Feminist Hypicrisy and Sarah Palin

Cassy Fiano's post called "Sarah Palin Brings Out the Hypocrisy of Jessica Valenti and the Feminist Left" at Hot Air is a rational explanation of how the hard left uses feminism as a vehicle for its own ideological agenda and has no interest in actual women or their interests whatsoever.

Sarah Palin is the feminist Left’s favorite target. It seems strange to anyone not entrenched in a radical, extremist feminist agenda. Feminists once fought for equality between the sexes — the right for women to vote, giving women a fair chance to go to college and get a job without fear of discrimination, and the choice to either stay at home with her children or work full-time. Fighting for equality has long since fallen by the wayside though, and the leftist agenda has fully set in. Women like Sarah Palin and Michelle Malkin, therefore, cannot be feminists.

Daring to call Sarah Palin a feminist will make radical modern feminists’ heads explode. Currently screeching with rage is Jessica Valenti, angry that someone might think that Sarah Palin is indeed a feminist.

Seriously, y’all – how many times does it have to be said? Sarah Palin is not a feminist. I thought we had covered Palin’s gross appropriation of feminism and feminist rhetoric during the election, but media coverage of Palin’s recent speech for the anti-choice PAC the Susan B. Anthony List has reignited the debate. (Incidentally, the whole thing about Anthony being pro-life has been debunked.)

So, simply declaring oneself a feminist is all that it takes to be a feminist? Methinks not. Under this standard of feminism anyone – a racist, a misogynist, etc – could be a feminist just because they identify as such.

Sarah Palin’s crime against modern feminism is that she is a political conservative who is pro-life. This makes her anti-woman, because all conservatives are apparently anti-woman. Valenti writes:

[W]hile I’m sympathetic to the idea that abortion shouldn’t be a litmus test for feminism – I believe, for example, that one can be personally pro-life and feminist – there is simply no way that you can advocate for the limitation of other women’s rights and access to health care and call yourself a feminist.

The line about being “personally pro-life” is meant to mislead. You can’t be personally pro-life and still support abortion, and Valenti knows it. This is exactly why Valenti phrases it this way. It comes across as a much more moderate position, yet still argues that all feminists must support abortion. The feminist Left believes it isn’t good enough to just believe in equality between the sexes. You have to toe the “progressive” line, as Amanda Marcotte recently showcased in an interview, saying that real feminists are devoted to a very specific set of issues.

Interestingly, Valenti’s screed against Palin is so extreme that not all of her readers could get behind her. Feministing usually serves as a leftist echo chamber, but several commenters actually disagreed that all feminists need to think a certain way in order to be considered feminists. Valenti had to jump in to defend herself five times before closing commenting on the post.

Perhaps it’s because she isn’t following her own rules of feminism. In her book, Full Frontal Feminism, Valenti had this to say about people defining what feminists should be:

[L]ike many feminist authors before her, Valenti quickly expands feminism to include a wide array of liberal pet causes. If you don’t agree with them, guess what? You’re not really a feminist — you’re an anti-feminist. According to Valenti, feminists demand government-funded preschools and universal childcare, think American culture “breeds a society where rape is expected and practically okayed,” and proudly wear shirts that say “I don’t f*** Republicans.”

Valenti vents that she’s “so f***ing sick and tired of people telling [her] how to be an appropriate feminist.” Maybe so, but Valenti is happy to dish out a feminist litmus test herself.

So it isn’t OK for someone to tell Jessica Valenti what makes an appropriate feminist, but it’s OK for her to tell other people what makes an appropriate feminist? Quite the hypocrite, I see.

Read the rest here.

Remember, mainstream contemporary feminism is not about equality for women, but rather about encouraging a revolution to tear down Western civilization so that some kind of utopian fairy tale can emerge in its place. It would be better understood as an expression of cultural nihilism. If you want a high view of women, try Christianity. If you want revolution and rage against the West, try Jessica Valenti.

