By BRIAN CLOWES
(Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995. For an electronic copy of this two-part article with footnotes, e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.)
Part 2
The evidence that the “new wave” of feminism, or neo-feminism, has destroyed the happiness of the women who have embraced it is not just anecdotal. Study after study has shown that the hookup culture is particularly damaging to young women. In general, the likelihood of depression rises steadily as the number of sexual partners increases and the possibility of an enduring relationship decreases.
Using the best available surveys, economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers found that women in the 1970s “reported higher subjective well-being than did men.” Now, exactly the opposite is the case.
Bioethicist Sidney Callahan explains what is happening:
“While the ideal has never been universally obtained, a culturally dominant demand for monogamy, self-control, and emotionally bonded and committed sex works well for women at every stage of their life cycles. When love, chastity, fidelity, and commitment for better or worse are the ascendant cultural prerequisites for sexual functioning, young girls and women expect protection from rape and seduction; adult women justifiably demand male support in childbearing; and older women are more protected from abandonment as their biological attractions wane.”
Abortion: The Right
To Capitulate
Neo-feminists actually strengthen their perceived “oppressors” by corrupting and diluting the central principles of true feminism. They do this by embracing what they claim are typical patriarchal faults — treating equals unequally and allowing the strong to oppress the weak. Nowhere is this more glaringly evident than with abortion.
At its core, abortion is not really about the right to choose, or about “reproductive freedom.” It is more about a woman’s right to conform or to capitulate to a male’s idea of the perfect female — a sterile woman of childbearing age. In other words, women can only be equal to men if they have surgery.
Societies in general — and many men — reject women when they are pregnant. As Erma Clardy Craven observed, “Women are being seen as wombs to be deactivated rather than human beings with lives to be fulfilled.”
Women who conform themselves to the male ideal of the pretty-sterile plaything are not at all free. If the neo-feminists were thinking clearly, they would recognize just why there is so little authentic backlash from the male-dominated power structure. In fact, gigantic male-run foundations like Ford and Buffett are actually contributing billions to the activist groups that push abortion, sterilization, and birth control on women. This is because the neo-feminists are essentially conforming to the wishes of this same power structure by making themselves accessible and disposable to men.
Any man can now indulge in unlimited sexual gratification as often and with as many women as he wants, and then walk away from all of them. If there is a “problem,” the woman is left to travel to any of the convenient nearby abortuaries, staffed almost entirely by male doctors. She is left to pay for the abortion — in some cases, for the rest of her life. Any counselor who has worked in a crisis pregnancy center or in an abortuary has heard this story many, many times.
Neo-feminists are so fanatical about their pro-abortionism that they invariably defend those male abortionists who butcher or molest their “sisters.” There are many examples of this:
The National Organization for Women vigorously defended Arizona abortionist Brian Finkel, and pro-abortionists ridiculed the more than 100 women who were sexually molested by him by referring to them as the “Victim’s Club.”
When Oklahoma abortionist John Baxter Hamilton was tried for crushing his wife Susan’s skull, pro-abortionists flooded the prosecutor’s office with death threats and demanded that he be set free.
When California abortionist Bruce Steir killed Sharon Hamptlon by puncturing her uterus, the woman-run Chico Feminist Women’s Health Center abortion mill wore buttons at his murder trial that said “Steir, Our Hero.” The National Organization for Women, the Feminist Majority Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, and many other national pro-abortion groups not only defended Steir and raised money for him, but claimed that his prosecution was a “pro-life conspiracy”!
One of the greatest tragedies that abortion has brought us is the murder of hundreds of pregnant women by their boyfriends and husbands because they refused to have abortions. Not one pro-abortion or neo-feminist group has said a word about these dead women, because they do not want to cause damage to their abortion “super-right.” But let someone burn a paper bag of trash in the middle of an abortion mill parking lot in the middle of the night, and their screams of outrage are heard from coast to coast.
Even some impeccably credentialed neo-feminists see the lasting damage being done to women by abortion. Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her classic 1949 The Second Sex that “men tend to take abortion lightly; they fail to realize the values involved. The woman who has recourse to abortion is disowning feminine values, her values….Women learn to believe no longer in what men say….The one thing they are sure of is this rifled and bleeding womb, these shreds of crimson life, this child that is not there.”
Lesbian Beverly Wildung Harrison, the “mother of Christian feminist ethics” and collaborator with Catholics for [a Free] Choice, said:
“Instead of being empowered by their abortion choices, young women having abortions are confronting the debilitating reality of not bringing a baby into the world; not being able to count on a committed male partner; not accounting oneself strong enough, or the master of enough resources, to avoid killing the fetus. Young women are hardly going to develop the self-esteem, self-discipline, and self-confidence necessary to confront a male-dominated society through abortion.
“The male-oriented sexual orientation has been harmful to women and children. It has helped bring us epidemics of venereal disease, infertility, pornography, sexual abuse, adolescent pregnancy, divorced, displaced older women, and abortion. Will these signals of something amiss stimulate pro-choice feminists to rethink what kind of sex ideal really serves women’s best interests?”
Anti-prostitution activist Mary Rosera Joyce makes the obvious connections between women selling their bodies and then their babies to men. Her unique viewpoint caused her to realize that easy abortion has given women the opportunity to prostitute themselves to men not once, but twice:
“Women are still big business for men. Abortion now provides a new multimillion-dollar business in another kind of feminine prostitution. In the first form of prostitution women are paid by men. But when women prostitute themselves to what is called the ‘baby scrambler,’ the suction machine for abortion, they give the money to men more often than not….If women were not so intellectually passive, they would be able to see through this so-called ‘liberation’.”
Conclusion
So what has happened to women?
They traded away happiness and deep contentment for fleeting enjoyment of the current moment and decades of depression and loneliness later. Unscrupulous and promiscuous men seized on the opportunity to exploit women — with their full consent and cooperation. Women have been cheated on a scale never before seen in the history of the world.
Heck, we men could have told them that was going to happen.
But nobody bothered to ask us.
Neo-feminism is insatiable and it will never stop demanding. Man was created by God to be satisfied only by knowing Him, and, since neo-feminist ideology rejects God, the risk of spiritual harm grows exponentially. They are always restless, always dissatisfied, always unhappy, and always demanding change, because they hope that change — any change at all — may bring that elusive happiness that always seems to be just out of reach. For a true feminist, injustice means that women and men are treated unequally.
But the injustice for the neo-feminist is being a woman.
The last century and a half has shown us that neo-feminism was never really about improving social and economic conditions for women. The original feminist movement has undeniably done much to advance conditions for women, resulting in the betterment of society — but the most important impact of neo-feminism is to completely transform the morality of Western nations, which are in turn now trying to force this new morality on the rest of the world.
The richest data available to social scientists is the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, a survey of Americans conducted since 1972. These show that conservative women are happier than liberal women, married women are happier than unmarried women, women who go to church are happier than those who don’t, and women with children are happier than the childless. Just as God (and Nature) planned.
St. Augustine said: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” There is no rest in what is not true, and so the neo-feminists will agitate endlessly for more and more change, caring not at all what — or whom — they destroy in the process.
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