As of 198O, 72 per cent of mental health professionals…described a `healthy, mature, socially competent’ adult, as androgynous.
~ Allan Carlson, Family Questions
“WASP men are the only safe target [for abuse] in advertising … you don’t get a single letter of complaint.”
~ Terry O’Reilly, host of CBC’s The Age of Persuasion (2009)
A major instrument in the feminist effort to equalize sex-roles in society, still used by those who insist on the by-now embarrassing sameness argument, is their assault on the whole idea of gender. In effect, this is part of a vast psychological, political, and yes, philosophical rebellion that in my last book, The Great Divide, 2015), I characterized as “The Triumph of the Will over Nature,” in a chapter of that title which I still believe hit the nail on the head, as they say.
At any rate, the root of this goes back to early feminist rebellion against natural gender of a kind that has exploded onto the political stage once again in the name of so-called “transgender rights.” “Androgyny” is a term with a somewhat different inference. It refers to both genders as one, and the use of it follows from feminist ideology. They think that if all sex-role behaviours are just a result of social conditioning rather than of biology, then without such biologically-determined “roles” authentic human beings must be … naturally androgynous (an equal mixture of male and female). Hence the distinction between male and female, they have argued, is a social myth. At the extreme, feminists even argue that God is both male and female, that “Holy Wisdom” is the female persona of God, and that human beings can attain “spiritual androgyny.” Such ideas have ancient origins in mystical forms of thought in which, at the extreme, the human spirit is said to be one with the universe, and all distinctions whatsoever are held to be a falsification of our original unity. This sort of spiritual egalitarianism is a retreat not merely from biology, but from all known social and material reality.
In his detailed, eloquent and sobering work Family Questions (1988), theAmerican scholar Allan Carlson was among the first to cite a bevy of serious scientists, some of them feminists of the honest type, who showed that the whole androgyny movement was and remains ideologically motivated, has never had any basis in fact, and has “elevated corrupted science to the level of public truth.”[1]
Beginning in the 196Os, in reaction to the “natural complement” theory of gender most people still hold (that males and females are both incomplete, and thus are a natural complement for each other), the radical feminists began to argue that women would never attain sex-role equality unless a different model of gender was created. Shulamith Firestone (who, as Carlson pointed out, did humanity a service by pushing feminist logic to perverse conclusions), argued that “Mom” must be eliminated, and replaced by a “socialist feminism”; that sex roles had to be eliminated, and replaced with her preferred “polymorphous perverse” sexuality (meaning anything goes); that the incest taboo had to be eliminated, and that parents should freely have sex with ready children. Bottle-feeding “technology” and daycare, she said, would end the need for natural mothering. This, she called “revolutionary feminism.” Her peer, Anne Ferguson, of the University of Massachusetts, argued that “androgynes” the “superpersons” of the coming new society (the feminist utopia she imagined), would be freed from the need for children (here’s that anti-child theme again, masquerading as a concern for over-population), by experiencing pure “bisexual love.” Ferguson despised natural biological parenting because it produces “a debilitating heterosexual identity” in children. Her formula to bring about the socialist society organized on strictly feminist principles, was simply to equalize all social, economic and political power outside the home (with affirmative action programs) – all else would follow.
Edward Tiryakian, of Duke University (still a real hotbed of feminist and post-modern psycho-babble), was out of the gate early too, insisting that androgyny is a “truly revolutionary” principle for overturning both the sexual division of labour and “the present prevalent form of the nuclear family which is the source of the reproduction of heterosexuality.” He too advocated revolutionary change through the perfection of baby-bottle technology, and called for a U.S. Supreme court ruling declaring it unconstitutional to teach or reinforce heterosexuality in the schools. It is now 2017, and this is about what we are seeing.
Ruth Bleier, another early soldier of fanatical feminism, argued that the nuclear family must be “crushed”. The bitterly hostile Andrea Dworkin made a name for herself arguing for homosexuality and even bestiality – for what she called “other-animal relationships,” and the freeing of children to enjoy their “right” to “live out their erotic impulses.” That’s what Rousseau advocated in the 18th century, and what his bizarre compatriot the Marquis de Sade actually did. She called for a “new kind of human being, and a new kind of human community.” At a Canadian feminist conference she notoriously advocated that battered women “should feel free to murder their husbands.”[2] Today, that would get her dragged up for “hate speech,” as well as for discrimination, for she did not advocate that battered males murder their wives, or sons their mothers.
In acceptance of this model for the new and healthier human being, Alexandra Kaplan actually argued that “social sickness” ought to be redefined as a society with “overly masculine” men, and “overly feminine” women. This, too, followed the peculiar egalitarian illogic of radical feminism, and illustrates the attempt to alter the foundational concepts and language of our society. Another writer, Christabelle Sethna of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (now as radical a leftist “education” school as one could find anywhere in the world) argued that dead animals represent patriarchal society and war, whereas live animals represent women; therefore, “meat eating is mysogyny” [woman-hating], and milk dairying (all those nasty men a-squeezin’ them thar udders) is a rampant exploitation of the female sex.
