One of the things that struck me many times reading Who Stole Feminism? was the number of times something a gender feminist would write something that sounded embarrassingly similar to something a white nationalist said, or could have said. The form of many GF dictums is identical to the form of many WN dictums, only with "whites" replaced by "women" and "blacks" replaced by "men".
Could a white nationalist (or paleoconservative) have written the following paragraph?
As long as some blacks use physical force to subjugate whites, all blacks need not. The knowledge that some blacks do suffices to threaten all whites. Beyond that, it is not necessary to beat up a white to beat her or him down. An organization complying with recent interpretation of civil rights law can simply refuse to hire whites in well-paid jobs, extract as much or more work from whites than blacks but pay them less, or treat whites disrespectfully. A black can fail to support a child he has engendered.... He can beat or kill the whites he claims to love; he can rape women, whether mate, acquaintance, or stranger.I think so. Of course, this quote is from Marilyn French, with "women" replaced with "whites" and "men" replaced with "blacks" and, in one case, "an organization complying with recent interpretation of civil rights law". (This latter point is important. In one notable way, WN form departs from GF form: WNs have black criminals and anti-white institutions as twin enemies; GFs have men, alone, for their enemy.)
It is natural that this should cause some dismay, since of course the GFs are wrong. Woman-beating males do serious time for their crimes, partly because they deserve the punishment and partly because there are no nationwide "civil rights" organizations putting pressure on law enforcement to go easy on them. Businesses that discriminate against women on pay grounds face serious legal action, which is why you need to ignore differing career paths in order to create the illusion of pay discrimination against women. (Industries in which pay is higher for women face no such legal threat, which is why female investment bankers and dieticians earn so much more than their male counterparts, and why women who have never had a child earn 113 percent of what men earn.) GFs have also made numerous false claims about rape, self-esteem, and even Super Bowl Sunday (I really recommend the book to learn about some eye-popping GF lies, and really shameful credulity on the part of the media.)
The dismay recedes when you remember that form isn't everything. Content, true content, matters more, and that is what the WNs have. Because of course what the WN/paleocon says is based on fact rather than emotion, which is why Jared Taylor and Pat Buchanan remind you of the host of a dinner party while Susan Brownmiller and Andrea Dworkin come off like hissing snakes. GFs have had to inflate pretty much every claim they make about male-on-female violence and discrimination, something Sommers documents in admirable detail in her book. In contrast, WNs only have to undo the suppression of facts about black-on-white violence (and discrimination by the government against white proles) to make their point.
Still, there is something fascinating about an utterly-wrong leftist ideology that gets the form exactly right but mistakes race & statism for gender. What could the connection possibly be? Sommers may provide the clues, even if she doesn't make the connection herself (since she has nothing to do with paleocon or WN ideologies):
[Katie] Roiphe sees the campus rape crisis as a phenomenon of privilege: these young women have had it all, and when they find out the world can be dangerous and unpredictable, they are outraged.She quotes Roiphe as saying:
Many of these girls [in rape marches] came to Princeton from Milton and Exeter. Many of their lives have been full of summers in Nantucket and horseback-riding lessons. These are women who have grown up expecting fairness, consideration, and politeness.Stripped of leftist-sounding talk about "privilege" this almost sounds like a paleocon praising traditional civilization for protecting women and families the old-fashioned way. The loss of traditional communities and the rise of education-driven career paths put thousands of young women in the paths of strange males in unfamiliar settings.
In a monoethnic, highly-religious society where anonymity was treated like a troublesome but short-lived "teething stage" in a human relationship, a bright girl could be put on a train, greeted at the station at the other end of the line by a firm but indulgent woman whom she had never met, and given an excellent education at a single-sex institution. At school, far from being treated like a galley slave or an imbecile (as the antihistorical GF propagandists would have us believe), she would be introduced to Shakespeare, Ovid, and Socrates. Nobody worried that Anne of Green Gables would get drunk or be raped when she went off to college. (And yet, with a combination of excruciatingly high educational standards and almost unbelievably low crime rates, the modern person can't quite put a finger on whether Anne was coddled or thrown into a sort of lace-curtain dungeon.)
Nowadays, anonymity is considered, of all things, one of the main benefits of urban living. Furthermore, "anti-racism" has stripped the victims of leftist propaganda of their ability to notice that black-on-white stranger rape is hardly a "myth", but is, in fact, a very real phenomenon. The expectations that women of northern European descent have, that a man will treat them with respect (or at least not rape them), have recently become quite unrealistic. "Anti-racism" blinds us to an important reason for the change. (The other major reason for the change, binge drinking, has been examined better, but hardly anyone forthrightly advises young females against heavy drinking around males.)
It was perfectly sensible for America to become collectively outraged at the loss of safety for women. The combination of GF and anti-racism saw to it that this outrage became grist for its favorite mill: hatred of white men. Equally important, ubiquitous leftist propaganda saw to it that the outrage was channeled safely away from the realization that racial diversity, bureaucratization, and urban anonymity are bad things. As evidence supporting WN and paleoconservative assertions has mounted, the left has gotten stronger. Only time will tell if modern internet technology will allow the record to be set straight.
