before socialism had been intellectually formulated and in an era that had witnessed the persuasive liberalism of the American revolution. Did she really model liberal feminist thinking?

As I have noted elsewhere,⁴ Wollstonecraft was at heart a radical of the Rousseauist collectivist mold: she lived in France for a time and became friends with leading French revolutionaries. Before her "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman," Wollstonecraft penned "A Vindication of the Rights of Men" in 1790 during the early stages of the French revolution - it was her retort to Edmund Burke who saw the revolution as a dangerous road to anarchy. Safe to say, Wollstonecraft's pamphlet didn't age well. According to the leftberlin.com, "Wollstonecraft was appalled by the extent of the bloodshed during the reign of Terror in the French Revolution. Nevertheless, she argued that perhaps it was necessary to rid society of all the evils of oppression."⁵

After arriving independently at a very similar critique of Wollstonecraft’s supposed liberal credentials to that sketched above, anti-feminist intellectual Janice Fiamango added this about Wollstonecraft’s famous 1792 work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: “though often praised for its alleged defence of equality, it is a philosophically incoherent and passionately anti-male tract written to promote the worst possible interpretation of all male actions, including their protection of women, and to exempt women from moral responsibility on account of their claimed powerlessness. Fascinating as a personality, Wollstonecraft cannot possibly be recruited as a libertarian champion.”⁶

Charles Fourier (active early 1800s): The following comment is reproduced from another WWC essay because Fourier’s involvement in instigating feminism bears repeating. The man who gave the movement its name, not to mention its core set of ideological presuppositions, cannot be omitted from a history of feminist thinking! And so: “although the women’s liberation movement might be pursued by employing liberal argumentation (men have been granted rights and so women should be granted rights as well), from the time that utopian socialist founding father Charles Fourier coined the term “feminist” and invented the ideology that goes along with it, women’s liberation has predominantly been argued according to the socialist mode.⁷ Just as Rousseau had decried Western civilization as the root of inequality and moral depravity, so Fourier argued that civilization too, as well as the institution of marriage, oppressed and victimized women in particular.⁸ And, just as Rousseau had identified the family as a stepping-stone toward the immoral descent toward inequality, so the Utopian Socialist sought to disband the family through various means.”

As the editors of one translation of Fourier’s 1808 The Theory of the Four Movements note, “no theorist before him conceived a more resolutely anti-patriarchal vision of social and sexual order…[Fourier argued] that the extension of the privileges of women provided the basis for all social progress. His was a systematic attempt to breach the law of the father at every conceivable point… [in his system] women were ensured full sexual freedom at the age of eighteen. No longer constrained by monogamy, they were free to form simultaneous erotic companionate relationships with several men. Women would control reproduction, just as children would be free to choose between real and adoptive fathers.”⁹

John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill (active mid- to -late 1800s):  Again, thinkers of the left choose willfully to misunderstand the intellectual underpinnings of the Mills’ writing about the social position of women, and to depict them (as Ruth does in her manual of women’s studies) as being the very paragons of liberal values.¹⁰ If it were just John Stuart Mill involved, that would be bad enough: occasionally hailed as the most influential English liberal thinker of the 19^th century, it is often overlooked that the same man, late in life, wrote the tract Socialism in which he argues for a liberal socialist mode of governance.¹¹ What’s more, his wife Harriet Taylor Mill was an avowed socialist and, from J. S. Mill’s autobiography, it is clear that she had ghostwritten sections of his political philosophy which called for experimentation with the models of Charles Fourier (as well as those of other early socialist thinkers such as Saint-Simon and Owen).¹² Arguably, although John Stuart Mill’s influential work, On the Subjugation of Women (1869), was written after his wife’s death, his analysis by that time was thoroughly painted with the socialist brush.¹³

Other influential feminist thinkers: When the postmodernists now dominating the humanities throw out the word “other” and “otherness” and “othering,” they aren’t showcasing some pearl of postmodern ingenuity, rather they are aping the thinking of acclaimed feminist, and Marxist, Simone de Beauvoir, active mid-20^th century). De Beauvoir maintained that female identities do not innately exist, but are created by men when they reduce women to the “other” sex.¹⁴ Similarly, the ubiquitous postmodernist jargon concerning the social “intersection” and “intersectionality” is a notion that has been transmitted (via CRT theorist Kimberly Crenshaw) from Marxist and black feminist theory (where it was known as the “triple oppression” thesis).¹⁵ 

From the preceding sketch, we find substantial reason to doubt the representations of feminist apologists who claim that the 20^th century saw three waves of feminism, the first of which was “liberal.” We also get a sense of the deeply anti-liberal ideation which influential feminists have imparted to the academy throughout the ages. It remains to consider the full extent to which the academia has subjected itself to feminist influence.

