Right now, the only right in this country that women have that cannot be taken away by a single reactionary legislature, intransigent executive, or ultraconservative judiciary is their right to vote. It is the only right they have that is clearly delineated under the U.S. Constitution. Many women believe they don't need to renew the drive for the Equal Rights Amendment, and perhaps they are right. But if they are wrong...

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Real Feminism: A Male Perspective

By Richard Girard

Neofeminism: The irrational belief that there are no natural behavioral differences between the sexes and that all gender (other than genital dimorphism) is "socially constructed". Neofeminists believe that if infant boys were "socialized" in the same way as girls they would act exactly like girls, even into manhood. The female standard of behavior is viewed as the "correct" one, thus normal male behavior is considered pathological.--Maggie McNeill, "Lexicon," The Honest Courtesan, August 13, 2013. Used with permission.

Maggie McNeill is a woman with whom I sometimes disagree but deeply respect. She is an unabashed libertarian though not doctrinaire: she is more than willing to listen to other opinions, even those of an unabashed Franklin Roosevelt-William O. Douglas Democrat-Liberaltarian such as myself. She is a retired professional sex provider (prostitute for those who are slow on the uptake) and librarian who writes for her own blog, The Honest Courtesan, on a wide array of subjects including literature, music, and politics; but especially the politics, history, and sociology of prostitution; the legal and moral advantages of decriminalizing the "oldest profession"; the exploitation of the myth of widespread human sex trafficking by government, religious zealots, and "Neofeminists" (a category of female for whom neither she nor I have any patience) in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Ze aland, and Western Europe; as well as the abuse, oppression, and exploitation of sex workers in particular, and women in general (yes, t he two are related) around the world.

I first became acquainted with Maggie when I was working on my March 24, 2012 OpEdNews article "Making Sex a Crime, " in which I wrote about the overstatement of the prevalence of sex trafficking in the United States and other Western democracies. I provided real statistics--not the alarmist ones we see on the TV news magazines or read about in newspapers like the New York Times--for sex workers here in the United States and other developed nations in the West. Maggie was kind enough to take a look at my article before my submission, and made some very useful suggestions.

Maggie and I disagree on decriminalized prostitution in two areas: I  think some zoning of where street prostitutes work may be needed--no trolling for customers in front of a school is the admittedly extreme example I give; I also believe that all of the sex workers--exotic dancers, phone-sex operators, professional sex providers, etc.--should organize into unions or guilds to maximize their political power and potential benefits (Health care, child care, negotiating rates with hotels, etc.). Maggie disagrees with me, but we can see each others' points and reasoning for our positions: she has the stand on your own/no limitations libertarian ideal; I have the strength in numbers, together with the "some people are too dumb, ignorant, or pigheaded not to make a public nuisance of themselves and ruin it for everyone else (even though I wish they weren't)" liberal ethos. But we also agree that for the majority of sex workers today, especially professional sex providers, the greatest danger isn't pimps or customers, it's law enforcement. Decriminalize prostitution, and the cops lose much of their ability to abuse the professional sex provider as well as becoming answerable for their abuse in both civil and criminal court.

Maggie and I are in absolute agreement on one thing: we do not want to see the "legalization" of prostitution, with the attendant regulation in such an action. This would simply make the state in general, and law enforcement in particular. It is law enforcement who, under our society's current system of criminalization, represent the greatest threat to today's professional sex provider, and not only in the legal sense. Legalization, and its inherent over-regulation, would turn law enforcement into de facto pimps. I am certain this would open the way to even greater abuse of the professional sex provider by members of law enforcement.

The Neofeminist Mistake

There are many faults with both the culture and the ethos of the Neofeminist. The first of these is that they see women as men with breasts and a vagina, and men as women with a penis and testicles. This is related to one of the general errors made by the collectivists in the Second Wave of Feminism as a group (and I am thinking of Simone Beauvoir in particular, whose book The Second Sex was the catalyst for the Second Wave), reducing every individual to the lowest common denominator possible in their dealings with others. In doing so, they forget that it is the differences in human beings that makes every human being unique and in their own way valuable. It also gives lip service to equality of the sexes, but most Neofeminists no more believe in the reality of equality than they believe in the Man in the Moon.

