Tag: Eleanor Smeal

That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore

An amusing tale of two wanna-be comedians unfolded in the Feminist Majority Foundation’s daily news wire the past couple weeks.

When Slim-Fast dropped Whoopi Goldberg after her round of Bush and Dick jokes at a fundraiser for John Kerry, the Feminist Majority Foundation defended her, noting that “a company spokesperson refused to say whether there was a decrease in sales because of the remarks” and added,

Goldberg was a featured speaker at the massively successful March for Women’s Lives on April 25, which brought more than one million women and men to Washington, DC in support of reproductive rights.

Less than a week later, however, when California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger alluded to the Saturday Night Live skit that used to parody him and referred to California legislators as “girlie men” the Feminist Majority Foundation was suddenly offended at such humor, headlining its coverage of Schwarzenegger’s remarks with “Governor Schwarzenegger Unapologetic for Sexist, Homophobic Remark.” According to the report,

Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, commented on the misogyny that underlies the governor’s comment: “Women are strong. And to denigrate half the human race is pretty sick. But that’s what he’s doing. He’s trying to denigrate the males by denigrating females.”

Ah, the fresh smell of hypocrisy in the morning.

Source:

Slim-Fast drops Whoopi Goldberg after anti-Bush jokes. Feminist Daily News Wire, July 15, 2004.

Governor Schwarzenegger Unapologetic for Sexist, Homophobic Remark. Feminist Daily News Wire, July 19, 2004.

Mary Daly’s Feminist Vision of Gendercide

In a post this month about a satirical essay by Martha Burk on controlling male fertility, weblogger Glenn Reynolds offered this parenthetical remark,

Though if you think that calling Burk’s piece “satire” changes the face of feminism you’re showing your ignorance. There are other writings by academic feminists calling for the elimination of men and similar absurdities in dead earnest, though at nearly midnight I’m not going to run them down. But as a guy who once edited Catharine MacKinnon, I know a bit about this stuff.

Barry Deutsch then challenged Reynolds as to whether there are really academic feminists who have called for the complete elimination of men. Reynolds turns up references in Mary Ann Warren’s “Gendercide,” which Deutsch says isn’t good enough.

Well, there is one academic feminist who is both a fan of parthenogenesis and advocates the elimination of men (and most women) — Mary Daly. Until a few years ago, Daly was a professor at Boston College. She was finally forced out there because she refused to allow men to participate in her classroom.

Daly has long advocated for research into parthenogenesis to dispense with men. Her book, Quintessence, is half-science fiction novel, half bizarre manifesto in which she explicitly lays out her views. Daly herself is a character in the book who visits a utopian continent where — thanks to the influence of Daly’s books — a lesbian elite reproduce solely through parthenogenesis.

And there is no doubt that Daly considers this both desirable and possible. Here’s Daly from a 2001 interview with What Is Enlightenment magazine (emphasis added),

WIE: In your latest book, Quintessence, you describe a utopian society of the future, on a continent populated entirely by women, where procreation occurs through parthenogenesis, without participation of men. What is your vision for a postpatriarchal world? Is it similar to what you described in the book?

MD: You can read Quintessence and you can get a sense of it. It’s a description of an alternative future. It’s there partly as a device and partly because it’s a dream. There could be many alternative futures, but some of the elements are constant: that it would be women only; that it would be women generating the energy throughout the universe; that much of the contamination, both physical and mental, has been dealt with.

WIE: Which brings us to another question I wanted to ask you. Sally Miller Gearhart, in her article, ‘The Future, If There is One, Is Female,” writes: “At least three further requirements supplement the strategies of environmentalists if we were to create and preserve a less violent world. 1) Every culture must begin to affirm the female future. 2) Species responsibility must be returned to women in every culture. 3) The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately ten percent of the human race.” What do you think about this statement?

MD: I think it’s not a bad idea at all. If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males. People are afraid to say that kind of stuff anymore.

Of course, what Daly is advocating here is nothing short of gendercide, and yet Daly is taken seriously by radical feminists.

Radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, for example, called Quintessence a “masterpiece.” When the Boston College controversy erupted, Daly’s supporters held a fundraiser called “A Celebration of the Work of Mary Daly” which included Diane Bell, Director of Women’s Studies at the George Washington University; Mary Hunt, Co-Director of the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual; Frances Kissling, President of Catholics for a Free Choice, and others. Daly also counted Eleanor Smeal, Gloria Steinem, and other feminists outside of academia in her corner.

The press release announcing the celebration explicitly includes Quintessence as one of Daly’s celebrated works. Can you imagine for a second the outrage if men in and outside of academia got together to celebrate the works of a misogynist who complained of female “contamination” and advocated “a drastic reduction of the population of females”?

And that, in a nutshell, is what is wrong with contemporary feminism — that such nutcases are not only tolerated but openly celebrated. And they still wonder why so few college-aged women want to self-identify themselves as “feminists.”

Source

Mary Daly event in Washington, DC, Jan. 29, 2001. Mary Hunt, E-mail press release, Jan. 10, 2001.

The Thin Thread Of Conversation: An Interview With Mary Daly. Catherine Madsen, Cross Currents, Fall 2000.

Change Agents in the Church: Mary Daly. Rev. Joan Gelbein, Unitarian Universalist Church of Arlington, Sunday, January 7, 2001.

Raising Questions about RAWA

Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, a group called the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) received a lot of media coverage. With its rhetoric about freeing Afghanistan’s women from oppression, its smuggled videotapes of atrocities against women, and the imprimatur of Western feminists, RAWA was the perfect group for the media to contrast with the misogynistic Taliban. But along the way there were some voices of caution about RAWA which culminated in an article earlier this month in The American Prospect which raised some disturbing questions about RAWA.