The New Female Ascendency — The Rise of Women’s Studies: In the mid-1960s, a women’s liberation group at the University of Pennsylvania staged activist events demanding that a department of Women’s Studies be created in the university. Within three short years (a remarkably short time in terms of how long a university typically takes to create a new program), women’s studies emerged, compelled by activist demands, in want of any genuinely academic rigor, and with practically no opposition from the university administrations. By the early 1970s, “300 Women’s Studies departments had come into being and countless individual courses.”¹⁶ 

That the new department along with its (socialist) feminist ideation represented a radical break with time-honored academic rigors and standards was noted by Sir Roger Scruton: “scholarship in the humanities [was] open-minded, guided by the pursuit of truth and not dismayed particularly if it came to surprising or unorthodox conclusions… [now, some studies adhere to] the pursuit of some kind of political conformity. If you take a subject like women’s studies… there is a subject [for which] it is very difficult to imagine that you would succeed in that subject if you didn’t have, either at the outset or certainly in the conclusion, feminist opinions… it’s a subject constructed around an ideology.”¹⁷

The effects of institutionalizing feminist activism through the medium of modern day Women’s Studies are in fact extraordinarily profound, for better or worse, a superb example of what the Marxist’s call praxis (putting a philosophical (or ideological) idea to work in the social world). Whether it is incidental or not (and I tend to think not), the gender composition of the academy has dramatically reversed course from the 1970s onward: in 2021, the ratio of female to male bachelor’s degree students was 59.5% to 40.5%; in private colleges, the ratio was 61% female and “in the next two years, if the trend holds, two women will earn a college degree for every man.”¹⁸  When we factor in the overwhelming predominance of leftists in college (43.8 left for 1 right in sociology, 20.8 left for 1 right in biology, even 5.6 left for 1 right in mathematics),¹⁹ It is clear that –today– the large majority of college degree holders are leftist women. The fact that so many of those degree holders have enrolled in yuppy identity politics courses probably goes some of the way toward explaining why Canadian women under 34 are twice as likely to answer “Yes” to the question “is Canada a racist country?” than their male counterparts of the same age.²⁰

What is all of this ideology fueled social transformation leading to exactly? The so-called reactionary feminist, Mary Harrington, a feminist writer I agree with in terms of what I have so far read, has suggested that the supersaturation of female graduates in academia and the professionals in the work world will lead to a new sort of “female ascendancy.” She argues that while influential feminists have suggested that when women predominate in the workplace, the “female soul” will prevail and there will no longer be domineering or dominance strategies, on the contrary, women too have a dominance strategy (one might add – so do all social creatures).²¹

• Harrington refers to Harvard social scientist Joyce Benenson who finds that women are every bit as competitive as men. “We just go about it differently.” She summarizes Benenson’s findings: “Girls’ competitive strategies include avoiding direct interference with another girl’s goals, disguising competition, competing overtly only from a position of high status in the community, enforcing equality within the female community and socially excluding other girls.”²² What emerges is not the end of domination, but the emergence of a new type of domination.

• What might this new female ascendancy in the workplace together with its intrinsic modes of female competition look like?  While correlation doesn’t always mean causation, it may be enacted (as Benenson suggests) “by enforcing equality and weaponizing social ostracism.”  And where might cancel culture fit into this equation? Harrington suggests here that “this may shed some light on the growing phenomenon of high-profile public figures shamed in recent years for past social media posts.”²³

According to a recent article by Barbara Kay, "The 2016 survey of 137,456 first-year students at 184 colleges and universities in the United States found that 41 per cent of women identified as liberal or far left, compared to 29 per cent of men. This is bad news for the precarious state of freedom of speech. A 2017 Gallup/Knight Foundation survey posed the question to 3,014 college students: “If you had to choose, which do you think is more important”: a diverse and inclusive society or protecting free speech? Male students chose the protection of free speech by a solid 61 to 39 per cent, while female students favoured an inclusive, diverse society over free speech by 64 to 35 per cent."²⁴

The ice cream cone licking itself:  The delightful metaphor of “the ice cream cone licking itself” is how Harrington describes the people-centric industries which have been created as a result of the overproduction of female elite, namely, in academic administrative centers. These lucrative industries are mainly staffed by women (70%) and the work is now less about utilitarian concerns and increasingly forms a “symbiotic relationship” with student activism and diversity and inclusion agendas which treat women like a minority in academia (despite that they are now a clear majority). In other words, the industry is a giant ice cream cone licking itself. And it is becoming a model for administrative centers spanning the entire private sector. It is most likely due to the feminization of the work place that I am obliged to call my supervisor a “people leader”; it is likely due to the same phenomenon that my “people leader” cannot chastise me for having done something “badly” or “wrongly” but must present my foibles as “opportunities to improve”; it is surely why I have been instructed to leave the door open in the event I should meet a female colleague alone in an office, just to make sure people would hear – you know, in the event that I, being a brutish male, should haul off and decide to rape her in said office (yes, these HR types have given me that instruction, though not entirely in those words).

