The Feminist Conscience
A Short Comparison of Two Hate Movements
I’ve been a lifelong supporter of equal rights for women. Even as a young child, well before Betty Friedan and second wave feminism, I intuitively supported equality for women because I recognized that my own mother would have been happier not being limited by her gender role.
But over time, I gradually began to harbor doubts about feminism. It appeared to me that like most other “social justice” movements, feminism had lost its way, forgetting about its original, noble goal of freeing women from the constraints of their gender role and changing into a movement that is now more motivated by the hatred of men than of working towards true gender equality; a movement that was completely oblivious to how men suffered even more from the heavy expectations of the male role, as currently exemplified by the men — both Ukrainian and Russian — who are compelled to fight and die in that awful war.
I’ve always been interested in the history of Nazi Germany, and most of my life I had wondered “How could Germans be so evil?” Nearly twenty years ago I read a book by historian Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, that answered my question:
“In fact, the perpetrators of genocide had a powerful sense of right and wrong, based on civic values that exalted the moral righteousness of the ethnic community and denounced outsiders.”
The source of Nazi beliefs was not in a summons to hate but in the appeal to the collective virtue of Germans, the Volk.
I realized at that time that Koonz’s book about how the Nazis took control of Germany by clever use of media not perceived as political, including academic research, documentary films, movies, mass-market magazines, art exhibits, slide lectures, books, and purported humor, also reflected the way that five decades of feminist political and cultural indoctrination has infected much of the Western world.
In short, the book can be used to understand feminism’s dark, hateful side.
Years later, in June of 2018, six months before it published the infamous Amber Heard op-ed, The Washington Post published a repulsive article, Why Can’t We Hate Men? that confirmed my conclusion about the real nature of feminism.
This #MeToo inspired rant was written by the director of women’s studies at Northeastern University, who had the gall to openly and shamelessly express a Nazi-like hatred for men in a major American newspaper.
Does anyone else believe that by printing an article that by its very name must be considered “hate speech”, the Post falls short of the true spirit of its “Democracy Dies in Darkness” slogan?
Does anyone believe that the Post would ever have published a similar article about hating African Americans, Jews, or any other group of people — or women?
Does anyone else think that the article echoes anything from the ugly history of Nazism?
Below is a comparison of the two movements that illustrate this conclusion. The content in the left column was found in the The Nazi Conscience; the right contains the same text modified to describe feminism.