On toxic feminism and other aberrant social philosophies

Several years ago, I commented at length

in my blog on aspects of French culture, notably on the enormously close-to-the-bone (no pun intended) feminine sexual appeal of French women (and the repulsive Chauvinism and contrarian arrogance of their French male counterparts). After winding up that sack full of comments, observations, beefs, gripes, and bottom-biting reflections, I mentioned that I would return at some future date to pontificate on the matter of modern feminism. As we (us card-carrying Sons of Eire and several hundred millions of sycophantic ’24-hour Irish’ celebrants, at least) near Blessed Saint Padraig’s feast day, today seems to be that ‘future date’ to which I referred, back then.

Just this week, I finally got around to ploughing through another issue of EPOCH INSIGHT magazine, the 17 Feb 23 release from The Epoch Media Group, a moderately conservative but ferociously anti-Chinese Communist and pro-Democracy organisation that evolved out of a newspaper (The Epoch Times) published by the Falun Gong theosophist entity (that has been characterised, unfairly, as an irredeemable cult).

Of course, the WIKIPEDIA characterisation of EPOCH (et al) is ‘radical far-right’, which is typical of so much of WIKIPEDIA’s leftist progressive-filtered stance on things. In actual fact, the magazine is far more ‘centered’ on the conservative side of the political speculum (sic), although it doesn’t pull its punches when it comes to analysing and criticising today’s widespread substitution of fanciful, hyper-radical leftist ideological dogmas for hard, cold, bitter realities.

Among the critiques this particular issue contained are several articles on the present radical feminism movement and its castigation of what the more extreme fem-libbers (excuse me, I mean Women’s Rights Advocates) characterise as ‘Toxic Masculinity’. These leftist progressive female Harpies (actually, since the original Greek ‘Harpies’ were supposedly female-gendered mythical breasts, I suppose this use of the phrase ‘female Harpies’ constitutes a first-rate oxymoronic turn-of-phrase, but we’ll let that nuance slide here). However that may be, this strikes me as supremely ironic, since if anything, the condemnatory ‘Toxic Masculinity’ boogyman in reference is actually a purely ideological, home-grown product of its diametric, polar opposite: ‘Toxic Feminism’.

Yesterday, I finally sat down to watch

the fascinating (if highly complex) Daniel Kwan/Daniel Scheinert film, Everything, Everywhere, All At Once… Since I have a small upper frequency register hearing loss bilaterally, watching movies with a wide-ranging dynamic sound track has become somewhat of a challenge, since a lot of those higher frequency sounds often come across as annoyingly distorted (one aspect of this is that young female voices, with their feminine Soprano vocal tones, are quite irritating to me…something that makes watching ‘mainstream’ news broadcasts with their invariably young female anchors and media reporters all espousing left-of-center biases even more of a distressing experience).

Be that as it may, I sat patiently through all 2 hours and 19 minutes of the film with my headphones on, trying to catch the highs and (whispered) lows of the soundtrack, aided somewhat by the subtitles, but flummoxed a bit by the intermittent switching back and forth between Standard Chinese Dialect (Beijing hua) and English (with some Cantonese terms tossed into the mix, just to make things a bit more confusing), as the Chinese characters communicate in a mix of both languages (and I know this to be very factual, since my own Chinese wife communicates in the same half/half manner at times). Trying to stay current with all the action without having read any of the available ‘explanations’ of what the movie is all about beforehand, took a bit of yeomanry, to be sure!

There’s little arguing (at least as far as I am concerned) that Kwan and Scheinert have orchestrated a most unique and intriguing film, although I am quite surprised to find that almost no one seizes upon the obvious fact that what we’re dealing with in its core premise is in fact a rather fanciful ‘Quantum physics’ fantasy (I’d call it SciFi, but its so much more than that, naturally).

[Before we continue any further down this particular White Rabbit Hole, I strongly advise you to read a very convenient and helpful explanation of exactly WHAT this film is all about…and how to understand the complex interplay of characters that can otherwise overwhelm both you and your senses, should you attempt to watch the film without at least a smidgen of understanding of it well in advance of its viewing. That explanation (or at least one very plausible explanation) may be found here, written by an anonymous ‘staff writer’ at the website ‘FortressofSolitude’.]

Within this film’s quantum action, a character from the so-called ‘Alphaverse’ known as Jobu Tupaki (played by Stephanie Wu), who has absorbed and merged with Joy Wang’s character (also played by Stephanie Wu), is, we are told, a manifestation of integration of all the information, data and sensory experiences from all the individual component universes that comprise the ‘Multiverse’, resulting in her being so ‘overloaded’ by all the logarithmically expansive stimuli, that she goes total bonkers.