The Neofeminists have no interest in the reintroduction and passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (changed in such a way so that it takes into account the biological differences between the two sexes, while at the same time making it inclusive of the LGBTQ community), or real equality in any cultural, social, political, or even economic sense. I believe that the Neofeminist philosophy is divided primarily into two groups: those who wish to destroy the patriarchal control of society, replacing it with a matriarchy; and those who simply wish to subvert the patriarchy and use it for their own ends. In the end, both sides desire to dominate and control society replacing male domination with a "kinder, gentler" female one.

This has always been the greatest weakness of collectivism; a collectivist system not only permits but encourages its members to turn people into things--oftentimes numbers for a faceless, uncaring, dehumanized bureaucracy--rather than celebrate and support those self-same people whose uniqueness represents the very best in what humanity and their nation have to offer.

I believe that a real feminist is not a one-size-fits-all collectivist, trying to shoehorn all of humanity into a small number of easily defined slots in the message center of reality. Nor is the real feminist a Thatcherite individualist who believes that there is no society, only individuals and families. A real feminist is a communitarian: someone who believes in the symbiotic and empowering positive relationships that exist between the individual and their community (or communities); in which every single human being in that community is a unique and valued member. The communitarian ideal recognizes the need for the careful balancing act between the needs of the many and the needs of the few or the one. The communitarian idea figures prominently in the philosophies of such diverse individuals as Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Abraham Lincoln. To quote Judith Ayers and Barbara Sostatia from their article "What Would Libertarianism Look Like, If It Wasn't Just White People,", "Despite the libertarian rhetoric of individualism, we are all intricately connected, and have been given the opportunity to craft our communities and government together."

Individualism and Its Faults

Individualism as a personal philosophy has the unfortunate tendency toward selfishness as a basis for personal morality. Because of this, there are individuals in the United States who wrongly believe they have rights that have neither limits nor concomitant responsibility. Many of these individuals hold public office or other positions of influence. They are wrong; such a belief is nothing more than a crypto-fascist aristocrat's selfish pipe dream.

There is the traditional limitation on individual actions, going back to colonial times, which says that your rights end at my nose. This is just plain common sense for most people, but there are individuals who for some reason believe that their rights are superior to those of other individuals. This air of superiority is the attitude of those who desire to be an aristocrat: someone whose very blood makes them superior to the average American; an attitude that is not supported in the United States by its history, law or custom. It has no place in our history except in a small number of mostly local or regional examples that were overthrown within a few generations due to their misuse and disrepute. Slavery is the best-known, longest-term example of this type of glaring evil.

There are also some individualists who think their rights and their desires are the same thing, and as a minority, their wishes should be followed by the government. I have bad news for them: rights and desires are not one and the same thing. I'll let Thomas Jefferson argue my point for me (all quotes are from The Complete Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition; 1904; volume and page are in parentheses separated by colons).

The first quote is from Jefferson's letter to Alexander von Humboldt in 1817 (15:127), "The first principle of republicanism is that the lex majoris partis is the fundamental law of every society of individuals of equal rights; to consider the will of the society enounced by the majority of a single vote as sacred as if unanimous is the first of all lessons in importance, yet the last which is thoroughly learnt. This law once disregarded, no other remains but that of force, which ends necessarily in military despotism." Jefferson had earlier expounded upon this principle in a letter in 1816 to Samuel Kercheval (15:33), "The mother principle [is] that 'governments are republican only in proportion as they embody the will of their people, and execute it.' "

In his First Inaugural in 1801, Jefferson asked the question about majority rule that many libertarians and conservatives ask today, and gave them a part of his answer (3:320), "Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question." Twenty-two years later, in a letter to an A. Coray, Jefferson expanded his answer (15:482), "The equal rights of man, and the happiness of every individual, are now acknowledged to be the only legitimate objects of government. Modern times have the signal advantage, too, of having discovered the only device by which these rights can be secured, to wit: government by the people, acting not in person, but by representatives chosen by themselves, which is to say, by every man [and woman] of ripe years and sane mind, who contributes either by his purse or person to the support of his country. " [Words in brackets are an addition by myself to modernize Jefferson's chauvinist viewpoint.]

