Process of a Smear
Recently, I’ve heard more than a few people in media express wonder at why people in general have such an adverse reaction to the word “feminist.” Considering that the word simply expresses the idea of equality between men and women, why is there such a negative sense to the word?
The answer is easy: feminists are a liberal constituency. And if you’re a liberal constituency or issue, there is a process of denigration that is rather consistently carried out.
Here’s how it goes:
Step One: Find the most extreme, worst example of that issue or group.
Step Two: Assume all the worst imaginable motives for the worst possible intentions.
Step Three: Subtract or diminish any redeeming qualities.
Step Four: Exaggerate what remains.
Step Five: Add imaginary negative qualities to it to suit common fears and build scapegoats.
Step Six: Claim that this is wholly representative of the issue or group.
Step Seven: Popularize and reinforce as much as possible in the media.
This happens for pretty much any liberal constituency that you can imagine. Feminists? Arrogant, aggressive, ugly, butch, man-hating lesbians intent on dominating men because they were never admired by them.
Minorities? Shiftless, aggressive, uneducated, drug-using incipient criminals with a sense of entitlement enabled by feeble-minded liberals, looking to get free government handouts paid for with taxes taken from hard-working conservative whites. Ignore and whitewash the centuries of relentless discrimination which has kept so many minorities in poverty and/or jail.
Unions? Corrupt thugs who command high salary and benefits only for those in their lodge; union workers are under-qualified oafs demanding constant breaks, more concerned with union rules than efficiency, demanding union fees like a protection racket while stifling efficiency and production at the cost of the taxpayer, their padded paychecks causing American companies to fail and be less competitive. Ignore and whitewash the endless accomplishments of unions to create universal standards for strong, well-paid jobs with safe working conditions.
The poor? Welfare queens, the indigent 47%, either unemployed by choice or stuck in low-end jobs because they refuse to work hard, always on the make for another government handout—food stamps, welfare checks, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security—while living in taxpayer-funded government housing with all the modern conveniences (they have refrigerators!), always ready to convert food stamps into liquor and fine dining or welfare checks into big-screen teevees and nice cars. Ignore and whitewash the fact that these people do the lion’s share of the most difficult and necessary work to keep our society functioning, and pay a great deal in taxes to earn their fair share.
Educators? Lazy ivory-tower socialists unable to get a real job in the free market who opt for a job with banker’s hours and three full months off in summer while demanding tenure so they can never be fired no matter how inept or harmfully incompetent they are—because of union protection. Ignore and whitewash how overworked and underpaid these well-trained professionals are in doing one of the most important tasks in society.
Same thing with issues. Abortion? Late-term abortion, happens all the time, bloody fetuses resembling newborns, used frequently and callously by feminists as an alternative to virtuous self-control.
Affirmative Action? Reverse racism, allowing any and every unqualified minority to grab a college slot they do not deserve or demand a job that would have gone to a better-qualified white person, after which they are bulletproof and exempt from the same requirements and standards whites must satisfy.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Think of any liberal constituency or issue and you’ll find the same laundry list of extreme, exaggerated, irredeemable, negative qualities applied to the entire interest. This has grown to include cities (San Francisco, Hollywood, Chicago, Boston, etc.) and any professions where liberalism is considered dominant.
If a group or issue begins to lean liberal where it did not before, or becomes more significant than it previously was, it is added to the list and put through the same process. Scientists were not one of the constituencies until evolution and climate change started to become bigger issues; when that happened, we started hearing about scientists whoring for government grants and so forth. If, say, nurses or farmers begin to emerge as a group supporting liberals, we’ll begin to see similar stereotypes begin to form.
So, no, I am not surprised that feminism has gotten a bad name. That constituency was smeared a long time ago.
really quite something how conservatives now control ~55% of the country, from Congress to the Judiciary to the state legislatures etc.
We’re in the high tide of conservatism’s BS wave. They seem to have shaken off the deleterious effects of the GOP Congress of 1995-2006 and of course W’s disastrous time at the wheel 2001-2008.
Yet I was driving behind some guy last week with a printout taped to his back window saying “Impeach the Devil” and various veteran support bumper-stickers.
I guess people are just so bamboozled they can’t tell up from down any more.
