Feministing.com: Jessica Valenti and the Politics of Rhetoric

By any reasonable assessment criteria, Anglo-American feminism is an abject failure. While enormous damage has been done to the family, to Marriage and other traditional institutions (or their pan-Anglosphere shadows that yet survive), most Anglo women are not feminists, at least not as originally conceived in the heady days of the Sixties. To the contrary, Anglo-American women are today never more immersed in ‘bourgeois’ lifestyles, values and assumptions: consumerism, vanity and sexual barter for material gain.

We see this attachment to bourgeois values in Feministing.com – a major mass conduit of contemporary feminism. Nearly all the Feministing women who post on YouTube are obvious avatars of bourgeois respectability: straight, pearly teeth, carefully applied make-up and costly designer clothes. If these women were truly opposed to the extant social order, they would dress with complete indifference to traditional female standards. Self-evidently, they retain a knee-jerk affinity to the existing social order and its values. Yet this, according to them, is an oppressive patriarchy that militates against their social and emotional well-being. Moreover, the computers they use, the publishers who print their turgid books, their cosseted university enclaves – are all products of the patriarchy they profess to despise. If they want to reject patriarchy, why do they not jettison their attachment to these creations of ‘oppressive’ patriarchal society? Why not live in feminist communes in the wilderness and ‘start again’ from ‘Year Zero’ like Pol Pot, using an exclusively feminist science and technology?

This ambivalent relationship with the social order is well-answered by Jessica Valenti’s public autobiography (Jessica, for the uninitiated, is 'Executive Editor' of Feministing.com). She is, somewhat predictably, a Women’s Studies graduate from some private university; and conducts herself like a typically spoilt, glossy product of the salubrious suburbs. At a cursory glance, the same is true of her followers on YouTube and elsewhere. Judging by Bernard Chapin’s scathing YouTube report on Valenti’s book, Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters, her major problem seems to be her prominent nose – a physical birth defect entirely unrelated to Anglo-American patriarchy. Interestingly, Full Frontal Feminism boasts a naked female body on the cover - and a somewhat suggestive title for a supposedly 'feminist' text.

Cutting to the chase, the whole point is that Jessica Valenti really has no legitimate gripe with the social order. Indeed, she has largely profited by an intimate association with it; and remains on the decidedly advantaged side of it. In other words, her ‘activism’ is just a careerist sham; she has nothing to protest about. This is not an African-American male maimed in Vietnam living in a trailer on a pittance; this is a hyper-advantaged individual profiteering from hollow rhetoric. All Feministing YouTube broadcasts have the same vacuous quality; much ado about nothing. The ‘Friday Feministing Fuck You’ always addresses the same tangential ephemera, never the real issues of the day (financial meltdown, political corruption, the war in Iraq or pan-Anglosphere social collapse).

Bluntly, this is because Anglo-American feminism is a bourgeois, white phenomenon, safely cocooned from mainstream social reality. Additionally, Anglo-American women enjoy rights denied to most women around the world – to education, autonomy and property ownership. Atop everything, they retain traditional privileges – for example, young American women do not have to register for the Draft, unlike their male counterparts. And so we see why Jessica Valenti engages in rhetorical politics: her protests ring hollow because the advantaged and integrated have no purchase on protest.

Feministing.com is a sham – and so is all Anglobitch feminism.

The Anglo Vice: Male Homosexuality in Anglo-Saxon Countries

‘You cannot imagine it in the history of France… Frenchmen are much more interested in women; Anglo-Saxon men are not, and this is a problem that needs analysis.’

- Edith Cresson (French Politician)

Homosexuality can rightly be called an Anglo-American vice. Homosexuality is particularly prevalent in Anglophone societies; many male entertainers, actors, writers, artists and intellectuals make no secret of their attraction to their own sex.

Biological explanations of homosexuality are currently in vogue. While they hold some truth, they do not really explain why homosexuality is more prevalent in Anglo-American countries than, for example, the Hispanic world (where it is viewed with horror). After all, if homosexuality were entirely biological in origin, it should not be culturally specific. The fact that it is implies that culture plays a decisive role in shaping homosexuality in men.

What Anglo-American cultural features dispose men to homosexuality? The answer is very simple: poor relations between the sexes. Interaction between the sexes is so unpleasant and mercenary in the Anglo-American bloc that many men derive more from relations with their own sex rather than women. This leads to exceptionally high incidences of homosexuality among Anglo-Americans.

In a crude sense, homosexuality is the best way to experience plenty of sex in a repressed society where women are taught to commodify themselves from infancy. For men of low socio-economic status, whom Anglo women automatically strike off as potential mates, homosexuality is simply the only way to get bountiful supplies of free sex.

The term ‘gay’ has unique significance in Anglo culture. ‘Gay’ shouts fun, happiness and liberation in societies largely bereft of all three. Why no one has ever noted that only Anglo-Saxon cultures associate homosexuality with happiness shows how blind commentators are to the failings of Anglo culture. Why aren’t straight men ‘gay’? In a society where women view sex as a form of material barter straight men are inevitably unhappy and unfulfilled. Additionally, heterosexual relationships are fraught with peril: divorce, penury, contrived pregnancies. These facts go some way to explaining why only homosexual Anglo males consider themselves ‘happy’.

