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Title: Feminism as fascism
Author: Bob Black
Date: 1983
Language: en
Topics: feminism
Source: Retrieved on October 1, 2009 from http://www.inspiracy.com/black/abolition/feminism.html

Bob Black

Feminism as fascism

As the title of a childhood classic points out, Pigs is Pigs — and this

regardless of the shape of their genitals. Ilse Koch was a Nazi, not a

“sister.” Love is not hate, war is not peace, freedom is not slavery,

and book-burning is not liberatory. Anti-authoritarians who would be

revolutionaries confront many difficult questions. First, though, they

should answer the easy ones correctly.

All hyperbole and metaphor aside, what passes for “radical feminism” is

fascism. It promotes chauvinism, censorship, maternalism,

pseudo-anthropology, scapegoating, mystical identification with nature,

tricked-up pseudo-pagan religiosity, enforced uniformity of thought and

even appearance (in some quarters, Hera help the ectomorphic or

“feminine” feminist!). Here is all of the theory and too much of the

practice we should all be able to recognize by now. An ominous tactical

continuity with classical fascism, also, is the complementarity between

private-vigilantist and statist methods of repression. Thus Open Road,

the Rolling Stone of anarchism, applauded some anti-porn actions in

Vancouver (not as direct action, hence understandable even if

misdirected, but rather) because they encouraged lethargic prosecutors

to persecute. In post-World War I Italy (the suppression of the IWW in

America followed a similar pattern), fascist gangs attacked socialist

and trade-union organizations with the tacit approval of the police, who

never intervened except against the left. As I once wonderingly asked:

“How come these women won’t get in bed with any man except the DA?”

Not that I could care less about the porn-for-profit industry, for its

“rights” of free speech or property. That is beside the point, which is:

why single out this species of business? To target porn bespeaks

planning and priorities, not elemental anticapitalist spontaneity. Those

who carry out a calculated policy can’t complain if their reasons are

asked for, and questioned.

Fascist ideology always incongruously asserts to its audience, its

chosen people, that they are at one and the same time oppressed and

superior. The Germans didn’t really lose the First World War — how could

they? ex hypothesi they are superior — therefore, they were stabbed in

the back. (But how could a superior race let such a situation arise in

the first place?) Men (only), we are told in a feminist/Anti-Porn

Movement (APM) diatribe in Toronto’s Kick It Over, “have created the

nature-destroying and woman-hating culture.” If so, then either women

have contributed absolutely nothing to culture, or there is something

more or something else to this culture than destroying nature and hating

women.

For their own purposes (some of which are as mundane as sexual rivalry

with straight men for the women they both desire), self-styled radical

feminists actually reduce women to nothing but helpless, cringing

near-vegetables, passive victims of male contempt and coercion. This

profoundly insults women in a way which the worst patriarchal ideologies

— the Jewish notion of woman as a source of pollution, for instance, or

the Christian nightmare of woman as temptress and uncontrollable sexual

nature-force — fell short of. They defamed woman as evil but could

hardly regard her as powerless. The new woman-as-victim stereotype is

not only directly traceable to nineteenth century Victorian patriarchal

attitudes reducing (bourgeois) women to inert ornaments, but by denying

to women the creative power inherent in everyone, it places women’s

demands on a par with those advanced for, say, baby seals.

Suppose instead what only the most demented feminists and misogynists

deny, that things aren’t quite that bad, that women have been subjects

as well as objects of history. Then how can women — or any other

subordinated group: workers, blacks, indigenous peoples — be entirely

acquitted of all complicity in the arrangements which condemn them to

domination? There are reasons for these accommodations. There is no

excuse for denying their existence.

This isn’t sour grapes. It has never bothered me that some women dislike

men, even to the point of having nothing to do with them. I don’t like

most men myself, especially the archetypal “masculine” ones. I can’t

help but notice, though, that the vast majority of women feel otherwise.

The radical feminists have noticed it too, and it drives them to

distraction. I would be the first to agree that vast majorities can be

wrong. If they weren’t we would be the fringe loonies, the impotent

kooks that almost everyone thinks we are. But then I criticize

majorities, I don’t pretend to speak for them. Radical feminists, in

contrast, are vanguardists. As such they need to rationalize their

animosities, and so they have — making a dick-determinist demonology out

of their prejudices. As man-haters they can’t help but be women-haters

too.

To equate pornography with rape — beneath the rancorous rhetorical

froth, this seems to be the core APM axiom — is presumably intended to

make porn seem more serious. And yet, if men call the shots and the

system’s built-in tendency (as we’re told) is to denature oppositional

initiatives of which the feminists’ is the most revolutionary, then the

likely result is rather to make rape seem more trivial. It’s the old

story of the woman who cried wolf. (Similarly, the manipulative media

line that “anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism” worked wonders to sanitize

Israel until its expansionism-cum-exterminism engendered anti-Zionists

who just might proceed to take the B’nai B’rith defamationists at face

value.)

According to feminoid epistemology, men understand nothing of the real

nature of women. One might logically suppose that the estrangement of

the sexes resulting from disparate roles and discrimination would work

both ways, and so most of us attending to our actual experiences

reluctantly conclude. But no: men don’t understand women, but women (at

any rate their radical feminist vanguard) understand men. Women —

feminist experts, anyway — understand pornography and its meaning for

men much better than the men who write and read it — and

lesbian-separatists, who avoid men and decline to have sex with them,

appreciate these verities best of all. The more remote your experience

is from the real life of actual men, the better you understand it.

