All Episodes
Previous Next
March 7, 2014 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
51:18
Gloria Steinem's Mental Health Problems
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
And now from our economic desk.
A new term, he covery.
That's what some economic analysts are calling what's happening in the U.S. job market.
Since the official end of the recession in June 2009, men gained 768,000 jobs while women have lost 218,000.
These are very strange lines to delineate across.
I'd like to know how many left-handed people got jobs and how many right-handed people got jobs.
Because I bet more right-handed people got those jobs.
What about blue-eyed people and brown-eyed people?
There are a lot more brown-eyed people.
I think that the brown-eyed people probably got more jobs than the blue-eyed people.
I want you to figure these things out for me as well, because they seem just as fucking important as whether men or women are doing the work.
And the news from the executive suites is no better for women.
Just 3% of Fortune 500 companies are led by women.
Listen, I'm taking exception to this, because you're saying that women are lazy bitches.
If women can get to the top, that means it's possible for them to get to the top.
That means the only reason they're not getting to the top is because they are choosing not to put the hard work in.
To understand these disparities and to take a hard look at the challenges facing women today, we checked in with one of the leaders of the women's movement, Gloria Steinem.
Whoa there, Skippy.
What are you talking about?
What challenges?
Do you think that more women should be CEOs of Fortune 500 companies?
Because last time I checked, that was a fucking hard job.
It was a lot of work.
It was a lot of sacrifice.
And at the end of it, women are not even going to get a husband out of it.
The men are doing it for status, because women are attracted to status.
Men are not attracted to status in women, or at least, by and large, they're not.
This is why you have so many women saying, but I'm earning so much money.
Why aren't the men flocking to me?
So yes, okay, let's carry on making women feel that they should be men.
The author and activist has been fighting for women's rights and social justice issues for more than 40 years.
In 1972, she co-founded Ms. Magazine and continues to serve as a consulting editor there.
She's written six books, including four bestsellers.
Oh, someone obviously without bias, then.
Someone clearly rational who doesn't have a dog in this race, who isn't interested about the outcome, just wants to report the facts objectively.
Need to know's correspondent Stacey Tisdale sat down with Gloria Steinem recently to talk about men, women, and power.
Let's time travel.
Let's go back to the 1960s.
When this woman was still relevant.
What was in the air that made this such a unique time, and what was on the minds and lips of average Americans?
Well, I think, speaking for myself, as an average person at the time.
Gloria Steinem was born in Toledo, Ohio in 1934.
Her mother, Ruth, was a Presbyterian, and her father, Leo, was the son of Jewish immigrants from Germany and Poland.
They lived and traveled about in the trailer from which Leo carried out his trade as a travelling antiques dealer in the 30s.
Right?
When Steinem was three years old, her mother Ruth, then aged 34, had a nervous breakdown that left her an invalid, trapped in delusional fantasies that occasionally turned violent.
She changed from an energetic, fun-loving, book-loving woman into someone afraid to be alone, who could not hang on to reality long enough to hold a job, and who could rarely concentrate enough to read a book.
Ruth spent long periods in and out of sanatoriums for the mentally disabled.
Steinem was 10 years old when her parents finally separated in 1944.
Her father went to California to look for work, while she and her mother continued to live together in Toledo.
While her parents divorced as a result of her mother's illness, it was not a result of chauvinism on the father's part, and Steinem claims to have understood and never blamed him for the breakup.
Nevertheless, the impact of these events had a formative effect on her personality.
While her father, a traveling salesman, never provided much financial stability to the family, his exit aggravated their situation.
Steinem interpreted her mother's inability to hold on to a job as evidence of a general hostility towards working women.
She also interpreted the general apathy of doctors towards her mother as emerging from a similar anti-woman animus.
Years later, Steinem described her mother's experiences as having been pivotal to her understanding of social injustices.
These perspectives convinced Steinem that women lacked social and political equality.
Yeah, that sounds like a fucking average American family.
Go on, Gloria Steineman.
Tell me about what the average American is thinking, you fucking fruitcake.
You were raised by an insane mother on her own from the age of 10 upwards.
She was so fucking crazy, she couldn't hold down a job, and you put that down not to the mother, but to the entire rest of the world.
