So It’s Come to This: A Feminist Is Calling for Female Slavery
For as long as I’ve been politically aware, the word “feminism” has evoked feelings of divisiveness, nastiness, and misandry. It’s at the extreme end of politically loaded words, producing strong reactions in anyone who hears it. For some, it is a rallying cry of justice and equality; for others, it is hatred made flesh. Why should this be?
My mother, who grew up in the 1960s, feminism’s heyday, remains a self-described feminist and insists that the term means only that women should have the same rights as men. Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary defines the word thus: “The advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes.”
What’s so objectionable about that? By this definition, everyone I know is a feminist, myself included. What sort of backward chauvinist would argue that women shouldn’t have the same rights as men?
The answer, apparently, is Sarrah Le Marquand, an Australian feminist and the editor-in-chief of “Stellar” magazine. In a piece penned for Sydney’s “Daily Telegraph,” Le Marquand argues that female parents of school-aged children should be legally required to enter the workforce and get a job.
That’s right: a philosophy that once demanded more rights for women now demands more restrictions. Men are free to work or to choose to stay home with their children. Women should be denied that choice, for the good of womankind. The ultimate goal of feminism is for women to have no choices except for those permitted them by society’s elites.
Le Marquand has a snappy retort to these objections. She parries accusations that she is against female choice by… openly admitting that she doesn’t care about female choice. Clever. She writes:
“Only when the tiresome and completely unfounded claim that ‘feminism is about choice’ is dead and buried (it’s not about choice, it’s about equality) will we consign restrictive gender stereotypes to history.”
This position is so staggeringly self-contradictory and antithetical to the stated aims of traditional feminism that it practically leaves one at a loss for words. Fortunately, we already have a word for legally compelling someone to work against her will. At the risk of triggering you, here it is: Slavery. One cannot help but be reminded of George Orwell’s chilling slogan of totalitarianism: War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is why feminism has become so toxic a term in modern discourse. This is why it’s hard to take feminism seriously at all, along with those intellectual women who gather in seminars to giggle about whether men, as a gender, are obsolete, in decline, and just plain unnecessary.
To the extent that there remains a philosophy that stresses equal rights as one of its primary tenets, that is blind to gender, as well as to color or creed, and that does not gin up its followers by engaging in identity politics, it has a different, perhaps less familiar name: libertarianism.
To the libertarian, women as well as men should be free to live and prosper as they choose, without interference from aggressors of either gender. The law should give no preference to one group of people over another, for we were all born with the same rights, rights inherent to our humanity. To the libertarian, you should be able to live the life you choose. And we would never dream of making you work rather than take care of your kids. (For more from the author of “So It’s Come to This: A Feminist Is Calling for Female Slavery” please click HERE)
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