If you're pro-life, we hate you?
I decided to look up www.gargaro.com/ribbonstxt.html after reading the piece "What Color is Your Ribbon" (October/November 1999). ... I was shocked to find that this ribbon site is hosted by a pro-life woman! ... Did Ms. know about the antiabortion view of this Web page?
- H. Allison Hergenrother Vice President-Orlando Florida Chapter, National Organization for Women, Ms. February/March 2000
Carolyn Gargaro is co-founder of the RightGrrl.Com site, and the kind of person the new rage women just love to hate.
Pop feminist racism?
The woman who led Lewis and Clark to the Pacific is finally getting recognized, but only on a dollar, and a coin at that. Insult to injury is that the round, gold-colored Sacagawea dollar coin, to be released this spring, replaces the 11-sided, silver Susan B. Anthony design.
- justthefacts, Ms. February/March 2000
Typical. These mostly middle and upper-middle class white women are so preoccupied with being the center of attention that they completely overlooked a rather nasty characteristic of this coin - its low quality.
A few days ago at my bank I requested some Susan B.'s because I've always liked the coin. The teller told me she also had the new dollar coin, so I asked for five each. First thing I noticed is, while the 1979 Susan B.'s were in good condition, the 2000 Sacagawea Golden Dollar coins, despite having never seen circulation, were as scuffed and marred as a buffalo head nickel.
The disdain American Indians have come to expect from the Federal government, and from pop feminists.
Sexism gets as sexism gives
The struggle to add (the Equal Rights Amendment) to the U.S. Constitution once united women of all ages, regions, and classes. In the end, there weren't enough votes for ratification, and the ERA died in 1982.
- Annys Shin, Reviving the E.R.A., Ms. February/March 2000
From its inception, the E.R.A. had the support of millions of American men, and many actively participated in promoting it. Ironically, the foremost feminists of the day spurned men's support or relegated them to low positions. In the effort to pass the E.R.A., some were more equal than others, and this, more than anything else, may be why it failed. They showed us their true colors, and we knew them for the frauds they were.
And nothing has changed.
Permanently pregnant?
Film director Roman Polanski's creative juices must have been flowing the wrong direction when he decided to tell an interviewer for Esquire magazine everything he knows about the Pill: "I think [it] altered female thinking. ... I truly don't think that feminism would reach such absurd proportions if there were no Pill."
- Kate Rounds, Clippings, Ms. February/March 2000
Long-time hippie chick and Internet curmudgeon Joan Brewer once told me "the Pill tricks women's bodies into thinking they're pregnant, and out of biological necessity pregnant women are extremely selfish."
Explains a lot about New Rage women and the pop feminist movement.
Not the "nice guy" myth, again!
What if it isn't biology that draws women to older men, but the fact that those men are actually less marketable and thus apt to treat women with more gratitude and respect?
- Natalie Angier, quoted in Turning the Tables on "Science," Ms. February/March 2000
Were that the case, then women would be drawn to young "nice guys" who "treat women with more gratitude and respect." But, as the sad but true saying goes, "nice guys finish last." Or, as my friend Wilbur Wormwood likes to say, "men will be nice when nice guys get laid."
Pop feminists rally around Faludi's Stiffed
Now it's true that any guy can come home from a meaningless job, ignore his sullen family, and wallow in an evening of phallocratic pleasures. But this is precisely Faludi's point. Men, she writes, are as victimized by the current "culture of display" as women ever were. In great numbers, they've been robbed of work that bolsters self-esteem, consoled by entertainment that fetishizes an unreal power, and cinched into an obsessive body consciousness. Indeed, the greatest achievement of this mammoth book is to make it perfectly clear that feminism is not the cause of men's decline. Both sexes are shaped by a consumer state that treats its citizens as niches.
Stiffed reveals what backlash boys can't face: the joke's on them.
- Richard Goldstein, Ms. February/March 2000
As we said several months ago:
The way to understand Stiffed is not as the ditzy stumbling of a half-witted new rage woman onto a few fundamental truths, neither as a profound effort by a bigot to begin the same journey Warren Farrell undertook so many years ago nor even a shrewd attempt to emulate Clinton's successful effort to co-opt the conservative agenda, for above all it serves precisely the same agenda of her original bleat, Backlash.
It's not that we disagree with all or even most of Faludi's contentions regarding the oppressive nature of the male role, but that her work lacks sincerity and serves the same agenda she always has. No where in Stiffed does she mention the majority of the men's movement. The Equalitarian men's movement, which has worked for decades to further the cause of equality while also countering the lies new rage women like Ms. Faludi have fostered.
The sole purpose of Stiffed is to preempt the equalitarian men's movement by appropriating the messages regarding the male role and the deteriorating quality of masculinity while dressing it up in the same old blame and shame to control outfit that tells us its all essentially men's fault.
For example, she points to the many war movies as one means by which men willingly saturate their psyches in old time patriarchal values. She even goes so far as to include Saving Private Ryan in this list, ironic given its heartbreaking portrayal of war, much as did The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Das Boot, BAT 21, Full Metal Jacket, South Pacific, Platoon and M*A*S*H, to name only a few.
Another reason to doubt Faludi's intentions is her persistent refusal to appear with Warren Farrell, a man about whom she lied in Backlash. Despite that Farrell has repeatedly extended the olive branch and offered to discuss the issues she raises in Stiffed, she has gone so far as to sit in the Green Room at various studios and refuse to come out until Farrell has left the premises. Maybe it's because he represents everything she hates, or because he represents the decades-old equalitarian men's movement she is trying to pretend she is starting, or maybe it's because she can't stand criticism and his review of Stiffed underscores errors in her work.
Either way, it's not that we "backlash boys" disagree with all or even most of her assertions so much as that we simply don't trust her, nor has she given us any reason to trust her.
After more than 30 years?
No longer are men (and for that matter, women) judged by the quality of their work or the depth of their convictions, but by the suits they wear and the SUVs they drive.
- Elka Karl, Fabula Volume Three Issue Four
After more than 30 years of pop feminist changes? Ouch!
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