On honest consideration, homosexuals in Anglo cultures have everything to gain by their lifestyle, very little to lose.

Anglo-Feminism: The Class Connection

The greatest absurdity in Anglo-Saxon feminism is its arrant class blindness. In lectures, books and articles, contemporary Anglo feminists continually conflate international bridge-playing females with underclass women and five-dollar call-girls as if they all shared common interests. Clearly,Anglo-feminism is rather like nationalism or racism, an attempt to inveigle disenfranchised women into subordinating their claims as an oppressed class in favour of an arbitrary gender link with their oppressors. It is faux revolt.

In the same tired vein, contemporary feminists claim that disenfranchised males are just as much ‘oppressors’ as men from Phillips Academy, Eton College or their equivalents elsewhere in the Anglosphere. Can the patrician origins of Anglo feminism explain this absurd position? We think they can...

Because early Anglo feminists were all upper class (indeed, most still seem to attend elite universities and generally enjoy privileged lives) they knew nothing about mainstream social experience. ‘Ordinary’ women never entered their thoughts, except as objects of domestic labour. ‘Ordinary’ men were mere beasts of burden. Consequently, their ideas were absurdly skewed: while claiming to be ‘revolutionaries’ they unthinkingly retained their traditional prejudices.

These characteristic contradictions can be seen in all subsequent Anglo feminists: Greer (a ‘revolutionary’ who hates working class women); Dworkin (a ‘revolutionary’ who favours censorship); Hite (a ‘revolutionary’ who ardently supports monogamy); Paglia (a ‘revolutionary’ who accepts men are biologically superior); Julie Burchill (a racist, nationalist ‘revolutionary’). Of course, all ‘liberal’ Anglo feminists remain committed to such bourgeois anachronisms as marriage to wealthy men and the protective platitudes of organised religion. These absurd inconsistencies have a long pedigree, dating back to the earliest origins of Anglo feminism, exemplified by the deplorably classist and racist Virginia Woolf.

Whatever they say, Anglo feminists are natural allies of the authoritarian right. The key lines of Anglo feminist thought were set when Anglo-Saxon society was still pre-democratic and the broad masses little better than serfs. Hence arrogant elitism pervades this brand of feminism, something quite absent from the 'partnership' feminism of Continental Europe. Since Anglo men have begun to reject the Anglobitch for women with traditional virtues, this intolerance has reached feverish levels (‘Oh, those China Dolls!’).

A Few Good Men: Anglo Feminism and the Mythical ‘Man Shortage’

Let us consider the dust-jacket blurb on the back of Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s ‘Why There Are No Good Men Left: The Romantic Plight of the New Single Woman’ (2003):

‘A double revolution is at work in modern American love. A revolution in higher education has created the most independent generation of young women in history, and a revolution in mating has created a prolonged search for Mr Right. Through extensive research and interviews, Whitehead documents the new social climate in which the demands of work, the rise of cohabitation, the disappearance of courtship, and the exacting standards of educated women are leading them to stay single longer and to find the search for a mate even harder when the time is right.’

This ‘man shortage’ has been a staple of Anglo-American pop-feminism since the early Seventies. Whitehead admits early on there is in fact no ‘man shortage’ at all: among American 30-34 year olds, there are four never-married men (30%) for every three never-married women (20%) (Whitehead, 2003: 10). Indeed if we accept Whitehead’s figures, there is obviously a ‘woman shortage’, confounding her whole thesis. Yet the rest of the book skirts this fact, focussing on such red herrings as cohabitation and the decline of courtship.

The only obvious solution to this conundrum is that white, middle-class women reflexively dismiss men of low socio-economic status as potential mates, giving them the false impression there is a ‘man shortage’. At a deeper level, it is obvious that middle-class, post-feminist white women retain traditional expectations of ‘marrying up’ in the midst of their new rights and freedoms. Traditional female privileges have been squared with new rights to create impossible expectations: and this is the broad error of Anglo-American feminism. It is an unstable conceptual hybrid, completely unworkable in practice.

Sex is the pivotal female weapon for manipulating men, and it is not in women’s interests to ever yield their power of sexual barter. Women will always ration sex to the highest bidder, whatever rhetoric of ‘liberation’ they care to espouse. Indeed, so ingrained is the female expectation of marrying a male of high income and status that men without resources are literally transparent to them. When ‘a shortage of men’ is translated correctly as ‘a shortage of men with more wealth than most women’ the true, vulpine values of post-feminist Anglo-American women are revealed.

Of course, a genuine feminist revolution would have ensured that women became indifferent to male income and other trappings of ‘patriarchy’. However, in the Anglosphere the retention of Puritanism with its attendant ‘Pedestal Syndrome’ neutralised any such possibility, allowing the Anglobitch to square her new rights with archaic expectations and privileges.