But Jefferson was not ignorant or indifferent to the potential problems with a nation where the majority of the people--and their representatives--make the laws. He had seen the potential for abuse firsthand under his friend John Adams with the Alien and Sedition Acts. In a letter to Samuel Dupont de Nemours in 1816 Jefferson wrote (14:490) "The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society. " In 1788, he wrote to his protege James Madison of the need to compromise, and ameliorate the positions of the majority with the respect to th e minorit y (7:184), "[Sometimes] the minorities are too respectable, not to be entitled to some sacrifice of opinion, in the majority. "

Your inalienable rights, whether they are social constructs or God-given, have limitations. You cannot inflict your religious-belief system on me unless I agree to it, even if your viewpoint represents that of the majority. You cannot set up some noxious enterprise on your private property--such as a hide-tanning factory--if it adversely effects myself, your other neighbors, or the rest of your community. You cannot use your freedom of speech and the press to slander and libel me without inviting serious civil and even criminal consequences. Freedom is never an absolute--it is always limited by those whose lives you and your actions affect.

Beginning to Define Real Feminism

I became aware of an article by Lisa Wade, PhD., a Professor of Sociology at Occidental College when it was mentioned by Cathy Reisenwitz on her blog Sex and the State, in an October 15, 2013 article titled "Sociology Professor at Occidental College Gets Super Close to Right on Feminism." Cathy is an unrepentant anarchist, of the sort every society and governmental system needs in small doses to keep them honest. She thinks most of today's problems can be settled by "more anarchy," in the form of an anarchic state of responsible individuals. Like James Madison in The Federalist Papers No. 51, I agree with her, but only if men and women were angels. The reality is that in an America where--according to Dr. Donald Black, MD, of the University of Iowa Medical School, and Martha Stout, PhD., formerly of the Harvard Medical School--between three and four-and-one-half percent of our population suffer from Antisocial Personality Disorder, aka sociopathy, anarchy is not a really viable option. (See my September 4, 2013 OpEdNews article, "Libertarianism in Its Destructive Phase; Or Why Responsibility for Yourself Just Isn't Enough, Part 2," for more on this subject.)

In Professor Wade's article, "My Two Cents on Feminism and Miley Cyrus," she compares the contradictory reactions of two "feminist" women in the music industry, Sinead O'Connor and Amanda Palmer, to Miley Cyrus's music video Wrecking Ball. I will quote from Professor Wade's article at length [I have edited it for clarity and conciseness, as well as adding my own thoughts]:

"O'Connor warns Cyrus that the music industry is patriarchal  and capitalist." She explains that the capitalists will never pay Cyrus what she's worth because "[t]he whole point is to exploit her. " O'Connor writes:

'The music business doesn't give a sh*t about you, or any of us. [Author's note--that is true of all of us when dealing with any unregulated capitalist system.] They will prostitute you for all you are worth, and when you end up in rehab as a result of being prostituted, "they" will be sunning themselves on their yachts in Antigua, which they bought by selling your body. 

"O'Connor is, of course, right about the music industry. This is not something that requires argumentation, but is simply true in a patriarchal, capitalist society. For-profit industries are for profit. You may think that's good or bad, but it is, by definition, about finding ways to extract money from goods and services and one does that by selling it for more than one paid for it. And media companies of all kinds are dominated at almost all levels by (rich, white) men. These are the facts.

"Disagreeing, Palmer claims that O'Connor herself is contributing to an oppressive environment for women. All women's choices, Palmer argues, should be considered fair game.

'I want to live in a world where WE as women determine what we wear and look like and play the game as our fancy leads us, army pants one minute and killer gown the next, where WE decide whether or not we're going to play games with the male gaze.  

"In Palmer's utopia, no one gets to decide what's best for women. The whole point is to have all options on the table, without censure, so women can pick and choose and change their mind as they so desire.

"This is intuitively pleasing and seems to mesh pretty well with a decent definition of 'freedom.' And women do have more choices -- many, many more choices -- than recent generations of women. They are now free to vote in elections, wear pants, smoke in public, have their own bank accounts, play sports, go into men's occupations and, yes, be unabashedly sexual. Hell, they can even run for President. And they get to still do all the feminine stuff too! Women have it pretty great right now and Palmer is right that we should defend these options.

