A great question, thank you.
“The body is not a thing, it is a situation… it is the instrument of our grasp upon the world, a limiting factor for our projects,” said Simone de Beauvoir. That is, and always was, the essence of my feminism. Women are not men. We should not try to be “like men.” We shouldn’t try to prove we “can do everything that men do.” Because we can’t. And men can’t do everything that women do. And it’s fine. We should strive for such a way of coexistence in society that makes life comfortable for both these different biological realities.
Alongside this original feminism that I espouse, another form arose. It postulates that men and women are not biological but aspirational categories. This brand of feminism does not accept that women have a different sexuality and a different reproductive schedule than men. It doesn’t accept that women are physically weaker than men. It doesn’t believe in biological sex but in gender, which is a set of traits that you can adopt volitionally. In this brand of feminism, a woman is not a person with a uterus but a person in a skirt and makeup. I have never supported this form of feminism because, in my opinion, it achieves the exact opposite of what the original feminism sets out to do. It makes the lives of women markedly worse by denying the importance of what actually makes us women. If we accept an unsexed body as the norm, women always lose. Our physicality and our reproductive system make us need civilization, society, family, and capitalism much more than men need them.
Gender feminism is anti-woman because it sees men as the norm to which women must aspire. Take the hookup culture. It’s a maximum expression of uncivilized, untamed male sexuality. Gender feminism sold it as an aspirational ideal to several generations of women. It’s gotten so that expressing the #1 female aspiration to have a husband and children has become an eccentric, downgraded pursuit. Women are supposed to want to spend two decades of their lives in a succession of hookups before they are ready to settle down. That this is utterly impossible given female physiology is not even discussed. Is it so surprising, then, that so many girls all of a sudden want to chop off their breasts and pose as men? Not even the most repressive patriarchal society has been as inhospitable to womanhood as gender feminism.
This form of feminism currently reigns supreme but it’s a fad that I hope will fade away. Then we can go back to figuring out how to make child-bearing, family, work, and life in general comfortable to men and women together. But for that to happen, we have to defeat our inner neoliberal who bristles at Simone de Beauvoir’s words about the limiting factors for our projects. We have to accept that our physical reality is absolutely a boundary for our wants and whims. We have to understand that this is a good thing and that it’s stupid to fight against it. When we re-learn to react with immediate, unpracticed positivity to the words “a limiting factor to our projects”, gender feminism will die. It is up to us whether we are ready finally to throw this perversion onto the trash heap of history.
Clarissa's Blog 
This is a work of art, suitable for framing. Exceptionally well said and 100% true.
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Thank you so much! Today at the open forum, people brought prepared remarks but I spoke off-the-cuff, improvising in the same style I did here. People are always shocked that I can produce long, strong sentences without preparation but I get a lot of training here on the blog.
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You have a gift.
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♥️❣️♥️
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States Rights – the Commerce Clause Trumps the 19th Amendment.
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Frankly, I doubt that there ever was a good feminism. The movement was fostered by Marx and Engels to undermine the family on the route to their utopian wetdream, and it has failed every single times that it has tried. The arch hobgoblin “patriarchy” was and is simply a means of identifying a child’s father, rending him financially and legally responsible, while providing sufficient degree of authority to carry those duties. In short, it is nothing less than the backbone of Western civilization, and it is long past that modern women admitted that truth.
As for Simone de Beauvoir, sorry but she pimped young and naïve girls for Sartre. Whatever philosophy, perhaps existentialism, she shows of love or marriage shows little discernible pattern. Here is perhaps her most famous quote: “No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.”
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“I doubt that there ever was a good feminism”
So Taliban norms are A-OK?
IMO the first and second waves of US feminism were fine, it was the third that went off the rails, when they chickened out of the next logical step (addressing misogyny in non-western cultures of which there is no shortage) in favor of looking inward and obsessing about emotional trivia.
I don’t think there’s anything in the current world that even remotely counts as real feminism… it’s either institutionalized in law (and accepted like the air we breathe) or absent.
Instead we have two counter-reformations (if you will). One (wolf in sheep’s clothing) reduces womanhood to makeup and dresses (addressed by Clarissa here) and the other (wolf in wolf clothing) reduces women to disposable vagina maintenance systems (see Tate, brothers).
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IIRC there were some feminists ~ late1990s/early2000s, who were reaching in that direction– Jean Sasson’s book *Princess* was published around then, and we also started getting the odd media story about the living conditions of women in rural India. Ultimately, those efforts never went anywhere. Knowing a wee bit about Sasson… I have to wonder if the thing wasn’t sabotaged by its most prominent publicists?
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It’s like gay rights. Instead of celebrating that everything has been achieved in developed countries and concentrating attention on barbaric societies, activists started inventing insane causes domestically and ended up turning everybody against themselves.
When gay men are hung off cranes in Iran, I find it insulting that the #1 gay cause is to plaster every surface with rainbows and prance naked in the streets in June.