Without our tax dollars, such people would be reading this drivel to the walls in some holding tank for losers; but with our considerable dollars, they have created a tax-funded audience. The State has paid for their jobs, subsidized their books, and funded their travel and their conventions. More’s the pity. Angry, narrow-minded feminists have been extremely influential, despite the blatantly ideological nature of their program, their shoddy science, and their perverse anti-social values. As American psychologist Paul C. Vitz of New York University discovered, after intensive scrutiny of over 1OO high-school social studies and history textbooks at the turn of this last century: “by far the most noticeable position in the textbooks was a feminist one.” Not a single story or theme celebrated marriage or motherhood as a positive experience. Sex-role reversals and the mockery of masculine men were common.”
In short, public (government) schools in North America (and many private ones, too) have for more than three decades been furiously promoting lies about human nature. They began with the androgyny myth (the lie that both sexes are the same); then moved on to the notion that human sexuality is a diverse phenomenon, and normal heterosexual relations, marriages, and families no better or worse than any other kind; to the general “post-modern” lie that all gender is at bottom a matter of choice, and is “socially-constructed.” That’s why today we can see vote-grabbing Mayors gliding through some of our largest cities on garish, tax-funded floats surrounded by genitalia-brandishing exponents of “LGBT” (etc., etc), or the “lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans-gender,”[3] lifestyle. Your gender is what you construct for yourself. Human nature is not defined by your biology, but by your will. It’s all a kind of sexual fascism – the imposition of human Will on reality; another expression of the eternal revolt against … human nature
In public schools it amounts to a tax-funded brainwashing of society through children. And this, despite the fact that there have always been a host of serious social scientists demonstrating that the androgyny notion has no basis in fact, and is a political hoax. So-called “androgynous” people are in fact far more dysfunctional, more neurotic, lower in self-esteem, and more confused than normal people. There is nothing “super” about them. Researchers have shown conclusively that normal sex-typed parents make by far the best parents (androgynous parents “perform dismally”); that masculinity in males is correlated most highly with positive mental health; that male psychopaths have low masculinity scores, and so on. Researcher Diana Baumrind summed it up long ago when she said that traditional sex-typing is healthy for society and for children, and that androgyny, as a positive concept, is a complete and utter failure.[4] Carlson lamented that in the United States (ditto for Canada) “a small band of ideologues…has succeeded in imposing a fraudulent, dangerous ideology, masquerading as science, on broad elements of our public life.” A major concern for our future is that this fraud has succeeded in legalizing “misandry” – the hatred of men – which I will write about next.
[1] Allan Carlson, Family Questions (New Brunswick, N>J.: Transaction Books, 1988), p.44
[2] Alberta Report, May 27, 1991
[3] From Wikipedia: “LGBT is an acronym referring collectively to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. In use since the 1990s, the term “LGBT” is an adaptation of “LGB” which itself started replacing the phrase “gay community” which many within LGBT communities felt did not represent accurately all those to whom it referred. In modern usage, the term LGBT is intended to emphasize a diversity of “sexuality and gender-identity based cultures” and is sometimes used to refer to anyone who is non-heterosexual instead of exclusively to people who are homosexual, bisexual, or transgender. To recognize this inclusion, a popular variant adds the letter Q for queer and questioning (e.g., “LGBTQ”) for those not explicitly denoted by LGBT, such as pansexuality, intersex, etc. The acronym has become mainstream as a self-designation and has been adopted by the majority of LGBT community centers and LGBT media in many English-speaking countries. These acronyms are not agreeable to everyone that they literally encompass. Some intersex people want to be included in LGBT groups and would prefer the term “LGBTI”. Some argue that transgender and transsexual causes are not the same as that of LGB people. A correlate to these ideas is evident in the belief of “lesbian & gay separatism,” which holds that lesbians and gay men should form a community distinct and separate from other groups normally included. Other people also do not care for the term as they feel the lettering comes across as being too politically-correct, an attempt to categorize various groups of people into one grey area, and that it implies that the issues and priorities of the main groups represented are given equal consideration.” [My comment: Such are the contradictions and confusions of post-modern sexual fascism.]
[4] Diana Baumrind, “Are Androgynous Individuals More Effective Persons and Parents?” in Child Development, 53 (January 1982), pp. 45-66, cited in Carlson, Family Questions, p.42.
Amdrogeny is indeed a lie
Pingback: Por que a idéia de um corpo perfeito continua mudando e como será no futuro