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Femi-Nihilism: The Feminist Mistake

November 10th, 2011

by Terrell Clemmons

When I turned 27, I thought my life was right on track. Respectable job? Check. Marriage? Check. Nice home in the suburbs? Check. Family? Check. Well . . . almost. My husband and I were expecting our first child. Three months later, when she was born and I laid eyes on her and held her in my arms, my heart jumped tracks. But my life didn’t, at least not yet.

Four months later, I suppressed an emotional tsunami, and dragging my kicking and screaming heart by the scruff of the neck, began handing her over daily into the care of another woman so I could return to work. At the time it seemed I had no choice. It wasn’t until years later that I realized what had led me to that conflicted place. It was feminism.

Modern Malaise

There’s a general malaise among women in America today. In an article titled “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” in the American Economic Journal (August 2009), researchers Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers reported that, while the lives of women in the United States have improved extraordinarily “by many objective measures, yet we show that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men.” As women have gained more freedom, education, and power, they have become less happy.

According to feminists, this only shows how much work still needs to be done. “I am fortunate enough to inherit the opportunities for which my second-wave foremothers pioneered in the 1960s and 1970s,” writes feminist author Kimberly George. “But I also find myself in a historical moment with so much left to do . . . to ensure that new generations of women are able to make new progress in gender justice.”

Suzanne Venker and Phyllis Schlafly, authors of a gutsy new book, The Flipside of Feminism: What Conservative Women Know—and Men Can’t Say, give a startlingly different reason for female discontent. There is no gender injustice, they say, and the problem is not that feminists still have work to do. The problem is feminism itself.

“If you ask a feminist to define feminism,” they write, “she’ll give you the standard, bogus answer: ‘Feminism is about equal rights for women.’ That benign, but very inaccurate, definition gives people the impression that feminism is a good thing. After all, who doesn’t believe in equal rights?”

“But feminism is not about equal rights at all,” they state flatly. And with refreshing straight talk, the niece and aunt co-authors proceed to dismantle feminism and to show just how destructive it has been.

Keep reading.

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