Will feminists ever learn to stop punching women in the face? Feminists of the 1970s told women they could “have it all”: career and family, independence and equal partnerships. A generation later, as Camille Paglia points out, “These women are miserable”.
But the feminists of the 60s & 70s were at least somewhat attached to real-world women’s issues: work and family, equal rights and pay. From the 70s on, though, a new breed of feminists ensconced themselves in academic ivory towers and completely detached themselves from the real world.
And it shows.
80s feminists were instrumental in engendering identity politics and Queer Theory. Women far from the taxpayer-funded cocoon of academia are the ones paying the price. In particular, with a new breed of aggressive, male, misogyny-in-womanface invading women’s most private, vulnerable spaces and erasing the biological realities of womanhood altogether.
If academic feminists haven’t wrought enough havoc in the lives of ordinary women, along comes Sophie Lewis.
A red-lipsticked, jewellery-festooned, Oxford-educated Marxist in her mid-30s who resides in Philadelphia with her “American wife and boyfriend”, although it is unclear whether said boyfriend is hers, her wife’s, mutual, or simply a roommate who identifies as such (“The Boyfriend”).
Like many such academics, Lewis isn’t really much of a thinker, however, she poses as one. Shear away their high-falutin’, jargon-laced prose and what’s laid bare is invariably a ludicrous monomania that doesn’t bear a moment’s rigorous analysis.
What’s Lewis’ One Big Idea?
The same as Marxists for generations: abolish the family. Literally. Her new book is Abolish the Family.
What’s notable about many feminists is that they seem to be hell-bent on projecting their own boutique childhood miseries onto the entire world, assuming that all women experienced the same upbringing of privileged neurosis. Germaine Greer and Helen Gurley Brown grew up smart but plain.
A notable number of feminists are Jewish: unsurprising, perhaps, from a culture which has long advanced intellectualism — but women like Betty Friedan, Judith Butler, and Andrea Dworkin, all seem to mistake their particularly patriarchal, bourgeois Jewish daddy issues as How Things Are Everywhere. Oh, mein papa, he never loved me enough.
Lewis, on the other hand, is apparently out to punish the world for being brought up a German, middle-class, scion of feminism.
Fuelled by her own, widely reported and fantastically unhappy experience of being parented, Lewis’s ideology is founded on the idea that mothers are a very bad idea, mother love is a fiction, and families are oppressive. Her late mother, a well-educated suicidal girlboss who was given no funeral because she’d alienated everyone other than her “damaged and damaging nuclear kin”, employed a series of “insufficient” au pairs to raise her daughter.
Just as previous feminist harpies were out to punish the world for making them intelligent but ugly, Lewis is a fury seeking retribution for a shitty mother.
Beneath these words is the anguish of an incompetently-mothered child who now demands to be mothered by the state […]
“So many families are extremely unhappy!” she exclaims. “And this extreme unhappiness feels unique, because its structural character – like the structure of capitalism – is cunningly obscured from view.”
The possibility that this “extreme” unhappiness may result from factors other than the structural character of the family seems to elude Lewis.
Because she’s not just a modern academic, a breed especially immune to thinking outside their own little intellectual cubicles, but a Marxist (very nearly a tautology). As always with Marxism, despite its blatherskiting about the “withering away of the state”, the state is in fact everything. “All within the state, nothing outside the state,” as a famous socialist once said.
And so it is that, just like utopian statists from the Maoists to the kibbutzim, Lewis proposes what Aldous Huxley satirised nearly a century ago.
Secure in her tiny little privileged academic universe, Lewis wants the state to return “especially dependent humans” – that is to say, children – “to the arms of the few caregivers it tends to recognise and insist on deprivatising care, contesting ‘parental rights,’ and imagining a world in which all people are cared for by many by default.”
The Australian
We’re already at the stage that Huxley wrote of, where children in state-run schooling are subjected to “Elementary Sex, followed by Elementary Class Consciousness”. The only problem is that these pesky families keep insisting that, in the words of American Congresswoman Winsome Sears:
“I get to decide what happens in my child’s life. Not you. Not you. Not the government. Not anybody.”
Yeah, well, Marxists like Sophie Lewis are going to see about that. They didn’t have a happy childhood with a loving mother and father, so they don’t see why anyone else should.