Tell me what the average American and you being the average American thinks.
Go on.
I assumed that you had to get married and you had to have children.
Otherwise, you were a little crazy.
So I kept saying, I'm definitely going to do that.
Just not right now.
So if I thought that, I think it probably was the general idea that every person had to live a very similar life.
What the women's movement and other social justice movements brought was the whole idea of uniqueness combined with community.
But you didn't have to play a role.
You could actually be an individual.
How ironic then that now all feminists are literally carbon copies of each other.
They are literally indistinguishable.
They are literally brainwashed into the same goddamn propaganda that comes out of the mind of someone who was raised by an insane parent and as the daughter of a traveling fucking salesman.
How would you know anything about what a stable family life is?
And, you know, I know I'm being mean.
I know I am.
But I don't care.
Anyone should be able to look at their situation and go, okay, hang on.
I can tell most people's lives are not like mine.
I can tell.
Everyone else seems to be getting quite a lot out of their lives, and I was unlucky.
I didn't have what they had.
That sucks for me.
The next logical step is for me to propagandize all other women, clearly, because my life sucked, even though it was no fucking fault of my father's.
I must now persuade all of the women that their lives suck.
How do you, Gloria Steinem, define feminism?
I'll go with the dictionary.
It just means the belief in the full social, economic, political equality of males and females.
I would add acting on it as well as believing it.
But other than that, I'd go with the dictionary.
What is the women's movement today?
Well, I think we've come through a big consciousness-raising phase in which women realized that we weren't crazy to think there was something wrong with the system.
Well, really, it would depend on what you consider wrong with the system.
Now, I'm going to trust the judgment of someone who was raised alone by an insane mother and say, Yeah, the system was fucked.
It was the system that was failing.
It was the fact, you know, I mean, the fact that millions of people had long marriages, seemed fairly happy, irrelevant.
Absolutely irrelevant.
That is a system that is not working for Gloria Steinem.
And so now we're going to have to persuade women who, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying women lived in blissful happiness or anything, but given the natural state of humanity since the dawn of time, it does seem to be some kind of natural order that all participants are generally happy with.
And it literally takes these goddamn brainwashing courses for women to have to go on to find out how oppressed they are before they realize they are fucking oppressed, apparently.
Now, I'm no social psychologist.
I've never done a women's studies course.
But I would postulate that if someone doesn't think they're oppressed and they require intensive courses and repetition, continuous repetition of the same retarded rhetoric to keep themselves persuaded and constantly remind themselves that they are in fact oppressed, then maybe, just maybe, they aren't.
And consciousness goes like the wind.
Now we're in a more difficult phase, a slower phase of trying to actually change power structures, the way that political decisions are made.
What exactly do you plan to do about the way political decisions are made?
Are you presenting a case against democracy or something?
The way that economics operate.
How are you going to change the way economics operates?
I have a product.
You want the product.
I require money so I can spend that money on other products that I want that you don't produce.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm no economist.
But to be honest with you, I don't think Gloria Steinem is either.
The way that families actually do and don't raise children.
You absolutely are a walking example of how not to raise a child.
If there is one lesson I think everyone should take away from you, Gloria Steinem, it's that you should not leave a young child in the sole care of an insane parent.
Really, the structures of life.
Let's talk about where things stand for women here in the U.S. Today there are almost as many women as men in the workforce, 47%.
But still, we're only earning 80 cents for every dollar that men earn.
Misleading statistic is misleading.
Maybe if you did a STEM subject rather than women's studies, you would have moved into a career that was productive and therefore paid quite handsomely.
I suspect, though, that might have been a lot of hard work.
Back in 1979, it was 62 cents, but it still feels like we should be further along.
Why do you think we still have this disparity?
Well, we have this disparity because women are the cheap labor force on which many things run.
The pink collar ghetto.
What?
Do you mean the cheap part-timers who go into childcare and nursing and other subjects that aren't as difficult as some other subjects?
I'm not saying they're not taxing.
I'm not saying they're not tiring.
I'm saying they do not require the qualifications that, say, a nuclear physicist requires, and yet they get paid loads.
Hmm.
Is there a correlation here, Gloria?
Is there?
Of mostly female jobs are the jobs that we can't outsource.
