Feminism and Leukophobia
By • 4/24/08Nora Ephron, the feminist screen-writer and blogger for Huffington Post, wrote the following in an article called White Men published just before the Pennsylvania primary:
This is an election about whether the people of Pennsylvania hate blacks more than they hate women. And when I say people, I don’t mean people, I mean white men. How ironic is this? After all this time, after all these stupid articles about how powerless white men are and how they can’t even get into college because of overachieving women and affirmative action and mean lady teachers who expected them to sit still in the third grade even though they were all suffering from terminal attention deficit disorder—after all this, they turn out (surprise!) to have all the power. (As they always did, by the way; I hope you didn’t believe any of those articles.)
I scarcely need to dwell on the idiocy of this passage, but I will make a few comments. For Ephron, it is only white men who feel racial or gender hostility—she originally suggests that all the people of Pennsylvania might hate blacks or women, but she corrects herself to specify that it is only white men. Despite the fact that she mentions black privilege, otherwise known as “affirmative action,” she nevertheless says that white men have “all the power.”
So, only white men feel hatred, and, since they have all the power, it is legitimate to discriminate against and slander them. That pretty much sums up what feminism is about. In other words, feminism is a form of leukophobia.
Cathy Young’s “The Feminist Hostility Toward American Society” in the 2004 book Understanding Anti-Americanism confirms that white men have overwhelmingly been the object of feminist attack. Besides that, her examples prove once again that anti-Americanism is a variant of anti-whiteness. Young mentions this quip by a speaker at a 1992 feminist conference:
“Only eight percent of the world’s population are white men. That’s a very encouraging fact”—an observation met with laughter and obvious delight from the audience.
Feminists routinely conflate sexism and white racism, as though the one inevitably accompanied the other. The following comes from a Canadian feminist of African descent speaking a month after the 9/11 attacks:
The people, the American nation…is a people which is bloodthirsty, vengeful, and calling for blood. They don’t care whose blood it is, they want blood… This kind of jingoistic militarism… the most heinous form of patriarchal, racist violence that we’re seeing on the globe today.
Young points out that feminists find it nearly impossible to acknowledge that women are treated better in America than non-Western cultures. As feminist journalist Jill Nelson wrote in 2001, “As far as I’m concerned, it’s equally disrespectful and abusive to have women prancing around a stage in bathing suits for cash or walking the streets shrouded in burkas in order to survive.”
Nelson doesn’t bother to mention that women are forced to wear burkas in Muslim societies, but not to participate in beauty pageants in the West.
Christina Hoff Sommers, a critic of feminism, pointed out many other ludicrous examples of such moral equivalence in a Weekly Standard article last year.
Here is Eve Ensler, the author of TheVagina Monologues:
We all have different forms of enforced burqas. Every culture has it. Whether it’s an idea or a fascist tyranny of what women are supposed to look like—so that women go to the extremes of liposuction, anorexia and bulimia to achieve it—or whether it’s being covered in a burqa, we all have deep, profound, ongoing daily forms of oppression.
Here is feminist Katha Pollitt:
In Bangladesh, Muslim fanatics throw acid in the faces of unveiled women; in Nigeria, newly established shariah courts condemn women to death by stoning for having sex outside of wedlock… In the United States, Protestant evangelicals and fundamentalists have forged a powerful right-wing political movement focused on banning abortion, stigmatizing homosexuality and limiting young people’s access to accurate information about sex.
It is for this reason that American feminists are almost entirely silent about the treatment of women in Islam. Sommers sums up their negligence:
The subjection of women in Muslim societies—especially in Arab nations and in Iran—is today very much in the public eye. Accounts of lashings, stonings, and honor killings are regularly in the news, and searing memoirs by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi have become major best-sellers. One might expect that by now American feminist groups would be organizing protests against such glaring injustices, joining forces with the valiant Muslim women who are working to change their societies. This is not happening.
