Amanda Marcotte: The David Duke Of Feminism

Article here. Excerpt:

'Twenty-fourteen has been a bad year for feminism. From the UVA rape hoax to the anti-civil rights atrocities that are “affirmative consent” laws, from the the scandalous radio silence after the Rotherham scandal, to the ever-escalating #Waronnerds (reaching peak absurdity in the controversy over Dr. Matt Taylor’s allegedly “sexist” shirt), 2014 was the year when feminism underwent a fall from grace that even John Milton would cringe to chronicle. It was the year the movement that gave birth to the suffragettes mutated into the Jane Birch Society, though actually, that might be unfair to the Birchers – they only saw communists under every bed, whereas many modern feminists see misogynists and rapists not only under them, but in them, too. It was the year when feminism decided it had had enough of trying to get equal rights, and now only wanted to get even, in the words of one particularly frightening column.
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It is not possible to overstate the intellectual dishonesty, moral myopia, psychological ill health, ideological hypocrisy and logical bankruptcy in evidence throughout Marcotte’s writing. Whittaker Chambers once denounced Ayn Rand, saying that in her work, “a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding – to a gas chamber, go!” But Rand’s gas chambers, if they existed at all, did so in the abstract. Marcotte, on the other hand, barely bothers to disguise the voice in her writing commanding, “get thee to the gelding knife.”

Indeed, if one reads even a small sample of Marcotte’s writing, it becomes clear that she views all men (especially the white variety, though by no means exclusively) as presumptive and/or would-be rapists who must be savaged, humiliated and persecuted at every turn due to their complicity in patriarchal oppression. Furthermore, for a man to be judged innocent of a sex crime by society is, in Marcotte’s view, not a testament to the efficacy of a liberal justice system, but rather a thumb in the eye of women everywhere. In fact, given the ugly, revanchist pose that Marcotte adopts, to say nothing of her zero sum view of gender relations, it’s not even accurate to call her a feminist so much as a female nationalist. And not the good sort of nationalist, either – rather, Marcotte’s idea of “girl power” should be heard with the same ominous connotations with which one hears David Duke’s invocation of “white power.”

In fact, the comparison to David Duke gets more distressingly apt the more one reads Marcotte’s work, which is so peppered with paranoia, accusation in place of argument and dehumanization of not merely ideological opponents but even friendly critics that with minimal editing (say, by switching out “men” for “Jews”), one could transform your average Amanda Marcotte column into a first-rate KKK pamphlet. Morally, she is indistinguishable from Duke and any number of other pathetically educated sociopaths who hitched their star to hate in order to rise in the world.'