Call me crazy, but that sounds like a windfall for women then, because men's jobs are getting outsourced at a fucking alarming rate.
At least you know your jobs are secure.
They're the food service and healthcare and office work.
And so, you know, they're poorly paid because they are mostly female.
Holy shit.
What is this interviewer doing?
Why isn't she just getting up and walking out at this point?
Why isn't she something?
No, this, sorry, sorry, I can't do this.
This one's crazy.
She thinks that food service people and office workers are poorly paid because there are mostly women in the job.
Not because they're easy and have, they don't really produce anything.
They're service jobs.
Anyone could do them.
They don't require any special fucking skills.
No, it's because women do them.
Fucking hell.
This woman is actually mental.
Her perspective on reality is so fucking skewed, it's scary.
And she is on TV.
She gets to influence other people.
Holy shit.
Ghettos.
So quantity is not quality.
You know, just because we have now almost 50% of paid work doesn't mean that it's equal.
No, it doesn't.
How many years of study does it take to become a waitress?
How many years of study does it take to do filing and data entry in an office or answer telephones?
The answer is fucking zero.
So is it any wonder that these jobs pay less?
All you're saying is that women are too fucking lazy to get fucking qualifications.
That's what you're saying.
And I don't even think that's true, but that's what you think.
And you know what?
I don't want to say it, but that's what your evidence is presenting.
That is the only conclusion your evidence is presenting.
And if you could show me how women aren't allowed in universities, how women are literally discriminated against universities, then fine.
I'd say, you know what?
Yeah, this is some sort of giant patriarchal conspiracy to keep women down.
But the facts are that women are like 60% of the fucking university graduates now.
And it's just like, so all you, all, the only argument you have is that women are fucking lazy.
And the other problem is that, of course, we have two jobs for the most part.
I mean, poor women always had two jobs, one at home and one outside the home.
Ah, yes.
Gloria Steinem, the average American who can tell us that most women are just like her and get married at the age of 60 fucking six.
How would you know what most families do?
And now most women do.
Let's talk about the way the popular culture interpreted the feminist movement.
Let's look at this ad from the 1970s.
Basically, women were told that we could have it all.
And then we realized that that wasn't possible.
So was our interpretation of the feminist movement wrong?
No.
Your interpretation of the feminist movement was absolutely correct.
They were wrong.
You can't have it all.
You can only have so much.
So decide what it is you want and work towards it.
You were completely correct.
They said, have it all.
You said you've tried it and found that it doesn't work.
Go on, Gloria.
Backtrack.
Tell us how that advert wasn't actually representative feminism in the 70s, despite being made by feminists in the 70s.
Well, that wasn't the feminist, we never said, I mean, if I had a dollar for every time Ms. Magazine had declared Superwoman dead, I would have a lot of money.
See, this is where the fundamental problem occurs, right?
She probably wasn't saying that women can have it all.
She was saying women should be like men.
Now, what women took from her message was that, oh, I should have a family and a job because fundamentally, women want families.
That is one of women, or at least it seems to be from my observations of every woman I've ever met.
They seem to want the whole family package.
What Gloria doesn't understand is that women can't conceive of not wanting a family in the same way that men can't conceive of not wanting to hang out with their mates and drink beer.
Now, this is where the confusion has come in, because Gloria is not your average woman.
She was raised by an insane single mother.
How could she possibly ever know what the average woman is thinking?
She is clearly against the idea of the nuclear family.
She didn't get married until she was 66.
And then she got married to Christian Bale's dad.
So it's probably someone with some money, is what I'm saying.
And this is my point.
This is exactly the problem with feminism.
It goes against what women seem to actually want.
And it is led by complete fucking head cases who presume to speak for all women.
She uses the term women this, women that, women the other, as if she has spoken to all women and they had a vote, a unanimous vote for Gloria Steinem to speak for them, even though none of them know what Gloria Steinem's background is, clearly.
And women have got this propensity to groupthink and it's weird.
If there's a woman listening to this, right, if a woman says, I speak for women, you should tell her to shut the fuck up.
The idea that you have to do it all to have it all was two things.
It's a culture that didn't want to change and therefore said, first said you can't be a lawyer or a TV interviewer or whatever it was you wanted to be.