"So, both are making a feminist argument. What, then, is the source of the disagreement?

"O'Connor and Palmer are using different levels of analysis. Palmer's is straightforwardly individualistic: each individual woman should be able to choose what she wants to do. O'Connor's is strongly institutional: we are all operating within a system--the music industry, in this case, or even 'society'--and that system is powerfully deterministic.

"The truth is that both are [partially] right and, because of that, neither sees the whole picture. On the one hand, women are making individual choices. They are not complete dupes of the system. They are architects of their own lives. On the other hand, those individual choices are being made within a system. The system sets up the pros and cons, the rewards and punishments, the paths to success and the pitfalls that lead to failure. No amount of wishing it were different will make it so. No individual choices change that reality.

"So, Cyrus may indeed be 'in charge of her own show,' as Palmer puts it. She may have chosen to be a 'raging, naked, twerking sexpot' all of her own volition. But why? Because that's what the system rewards. That's not freedom, that's a strategy.

"In sociological terms, we call this a patriarchal bargain. Both men and women make them and they come in many different forms. Generally, however, they involve a choice to manipulate the system to one's best advantage without challenging the system itself. This may maximize the benefits that accrue to any individual woman, but it harms women as a whole. Cyrus' particular bargain--accepting the sexual objectification of women in exchange for money, fame, and power--is a common one. 

"We are all Miley, though. [Author's note--This is equally true of males who aren't part of the power elite.] We all make patriarchal [and other] bargains, large and small. Housewives do when they support husbands' careers on the agreement that he share the dividends. [Men do when they put up with abuse from their boss to keep their job.] Many high-achieving women do when they go into masculinized occupations to reap the benefits, but don't challenge the idea that occupations associated with men are of greater value. None of us have the moral high ground here.

"So, is Miley Cyrus a pawn of industry patriarchs? No. Can her choices be fairly described as good for women? No.

"That's how power works. It makes it so that essentially all choices can be absorbed into and mobilized on behalf of the system. Fighting the system on behalf of the disadvantaged--in this case, women--requires individual sacrifices that are extraordinarily costly. In Cyrus' case, perhaps being replaced by another artist who is willing to capitulate to patriarchy with more gusto. Accepting the rules of the system translates into individual gain, but doesn't exactly make the world a better place. In Cyrus' case, her success is also an affirmation that a woman's worth is strongly correlated with her willingness to commodify her sexuality.

"Americans want their stories to have happy endings. I'm sorry I don't have a more optimistic read. If the way out of this conundrum were easy, we'd have fixed it already. But one thing's for sure: it's going to take collective sacrifice to bring about a world in which women's humanity is so taken-for-granted that no individual woman's choices can undermine it. To get there, we're going to need to acknowledge the power of the system, recognize each other as conscious actors, and have empathy for the difficult choices we all make as we try to navigate a difficult world."

I believe that Ms. Reisenwitz has misread Professor Wade's article when she describes Professor Wade's solution as collectivist. In fact, I would actually state that Sinead O'Connor's view is more collectivist than Professor Wade's. Professor Wade is describing a communitarian solution to a problem when she speaks of collective sacrifice. It would be collectivist only if it were not voluntary. Professor Wade is describing women voluntarily sacrificing some of their individual goals and strategies--including both the fiction of "having it all" and the use of sex as a means to get ahead--in order for the community of women at large to achieve true equality.

Calling for a New Equal-Rights Amendment

There is still a very strong undercurrent in this country to treat women not just as second-class citizens, but as children, incapable of making decisions regarding their own mental, physical, or emotional well-being. This is seen in the fight against abortions and birth control, the crusade against exotic dance clubs, and the continuing fight against the decriminalization of prostitution. Years ago, COYOTE (Cast Off Your Old Tired Ethics) founder and prostitution decriminalization advocate Margo St. James warned everyone of what the result of not ending the prohibition on sex work in this country would be: "If we [can't] get the prohibition on sex work repealed, we [will] never end up hanging on to our abortion rights: 'it's the same piece of property.'"

