Who Stole Feminism?
Who Stole Feminism? By the fabulous Christina Hoff Sommers was initially posted on YouTube on May 17, 2021, but you can watch it now on Rumble or listen to it on PodBean.
This book landed on my “to be purchased and read pile” after I stumbled across her YouTube channel, the Factual Feminist. And I was blown away by how intelligent and articulate Dr. Sommers is. So of course, I had to buy her books. Yes plural, but I only read one this week, Who Stole Feminism?
So, this book blew my mind. I always knew that the loony toons extremists running the vocal face of Feminism were really fucking crazy, by Dr. Sommers did a deep dive in to how crazy, then deconstructed it for us. And what’s REALLY crazy? This book was written in 1994…but every single point she addresses is still being screeched about by whackadoos today. And yes, I know calling people names is counterproductive, but frankly if I don’t joke about it and call them names, this video will end up being a long screech of inchoate rage at the profound manipulative stupidity that has been controlling education and public policy since the mid-1980’s. No joke. Mid-1980’s this shit show started.
Basically, feminist movement started in the mid-19th century. And this was equity feminism, women wanted the right to vote, right to own property, right to education…equal rights with men. This is a logical, consistent ideal to seek, and they did! Dr. Sommers recounts an episode in early feminist history, 1869 where domestic worker, Hester Vaughan, got impregnated by her boss and was promptly fired. When she gave birth alone in her room and passed out after, the baby ended up dying. She was charged with murder, no lawyer represented her, she was not permitted to testify in her own defense and was convicted by an all-male jury and sentenced to death. The feminists of the day, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony rallied and got the conviction overturned. THAT is justice, THAT is true victimhood. Compare it to the feminist literature of today which only resonates on college campuses and is so far removed from actual feminists as to be unrecognizable.
Dr. Sommers calls this Gender Feminism, which is full of misandry and victim ideology…Weird right? Being a victim has reigned supreme among ideologues from at least the 1980’s. And it’s found new wind with the SJW of the 21st century, CRT, BLM, and of course feminists still claim the top spot as victims supreme. But we can see the roots of all of it in this careful deconstruction of ideology. And Dr. Sommers does an amazing job of digging into the insanity and exposing the horror, inconsistency, and house of lies, upon which modern “Feminism” is built.
Some of the lies Dr. Sommers tackles: girls experience decreased self-esteem when they enter puberty. Boys experience favoritism in the classroom to the detriment of girls. Women experience more depression than men. Women are happier single than married. The wage gap. 1 in 4 women are raped. Backlash.
I am lucky enough that this madness didn’t hit the schools until after I had graduated high school, and when I was going through college, it had not yet reached my campus at least. But I have heard every single one of these claims in the intervening years…from NINETEEN NINETY FOUR to present. And Dr. Sommers ran down the source of each and every one of these rumors, and deconstructed it, giving full credit to those who were incredulous enough to start the investigation, but sadly placing too much faith in our elected officials to do their own research. The short uptake is that the surveys around which these “findings” were based, were seriously flawed. In the questions, in who they asked meaning they hand picked a very narrow selection of women to ask, then how they interpreted the data, sometimes even bluntly lying about the results (see the chapter on Backlash for a truly awful example on blatant misrepresentation of polled results.) And why would they misrepresent their findings? Probably because the findings did not support their supposed hypothesis. And that is incredibly bad science. It’s good to have a hypothesis…but if the findings don’t support your hypothesis, you change your hypothesis, not the findings to suit the story you’re trying to tell.
And that is ANOTHER problems Dr. Sommers addresses, this absurd belief that women just know. Women know in the same way that men know…by learning. I’m all in favor of intuition, but intuition works best when backed up by a solid core of knowledge. Which you can’t get by pretending that all knowledge prior to the 1970’s is part of the patriarchy. Rather than building on the knowledge of the past, gender feminists, as Dr. Sommers calls them, seek to alter the past to fit the narrative they are trying to sell.
This book was eye opening and frustrating to read through. I can only imagine how frustrating it must have been for Dr. Sommers to boldly walk through the valley of misandry for us and tell us what she found. So that’s it for this week. I highly recommend this book as a resource for fighting back against the feminist myths that prevail even today, since a lot of the data hasn’t even changed. It’s like once they published the false findings, they just trust on history to bury it under the weight of their own lies. It’s mind-boggling.