And then when we did it anyway, said, okay, providing you do everything you did before.
You have to cook three meals.
You have to, you know, be the perfect housekeeper.
You have to be multi-orgasmic till dawn.
It makes you tired just to think about it.
Gloria, did you forget in your evident senility that you didn't get married until you were in your 60s?
You did not have to do these things.
You did not have to cook for a family after you got back from a hard day at work.
And not just because you've never done a hard day's work.
Because society didn't want to change.
So it was a recalcitrant society that said you have to do it all.
Still, there's some research that shows that women don't necessarily step into leadership roles with ease.
There was some big psychological, big emotional transition just to get their heads around, I guess, being in that role.
Like a new study shows that women's share of corporate jobs is 53% at the entry level to 14% at the executive committee level.
Do you think women are mentally and psychologically prepared to be that top person?
God, this program is just full of women bashing.
Oh, women get jobs perfectly well.
They're just too lazy to work their way up the ladder.
Look, I think these women are making wise choices because one of the most common deathbed fucking regrets is, I wish I hadn't worked so much.
I wish I'd spend more time with my family.
Now, I don't know if dying people know what they're talking about.
They might well not.
But when they look back at their lives and think, you know what, I shouldn't have spent so much time in the office, I think there might be some merit to that.
I hope not.
Many a truth is spoken in jest.
She hopes not, because if women don't feel like victims and they can achieve what they want to achieve rather than what she is telling them to achieve, then she has no source of income.
No, because it's not about integrating a not-so-good system.
It's about transforming and making it better.
Yeah, right.
Because if there's one thing future historians are going to say about the Western world, it's that, oh, capitalism, it was just terrible at generating money.
And it played absolutely no part in America's rise to become a superpower.
You know, if women have to acquire all the characteristics of the corporate world, it may not be worth it.
So what Gloria is literally saying here is that you will either have to become a man and do lots of hard work, make lots of sacrifices to succeed, because this success is built purely on merit.
There is no handout.
There are no equalizers.
You compete for the success.
Or we can change the system so it is not a competitive system in the same way that it was before.
It is not an efficient competitive system, which I'm going to term feminizing it to make it a lot more restrictive and have quotas.
So merit is not an issue.
Just quotas of different kinds of people are the issue.
And we'll put these two systems side by side and we'll see which one is more efficient and makes more money.
Because I'm pretty sure that the one with quotas isn't going to make the most money.
This is the point, Gloria.
This is entirely the point.
It is going to be a waste of women's time because they do not have a natural proclivity for this.
This isn't something most women tend to want.
You know, it requires them to make sacrifices they don't really want to make.
And then they start really regretting them.
You know, most men who don't marry, they don't regret not marrying.
Most of them, and I know a lot of them, I know a lot of men who didn't marry.
And most of them shrug their shoulders and go, well, you know, I just didn't find a woman I liked.
They have a great life.
They are the envy of their married friends.
Yeah, it probably gets a little bit lonely every now and again.
But still, they make do.
Women don't get along that well.
Women start to get really distressed.
Just look at some of the shit that is put in newspapers by women in women's sections where women are just, they're panicking.
They're in their 30s and they can't get a fucking date.
No one is interested in them and they are terrified of dying alone.
That is something women really don't want.
At least, that's what they are saying.
That's just what I'm taking.
I'm not even dictating.
I'm just trying to say that this is the general observation that comes back.
So why are you suggesting that they should be like men?
You know, so, and I think women are saying that.
So you it's actually probably more useful to think of women as an immigrant group.
What?
How is it more useful to think of women as an immigrant group?
Why can't we think of women as what they actually are instead of trying to force them into a mold that they clearly do not fit?
Because you have to try and imply that half of the country is a fucking immigrant group just to be able to make this concept make sense in your own heads.
You cannot all possibly be thinking about going along with this.
We're like the biggest immigrant group.
And like other immigrant groups, we probably have a hard time making it up through other people's hierarchies.
Oh, probably.
You probably do.
No, no, probably about.
You certainly do.
You've shown proof that women are having trouble getting to the top.
But it's not that they can't get to the top.
And it's not that there are any fucking barriers in their way.
It's because they are choosing not to do it.