The Neofeminists, in an attempt to acquire relevance  and maintain power, have joined an odd coalition of right-wing Christians, law-enforcement agencies, unscrupulous academicians, and ignorant or corrupt politicians; who use the unfounded fear of wide-spread sex trafficking in this country as a means to bolster budgets, receive grants, raise their own pay, and to keep prostitution illegal in the United States. These faux feminists, ignoring Ms. St. James' prescient admonition, are in fact traitors to their cause, refusing to understand that everything either continues to evolve, or it begins to regress.

The Neofeminists believe that they have achieved so many of their goals to expand the role of women in our society without an Equal-Rights Amendment (ERA) that it is no longer needed. The continuous attacks from the Right on issues such as abortion, contraception, and other issues involving the control of women's bodies, shows that women's advances lack a true foundation. The various limitations to abortions by various states, the continuous attacks on and closing of abortion clinics, the murderous jihad against abortion providers, as well as the ongoing crusade against exotic dance clubs across our country, particularly in the "red states," shows the rights women believe they have gained without an ERA are as ephemeral as a fever dream. Without an ERA to protect women, and its inherent guarantee of women having control over their own bodies, all the Neofeminists believe they have gained can disappear in a single upheaval of reactionary fervor.

If any of you feel your rights are safe from reactionaries like Charles and David Koch, Joe and Pete Coors, the majority of the Hunt, Mellon, and Walton families, etc., you might want to take a glance at this Huffington Post article from January 3, 2011, "Scalia: Women Don't Have Protection Against Discrimination." This is what the extreme Right, the "let's take our country back (to the 1890's when Plessy v. Ferguson and segregation were the law of the land, there was no regulation of corporations, and antitrust was only used against unions)," really believe and strive to recreate. They don't want democracy, they want plutocracy--a form of oligarchy where the rich, and only the rich, are blessed with any real protection under the law, and the government is a wholly owned subsidiary of the domineering corporations. If any of you think the rights we have gained in the last fifty years are safe, I would very strongly advise you to look again. (See "12 At tacks On Workers' Rights That Will Make You Kinda Mad ," and understand women still get it worse then men do in the work place.)

A Future of Real Equality

I believe--like psychologist David Loye, PhD. (husband of Riane Eisler, author of The Chalice and The Blade)--that we are in the midst of a new epoch of evolutionary change for humanity, an epoch where democracy, community, empathy, conscience, and love will take the forefront in the relationships between individual humans and the nations and communities to which they belong. The once hopeful motto of the French Revolution, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" will lose the terrifying aspects given it by men like Robespierre, and become the watchwords of a new generation. This new generation, stripped of hope in the system, and raised on the tactics of Gandhi, King, and Mandela, where men and women (included together under the word "Fraternity") will at long last begin to value the uniqueness of everyone regardless of race, creed, color, class, national origin, personal philosophical or religious beliefs, as well as what neighborhood, town or city, state, province, or nation they were born in, by realizing we all belong to a larger community, humankind. We will all as human beings finally realize and accept that our differences do not represent a threat, but rather an opportunity for us to grow together and become something greater than we are already. We may at long last see the end of the patriarchal, dominator paradigm that has been used to divide us with fear of the other, which has held sway over so much of the world for the last five millennia, and disappear like a bad dream. With the end of that paradigm, we may also see the end of the alienation and hatred that has made this world a neurotic, borderline Hell for so many of us.

I believe that future is something that is worth all of us fighting for.

Authors Bio:

Richard Girard is a polymath and autodidact whose greatest desire in life is to be his generations' Thomas Paine. He is an FDR Democrat, which probably puts him with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in the current political spectrum. His answer to all of those who decry Democratic Socialism is that it is a system invented by one of our Founding Fathers--Thomas Paine--and was the inspiration for two of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who the Democrats of today would do well if they would follow in their footsteps. Or to quote Harry Truman, "Out of the great progress of this country, out of our great advances in achieving a better life for all, out of our rise to world leadership, the Republican leaders have learned nothing. Confronted by the great record of this country, and the tremendous promise of its future, all they do is croak, 'socialism.'