In summary: woke is not properly a term that should apply to the feminist subversion of Western society (in origin, “woke” was first used by an influential black nationalist and resurrected on twitter in the context of the 2010s BLM movement).²⁵ However, woke in common usage has expanded semantically to reference the entire cocktail of radical identity politics activism. On that definition, feminist ideation has always been, is currently, and will forever continue to be extraordinarily woke.

If you look at the books I recommend in the Anti-Woke Forbidden Library you will find ample material that explains the issues with ideological feminism. Feminism is not defined by the  projections of individual people. Just like Critical Race Theory, Feminism is a specific thing with a specific academic lineage, many people describe women's rights advocacy but invoke the term feminism while doing it. I mean no ill will to anyone, but ideological feminism is far too destructive a force in society (like trans-activism) to let it get away with any of its bullshit.

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Thanks for reading. For more from these authors, checkout the Great Illiberal Subversion.

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Bibliography

Jacobs, Jo Ellen. 1994. “The Lot of Gifted Ladies is Hard: A Study of Harriet Taylor Mill Criticism.” Hypatia 9/3: 132–162. 

Goldstein, Leslie. 1982. Early Feminist Themes in French Utopian Socialism: The St.-Simonians and Fourier. Journal of the History of Ideas 43/1: 91-108.

Salzman, Philip. 2020. Feminism and Injustice. (Kindle Edition).

Ruth, Sheila.  2001. Issue’s in Feminist Studies: An Introduction to Women’s Studies (Fifth Edition). Mayfield Publishing: California, London, Toronto.

Jones, Gareth and Ian Patterson. 1996. Fourier: The Theory of the Four Movements. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1. Salzman 2020, 11

2. https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/hfskw2/socialist_countries_throughout_history_as_they/

3. Ruth 2001, 24.

4. https://wokewatchcanada.substack.com/p/the-utopian-whimsy-left-politics/comment/13549987

5. https://www.theleftberlin.com/mary-wollstonecraft-a-fearless-radical-in-her-life-and-thought/

6. The Last Thing a Pro-Liberty Conference Needs is a Feminist Panel: My Unsolicited Advice to Students For Liberty

7.  For Fourier’s coining of the term “feminist” see Goldstein 1982, 92.

8. See Goldstein 1982, 99.

9. Jones and Patterson 1996, xiii.

10. Ruth 1991, 24.

11. For a quick overview of Mill’s ideas and impact, including his leftward drift into socialism, see: https://areomagazine.com/2021/05/12/john-stuart-mill-socialist/ . This aspect of Mill’s political thinking was also touched on in another WWC article: https://wokewatchcanada.substack.com/p/subversion-of-meaning

12.  This is recounted in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/harriet-mill/

13. See Jacobs 1994 for the arguments for and against interpreting the influence of Harriet Taylor Mill on the Subjugation of Women. For additional perspective on Harriet Taylor Mill as socialist, see Fiamango’s piece: https://fiamengofile.substack.com/p/the-last-thing-a-pro-liberty-conference?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

14. See Ruth 1991, 26. Also: https://www.tutor2u.net/politics/reference/otherness-feminism

15. For a discussion of the evolution of intersection ideology, see another WWC article: https://wokewatchcanada.substack.com/p/a-moral-chimera

16. The quotation and the preceding remarks draw from Fiamango: https://fiamengofile.substack.com/p/book-on-the-evolution-of-womens-studies

17

18.  https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/december-january-2022/new-female-ascendency/

19. https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/homogenous_the_political_affiliations_of_elite_liberal_arts_college_faculty?ref=quillette

20. https://angusreid.org/diversity-racism-canada/

21. https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/december-january-2022/new-female-ascendency/

22. https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/december-january-2022/new-female-ascendency/

23. https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/december-january-2022/new-female-ascendency/

24. https://nationalpost.com/opinion/women-are-fuelling-the-crisis-of-wokeism-on-campus-and-in-society

25. https://www.vox.com/culture/21437879/stay-woke-wokeness-history-origin-evolution-controversy