They are not an immigrant group.
They have absolutely the same opportunities as anyone else.
Sometimes they have more.
More women graduate from universities than men.
All right?
You are getting more degrees.
You are getting more jobs.
Your own stats said 53% of new hires are women.
It's not that you can't do it.
It's that they're choosing not to do it.
And more power to them.
Do whatever you want.
Do what makes you happy.
Don't listen to this crazy woman.
This woman thinks that women are a homogeneous group.
She thinks she speaks for all women.
She thinks, despite her remarkably unusual upbringing, that she is an average woman.
And she also thinks that women can be classified as an underclass that live in ghettos and as an immigrant group to the country that they have been born in.
It's unbelievable how insane this woman is.
Why she is even given any credence at all is beyond me.
Women are starting their own businesses because both because it's hard to get up through somebody else's hierarchy and because they don't like what they find there.
You just said you wanted to change the system.
That isn't changing the system.
That is creating a new system.
Oh, everything you say is wrong.
It's described quite a shift.
Speaking of shifts, let's talk a little bit about reproductive rights.
It feels like in the United States, there's almost a targeted state-by-state movement to limit access to family planning.
For example, in Indiana, there is a law that bans access to Planned Parenthood for Medicaid recipients.
That affects birth control, testing for sexually transmitted diseases, screening for cervical cancer, abortion.
Is this just politics as usual?
Actually, no, this is corporatism as usual.
Corporations care only about the bottom line.
And if they can find a way to get people who aren't paying into the system not to benefit from the system, then they will make more money for their shareholders.
These things are an expense that aren't paying back into the system, so they want to remove them.
They just want people who are paying in to gain the benefits of it.
It's quite heartless.
I imagine that there are a lot of unemployed people who can't afford these expensive healthcare systems and don't have this option.
And so, yeah, I agree.
I think they should have it.
I agree with you.
But it's not politics as usual.
Well, yes and no.
I mean, it's patriarchal politics as usual because the very definition of patriarchy is controlling reproduction.
They aren't controlling reproduction.
Or at least, not based on gender lines anyway.
They're controlling reproduction based on wealth lines.
The poorest people don't get to have reproductive rights.
And if you think about it for a minute, what's that going to do?
That's going to create a lot more poor people than rich people.
It's, you know, they're still going to breed.
Only this time they won't be able to stop themselves from actually producing the children.
So that just means you've got more poor people.
And that's perfect for a corporatocracy.
Because that is a large number of people who will be competing for jobs.
And the wages will go down because people will accept lower and lower wages because so many people are unemployed.
It is literally going to breed an underclass of effective slaves.
And I know I'm going off on one, but these people are completely muddying the waters.
Instead of thinking about the actual important impact of what these decisions are, they're talking about how it affects, oh, how does it affect women?
How does it affect society?
You know, can you not just think beyond yourselves for five minutes?
Because these are really important issues.
And if you attack them in a way that is fundamentally flawed in itself, then it's not going to work.
Because your opponents will be able to attack you back on those flaws.
You have to take the most reasonable and logical and rational reason for not doing something and apply it.
Because that is the best way.
And women's bodies are the means of reproduction.
So every patriarchy in different ways tries to control how many workers, how many soldiers.
Right.
So now we're talking about history, Gloria.
And I'm going to guess that you don't know shit about history.
You severely overestimate how much power a ruler in the ancient world or medieval world had.
They simply could not enforce any kind of ironclad dictatorship that could, Nazi-like, control in this eugenics manner.
People were not under the direct control of anyone.
It was really difficult to control people when you didn't have means of mass media.
People did what they fucking liked.
A lot of the time.
You couldn't stop people from fucking each other.
Your complete lack of knowledge about anything is baffling.
If you're going to say that the state or the the patriarchy, which I assume is what you're saying is the state, the the the method of societal organization, then if you think that I mean that if you're equating that to controlling workers and soldiers, then you must be equating it to some sort of organized body of state.
They make decisions as to how many soldiers there are.
And they are taken from how many workers there are.
And a lot of the time, this is done indirectly, through hiring.
They say, we are going to hire soldiers.
And they try to rally people to their standards.
You know, they try to attract people based on wealth and status and success.
They don't just say, oh, all of society is a big group that we can play with.