If you go to the websites of major women’s groups, such as the National Organization for Women, the Ms. Foundation for Women, and the National Council for Research on Women, or to women’s centers at our major colleges and universities, you’ll find them caught up with entirely other issues, seldom mentioning women in Islam. During the 1980s, there were massive demonstrations on American campuses against racial apartheid in South Africa. There is no remotely comparable movement on today’s campuses against the gender apartheid prevalent in large parts of the world.
Although typically of conservatives, Sommers makes no mention of anti-white bias, her mention of rallies against South African apartheid tells us all we need to know.
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NRO just published an article by Kathleen Parker about this Ephron screed.
Parker says:
“By Ephron’s calculus, if a white male votes for a black man, it couldn’t possibly be because he finds the man a more suitable candidate. He simply hates women more. And if he votes for the woman, he’s probably got his nutty uncle’s white-sheet ensemble stashed upstairs in an attic trunk just in case cross burning enjoys a revival. He couldn’t possibly deem any woman superior to any man. He simply hates blacks more.”
Parker has an important insight here. Ephron isn’t just implying that only white men are capable of hate, but that hate is their sole motive in choosing who to vote for. So hate is such a powerful force in white men’s psyche that reason stands no chance against it.
By on 4/25/08 at 10:18 am
The paramount idiocy and irony of Ephron’s tirade is that she’s referring to white male Democrats, including left-liberals, not “conservatives” and “reactionaries.” If what she says were true, both Hillary and Obama would have been forced to drop out of the race long ago and either 2 or 3 white males would be fighting for the democratic nomination or a white male would have already secured the nomination. Obviously, even before it became a two person race, far more white men must have voted for Hillary, and even more so for Obama, than for any of the white male candidates.
By on 4/25/08 at 12:55 pm
Alex,
A lot of people read the Huffington Post and other publications that publish material like Ephron’s. If no one wanted to read this stuff, why would they publish it? I think leukophobic feminism is extremely influential; so influential that it’s part of our cultural common sense. Just think of the Duke Rape Scandal. Why did so many people irresponsibly jump to the conclusion the young men were guilty? It’s because they were massively prejudiced against white men, especially those from wealthy families.
By on 4/25/08 at 6:23 pm
You’re right. The Duke rape hoax wasn’t driven by “misandry,” i.e., hatrred of men per se, as “masculists” and “equity feminists” proclaim. It was driven by hatred of white men, especially privileged, affluent, and elitist white men.
In an egregiously dishonest article, Stephen Baskerville of the father’s rights movement blames this outrage on “feminist justice” and denies or trivializes the role of blacks and their white enablers and sycophants. Put differently, “radical feminists” were largely culpable for the persecution of three innocent young white men with blacks assuming only a minor and tangential role.
It’s difficult to imagine a more perverse inversion of reality. In truth, this sickening travesty was a grotesque synthesis and interaction of black “justice” and “feminist justice.” Although the examining nurse and a few others might have been largely motivated by feminist ideology, black “justice” (i.e., vengeance and “payback”) was obviously predominant, overwhelmingly and flagrantly so to any honest person.
A few months or weeks(?) after the “white boys” were charged with the “immaculate gang rape” of Crystal Magnum, a black student was accused of raping a white coed at a Duke fraternity party. Given the realities of black-on-white rape, the allegations in this case were probably true. But there were no protests, no marches, no manifestos, no pot-banging by white feminists.
And imagine if the accuser had been white and the accused black members of Duke’s basketball teame, all other facts being identical. If so, nobody would have even been arrrested, so preposterous were the charges, and feminists would not have protested.
Only blacks and their white apologists, enablers, and sycophants could have sustained this horrifying madness for over a year when the accused were demonstrably innocent to any minimally honest and rational person. The “masculists” have it exactly backwards: “radical feminism” was of secondary importance.
By on 4/26/08 at 11:18 am
Apart from their captive audiences in the media and in higher education, does anyone pay attention to and act upon what the feminists say?
The agenda of the so-called ‘feminist movement’ has acquired a bogus intellectual respectability under the patronage of supine liberal sophists. In any other age and society this ridiculous imposture would have been laughed into a deserved oblivion.
By on 4/25/08 at 6:11 am