For example, shouldn't most of us “anti-feminists†say we oppose gender feminism/mainstream/liberal feminism, which I tend to find is the type that most anti-feminists hate. It seems that we just say "anti-feminist" because it sounds catchy, if you get what I mean, but then we offend dozens of intelligent and honest women out there who just want equal rights for women, by generalizing all the time.
We could at least show them that we are not misogynists like some anti-feminists, by saying that we are specific type of feminism, opposed to mainstream feminism. Which we are, since we DO support women's rights – which is why the term ant-feminist is misleading. We just oppose certain types of feminism, not the basic dictionary definition.
“But more important than any mis-estimation or misunderstanding about what people valued, feminism was perceived as having positive reasons to hate the family: not only ignoring but militantly rejecting the focus of meaning in people's lives. The hostility to the family came from ideological & political reasons: any old social function that the family may have fulfilled was to be fulfilled by the state instead, much more safely and effectively, safely because children would be outside the influence of reactionary parents, especially patriarchal men. Effectively because they would be in the hands of politically sound professional "care givers." The literature was full of how wonderfully this had been working in the Soviet Union, Israel, etc. What the professionals could accomplish best, of course, was to erase the old sexist gender differences by socializing the children differently. This view rested, then, on the theory that gender differences are the result only of arbitrary social convention.
The problem with the examples cited so warmly, however, was that they were often monstrous acts of totalitarianism, and that they failed. The problem with the theory that personality and gender differences are entirely the result of environment, not heredity, is that it is indeed a prescription for just the kind of coercion and tyranny that most conspicuously tried to exploit its possibilities: if everything that we are is just socialization, then the reasonable thing is to socialize us in the best way possible, and that would be through the agency of those who know best. Those who know best, in turn, would be those politically favored, or at least self-appointed with enough fanfare. The socialization, in turn, would be a thorough indoctrination which, if done to adults, would have been called brain washing -- but then the brain was supposed to have been blank in the first place. Cambodia took this to the logical extreme: if you simply kill the parents, then that leaves the children in the hands of the state by default. Fortunately, the last line of defense against totalitarianism was the simple fact of human nature. All the power of the state could not really make the "New Man," and no amount of lies could cover that up indefinitely. The Soviet Union crumbled to reveal the people of 1913 emerging from the shadows, wanting the same things out of life that they did then, without all the bombast, promises, fanfare, and lies.â€Â
(- by the way if you want to know today is one of my sober days)
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