So this is how many soldiers we can have, this, how many workers are going to have.
Generally, they took as many of anything as they could get.
There was a severe amount of scarcity.
So I mean, that's the only way these things are organized.
The only way you can dictate how many workers and soldiers there are is if it's a central authority.
If it is just a societal-wide, these are the natural inclinations of people in these percentages, you know, 50% of women are going to have children by the time they're 20, say, you know, 35 by the, another 35 by the time they're 50, and then 15% don't ever have children or something, then that's just nature.
You know, that's just the way the statistics work out by people making choices in their lives.
That's not any kind of organized or you know, that's independent decisions being made, just millions of them.
Which races or classes should increase more than others.
So classically, they restrict the women of the superior group, so-called, and exploit the bodies of the inferior group, you know, in order to produce cheap labor.
They didn't know what they were doing most of the time.
They couldn't see the future.
what you were doing is seeing the outcome and ascribing that as intent.
They were not in control of how many...
the spartans could not control how many helots bred.
There were often problems with too many helots.
You know, that's why there were often revolts.
That's why they had the cryptia.
The world, the ancient world was not like Sparta.
Only Sparta was like Sparta.
Modern life isn't like Sparta.
Only Sparta was like Sparta.
And that is what you are describing.
In order to maintain class or maintain clear racial differences, by declaring reproductive freedom as a fundamental right, we are seizing control of the means of reproduction.
It even sounds radical.
It is radical.
It's not really all that radical.
I mean, in the ancient world, there was a plant called ciliphium that was harvested to extinction that was used as a contraceptive.
It worked like the pill.
And incidentally, it's the only reasonable way to survive on this planet Earth.
I can tell what this woman's thinking.
Look at her face.
All right, Gloria, turn down the hyperbole.
I mean, women aren't going to die off if they don't get contraceptive pills, and they have survived to this point without them.
So it's not something that's really quite as important as you're making it out to be.
It's not like food and air.
To be honest with you, I think you're worried about feminists dying off if they don't get access to contraception.
Because whether we can decide when and whether to have kids is the biggest determinant of whether we're healthy, how long we're going to live.
Are we educated?
Can we work outside the home?
It's a fundamental human right.
What are you talking about?
You don't think that there are much more important factors in how healthy and educated you are.
Do you not think that the food you eat and the exercise you take determines more how healthy you are than whether you have kids or not?
Do you not think that whether you go to school or university, whether you have access to education determines whether you are more educated or not?
You can do education and have a child.
It's not impossible.
The point is, it takes compromise.
For example, if you said to your husband, I tell you what, I've got a course on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and then a few hours in the weekend I'll need to do coursework, I'm sure that being a normal, reasonable man, he'd say, yeah, okay, that's no problem.
I'll look after our child while you're doing that.
You know, and I'm sure he'll look after any other points, you know, as well, because most men are quite reasonable.
But the thing is, Gloria, you didn't have this problem.
You don't have kids.
You don't have a husband.
It's one of those things that you don't know what you're talking about.
You don't know what an actual relationship is like, probably.
It's a partnership.
You help each other out.
What would you say to someone that argues that the feminist movement became very quiet after games like Roe versus Wade and that never really took the spotlight that it created to the next level?
To my knowledge, the feminist movement has never become quiet.
Here's more what's happened.
I think that in the beginning, we were sort of odd and interesting and 12 crazy women and people covered us, you know, because we were new.
We were the hula hoop or something.
Then we got to be a majority because every single issue raised by the feminist movement is now supported by a majority of Americans in public opinion polls.
That's because you are deceptive.
You say, are you in favor of equality for women under the law and the ability to work?
And they say, yes, of course I am.
Because everyone is.
Everyone was all for that, right?
What you don't ask them is, do you want to remove merit from government?
Do you want to remove merit from anywhere we go?
Because what we're going to do is introduce a series of quotas, so X amount of people have to be in a certain quota, regardless of whether they're any good at the jobs or not.
That's what you don't ask.
Then we got a big backlash.
And part of the genteel part of the backlash was to say, well, it used to be necessary, but it's not anymore.
You know, you've already succeeded.
The not-so-genteel part of the backlash is all the anti-laws you describe.
