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COMMENTARY
June 8, 2008
Domestic violence
I’m not sure I said enough about domestic violence last week, while attacking a vicious “public service” advertisement from the Canadian Women’s Foundation, designed to focus hatred on “white males” -- though perhaps I did say enough to satisfy some of my feminist readers (or as I call them, affectionately of course, the “shriekie sisters.”) I mentioned the ad as a token for what has in fact been a long-rolling social and political campaign, nay melodrama, dating back before the “take back the night” spectacles of the ’nineties, before the “recovered memory syndrome” hysteria of the ’eighties, before the “pantsuit revolution” of the ’seventies, to the pioneers of “second-wave” feminism in the ’sixties of the last century.The history is itself interesting, and let us quickly surf those waves to understand at least the received jargon of this ideological movement, which has tended to fill all the spaces between Communism, Environmentalism, and Islamism. “First wave” feminism is taken as having consisted of the various women’s rights, suffragette, and temperance crusaders of the late 19th and earlier 20th centuries. The women, and allied men of this wave, sought to remove actual legal impediments to a woman’s full participation in public life. These were all removed shortly after the Great War. The “second wave,” dating roughly from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique -- a polemic of 1963 that wove strands of earlier feminism together with neo-Marxism and neo-Freudianism into a stinging lash -- began with the observation that women remained “subjugated” by false consciousness even after being legally freed, and demanded that the de jure accomplishments of previous generations be consolidated de facto. The target became “patriarchy,” and with this, men qua men. Beneath the radar, the target became women who persisted in behaving like women. This is the feminism I was raised in, and I remember how slowly its tenets seemed to spread -- though in retrospect it was an historical blink of an eye. The cutting-edge “hippie chicks,” who were my precise contemporaries, sought liberation, but continued to dress and behave in stereotypically feminine ways. Indeed, for many men of my generation, those were the last real girls we ever got to see, and we remember them fondly. In what came to be known as the “third wave,” which has now been with us for two decades, the partially comprehensible motives and intentions of the second wave diverged, then converged, and resurged, in a great heaving flood of moral acids, and in the blather of post-modern irrationalism (or “subjectivity” as its exponents call it) -- e.g. “womanism,” “ecofeminism,” “sex-positivity,” “post-colonial theory,” “anti-racism,” “queer theory,” “transgender politics,” and so forth. In this wave, the hatred has become focused on the one remaining excluded group -- the heterosexual white male. And the one remaining rational link between the various acidic “theories” is the need to demonize, then destroy, or at least geld, this sorry masculine creature, wherever he can be found. Needless to say, among those who can count higher than three, various “fourth waves” have been announced more recently. As a “heterosexual white male” myself, the eagerness of many other HWMs to buy into all this was long a mystery. Why try, when you are disqualified by race, “gender,” and sexual orientation? But I’ve come to understand these men. My affectionate term for them is “the castrati” -- nominally heterosexual males who seek the protection of a dominant female, on the analogy of the yappy little poodle on a leash. We all know the type, although for obvious reasons it is seldom in everyone’s interest to admit what we know. Nature continues to assert herself, however, and as I continue to observe at first hand, women prefer men to poodles, at least sexually. (Well, not all women.) Alas for them, the diminishing supply means that more and more must settle for a nasty core of actual psychopaths, who give flavour to the proposition that men are inherently violent. This is in turn another by-product of a “feminized” social and educational order, that denies the value of any kind of manliness -- for it often appears that only the psychopaths survive the indoctrination. So: if the reader has followed my analysis this far, he will grasp that the focus of demonization has further narrowed: to heterosexual white males other than yappy little poodles. These are the men responsible by definition for all the violence in the universe, who must be caged for the sake of everyone else: women, children, the various transgendered, whales, dolphins, monkeys, snails, and all the endangered species of the rainforest. The idea that men, and men alone, are inherently violent -- and that therefore women need special State protection from them in any intimate relations they may enter into -- is among the received premises of the “meta-logic” of post-modern feminism. It is why in a country like Canada today, where statistics still show a remarkably even distribution of actual domestic violence, we have approximately 500 shelters for abused women, and approximately zero for abused men. Oh dear, I have run out of space. Will continue these reflections next Sunday.rn David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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