50 Shades of Feminism

Today I’m going to share an observation I’ve made over the past year. It involves the book (three books actually) “Fifty Shades of Grey” and the death of liberal-feminism. Here’s the bottom line: “Fifty Shades” is a watershed moment that has altered the course of inter-gender relations. Yep.

In many ways, my generation bore the brunt of feminism.

Liberal feminism (as distinguished from “conservative feminism”) has always been about economic power. Essentially, liberal feminists view women as economic inputs who need to out-earn men so they can take over the patriarchal power structure blah blah blah oppression! This is why feminists pushed the idea of divorce in the 1960s. They realized that women who married were much more likely to drop out of the workforce and become useless to the struggle. To fix this, they advocated a combination of birth control to stop women from being burdened with kids and no-fault divorce to weaken the marriage commitment so women would always keep one foot in the economic door. Basically, if you can’t trust your husband to be there, then you need to maintain an independent existence.

The effects of this hit in the 1970s and 1980s as many of the kids I grew up with became the first generation of kids from broken homes. It was a mess. Indeed, while feminists published politicized studies to try to convince the public that divorce was harmless to kids, it was obvious to all us that this wasn’t the case.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, feminism took the next step: de-feminization of girls. This was when young women were told that they were no good if they didn’t compete with men. If you didn’t play sports like the boys, you were a loser. If you didn’t want to be President or a CEO, you were a loser. Housewives are losers. . . oppressed cookie bakers. This was the time feminists began attacking things like makeup and high heels and Satan herself. . . Barbie. This was the age of gender neutral toys, of forcing girls to play soccer, and “try lesbianism. . . everybody’s doing it.” This was the time a number of feminists openly spewed ideas like “all sex is rape.” The early 1990s were also the point where you would meet womyn in law school who wanted to become “reproductive rights lawyers” or divorce lawyers who “only represent other women.” This was the time feminists claimed that 25% of all women had been raped and PSAs warned women that all middle-age white males were abusers. This was when there was a big push to make women keep their last names when they married – a trend which died in the 2000s – and when single-motherhood was celebrated.

This destroyed the dating scene for my generation. For one thing, many women responded to the above by becoming neurotic man-haters. But even beyond them, there was tremendous confusion. No one understood the new rules - some women viewed common courtesies as oppressive or sexist. None of the males I knew wanted one of these de-feminized creatures and most of the women didn’t want to be like that, but it was so pounded into people that this was expected that few dared say otherwise. The result was that my generation married later and, of all the women I’ve spoken too, the women of my generation are the most unhappy and are uniquely uneasy about their sexuality. . . I haven’t found this in any other generation.

Anyway, around that time, I discovered a female underground. There seemed to be a large number of women who really hated the feminists and the feminist vision of what they should be. They were, however, afraid to speak out for fear that other women would be nasty to them. Conservatives weren’t a helpful alternative either. So they had no voice.

By the 2000s, however, liberal feminism was killing itself with its owing idiocy. It’s one thing to say that women are treated unfairly, it’s quite another to whine that the English language oppresses you or to claim that all men are rapists. It also seemed that women weren’t particularly happy with the demands liberal feminists were placing on them. This was when I noticed the rise of a new branch of feminism, which fits with the modern “conservative-feminist” view of feminism. These women describe themselves as “feminists” but see feminism as being about giving women the same choices men have to chart their own courses. They don’t buy into the competition theory of liberal-feminism, nor do they want to de-feminize women or emasculate men. But they also don’t buy the “promiscuous women are evil” routine of the Bill Bennetts and Rick Santorums.

In short order, this view appears to have become the vast-majority view of the American public. What’s kept this group off the radar screens, however, is that the MSM is dominated by liberal-feminists and the conservative opposition is dominated by the so-cons, and neither group wants to acknowledge this “silent majority” who reject both ideological camps. Moreover, this group has no leader and hasn’t had an event to galvanize them and to expose how large their support really is, e.g. the Stonewall riots for gays, Selma for blacks, publication of “The Feminine Mystique” for feminists, etc.

Then came “Fifty Shades of Grey.” This book has caused a silent revolution.

“Fifty Shades” is about a woman who decides she wants to submit sexually to some guy. This is interesting because the idea of a woman submitting to a man flies in the face of liberal feminism in a big bad way because it fundamentally rejects the one commandment of liberal feminism: women are worthless unless they try to dominate men. What makes this book REALLY interesting, however, is its popularity. “Fifty Shades” has sold 70 million copies, which is a monster amount these days, and they’re making a movie. More importantly, this is one of those rare books which people know even if they haven’t read it. Even more importantly, women ARE admitting they’ve read it, and what’s more, they’re talking about it openly. They’re talking about it in book clubs, on blogs, and on television. You may recall me mentioning that I’ve spoken to bunches of women Rush hates, well, they all talked about this book too at one point or another. . . they’re all fascinated by this book. This never could have happened in the 1990s. In fact, I doubt this book would have been published in the 1990s. And if it had, feminists and their allies in the media would have silenced the book as hateful, sexist and anti-woman. And I certainly can’t imagine women in the 1990s, who were cowed by feminists, admitting they’d read it. But now they are.

Now, before you get the wrong idea, I should point out that I don’t think this means vast numbers of American women are looking to become sex slaves. Far from it. Indeed, the conversations I had never went like that. What I found instead was that women are using the book as an opportunity to ditch the idea that women need to compete with men and that all relationships need to be equal. In effect, this book has become the catalyst for making it acceptable for women to declare that they’re ok with women letting their husbands run their relationships. . . if that’s what they want.

That sentence is the key point. It’s key because it tells us what is really going on here.

These women are using this book as a catalyst to change the course of feminism away from the anti-male garbage of liberal-feminism and toward the supposed original purpose of feminism: freedom of choice for women. In other words, this is not a rejection of feminism, it is instead a reformation. These average women are basically saying, feminism is about choice and they want all the choices. . . not just the approved choices. And in so doing, they are rejecting the very basis of liberal feminism. Frankly, I see this as being as significant as if blacks suddenly rejected affirmative action and all the other things the race lobby have demanded and they instead declared an intent to see the world as color-blind. Same thing here. Moreover, this appears to be a mass movement, even if it hasn’t been covered by the MSM. . . like the Tea Party, the liberal-feminist MSM is blind to this.

Ultimately, what I think this means is that conservative-feminists have won. The public has decided that genuine freedom of choice is the order of the day and they are done politicizing sex. Naturally, ivory-tower feminists will still rant about the phallus lurking under their beds and pulpit-conservatives will rant against promiscuous women destroying the fabric of once-great America, but I don’t think the public is listening anymore, and I think historians will look back at this book as the moment everything changed.

Thoughts?