Wendy McElroy first raised concerns about RAWA back on October 23, 2001 when she questioned what was happening to money that the Feminist Majority Foundation and others were raising and giving to RAWA.

Noting that RAWA had clearly done some very good things, McElroy nonetheless questioned the wisdom of involvement with a group that had appeared to have close ties with Pakistan’s Communist Party. Moreover, the group had almost no accountability with only a P.O. box in Pakistan as an address and the routine use of false names in interviews. McElroy conceded that some secrecy was warranted due to fear of retaliation by the Taliban, but most groups like RAWA at least have some sort of open political structure (even terrorist groups generally have some sort of open, above ground representatives) and urged RAWA to pursue openness.

RAWA did not take that advice. And then on April 20, 2002 a very odd thing happened. As well-chronicled by The American Prospect’s Noy Thrupkaew, on that date Elizabeth Miller, a U.S.-based supporter of RAWA, posted a letter attacking Ms. magazine on a listserv run by RAWA. Ms. had run a special insert on the Feminist Majority Foundation’s Afghanistan campaign which profiled women working at the United Nations and a number of other similar “behind the scenes”-style looks, but failed to mention RAWA. For this, it was attacked as being a “mouthpiece of hegemonic, U.S.-centric, ego driven, corporate feminism.”

The letter also attacked Sima Sama, who was at the time Afghanistan’s interim minister of women’s affairs. Miller claimed that Samar “was a member of the leadership of one of the most notorious fundamentalist factions Hezb-e Wahdat.” As Thrupkaew puts it,

Some probing, however, finds little evidence that Samar has anything to do with Hezb-e Wahdat. Rather, what comes to light is a pattern of RAWA-led smear campaigns against other Afghan women who rise to prominence.

In The American Prospect article, Thrupkaew documents a persistent habit of RAWA attacking Afghan women with absurd charges. In each case the real crime committed by the women is that they have risen to a prominence that RAWA apparently feels threatened by.

The Feminist Majority Foundation comes across as genuinely shocked by RAWA’s reckless charges. FMF’s Jennifer Jackman lamely tells Thrupkaew that FMF did refute the attacks, but did not do so publicly. Which, of course, gives the impression to the casual observer that FMF does not disagree with RAWA’s absurd charge.

Which takes us back to McElroy’s earlier comments on the group’s links to Pakistan’s Communist movement. Because, of course, we have seen RAWA-style tactics before. In fact, reading through the back and forth petty feuds and accusations is like reading some old account of internal conflict at a gathering of Trotskyists.

Thrupkaew notes that RAWA’s behavior has fueled rumors that the group is really controlled by a group of men who are Maoists or Communists, and certainly their behavior is exactly the sort of rigid thinking characterized by such groups.

Either way, the Feminist Majority Foundation should be ashamed of itself for keeping its refutation of RAWA’s attacks “within the family.” It is interesting that the FMF emphasizes the fact that it does not gloss over the Northern Alliance’s failings, but it is apparently more than willing to do so when it comes to the highly questionable actions of an Afghan feminist group. When Eleanor Smeal finally wakes up and realizes there’s something wrong with that sort of double standard, we’ll actually be getting somewhere.

Sources:

What do Afghan women want? Noy Thrupkaew, The American Prospect, August 5, 2002.

Afghan Women’s Group Raises More Questions Than Answers. Wendy McElroy, IFeminists.Com, October 23, 2001.

The Silence Surrounding RAWA. Wendy McElroy, IFeminists.Com, August 20, 2002.

Feminists and the War Against the Taliban

In an op-ed piece for The Washington Post, Amy Holmes wonders why the National Organization for Women seems to be largely ignoring the United States’ war against the Taliban.

Holmes notes that NOW did put out a press release a few days ago quoting NOW Action Vice President Olga Vives saying, “In this time of national and global turmoil, the reasons we celebrate Coming Out Day are more visible and more important than ever,” but aside for demanding more money for Afghani refugee camps in Pakistan, NOW is silent about the U.S. attack on Afghanistan.

Which is weird since if you search on “Afghanistan” in NOW’s web search engine, you will find numerous press releases condemning the Taliban, including on urging the world to Stop the Abuse of Women and Girls in Afghanistan! But now that a Republican president is actually attempting to end the Taliban regime, there’s not a peep.

Holmes contrasts this with Eleanor Smeal and the Feminist Majority Foundation which maintains that “the United States has a unique obligation to end the Taliban’s atrocities toward women” and explicitly calls for the United States to remove the Taliban and replace it with a constitutional democracy which will guarantee the rights of women in Afghanistan. Though that may not be possible — although the Northern Alliance, the main threat to the Taliban, is certainly an improvement over the Taliban, they are hardly a group of liberal democratic constitutionalists.

Holmes doesn’t mention it, but the obvious question is whether or not NOW would maintain this weird silence over the war in Afghanistan had it been prosecuted by Bill Clinton or Al Gore. The few things NOW has released related to the terrorism attacks are meshed in with NOW’s theme of fighting George W. Bush and the Right. I suspect that for NOW giving Bush credit for trying a government run by misogynistic religious fanatics simply wouldn’t mesh very well with their theme that Bush is “like a vampire who will suck our rights away” as Patricia Ireland described him last October.

Source:

Feminism goes to battle. Amy Holmes, The Washington Post, October 14, 2001.