Anti-Feminists? Are you SERIOUS?

I am just so damned busy at the moment, ladies, which is why posts have been coming a little thin and slow, unlike my period which has reached Gaza levels of atrocity and is laying me low at the moment. Still finding time to work on Sally: A Fiction and am in heated contact with some Pornocrats - await my probing article on the sexualisation of just about damn well everything coming as-soon-as.

In the meantime, check out this great article at the Guardian Comment is Free. Normally content with spouting nonsense genderist tripe, they've finally managed to employ a proper writer in the form of Cath Elliot. In Beware the Anti-Feminists she delves into the frankly terrifying world of the US anti-feminist WOMEN-LEAD movement, 'True Woman', who in their MANifesto resolve to cultivate (her quote) "such virtues as purity, modesty, submission, meekness, and love" and "to encourage men as they seek to express godly masculinity, and to honour and support God-ordained male leadership in the home and in the church".

Apart from the fact that there's an ark full of God-wanking nonsense splattered all over their rhetoric, the position this aims to return women to is so utterly at odds with modern life and the advances of women's liberty that, along with Cath, I'm adamant that it'll only attract an absolute minority of weirdos. Here's their skank manifesto if you're interested, but really it's barely worth criticising. http://www.truewoman.com/assets/files/TW_Manifesto.pdf

What's really troubling are two other movements she discusses, Surrendered Wives and Taken in Hand. In the former, women are supposed to float back into Prelapsarian Bliss by attending to domestic chores and bejewelling their interior surfaces with cupcakes and pastel, the usual fare. In the latter, women are admonished to consent their husband's will, "which basically boils down to physical and sexual chastisement, up to and including rape, as punishment for the woman's transgressions." There's some masochistic stuff going on here which should appall anyone and everyone, and more of the tell-tell biblical hocus pocus that really makes these 'movements' stand out as complete shite.

Cath's criticisms of these movements should be considered as fine, done and dusted, easy to agree with, quick to condone, right? Or WRONG, according to a frightening amount of commenters who felt the need to parp their little thoughts after her sweeping report. SwiftBoy (Swift in which capacity, Boy? Fast to talk without thinking? The old premature ejaculation without consideration of one's partner? I expect both) makes the inane reply:

@Cath:
the men in our lives... if they can't handle a bit of dust on top of the telly and are seemingly incapable of doing anything about it themselves
Heh, how's the pilot light Cath, did Mr Elliott finally get it fixed after weeks of promising to?
As usual, my main gripe with your cheerful ramble through the outer fringes of rational thought would be along the lines of "if a woman chooses to be in one of these organisations, who are you to say she can't?"
Surely, if feminism has taught us one thing, it's that women can be who they want and choose for themselves, without having their choices questioned, isn't it?
Or is that two things?

I've made his writing smaller to match his brain. I've actually just checked his profile and he lists his interests as "Guitars, words, how things used to be." What a twat. I digress.

For a start, cheerful Miss Elliot was not. She was sombre and disgusted, as should you be SwiftBoy. Secondly, 'rational thought' is one of those 'universal' markers of judgement which anyone vaguely capable of critical thought should be more than able to query. Once it was thought 'rational' to kill children who were born with disabilities (see Plato's Republic, SwiftBoy) or to enslave prisoners of war and foreigners (see Aristotle, why don't you?). Finally, as Feminists and our like minded compatriots on the Left continually ask, what kind of choice are women really given in a social situation which embeds them with norms of submission and apathy before they have even reached puberty? The capacity to act as a 'free agent', which SwiftBoy so delightfully waves around like so much attack-jelly, is only made possible in a social and cultural system that allows women to act as free agents in the first place. That IS, to criticise their social order, to hold its values to scrutiny and to firmly refuse to occupy the place in it carved out by patriarchs, 'god', or any other idiot man.

Last week, a 15 year old girl was rescued from a paedophile she'd met on the internet and returned to her parents. Why did she run away, and why was it the right thing to do to separate them? Because sometimes people make choices as a free agent (which she clearly felt she was doing) which are reallyreallyreally bad for them. How do we know the choices are bad without the presence of a law to help us make a moral judgement? (the girl's age, in this case). We can begin by looking at whether the so-called choice puts the chooser into the position of a victim, sufferer or slave to the interests of another person who is making no similar sacrifice. Surely then, something is at work other than free will. Why have peoples around the world at various stages welcomed fascism? Not just for the great outfits and the sense of camaraderie, I'll tell you.

To SwiftBoy I say - check out Adorno, Deleuze-Guattarri, Horkheimer and, like, stop being so damn representative of public opinion! We'd be much better off without you.

To everyone else I say - find the SwiftBoy in your lives, he's bound to be there somewhere, maybe at work or lurking in a group of friends from college you really should have dropped, and destroy him. You can use my words if you like: as usual they are absolutely final.

Toodles!
xx