But because you make your money from being a feminist, you cannot stand to have them say to you, you're done.
That's it.
Well done.
You've, you know, round of applause.
Good.
Well done.
Now, that's it.
Feminism's done.
And you can't have that because what are you going to do?
You have no other skills, Gloria.
These are your only skills.
All you can do is talk about fucking feminism.
But both of them are aimed at stopping change.
I want you to elaborate on a quote that I've heard you say.
The overall problem is that women are still treated as if they were a particular subject rather than something that transforms every subject.
And the person most guilty for doing this is Gloria Steinem.
She's just saying women do this, women do that, women are the subject of what I'm talking about constantly because I and I really think that whenever feminists use the word women, what we should all collectively do is replace it with the word feminist.
So when they say women like this, they're actually saying feminists like this, feminists like the other, feminists like this, feminists like that.
And then suddenly it makes a lot more sense.
It's like saying war gamers, like, you know, to have this.
And people go, great, that's great for them.
No one's going to take it away from them.
You know, but that's not going to force it on the rest of them, the rest of everyone else.
You know, if they want to create feminist corporations, do it.
I don't care.
I do not care.
They're not going to get my money, but I'm sure that there is a market for it and the market will sustain the size of the business that needs to be sustained on that model.
That's fine.
I would have no problem at all with that.
It's this masquerading as the voice of women that is bullshit.
Absolute bullshit.
Yeah, I mean, women are half the human race.
And not only that, but if you grow up in a home in which it's okay for, by birth, for one group to eat and the other to cook.
Fucking what?
One group to eat and the other to cook.
Are you suggesting that group also didn't eat?
What do you think the group that is just eating and not cooking is doing?
Where do you think this food that is being cooked has come from?
Holy shit, this is pissing me off.
For one to get an education and the other not.
All children have to go to school, Gloria.
And 60% of university graduates are female.
40% are male.
Stop living in this fucking deluded fantasy land.
What you're saying does not reflect reality.
For one to get beaten up or one to get ordered around or and the other give the orders and do the beat.
What kind of family life do you think most people have?
This is the product of being raised solely by an insane mother.
Most people don't have one child that they let beat up the other child.
I've never seen that.
I've never seen it.
Never.
I've had hundreds of friends over the years.
I'm a forces brat.
I've moved around.
I've had hundreds of friends.
You know, most of them have had siblings.
And I've never, ever seen a parent just let one child beat another and order them around.
Never.
You are insane, you need, I should be more compassionate because you are someone who has something wrong in their mind.
You need help, Gloria.
In my opinion, I would recommend you see someone and talk to them about your issues.
They don't reflect reality for the majority of people on earth.
You can directly predict the amount of democracy in a society by the amount of democracy in the home.
I severely doubt it.
I just don't see how you could substantiate that.
The amount of democracy is fallacious in itself.
You don't have an amount of democracy.
You either are democratic or you are not.
So, you know, to suggest that democracy comes in in a measurable quantity is stupid.
You can directly predict the amount of violence in public life or foreign policy by the amount of violence in homes.
I don't think you can.
I really don't.
I think there are too many other geopolitical factors that would have such a greater overriding effect on that.
But not only that, the personal inclinations of the person wielding power at the time would be so so much more important.
You know, like George Bush going to war with Iraq, even though Iraq hadn't done anything wrong.
You know, it's to suggest that somehow the families in the homes have got an influence on a nation's foreign policy like that is absurd.
The Irish peacewomen, for instance, who won the Nobel Prize for beginning the end of centuries of violence in Ireland, did it by saying a Catholic and a Protestant woman saying, we've had violence in the home too long.
We know that that's the source.
Gloria Steinem, you were a snake.
You are a serpent.
Listen to this.
From NobelPrize.org.
I will put a link in the description if I remember.
An IRA man was shot dead fleeing from British soldiers, smashed into a family out for a walk.
Two children were killed outright, and the third was mortally injured, and the was critically injured.
The senseless killing of innocent children produced a wave of revulsion against the violence that had been sweeping Northern Ireland and the Catholic IRA members using murder and terror to drive out the British, Protestant extremists doing the same in response, and many innocent victims killed as a consequence.