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…or that, having achieved equality under the law, entry into every desirable career, plus the rather icky lopsided ability to use “sexual harassment” policies to destroy male coworkers at will…
We’re raising an entire generation of girls who want to be “Influencers” and OFgirls.
What happened to “You can be president! You can be an astronaut!” ?? I am baffled by how we went from there to promoting prostitution.
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And the great idea that being a mother is a lifestyle choice and not the norm. Instead of making sure that having children is possible, crucial and comfortable, we are positioning it as dispensable, a consumerist choice, like any other. A denial of child-bearing is a denial of womanhood. That cannot be feminist in any possible way.
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I think this is part of the covert lowering of lifestyle standards for plebes in the US. Having a hard time financially? “Well, *you chose* to have kids, you irresponsible twat. Why didn’t you think about how you were going to afford them first?”
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In your blog archives you seemed to espouse this view that being a mother is a choice, and futher, that people shouldn’t have kids if they can’t also keep their job. I’m not trying to be mean to you but…this is a really fascinating and dramatic change of opinion. How much of this is change in your personal circumstances and experiences and how much of this is change in your understanding and values about the world?
In 10 years, do you think you’ll still believe what you believe now about motherhood?
-YZ
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I grew up with an abusive mother who couldn’t tolerate competition for the role of the woman of the family.
My reproductive situation is highly aberrant and should not serve as guidance to anybody. As I always say, please don’t try this at home. 😁
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// We’re raising an entire generation of girls who want to be “Influencers” and OFgirls.
Are today’s boys very different, except OF part?
el
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“Are today’s boys very different, except OF part?”
Counter-reformation that I mentioned (Tate version)… women are all whores or maids or don’t exist and men are pimps or johns.
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” pimps or johns.”
…and video-game designers. Don’t forget that one. That job was hyped to the moon among the current crop of twentysomethings, and there are probably 10,000 wannabe game designers for every actual job in that field.
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“some feminists ~ late1990s/early2000s, who were reaching in that direction”
I’m thinking about 10 years earlier… but it was a really bad time to start that since so much of the social sciences were under the ruinous reign of…. French…. theory (no truth, it’s all subjective) and Said’s ‘Orientalism’ (which demonized western critics of middle eastern dysfunction… maybe not his goal but how it worked out in practice).
And by the late 1990s 3rd wave belly button gazing was in ascendance…
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Could be!
I was not an age to be reading that sort of literature a decade earlier, so would not have been aware of it.
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cliff arroyo
LOL, are you familiar with the evolutionary biology term: Sneaky Fucker, a mating strategy where a sub-dominant male adopts female behavior in hopes of mating; for example, where male chimpanzees groom females to get more access to mating, or as a human example, the behavior of a male social justice warrior ;-D
I doubted that there ever was a good feminism, and I mean it. Marx and Engels supported feminism because they believed that it would undermine the family structure. Current society demonstrates that they were correct on that particular point. The origin of the idea of the equality of the sexes emerges from the New Testament; Christendom has been fighting Muslims since at least the 8th century, but sadly, today the major churchs have degenerated into emasculated cowardice. And given the current institutional feminism, perhaps we shouldn’t be shocked to find young men attracted by the empty masculinity of the Tates.
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Actually, feminists of all generations detested Marx precisely because he didn’t take women and their interests remotely into account.
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True enough, he would never have created the idea of communism if he understood the female need of protection and provisions. Afterall, Marx didn’t state: “From each according to his ability, to each according to her needs” ;-D
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Clarissa, I wanted to respond to your thoughts on addressing injustices (women’s rights, gay rights) in poorer countries.
I agree with you that logically those should have been the issues to addressed after legalizing gay marriage here at home. But in reality those are different countries with different cultures (people are not widgets). If you want to address gay rights in, say, Pakistan, your best bet is helping people escape.
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There’s also the problem that things like gay marriage/rights and the idea of women as autonomous agents whose autonomy should be protected by the state (aka women’s rights: you are an independent person, not just an appendage of your family), are essentially luxury beliefs: they are nice and I prefer living with them, but they cannot really be enacted/enforced in an environment of widespread poverty. It is only with prosperity that *anyone* can be an independent agent, apart from his or her family.
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It is only with prosperity that *anyone* can be an independent agent, apart from his or her family.
True, the agitators of the first wave were typical wealthy and upper class, while those of the second largely married into either wealth or the state in one form or the other, and now that the state is essentially broke…?
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The state is not broke. It’s being stripped bare to enrich the oligarchy at the expense of all of us. On a smaller scale, my state university is being dismantled so that one finicky dude can be driven in a fancy car and buy $2,000 shoes.
Austerity is not an accident. It’s purposefully engineered.
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Enough! Like many in the Western world, both your country and my own are spending more than they take in, debasing of the currency, and creating inflation. Yes, some of it is the result of corruption by powerful individuals, but much of the borrowing is the result of endless growing welfare and various PC make work scams. To paraphrase the famous philosopher Pogo,“We have met the enemy and s/he/it is us” ;-D
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