We’ve been so wonderfully insulated from our various policy mistakes thus far — NAFTA, our $5.5T accumulated trade deficit
http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/international/intinv/intinvnewsrelease.htm
tax cuts and our economy so structured to encourage capital concentration
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CP/
and increasing Gini.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/GINIALLRH
the recent wars too, though 2.5 million people got fed into those meat grinders.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/03/14/185880/millions-went-to-war-in-iraq-afghanistan.html
I guess people don’t want to doubt or keep an open mind about things. They want certainty and faith.
2016 may not be as good as 2006 for liberals, but it’s going to be battle royale nonetheless.
> Considering that the word simply expresses the idea of equality between men and women …
That was the original meaning of the word, but things have moved on since then. A number of (prominent, entrenched) ‘feminists’ now fight for superiority rather than equality.
If you consider the backlash as aimed against the extremists, the feral feminists, the ones pushing for far more than ‘equality’, then the negativity is well-earned.
Brad:
I strongly disagree—but you leave me little room to debate your point as you have no specifics whatsoever. Give me at least two “prominent, entrenched” feminists—that would mean feminists who would be recognized by name by much of the population, and who are considered leaders in the movement rather than extremist radicals—who “fight for superiority rather than equality,” with some description/example of how they do so. I can certainly think of none.
What feminist, for example, has asked that women get more pay than men? That women should have more voting power? That women be hired more often than men? I do not recall any such claims. There are some people who claim that women would make better leaders, but no call whatsoever for any mechanism to make women exclusive leaders, no calls for superiority any more than would be the claim that better upper body strength in men making them better at professions that require it.
Without details or examples, I am facing an essentially blank reply, forcing me to do something I resent—trying to make your argument for you. It’s not fair to me nor to you. Not that I can resist, however—
A quick search on the Google finds a few examples of women claiming superiority, but they are people who are radical extremists which I would be astonished if even one out of a hundred Americans have ever heard of. I never heard their names or their theories before; I would think they would haven no influence on the common perception of feminism, considering that the really well-known, mainstream feminists are about equality and liberty, and not superiority.
Most claims I find of feminists being about superiority are, like yours, completely unevidenced. The few I find that provide details give quite specious claims. One I found, for example, said that feminists should rail against statistics that say that female students outperform male ones; another claimed that women are trying to be superior because far more money is raised to fight breast cancer than to fight prostate cancer. One even cited an article by a woman who quite plainly labeled herself “not a feminist.” Such arguments are not hard to completely trash with minimal effort—nor do they compose any substantial part of the popular feminist movement.
Now, if these are the examples you wish to bring, then you are simply making my point—that extreme examples are chosen, false arguments and exaggerations made, and then are said to represent the movement as a whole.
If not, then please explain.
^ and that, that is how you dismantle an argument. : )
> Without details or examples, I am facing an essentially blank reply, forcing me to do something I resent—trying to make your argument for you.
No-one expects that of you. Plus I suspect you’d pull your punches when fighting on my side.
After all, you’d be aiming at yourself. 
I’m not monitoring the feminism topic closely myself but I have a couple of friends who are, and they feed me information. I do believe that the feminism movement – a large part of it, an entrenched part of it – is fighting for a cause that has been won. Or they find it in their best interests to continue fighting.
There’s lots of articles written over the past year or so that my friends have supplied, but I don’t have them at my fingertips. But it does seem to me that women – at least women in highly urban areas of the USA – have not only achieved ‘equality’ but now some measure of ‘supremacy’ with men.
A quick google found me this article, for example:
http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274,00.html
“But now there’s evidence that the ship may finally be turning around: according to a new analysis of 2,000 communities by a market research company, in 147 out of 150 of the biggest cities in the U.S., the median full-time salaries of young women are 8% higher than those of the guys in their peer group.”
I heard that referenced in a televised panel of feminists a few months ago. Three of the four feminists were unning on the old-guard arguments and momentum of decades past. The other was mentioning current trends, like the above, and stopping them in their tracks. It was quite an eye-opener.
Education is another area where the women seem to, now, be miles ahead –
“For every two guys who graduate from college or get a higher degree, three women do. This is almost the exact opposite of the graduation ratio that existed when the baby boomers entered college. Studies have consistently shown that a college degree pays off in much higher wages over a lifetime, and even in many cases for entry-level positions. “These women haven’t just caught up with the guys,” says Chung. “In many cities, they’re clocking them.”