The movement was led by Betty Williams, a housewife, not a feminist, who came upon the scene after she heard the shot, and Mayor Reed Corrigan, the young aunt of the dead children.
Arvik told how the two women led marches in which Protestants and Catholics walked together in demonstrations for peace against violence.
That so many people in Northern Ireland recognise that violence cannot bring social justice, Arvic declared, gave hope that it could be the dawn of a new day bringing lasting peace to the sorely tired people of Ulster.
These women are in no way connected between domestic violence and state violence, foreign wars and foreign policy.
These people were suffering and these women, Nobel Peace Prizes winners they deserve to be, actually did something.
They weren't oppressed.
They weren't victims.
They got off their asses and made a difference.
To try and hijack the reasons they did what they did is low.
Really fucking low.
They did it because children were suffering because of a religious sectarian conflict.
The IRA did not want Northern Ireland to be British.
It was nothing to do with domestic violence.
And it didn't change.
There was no increase or decrease of domestic violence.
This was an act of terror.
It was not connected.
You snake.
Of violence in the street and no more.
The good news about being human is we're adjustable.
The bad news is that we're adjustable.
So there's just nothing, absolutely nothing, that isn't affected by the female half of the human race as well as the male half.
The feminist part of the human race, you mean?
You only represent feminists.
Gloria Steinem, author, journalist, icon.
Thank you for joining us.
Thank you.
I am so angry about this because I never thought I would hear someone saying such stupid things with such poor rationales and have the person they're talking to just lap it up.
Oh, you're an icon.
You're an idiot.
That's not fair.
She's not an idiot.
She's just got something wrong with her mind.
She has just had such a strange and unusual upbringing that it has warped her sense of perspective about what most people want.
She doesn't represent anyone but Gloria Bloody Steinem, really, because she had a bad childhood.
You know, I should be a lot more sympathetic.
I really should.
This is a person with serious mental problems, and they they really need to be addressed, but not by giving her a platform in which to spread stupid ideas, misinformed ideas, myopically self-centered ideas, because there are always going to be people out there who will end up who are too stupid to know otherwise and will end up giving her legitimacy.
She is not a legitimate actor, she is biased, she is wrong, she is ill-informed, she has an agenda.
There are so many reasons that she cannot be trusted to be a source of correct information.
It's untrue.
Nobody should listen to this woman ever.
And I feel terrible saying that.
I would hate it if someone said that about me.
But I would endeavour not to be so goddamn wrong about it.
And to try and steal the motivation for the Irish Peace Prize winners is just oh, that is awful.
That is just an injustice to the people who suffered in that situation.
And I am not one to be given to hyperbolic rhetoric, really.
I mean, I probably am somewhat of a demagogue, in fact, but I don't want to be.
And I, you know, I want to say the right and rational things.
So if anyone's listening, they understand that I'm not trying to tell them how they must think.
I'm just trying to tell them just do a thing.
Stop.
Just step back and say, okay, is this likely?
And no, it's not fucking likely.
I am so flabbergasted that any of this is listened to.
It's exhausting and terrifying.
It's absolutely terrifying to think we are moving into a world where merit doesn't count.
It comes, well, it comes second.
It comes second to quotas.
It comes second to arbitrary distinctions.
You know, it's not about performance or success.
It's about how you were born.
And I don't think we should be talking about how people were born.
They don't have any control over that.
The thing they have control over and that shows the character of person they are is how they function, what they do, what their intents are, what their motives are, and what they achieve in their lifetimes.
And not everyone achieves highly, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be accorded the same respect to those who do.
It's about merit.
If they have capacity, if someone has the capacity to do advanced mathematics and they do marvelously well and they change everything for the human race, yeah, they're going to get a much, much greater amount of respect.
But respect is still accorded to people who don't have that capability and yet still put in the same work.
You know, I would still give complete respect for that.
And I feel like I've taught myself round to having to force myself to try and respect Gloria Steinem now because she's obviously working very hard at spreading these nonsense propaganda rumours.
So I don't know.
She is just wrong.
And I know that it's, you know, I shouldn't say that.
I know that it's not fair and I should look at the other side and say, but when I look at the other side, it just seems like she is emotionally damaged by her insane mother.
So I think she needs help.
▲
Export Selection