In view of the current public fixations with respect to so many topics rooted in confusion over male-female relations, I will be posting a series of selections from Chapter Ten of my book, The Trouble With Canada … Still! (BPS Books, 2011), which is entitled “Radical Feminism: Attacking Traditional Society.”
The first few selections deal with important background influences, and then I move into discussion of the essential sexual and familial relations and tensions that have guided male/female life in the human community for eons, but which have been deeply disrupted by radical ideology of late.
The thesis is that much of the current Anti-male/Anti-Biological Gender/Anti-Traditional Family attack began with Radical Feminism … which was, and remains, rooted in the tired Marxist insistence on “systemic” oppression(s) that produce our contemporary inequalities and discontents. Marx was mostly blaming what he considered to be economic oppressions (owners of capital oppressing the workers of the world, etc).
But that was just the beginning of a broader and deeper moral shift away from individual responsibility for one’s own condition in life, to “blaming the system.” And it signalled an ideological shift in the Western world away from what I call the “starting-line equality” we all used to believe was essential to human flourishing (the New World was considered the Fresh New Starting-Line for so many modern settlers and immigrants!), toward the present “finish-line equality” that today dominates the public mind (the notion that human inequality is intolerable because many classes of citizens are victims of systemic bias: economic, sexual, gender, racial, etc., etc.).
And so … government policies must now adjust every perceived inequality of outcome, by penalizing those with perceived advantages, and selectively subsidizing, and adjusting laws to equalize, the conditions of those with perceived systemic disadvantages.
Anyone can sense the deep anger, and resolve to change the Finish-Line conditions of human life even in the handful of the early radical complaints listed below. These are not people who want to soften, or tweak, or moderately alter some of the ordinary conditions of human life in the hope of a greater happiness for all. No. They hate human life as it is, and this can be seen in the words they use, such as as they “demand” “abolition”, or the “Whole transformation” of society, or the complete “end of marriage”; or to “change the entire structure” of society, etc.In other words, if you can’t improve something in the human condition, you decide to destroy it completely and start over.
Violent language precedes actual violence. They all want to change the world as it is in the name of a perfect future world they imagine themselves to be creating and managing for the rest of us, but that no one has ever seen before in all of human history. These are dangerous dreamlanders who are not above using the force of law and the violence of the state to re-organize everyone else’s life to suit their personal preferences.
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“It will be plain that the first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex into public industry, and that this in turn demands the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society.”
~ Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884)
“You see, we want a whole transformation of society in the most revolutionary way . . .”
~ Louise Dulude, former President, of Canada’s National Action Committee on the Status of Women (1987).
“The end of the institution of marriage is a necessary condition for the liberation of women. Therefore it is important for us to encourage women to leave their husbands …”
~ US “Declaration of Feminism,” November, 1971
“My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of Western civilization, to make it a feminized world.”
~ From obituary notice for Canadian activist Marilyn French (National Post, May 7, 2009).
