Anyone who thinks that women aren’t being erased from the public sphere is just not paying attention. In a particularly egregious example, a recent awareness campaign for ovarian cancer featured… drag queens. That’s right, men in misogynistic blackface were the public face of an illness that can by definition only ever affect women.
The great irony, if not tragedy, of the new misogyny is that it originates almost entirely from the ranks of feminism. This might seem an unlikely idea, but the feminist attack on women is a pincer movement on two fronts. The first is transgenderism, an ideology mostly fostered by feminist academics (in cahoots with a few oleaginous gay men).
The second, intertwined with the first, is the much longer-standing feminist derogation of the majority of women who choose marriage and child-rearing above career and power.
Almost every time I turn on the telly, it’s there again, another story about getting more women “back to work”.
It’s puzzling because I thought I already was working.
Like an unreconstructed ’50’s male chauvinist, though, career feminists don’t regard “women’s work” as “real work”.
It’s just not the kind of work that counts, apparently. Women have become great big dollar signs in the government’s bid to rebuild the economy […]
I don’t want gender equality if it is simply a process of erasing everything that is inherently female. With another childcare rebate on the way in July, and childcare subsidies having almost doubled to $11bn since my eldest was born in 2015, I get a definite sense that I’m not pulling my weight. Not “participating”.
There is an undeniable government agenda at work. As new Italian PM Giorgia Meloni says, “Why is the family an enemy?… Because when I am only a number, when I no longer have an identity or roots, then I will be the perfect slave at the mercy of financial speculators. The perfect consumer.
No wonder the Establishment are so determined to smear Meloni: she terrifies them by encouraging women to remember that they are “woman; mother”.
The government already knows that family policy marginalises parents who choose to care for their own children full time and makes them feel like freaks of society, because they commissioned a research paper which drew these conclusions more than eight years ago […]
For many families, the government is craftily giving them the choice between poverty and outsourcing substandard care for their children. For single parents or low-income families this does not seem like a fair suck of the sauce bottle. This is a sauce bottle-or-starve situation. Coercion dressed up as opportunities for women. The government’s current childcare policy is enabling a reliance on dual incomes and robbing parents of precious hours with babies and young children.
The devaluation of caregiving that is driving educators and childcare workers out of the sector is the same devaluation of care that is driving parents back into the paid workforce.
They have become the perfect consumers.
And the vicious twist is that leftist academics and career feminists have colluded with the forces of globalist capitalism to strong-arm them into it.
Much has been said about the rise of “care feminism” but make no mistake, career feminists are still at the wheel, simply for the fact that women who prioritise their careers are generally the only women who ever make it into positions of power and influence. And they use their power and influence to support women who make the same choices they did. There is a constant stream of lip service about improving the status of the care workers they rely on, but career feminists inherently devalue care work by rejecting that work for themselves.
The Australian
As Camille Paglia points out, though, the end result for women is not “empowerment”, but misery.