So there you go. I have seen other articles supplying facts along these lines.
In the white-collar urbanised sections of the USA, at least, the women have eliminated the gender gap and have come out ahead. Many educational institutions are now biased towards women. But the/some feminists are still pushing to defeat the ‘gender gap’, the glass ceiling and so forth, despite having already won.
Another issue is the increasing ‘victimisation’ of women for more and more trivial cases. A number of feminists shout out about the campus rapes, some universities – Canadian? – have been trying to impose mandatory ‘you should not rape girls’ lectures on male students, things like that, which on rational examination are HUGELY exaggerated. That’s extremism that’s already there to mock and denounce; a real-world reflection of your argument about conservatives needing to contrive artificial cases.
While I’m here, can you pass on my regards to Semprini? I used to send him Christmas wishes around this time of the year but I lost track of him a few years ago – the e-mail address I had for him bounced. Please give him my very best and tell him I still re-read his Harry Potter novels? He’s an excellent author. I do hope he’s doing well.
And Merry Christmas to you too!
Cheers, Brad.
Well, this just kind of brings me back to my original statement: the above gives me nothing to work with. Citing a source I can look up and read over myself allows me to answer specific points; however, just saying that your friends said this, and I read somewhere that, and it seems to me this other thing, only allows me to answer, “Nuh uh!” and not much else.
You do cite one specific article, however, and that single citation is all I have to go on for the quality of information you work from. You cited the TIME article as expressing information that was “stopping [a panel of feminists] in their tracks.”
It shouldn’t have. If you read beyond the first two paragraphs of that article, you will note that the statistic in which women make a whole 8% more than men only applies to “unmarried, childless women under 30 who live in cities.” That, my friend, is what you call “cherry-picking.”
First, this is the median full-time income of all workers—not a side-by-side comparison of men and women doing the exact same job at the exact same level with the exact same qualifications, and comparing their pay. Chung, the researcher who came up with the 8% figure, himself said, “It does not mean that a woman holding the same job and the same degree out-earns men.” (Source)
Second, we are talking about a relatively narrow range of a working career, only about a decade (assuming an average of 2 years of college), or about 25% or less of a lifetime of work.
Third, we are talking about women who are unmarried and childless and live in cities, which represents a subset of all women in that group. About half of all women are unmarried in their 20s, and about half of unmarried women have children in their 20’s. At most, about 75% live in the cities mentioned, probably less. So we’re talking about maybe a quarter of the female population at most.
Finally, we are talking only about what is the beginning of any career, most often hourly wages. It is quite possible that this may represent the fact that people starting more rewarding careers often begin with lower-paying jobs or even unpaid internships, while hourly wage earners will, despite low pay, get more money for work that has far less a reward later on.
In other words, if you look at maybe a quarter of the female population for only the first decade of their careers and make a rather broad generalization about income, you can barely eke out a single-digit advantage in their pay levels.
What the article does not say is that, if you compare men and women in comparable jobs with comparable qualifications, or if you take all men and all women over a lifetime, you will find that, everything else being equal, men earn more than women do. And if you researched the study you cited a little more, you would have found the very same researcher expressly admitting it. And the source I cite above notes that this pay disparity both exists and is significant. Women over 35 regularly make only 75% of what men make when all factors (education, experience, etc.) are equal.
You then go on to cite that same researcher’s thesis to explain that very limited area in which women earn a slight amount more than men: that women graduate from college more. In other words, when women have greater qualifications than men they are capable of earning more. Chung gave no evidence about how this travels over a lifetime, nor were his conclusions provable: he only took general information and pulled his conclusions from that. There is no evidence that the same group of women will continue to out-earn men, and even in the age group cited, men still are paid more than women for the same jobs.
In other words, the claim you make is false: this does not give any proof whatsoever that women are not discriminated against in terms of pay because of gender. Women have not eliminated the gender gap; in fact, the evidence we have shows the exact opposite.
Now, even if the factoid you presented were somehow proof that the gender gap had disappeared, it still would not prove your point that I challenged, namely that “a number of prominent, entrenched feminists” are pushing for “superiority.” You gave no reply to that.
Nor did you answer my most basic query, to name any well-known feminists who advance the agenda you claim they do.
I will definitely pass on the “Semprini” message, and thanks!