Confusing? I certainly hope so (or I'm worse off than I suspected!). At any rate, I am reaching into this plot to pull out ‘Jobu Tupaki’ as a convenient analog to the essential heart of radical feminism as it manifests today. Explained more simply, modern-day radical feminists, far from still merely battling for basic universal women’s ‘rights’, have gone absolutely starkers. That’s right, bonkers, over the top, ‘out there’, what have you. In other words, CRAZY. They seem willing to settle for nothing short of virtual emasculisation of all men, regardless of their individuality, finer qualities, uniqueness or superior intellectual capabilities. Reading through most of their more extreme texts, one gets the uncomfortable feeling that they would love to turn ALL men into eunuchs, both virtually and physically. And yet one cannot help but notice that a goodly percentage of them emulate the same ‘toxic’ traits they so decry among cisgendered males. Paradoxically, many of these ‘toxic’ feminists, when it comes to sexual desires, revert to a sort of ‘Conan the Barbarian’ toxic standard…the same behavioral characteristic they otherwise so deplore! How perfectly reasonable! (note: irony implicit).

Numerous studies carried out by reputable,

independent research institutes and think tanks have demonstrated that a great many of their more strident demands and pet assumptions, especially as regards child-raising, are about as full of holes as the brains that many of these shrieking meamies harbor under their tresses. I’d use the metaphor ‘Swiss Cheese’, but that would be doing a gross disservice to the Swiss, who, although terminally parsimonious, generally have first-rate, no-nonsense brains (both men and women) and their excellent cheeses.

The above studies consistently demonstrate to even the most critical skeptics that children raised in single-parent families (as compared to those with both a cisgendered father biological male and biological female mother) are far less likely to grow up and mature into children who stay out of criminal activities, complete high-school, college/university and take up successful gainful employment in our society…all requisites for achieving a responsible, materially successful role in the conduct of one’s life. Exactly the opposite, unsuccessful outcome obtains for those from a single-parent familial context. This fact has yet again, most recently, been explored (and confirmed) in Conn Carroll’s recent journalistic examination of this phenomenon.

Moreover, any number of past and present studies of parenting child-raising have also demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that BOTH a biological male father and a biological female mother are absolutely important, vital necessary elements in the raising of well-adjusted, responsible and productively well-balanced, reflectively intelligent offspring. Again, the opposite holds true (as above).

Thus, the present absolute chaos

created by the ethically perverse and highly fanciful ‘assumptive-gender option’ theory in our public schools that is fueling all the widespread education-focused emphasis on encouraging children to transition one’s gender merely on a whim, regardless of the genitalia a child is born with. This is fostering a large number of future problems as children finally pass beyond puberty and ‘settle’ into true adulthood. Gender dysphoria, which is well-described in the literature (including the DSM-5) is common at this ‘tender’ state of life and the techniques and practices used by leftist progressive (largely female) educators (both by college professors and graduate level instructors in college and among elementary and secondary school teaching staff) to promote transgenderism are not just deceitful but highly ethically questionable (particularly in cases where teachers counsel very young children to undergo a transgender operation without informing parents!).

Books such as Abigail Shrier’s excellent book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, and Inventing Transgender Children and Young People (edited by Michele Moore and Heather Brunskell-Evans) are full of horrendous illustrations on just how terrible these unjust ‘gender transformations’ are with regard to children not yet sufficiently mature enough to rationally and reasonably participate in decisions of this sort. And all of the above examples are merely examples of how radical feminists are advancing harmful fantastical theories and assumptive ideologies, in league with other groups (such as ‘woke’ individuals, the LGBTQ+ ‘alphabet soup’ fringers, DIE (Diversity, Inclusion, Equity) and CRT (Critical Race Theory) proponents and a whole range of other equally deluded and grossly deluded souls.

Other signs & symptoms of the ‘over the top’ lunacy

of radical leftist progressive feminists abound, if one dares to think reflectively and look critically at the heavily commercialized, ‘virtue-signaling’ corporate materialism we are daily submerged in and subjected to by both journalists (who were formally admonished in school to strive for ‘objective, balanced’ reporting, but who now see no harm in straining their information through a distinctively leftist filter before presenting it, as several important studies have shown), and their so-called ‘audio-visual mainstream media’ employers that dominate the major corporate commercial media networks (ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX, NBC, SCRIPPS, et al).

