I chose the title for this post advisedly after – unfortunately – coming across one of those “dolly diatribe” blogs entitled “I blame the Patriarchy”. The banner was in an appropriate washed out green, but the title was discernible.

Judging by the blog’s contents, the writer is obviously some feminatric who attended a mid twentieth century course on women’s studies and is still using the notes she made at the time.

Her “style” impinges on the English language from time to time but is mostly confined to diatribish with such offerings as “I wouldn’t give him the steam off my piss”. The blog is full of such academic and uplifting “thinking” and is about as high as it gets.

The sycophants who read her blog quite naturally agree with her every utterance, and everyone who falls into this predictable mould is allowed to have their say; but there is a warning that no dissent is allowed. This has always been a feature of feminism and one of its many failings. It has never countenanced a differing point of view.

You might remember that in January 2005 the President of Havard University, Lawrence H. Summers, caused something of an uproar at an “academic” conferance when he said that innate differences between men and women might be one reason why fewer women succeed in science and maths careers. In this connection he also happened to mention the dearth of female professors in science and engineering at elite American universities. These are two facts which have been amply illustrated by school and university staffing and results over past decades but, sadly, it does not accord with feminist “thinking” which declares that there is very little difference between men and women – this despite clear DNA evidence that the difference genetically between men and women is about 2%, the same sort of gap as between a woman and a female chimpanzee.

One female teacher, from an Institute of technology, felt compelled to walk out of Summers’ talk saying that, if she hadn’t done so, “I would have either  blacked out or thrown up”. I would have thought that anyone so academically parochial and unstable that she is unable to appreciate a point of view which differs from her own would be eminently unsuitable to teach young people how to study and how to think; but such is the state of American education at the moment.

Feminists, such as the writer of the blog I refer to, totally justify the comments by Robert H. Bork in his outstanding book “Slouching Towards Gomorrah”:

“Radical feminism is the most destructive and fanatical movement to come down to us from the sixties . . . by now it certainly deserves its own place in the halls of intellectual barbarisms”.

In true feminist style, the blog blames everything in the world, from big business to religion, for having taken part in “the oppression of women”. But fortunately there are some women who think clearly on these social issues. Midge Decter, for instance, in her article “You’re on your own baby” in The Women’s Quarterly, asks:

“Why there should have been an explosion of angry demand on the part of women who as a group were the freest, healthiest, wealthiest, longest-lived and most comfortably situated people the world has ever yet laid eyes on.”

Decter anwers this question by stating that it is her freedom that frightens today’s woman:

“The appeal to her of the women’s movement is that in her fear and disorientation, the movement offers her the momentary escape contained in the idea that she is not free at all; that she is, on the contrary, the victim of an age-old conspiracy that everything troubling to her has been imposed on her by others.”

Think of all the freedom and choice available to modern woman: whether to take up a career in any field she chooses, whether to get married; and if she marries whether to juggle both or to make the choice of becoming a career mother and wife, and so on. In short, today’s woman has to take responsibility for her own actions and decisions. How much easier it must be to retreat into victimhood and “blame the Patriarchy”. Hence white, heterosexual men have become the universal blamees.

The most constructive comment I’ve ever read about feminism was by a woman who said: “Let’s face it, girls, feminism was a mistake”.