… for The Pompous Git. In March, he released Dr John Young’s memoir, Going Down Another Lane. On 1 July, John’s sister Heather Goodare’s Foiled Creative Fire will be publically available. Yesterday the press proof of This Gardening Life arrived from IngramSpark. In researching the many essays on science and climate change The Git penned on his old blog, he discovered the entry for when he started This Gardening Life — it was in 2002! From the same era:
Feminism is one of those words that contains an apparent self-contradiction. My free Word Web dictionary defines it as”: A doctrine that advocates equal rights for women”. Not “equal rights for people, regardless of sex, colour, marital status, age etc”. Just… women. By implication that means non-women, that is men, should not have equal rights. If it is meant to stand for “equal rights for everyone,” we already have a perfectly good word for that: “egalitarian”. So, the word feminism is either redundant, or about anything but equality, or equal rights.
The early agenda of the feminists in the 1960s and 70s was apparently a logical extension of the suffragette movement that resulted in women achieving the vote and property rights. The demands of the new movement in the early 1970s were for:
* equal pay
* equal employment opportunity
* free contraceptive services
* abortion on demand
* free 24-hour childcare
The Whitlam government in Australia, before being effectively torpedoed by the CIA, managed to introduce legislation to provide equal pay for equal work and significant moves were afoot regarding the rest. Since Australia, like the US, is a federation of states, the provision of equal pay for federal employees affected only that minority employed by the federal government. Nevertheless, the Women’s Electoral Lobby had proved itself a potent political force in a major federal election and continued to have similar effect on subsequent state elections, as well as public opinion. There were few who took South Australian, John Petch’s “lunatic fringe” label seriously. In The Git’s instance, it made him want to vote for the “lunatic fringe” on the grounds that the lunatics currently in charge were noticeably deficient by most measures!
The demand for equal pay met with considerable approval from many, if not most. Women who performed the same task as a man to the same measure of competency, logically should receive the same remuneration. The Git often made the observation at the time that if there were to be a financial reward for belonging to a particular sex, then women should be the recipients, not men. The women in his employ were more punctual, less likely to turn up to work inebriated/hungover, had fewer absences and were less inclined to leave without notice. They never achieved the same heights of performance as the best of the men, but were far more consistent from day-to-day and week-to-week. They were generally also far less demanding of my time and easier to get along with.
Similarly, there was little real opposition to the concept of equal employment opportunity. The Git remembers a Swede with a degree in shop-window dressing immigrating to South Australia, but being denied employment because as a woman, she could not join the trades union. She was likely the only qualified shop-window dresser in the whole of Australia! Such farces were widely publicised in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the pressure generally had its desired effect.
The demand for free contraceptive services was a declaration of the real motives behind the feminist agenda. They were clearly socialist. Access to contraceptives was pretty widespread already: Australian women more avidly took up the new contraceptive pill than most other places. They also made maximum use of the freedom from unwanted pregnancy this provided. Quite why an inexpensive, readily available commodity should be provided at no cost to fifty percent of users was never made entirely clear to me, then or now.
The Git recalls his first visit to Hobart in 1970. His lady friend, Eve, suggested he pop into Hobart’s only all-night pharmacy for some contraceptives, but the pharmacist was a Roman Catholic and didn’t stock them. Since we were far from lacking the imagination of the Women’s Electoral Lobby, we employed at least one (and probably more!) of the myriad free alternatives to inserting my penis into her vagina. Sexist that he is, The Git recalls only how we satisfied Eve’s sexual needs! [it was incidentally completely free and it boggles the mind as to how it could be subsidised by the government!]
Abortion on demand was and remains very controversial. The Git had the unfortunate task of assisting two of his friends to obtain abortions while they were still illegal. They were not backyard operations, being performed by qualified doctors, but were a traumatic experience for The Git and the girls in question. Abortion can be justified on the grounds that a woman should have the right to not have a parasite inhabit her body, but it remains far too close to murder for comfort. The only real beneficiaries in the process were the doctors who charged exorbitant fees for the operation and the police who extorted much of the fees in return for turning a blind eye.
The Git had no problem countenancing the need for child-care, though again whether it should be free is questionable, if only because nothing is free. Someone must pay — the question was: who? There can be no doubt that society as a whole benefits from its children. A society that doesn’t reproduce will wither away, as is now clearly happening in Australia with government-subsidised child care. We no longer reproduce at a rate sufficient to maintain the current population. This particular issue deserves more than today’s passing mention and certainly more than the amount of thought The Git has devoted to it so far.
So, that was the first round of demands from the Women’s Electoral Lobby that The Git has taken to represent the broad demands of the feminist movement in the 1970s. True, they have not been fully met, particularly in the area of equal pay for equal work. Presumably a more rational society than ours would have come up with a reasonable compromise on each issue for all concerned. But, having gained a significant voice, electorally and in the media, the feminist movement was only barely started in the 1970s.
During the intervening 30 years, the feminists have redefined some of those earlier demands. Equal employment opportunity, while regrettably not fully met, has been replaced by a demand for what is called Affirmative Action. There are many occupations that most women have no particular interest in performing, just as there are occupations that most men have no particular interest in performing. This has aroused the ire of the modern feminist who demands that something must be done about this lamentable state of affairs. That something is intended to overcome a supposed imbalance between the sexes in certain occupations. The correct balance is taken to be the same as the relative proportion of the sexes in the population.
Achieving this “balance” requires compulsion. In the medical profession, for instance, it is a fact that women are far more attracted to paediatrics than surgery. Artificially boosting the number of female surgeons by either lowering the standards required for women, or increasing the standards required of men, affects far more than the ratio between the sexes. It creates two classes of surgeons, the females with a lower average competency and males with a higher average competency. Given a choice, the sensible among us will choose the male surgeon ahead of the female, even when, all other things being equal, we have an urge to prefer the female. The Git, for instance, finds conversation with women often far more congenial than with men, not to mention finding them visually more attractive.
This lowering of the relative standards for women is to my mind degrading to the women who would have succeeded without Affirmative Action. Further, it undermines the principle of equal pay for equal work. If the work of female surgeons is on average demonstrably inferior to that of male surgeons, then this ought to be reflected in their remuneration being less. This is far removed from the concept of equality in the demands of WEL back in the 1970s — it is deliberately introducing inequality, while calling it equality.
This warping of language and meaning was recognised by George Orwell and his novel 1984 makes excellent reading, especially during this time of decreasing freedom. The demand that certain words no longer be used, or only be used in certain ways, is a restriction on freedom of speech. Such demands are a primary characteristic of totalitarian political systems and the most widely recognised totalitarian system is that once employed by the Nazis in Germany. Hence, those of us that recognise today’s feminism for what it truly is, name it so: Feminazism. It should be pointed out that there are Feminazis of both sexes — all are opposed to true equality of opportunity and freedom. Saying that oppression is for our own good, does not make it so.
Thought for the day:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercized for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
C. S. Lewis
The Pompous Git 