The “manosphere” is the term typically given to male opposition to feminism’s lies, hate, and misandry. But many women who are speaking out against feminism can legitimately be considered an integral part of the manosphere. A list of these women can be found in my article Women of the Manosphere.
This article profiles just one these wonderful women, Cathy Young.
Cathy is primarily known for her writing about feminism and other cultural issues, as well as about Russia and the former Soviet Union. She is the author of two books, a frequent contributor to the libertarian monthly Reason, and a regular columnist for Newsday.
She is also a cultural studies fellow at the Cato Institute, writing on a wide variety of cultural and political issues, and gender issues including equal opportunity in the workplace, sexual harassment policy, sexual assault and domestic violence law, child custody, etc.
Cathy is also the author of Ceasefire!: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality, where she
… insists that we must abandon the premise — rooted in women’s historical second-class status — that anything that benefits and empowers women furthers justice and equality. This belief leads to the unspoken assumption that women’s interests are more legitimate than men’s and that their problems are more deserving of concern.
Young argues that, whereas feminism once focused on inequities in laws and social norms, it has become preoccupied with men’s personal mistreatment of women. As a result, bad acts by men are magnified into a “war against women,” while women’s bad acts are denied.
A new emphasis on special protections for women rather than equal rights has dangerously eroded the rights of men accused of rape, domestic violence, or sexual harassment in ways that can backfire on women too. Meanwhile, conservatives have developed their own mythology of women’s victimization — by divorce, by sexual liberation, by pressure to work outside the home.
Young’s views on feminism are summarized on her Wikipedia page:
Young has defended the social media campaign Women Against Feminism.
Describing the Gamergate controversy in relation to feminism, Young has stated that she believes that Gamergate is a backlash against feminism, but “it’s a backlash against a particular kind of feminism, one that has a tendency to look obsessively for offences, read ideology into everything, and demonize male sexuality under the pretext of stamping out ‘the objectification of women’.”
In 2015, Young wrote an article in The Daily Beast in which she interviewed the student whom anti-rape activist Emma Sulkowicz accused of rape. In a response, Sulkowicz described Young as an “anti-feminist”, saying that Young published Facebook conversations between her and her alleged rapist to shame her. Heather Wilhelm wrote in RealClearPolitics that Young’s article about Sulkowicz “sets aside the hype and soberly assesses the facts.”
Thank God for Cathy and women like her! They are literally one-in-ten-million!
For other articles about other Women of the Manosphere.
By Stephen Bond on February 27, 2023.
Exported from Medium on February 28, 2023.