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Oh feminism, what happened to you?
Article here. Excerpt:
'Many modern-day feminists engage in man-bashing rather than making dignified demands for equality, as the feminists of the early twentieth century did. So Robin Morgan unashamedly admits, ‘I feel that man-hating is an honourable and viable political act’. The view many modern feminists seek to spread, in the words of Marilyn French, is that ‘all men are rapists and that’s all they are’. A Feminist Dictionary goes so far as to define ‘male’ as ‘a degeneration and deformity of the female’. This is an effort to make men seem inferior, not to elevate the position of women. It starkly contrasts with the goal of feminists of old, which was to make women be viewed as equal, not superior, to men.
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Feminism used to view women as self-sufficient rather than requiring the protection of the state
If recent debates are anything to go by, feminism now seems to be about protecting the delicate, sensitive, victimised female of the human species. For example, we apparently need to be protected from pictures of topless women in the Sun, lest these images destroy our self-esteem. Feminism perpetuates the view that women are fragile – in the words of Andrea Dworkin, ‘to be rapeable, a position that is social, not biological, defines what a woman is’. In contrast, the feminists of the early twentieth century were keen to show that they needed little help and could fend for themselves, just like any man. Indeed, as early as 1847, Charlotte Brontë wrote: ‘Women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer.’'
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