Turning this around, isn’t the Pope, as he claims, the ultimate

authority on women and sexuality?

The asserted connection of porn with rape is allegorical, not empirical.

As a correlation it compares with the recently revived “reefer madness”

marijuana-to-heroin Rake’s (Rapist’s?) Progress line in absurdity no

less than in suitability for the state’s purposes. If feminism didn’t

exist, conservative politicians would have had to invent it. (Why, pray

tell, did all-male legislatures ever criminalize “obscenity” in the

first place? And why do all-male courts arbitrarily exclude it from

constitutional protection?) APM harpies, should they ever deal with

people instead of their own fevered projections, would discover that

porn is of no interest to the majority of post-pubescent males — not

because they are politically correct, but just because it’s obviously

gross, sleazy, and above all, inferior to the real thing.

The feminist book-burners are cowardly opportunists. If what they object

to is subliminal socialization of women into subservient roles vis-a-vis

men (curiously, adopting the same roles vis-a-vis butch lesbians is

harmless fun), their primary, near-preemptive preoccupation would have

to be Cosmopolitan, Barbara Courtland romances, and the vast

crypto-pornographic pop literature written for and snapped up by women.

After all, the gore and violence are derivative: only victims can be

victimized in any way. Fifteen years ago, the original women’s

liberationists (subsequently switched like changelings with today’s

priestesses, lawyers and upscale bureaucrettes) at least lashed out at

influential enemies like Hugh Hefner and Andy Warhol. Nowadays they

terrorize teenage punk anarchists (this anecdote is from The Match!)

whose collages insinuate that Margaret Thatcher for instance is a ruler,

the “mother of a thousand dead,” not a “sister.” Such is the logic of

this bizarre biological determinism: any animal equipped with a vagina

is one of Us, any prick-privileged person is one of Them. One can only

echo The Firesign Theatre: “Who am us, anyway?”

Male leftists, for instance, are easy and often willing yes-men to

feminist aggrandizement. They combine guilt at past improprieties (by

and large, those who feel guilty — toward women, blacks, foreigners,

whatever — usually are) with a present ambition to get into the

leftist-feminists’ pants. Thus Berkeley, California (to which I am

adjacent) is crawling with male “feminists” who converted the easier to

get laid. Much the same scam seems to be happening in Toronto and,

doubtless, many other places. These ulterior ambitions obviously don’t,

in themselves, discredit the ideologies to which they are appended — one

can come to the right conclusion for the worst of reasons. But insofar

as the opinions at issue certainly seem to be idiotic to anyone without

extraneous interest in embracing them, otherwise inexplicable paroxysms

by male intellectuals seem to be most plausibly explainable as

self-interested insincere rationalizations.

Possibly the ideology I’ve excoriated is something that people had to

work through in order to free themselves to the extent necessary to

venture upon a project of collective liberation. Already alumnae of

feminism have moved on to the common quest for freedom, and some are the

better for what they’ve been through. We all have our antecedent

embarrassments (Marxism, libertarianism, syndicalism, Objectivism, etc.)

to put behind us: had we not thought in ideological terms it’s hard to

believe we’d ever get to the point where we could think for ourselves.

To be a Trotskyist or a Jesuit is, in itself, to be a believer, that is

to say, a chump. And yet a rigorous romp through any system might show

the way out of the master-System itself.

Not likely, however, when women critics are ostracised as renegades

while male critics are ignored or defamed as a matter of principle. (A

precisely parallel mechanism for maintaining a conspiracy of silence is

worked by Zionists: Gentile critics are “Anti-Semites,” Jewish critics

can only be consumed by “Jewish self-hatred.”) Separatism may be absurd

as a social program and riddled with inconsistencies (scarcely any

separatists separate from patriarchal society to anything like the

extent that, say, survivalists do — and nobody intervenes more to mind

other people’s business than separatists). But semi-isolation makes it

easier to indoctrinate neophytes and shut out adverse evidence and

argument, an insight radical feminists share with Moonies, Hare Krishna,

and other cultists. It’s fortunate that their doctrines and subculture

as initially encountered are so unappetizing. Indeed, I’ve noticed a

graying of radical feminism: as Sixties politics and culture continue to

gutter out, less and less women have had the proper pre-soak preparing

them for feminist brainwashing. Radical feminists (so called) in their

early 20’s are rare, and getting scarcer.

Radical feminism (no point disputing title to the phrase with its

present owners), then, is a ludicrous, hate-filled, authoritarian,

sexist, dogmatic construct which revolutionaries accord an unmerited

legitimacy by taking it seriously at all. It is time to stop matronizing

these terrorists of the trivial and hold them responsible for preaching

genocidal jive and practicing every evil (even, if the truth be told,

rape!) they insist has been inflicted on them (or rather, as it usually

turns out, on some other suppositious “sister”: the typical radical

feminist has it pretty good). How to thwart femino-fascism? That’s easy:

just take feminists at face value and treat them as equals... then hear

them howl! The Empress has no clothes... and that’s what I call obscene.