In that context, although I fail to see how ANYONE (even a mouth-breathing, three- brain-cell moron) who watches commercial broadcast television could fail to notice that almost all mainstream media anchors and reports (with few prominent exceptions on both local and national news) tend to be young females in their early 20s, who shrilly and dramatically parrot the latest news stories with an excess of needless and deliberately contrived emotionalism. Male news reporters and anchors, by contrast, seem to be dropping away palpably and those who remain may well be closet-gays, since so many of them appear to have…how shall we say...’overly developed’, muscular builds? One can only surmise, of course, but overly buff bodies on so many male media people imply at least an extreme aspect of narcissism, if not covert gayness…

A present leftist progressive cause that seems to have been enthusiastically embraced by many radical feminists, in expansion of their activism, is the movement to make ‘reparations’ to African-Americans as “just” recompense for alleged enslavement in the historical past. As with so many other examples of applied ‘woke’ philosophy, the cancel-culture mavens who police the social media nexuses are quick to immediately label any dissenting views on an issue of this sort as racist, bigoted, biased and therefore not worthy of expression in any public colloquy.

Last week, I stumbled across a website wherein coverage was given to the California ‘reparations’ movement (strongly advocated by a range of prominent state officials, from Governor Gavin Newsome on down the congressional Democratic ranks) that advocates giving SOME $800,000,000 (bereft of any reasonable vetting or qualificative determination of eligibility!) to any and all Afro-American Californians as restitution for the alleged suffering they or their relatives may have experienced at the hands of ‘evil white people.’ Of course, the fact that the hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money required to fund such an outrageous and absolutely ludicrous scheme would come from ALL citizens of the state…even those whose families were not supportive of the Democratic Party’s southern slavery philosophy, or participants in it in any way. One has to reflect on the stunningly stupid impact (let alone insult) of a proposal like this on Chinese-American citizens who themselves frequently suffered great bodily harm during the Frontier ‘gold rush’ in California’s 1850s/60s…or on Indigenous Native American Tribes, who in many cases were almost harassed into extinction by settlers as the Western Frontier opened up!

At any rate, my response to that absurd advocacy of a legislative ‘reparations’ act took the form of the below response. Predictably, it was immediately ‘disappeared’ owing to its politically incorrect sentiment (and perhaps by those who were offended by an assertion that it was a massive ‘brain fart’…).

“The idea that California, a non-slavery state during the Civil War, must pay 'reparations' to African-Americans is one of the most absolutely ludicrous brain-farts yet to spring forth from the state's fertile cesspool of leftist, race-identified' leftist progressives yet! It is an insult to each and every individual whose family not only NOT supported slavery of African-Americans in the South but do not have any relatives who were either slave-owners or participants in the slavery in reference. It is a further insulting slam to those of us who DID have family who were enslaved by the English colonialists in the 1600s and 1700s (I refer to the Irish 'white slaves', who were brought by the English to the new American colonies and literally 'enslaved' even before the Africans were) but that have never stood on that erstwhile 'victim-hood' status and claimed compensation for the extreme bias and discrimination THEY underwent.

"And if anyone doubts this, I suggest they do a little reading and research into that subject before supporting this insanely stupid proposal to award compensation to African-Americans for their alleged subjugation by inherently 'evil white masters'. Further, the whole idea of African-American racial singularity (vis-a-vis restitutions) is a further stinging rebuke in the face of all Native Americans, who suffered terribly due to the opening of the American frontier West and yet do not presume to paint themselves as pitiful victims of racial oppression, despite all their very own real anguish and suffering.

“And finally, what about Chinese-Americans who also suffered and often died as a result of virulent anti-Chinese sentiment that was so prevalent and widespread in that same Frontier period? Can you recall a single moment when said Asian people EVER assumed an in-your-face demand that they were owed an equally preposterously large sum of money for the very blatant discrimination they faced (aside from the Japanese-American citizens during that same war who were actually placed in concentration camps), from the early 1800s up through WW2? I can't, either!

“I am tempted to say, 'Get real, snowflakes', but obviously that is the wrong figure of speech to use in this context, here, for obvious reasons...

“The once great State of California clearly has its collective head up its nether extremity. I was born here, and I have witnessed the transformation of this formerly serene state degenerate, both politically and socially, into the sewage processing plant it is today. How utterly sad, how utterly tragic! “It would pay, I think, to recall the words of Rodney King, when despite the brutality he suffered, reminded us: “Can’t we all just get along?...” Propose and pass a legislative act forcing something like the current ‘reparations’ plan on all Californians and I guarantee Rodney’s words will vanish forever in the wind like so much California dust…”

Let’s face it. This sort of ‘cancel-culture’ attitude is characteristic of not just most radical progressives today, but most emphatically of virtually all radical feminists as well, who seem to have embraced the ‘woke’ mentality and all its related ‘victim/oppressor’ grievances by (much as Lee Marvin’s character, Ben Rumsfeld, put it in the acclaimed ‘70s Broadway play ‘Paint Your Wagon’), “Ankle, thigh and upper half!”

