Views from the Abyss #26: Feminism

If you were to ask me what the greatest potential threat to civilisation we face in the modern world is...

What am I saying, 'if'?

Q. What is the greatest potential threat to civilisation we face in the modern world?

A. Feminism.

Definitely not a terrorist organisation

Now let me preface this by reminding everyone that while the base assertions of academic ideologies can assist in leading one to some interesting insight into the reasoning behind certain social interactions and phenomena, the base assertions themselves should never be taken literally, and the conclusions drawn should never be mistaken for actual explanations for individual instances of a given behaviour or phenomena, or a call to action over society-level issues that have been identified as requiring fixing.

Such academic insights provide little more than an analogy of macro-level social dynamics. They do not correspond meaningfully to anything real.

So for example, analysing the knock-on effects of strategic anti-essentialism in terms of perpetuating pre-existing majority vs. minority unequal power relations, is probably quite interesting, if you like that sort of thing. Accosting white guys in university hallways for wearing dreadlocks, on the other hand, means that you are an academic failure for having failed to grasp what academia even is, and let’s be fair, a failure at life in general, because you’re accosting white guys in corridors for 'stealing your hairstyle'. I mean, really. What the hell’s the matter with you?

So where does feminism come into this? Well, let’s look at the core assertions of feminism. The quick version...

'The entire history of human civilisation can be described in terms of systems of social structures, and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women.'

Feminists, trivialising rape
since 1992

Sounds very truthy doesn’t it. Of course, not only is it contentious at best and demonstrably false at worse, it’s like that by design. Think of it as an academic 'what if?' scenario.

But something else you may notice is that it sounds rather a lot like another ideological underpinning (edited down for conciseness).

'The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight.... Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.'

Yes, the latter is straight from The Communist Manifesto, academic Marxism at its finest (as if there’s any other kind—Karl Marx was not a Marxist), and it’s no coincidence because the tenets of feminism were very closely modelled on this.

So why is this a problem? Because people took Marxism literally, and the results were not pretty. At an estimated 94 million deaths, Marxist-inspired Communism was the leading ideological cause of death in the 20th century.

Feminists, tackling
the big issues

And increasingly, more and more people are taking feminism literally too.

Now, I’m not saying that feminists are advocating for anything silly, like, a genocide of 45% of the global population—other than those that are advocating for exactly that scenario, of course. But when the parallels are that close, and you have first world nations being led by self-professed feminists whose first act of parliament is to abandon meritocracy and to hire solely on the biological facts of one's birth, you would have to be blind not to see the looming danger.