The "Freedom" That is Only a "Freedom to Die"

Here is a quote from Bertrand Russell's A Free Man's Worship (as quoted by Peter Kreeft in C. S. Lewis for the Third Millennium, p. 172). My question is: "If people really believed this way, how would they live?" My answer would be "Look at Europe. There a whole continent is living out Russell's nihilism."

Such . . . is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforth must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

Kreeft comments:

This is a philosophy but it is also a spell, a spell of black magic laid on the human soul. Philosophical arguments are needed to refute the philosophy, but philosophical arguments alone will not lift the spell. Only a counterspell will. Only good magic defeats bad magic. We need a spell weaver, a magician. When Tolkien's son had to fill out a draft induction form, he filled in the blank for "father's occupation" with the word "wizzard." The same could be said for Lewis, especially in Prelandra.

I agree with Kreeft when he calls the preaching of Russell a "spell of black magic laid on the human soul." It is not science or reason speaking; it is the voice of Hell insisting that there is no God, no immortality, no heaven and no hope. And modern Europe has listened to this snake and has nodded in agreement until it has fallen into the sleep that precedes, and is virtually indistinguishable from, death.

Where Does Nihilism Come From?

In a very interesting book entitled Nihilism Before Nietzsche, (U. of Chicago Press, 1995) Michael Allen Gillespie argues that Nietzsche misunderstook the origin of nihilism. Nietzsche believed that nihilism arises from the death of God, which means the loss of the possibility of truth and meaning. Certainly Nietzsche's view has a widespread influence on the contemporary world. For Nietzsche, the weakness of man, which began with Socrates and Christianity, comes to a sad and pitiful end in the modern world. With the death of God comes the death of morality and a world in which everything is permitted.

But, Gillespie argues, Nietzsche was mistaken about the nature of nihilism, which Gillespie argues originated in the late Medieval nominalism that produced an heretical view of God as sheer will, which calls into question all reason and nature and thus overturns all eternal standards of truth and goodness. This new view of God was the foundation of the via moderna, which is the foundation of modernity as the realm of human self-assertion.

If Gillespie is right, the implication are immense. For one thing, Nietzsche's answer to what he regarded as the slave morality and limp passivity of Christianity in the figure of the "Overman," who scorns limits and asserts his own will in order to create something noble in the world despite knowing the tragic limits of existence, is simply more of the same basic impulse of modernity. Nietzsche thus becomes the reductio ad absurdum of modernity - its claimax and pinnacle - rather than an alternative to it. The line, which Gillespie helpfully does much to elucidate, extends from late medieval nominalism and voluntarism to Nietzsche rather straight-forwardly.

Although Gillespie, a political philosopher who teaches at Duke, does not mention either Joseph Ratzinger or John Milbank in the book, his reading of Western intellectual history is similar to their's in key respects, especially with regard to the origin and nature of modernity. The centrality of the absolute will is traced from Descartes' cogito to German idealism (in particular Kant and Ficte) to Romanticism, Russian Nihilism and eventually Nietzsche.

What I find fascinating in this reading of Western intellectual history is that the roots of modernity are located in an heretical view of God that emerges at the end of the Medieval period and begins to shape an heretical theological anthropology progressively throughout the modern period until we come to the Nietzschean overman and last men. Nietzsche thus represents the culmination of modern (but not Western) thought.

One of the defects of much of postmodernism is that it deconstructs the Enlightenment and thinks that it has thereby deconstructed Christian theology and Western philosophy as a whole. But, as Benedict XVI reminds us in his Regensburg Lecture, the classical Augustinian-Thomist orthodoxy that emerges from the encounter between Hellenistic philosophy and Biblical Faith in the Fathers is a continuing tradition, from which secular modernity is an heretical offshoot. Postmodernism' claims are much too grandiose, but they could be accepted if framed more modestly as proof that the modern, heretical God of sheer will is a dead end. As for the God of the Bible and Christian orthodoxy, that is a different matter.