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Feminism, Keep Your Filthy Hands Off My Wife

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A new feminist proposal has surfaced at the Daily Telegraph: Penalize women for staying at home with their children. This is why feminism can’t have nice things—like, for example, the respect of women. A steadily increasing number of women are rejecting the ideology. And it’s high time men do too.
My colleague Jennifer Hartline sums up the Telegraph proposal at The Stream:
The Daily Telegraph recently published a piece by Sarrah Le Marquand in which she says it should be illegal for mothers to stay at home once their children are school-aged. She draws on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) recent report which said mothers “would be better off putting their skills to use in paid employment.”
Hartline goes on to analyze the central arguments of the Daily Telegraph piece: That feminists should drop the outdated notion that feminism is about “choice” rather than a sort of equality that amounts to State-enforced androgyny, and that ultimately women should “held accountable” to the modern State rather than to themselves, their God, and their families.
As Hartline writes, “We all know the only ‘choice’ liberal feminism allows women is to kill the child in the womb.” That’s old news. But the strict logic of pro-abortion feminism also threatens to delete the biological realities of manhood and womanhood as if they were nothing but bugs in an ultimately sexless, restrictive utopia in the making.
“We can’t just shrug and say this kind of coercion could never happen in America,” Hartline concludes:
We have abandoned the truth that marriage is between a man and a woman for life, for the benefit of their children. We’ve forgotten that the family is the first cell of society. The adults’ wants now outweigh the children’s needs, so we’re well on our way. When the State becomes god, then get ready for the Work Force and all the tyranny that comes with it.
Jennifer Hartline is not alone. More and more women are opting out of feminism as currently constituted, with its radical abortion advocacy, its misandry, and its hatred of the unique gifts of womanhood.
Last week I cited my friend Carly Hoilman of the Conservative Review, who says the common feminist claim “that motherhood is a barrier to living a full life” ignores “the stories of countless women and families whose lives were enriched by this unique call to sacrifice.”
The Stream’s Liberty McArtur argues that while women in America certainly do face some male misogyny, “we already have all the empowerment we need to fight back, work hard, and prove the sexists, misogynists and chauvinists wrong.”
Amanda Prestigiacomo of the Daily Wire, herself a champion on behalf of women oppressed under Sharia law, has written that “the feminist movement in America is essentially useless, constantly ignoring actual oppression of women to scream about the ‘right’ to kill unborn babies.”
Throughout the “Women’s March” events of the past two months, numerous other female commentators expressed their disapproval of the organization’s agenda, which is every bit as hostile to dissenting women as it ever was to the so-called “patriarchy.”
Outside the world of professional conservative commentators, there has also been a recent groundswell of apolitical women who express similar sentiments. In a recent trend on some social media platforms, women posted “selfies” along with messages that began “I don’t need feminism because.…” Examples included “it reinforces the men as agents/women as victims dichotomy,” “a victim complex is not empowering,” and “I believe in unconditional love and respect for all human beings….”
It also bears repeating that, as Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser recently pointed out to me, even women who consider themselves part of the “Women’s March” movement are almost certainly more moderate than the event organizers and spokeswomen. “At a minimum, it is almost certain that they reject [abortion]after 20 weeks.
Feminists Bully Good Women. Men Should Stick Up for Them!
Too many men have been convinced that questioning radical feminism will get them labeled as misogynists. But the time has passed for that kind of timidity. Good women like the ones I cited above now have to defend themselves against radicals who hate them for who they are, and men shouldn’t leave them to fight alone on the front lines.
When feminist logic leads to literally threatening to jail wrong-thinking women, it’s past time for men to respond forcefully as well: “Feminism, keep your filthy hands off!”