Consider that in higher education environments, women now outnumber men by a substantial margin and in certain professions (such as nursing and elementary/secondary level teaching) they are an unquestioned majority who wield tremendous, inordinate political and social clout (which is just dandy, unless they start to espouse the poisonous leftist progressivism that is such a sickening dynamic in our society today).

This reaches back to an insidious trend of the mid-to-late 1800s American Frontier culture, wherein women moving west tried unrelentingly to ‘civilise’ their men. In this application, ‘civilise’ translates to ‘taming, gentling and subjugating’ all those formidable characteristics of unapologetic masculinity that essentially opened up and helped shape American hegemony on the North American continent.

No one in their right mind would want a nation full of ‘Casper Milquetoasts’, least of all when the faeces hits the air circulation device and we face powerful external threats to the sacred American institutions that, after all, have provided and protected the freedoms and equality (not ‘equity’) we all enjoy today (or did, at least last time I checked). The same ‘freedoms and equality’ that today’s young radical feminists seem so totally oblivious and unmindful of in their vengeful effort to remove the ‘man’ from ‘mankind’.

Hence, my expression ‘Selective Misogyny’,

which I used when discussing some of these same social dynamics with an old Berkeley friend (a cisgendered female and also, as it happens, an African-American Jew) a while back. Like an artful, experienced cage boxer, who has learned that outlasting an opponent is more effective than KO’ing him, this friend (let’s call her ‘Azura’, which I think is a very pretty name for a woman, at any rate) patiently countered and parried my more frank declarations and finally came right out with the not-unexpected je accuse jab of “…well, that makes you a real misogynist, doesn’t it?” Seeing an opening in her fusillade of arguments contrer to my core thesis, I responded, “Yes, in fact I am a misogynist…of sorts, but a selective one”. That is, I have no inherent hatred of women as a gender, per se, but more a dislike of certain characteristics of the female affect. Specifically, the tendency that women have (and younger ones in particular) to be excessively emotional, as well as the hormonal nature of shrill female voices. Give me a good, lower-toned woman’s voice any day to the ‘girly’ qualities of most younger women who seem to be at the forefront of the crowds of women under radical feminist sway (perhaps without even being aware of it!). Surprisingly, I’ve noticed that the network mainstream media companies apparently make no attempt to provide ‘voice coaches’ for their young reporters and anchors. As a result, when these young reporters get worked-up over a particular news item, their voices tend to rise accordingly…and when you have an upper-register hearing loss (as do I), this becomes a grating audio-irritation I can well live without!

I always look back at former NBC anchor Ann Curry (or even Eileen Javora, a local KCRA weather person in Sacramento, CA) as an excellent example of the ‘perfect’ woman’s voice. Pleasingly low, silky, smooth and mature, as opposed to shrill, semi-hysterical and overly emotive! But try to convey the importance of a good voice coach to the philistine PC bean-counters who run CBS, ABC, CNN and NBC! Since they don’t give a fig for anything except reaching the mouth-breathers in the television audience (and making money), such rational pleas fall on predictably dead ears.

And so, as International Women’s Day dawns anew,

I find myself again wondering if/when ‘female toxicity’ will finally retreat from the social battlements, return its pikes to the ‘libber’ armory, and settle into a grounded reality wherein both cisgendered man and cisgendered women may live a peaceable, mutually harmonious existence together…in a manner that obviously eluded James Thurber for most of his humoresque life!

As for the transgender idiocies, the belief that gender assignment is arbitrary and may be effortlessly ‘assumed’ (despite one’s external/internal genitalia at birth) on a whim, DON’T GET ME STARTED!

And now, I’m going to slap the wife around a little bit, pound my manly, hairy chest for a few moments and yell “I AM MAN, HEAR ME ROAR!” a bit until I work all this out of my system again… (note: irony and facetiousness implied, lest you think you need to suddenly call 911!).

The really good news is that whereas I only have to tolerate all this crap for a few more years, most of the rest of you still have to endure it for further decades.

As dastardly Dishonest John of the vintage ‘Beany and Cecil’ cartoon strip of the 60s so eloquently put it: “NnnnnnaHAHAH!”

-----------------------------------------------

Note: For a very interesting take on the controversial Reparations scheme for African-Americans, see the following: https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/06/if-anybody-should-pay-reparations-for-slavery-its-the-democrat-party/

And one other, also on the same lines: thefederalist.com/2023/03/08/why-its-no-surprise-women-are-sadder-than-ever/