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Jan. 24, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
11:31
2082 Feminism Is Socialism with Panties?

In which Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, attempts to provide some context for a recent minor firestorm.

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I guess a firestorm has erupted over my statement that feminism is socialism with panties.
Well, yes, I completely stand by that.
And of course, I will leave it to the fourth-rate thinkers to point out that there are feminists who aren't socialists.
Of course, absolutely, this was a comment.
This was not a recent argument with footnotes.
But yeah, the vast majority of feminists are socialists who will choose socialism over women, who will promote socialism over women.
I'll give you some examples.
Betty Frieden, of course, one of the most powerful feminists of the 60s.
Of course, she often compared American society to Nazism and so on.
She characterized the traditional home as a comfortable concentration camp.
But that was pretty monstrous.
And of course, that's typical Marxist stuff, right?
The family is a prison and so on.
Kate Millett in her book Sexual Politics was of course that patriarchy must be ended by a revolution to install the new sexual order, you know, this egalitarian one.
And of course the only way to achieve egalitarianism for women who want to have babies is to have the state take over half the parenting.
That's the only way that it can work.
If you want a full equality for women, if those women want to have children, then you have to have a state.
This is simply no other way.
This is why feminism of this ilk and socialism are so much hand in hand, because women are going to get pregnant and women need to breastfeed and women need massive amounts of resources to raise their children.
As somebody who's been a stay-at-home dad for three years, I can tell you it is a staggering amount of work to raise a child.
And you simply can't have egalitarianism between the sexes without massive transfers of wealth from the general population to women who have children.
I mean, there's simply no conceivable way to achieve it.
College-aged women who've been in the workforce for the same amount of time as college-educated men earn almost exactly the same amount of money.
But the pay of women is discounted because they may want to go have children, and most of them do.
Like 95% of people marry and have a family.
So what does she say?
So let's see. Much like the Plato and Rousseau and Marx and Engels, Kate Millett wanted to abolish the family, and the only way to turn that is to communize the raising of children.
So she wrote, the care of children is infinitely better left to the best trained practitioners of both sexes rather than to harried and all too frequently unhappy parents.
And she also agrees that, quote, the radical outcome of Engel's analysis is that the family must go.
Simone de Beauvoir, well, I mean, that was just a complete mess.
This, um... The mistress of Jean-Paul Sartre, she remained childless.
He had his affairs with his often underage mistresses.
She had violent affairs with them.
She lived in garbage.
I mean, it's just a complete mess.
A complete mess. So, you could sort of go on.
I mean, I won't read you too much.
You can look into all of this kind of stuff.
I'll put some notes about this below.
Gloria Steinem, of course, quite a very famous feminist from the 60s and 70s, who declared, overthrowing capitalism is too small for us.
We must overthrow the whole fucking patriarch.
I think, anti-capitalism.
Because capitalism assigns value to To that which is in demand.
And if women take themselves out of the workforce to have children and to breastfeed and to raise kids, then they're going to be paid less.
I mean, of course. Judy Rebeck, president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women.
It's a quasi-government agency, a radical left-winger.
Judy Darcy, once a radical left-winger, was the head of CUPE, Canada's 400,000-member union of public employees.
This stuff is a little dated.
The NAC lobbies aggressively for abortion on demand, legalized prostitution, lesbian rights, universal tax-funded daycare, and the nationalization of banks and industry.
Okay, well, these are socialist agendas.
And so, again, you can read on and on.
Yeah, there are some, you know, Wendy McElroy and other fantastic libertarian thinkers are staunch feminists and fantastic.
More power to them. I stand with them.
But a lot of them aren't. So let's look at one other thing here.
Meryl Streep, again, more famous for her acting than her feminism.
But this is from Maclean's Canadian magazine, December 21st, 2011.
I just read this a couple of weeks ago about her recent portrayal of Margaret Thatcher, who I have not read.
So it says, Streep has long been an outspoken feminist.
But when Thatcher became Reagan's, sorry, when Thatcher became Britain's first female prime minister in 1979, the actress wasn't terribly impressed.
Quote, I was not a Reagan supporter, she explains.
I was in the left wing, the actor's end.
The lines are drawn.
You don't cross over.
The lines are drawn.
The fact that Margaret Thatcher became Britain's first female prime minister in 1979, if you were interested in gender rather than socialism, if you were interested in feminism rather than socialism, rather than the state, then you would cheer Margaret Thatcher for crossing that line as a woman.
But no, she said...
The lines are drawn. You don't cross over.
And the lines are socialism versus the Thatcheristic kind of neocon philosophy.
So to continue.
Meryl Streep says about Margaret Thatcher, she was from another species with the bubble hair and the wrong clothes.
Oh, man.
I've spent some time around actors.
I went to the National Theatre School for a couple of years and I've spent some time around actors.
And that's pretty bubble-headed even for an actor to say that the problem with Margaret Thatcher was that she wore the wrong clothes.
Is that really how a feminist is going to judge an incredibly accomplished political woman who's crossed a massive gender barrier in a pretty sexist society like England?
Is that how she's going to judge her by saying she has a funny haircut and the wrong clothes?
Oh, Meryl Streep, for shame!
Oh my god!
Oh, well, I guess it's better when other people write her lines.
She goes on to say, When Margaret Thatcher was elected, I had just had my first baby, and I was consumed with that.
But I do remember having a discussion with my friends that, whether you liked her or not, it was very cool that England, this hidebound, class-driven, gender-exclusive, homophobic, anti-Semitic old boys club, had allowed this to happen.
We thought it was just a matter of seconds before it would happen in America, she laughed 30 years later.
Really? That's what a feminist is going to say about Margaret Thatcher?
That the old boys club just allowed it to happen?
That Margaret Thatcher had nothing to do with it whatsoever?
She didn't will it? She didn't work for it?
She didn't earn it? She didn't carve her way through?
I mean, everybody goes completely mental when a half-black president gets into the U.S. But when Margaret Thatcher...
Became the first female prime minister of England.
I heard nothing about it from feminists.
Nothing! You can't even get them to talk about it decades and decades later.
I mean, the other example, of course, which I'll touch on briefly, is you can't find mainstream feminists who are willing to say anything positive about Ayn Rand.
Astonishing! Astonishing!
If, of course, you believe that feminism has anything to do with women, when I argue it has everything to do with socialism.
The reason that Margaret Thatcher and Ayn Rand are a persona non gratis for feminists is because they're right-wing, because they're neocons, because they're anti-government, and feminists are mostly pay-to.
$300 million of funding in Canada goes into feminist causes.
I mean, they're state creatures.
They're state Frankenstein.
So, of course, they're going to be pro-state.
I mean, whoever pays the piper calls the tune.
And, I mean, whatever you think of Ayn Rand, I mean, what?
An amazingly accomplished woman and wrote the second most influential book in the English language after the Bible.
When English wasn't even her native tongue.
She only learned it in her twenties with any competence.
I mean, wrote one of the most stimulating and powerful intellectual works in history and popularized philosophy in a way that was truly stunning and unprecedented in the world, had an enormous impact on things, had movies made, got into that system, spoke all over America and other places, and just, I mean, had an astounding life, chose to become, chose to remain childless.
That's pretty ideal I think in terms of feminist accomplishments and achievements.
And so when people say, well, you know, women are not good abstract thinkers, Ayn Rand was a good abstract thinker, if not a great one.
And so, again, you would think that feminists would be all over trumpeting this as a wonderful example of the amazing power that women can achieve, the amazing influence, the amazing work that women can perform in society.
But you can't find feminists who are willing to talk positively about Ayn Rand.
If gender was their, not even their only, but their main criterion, then they'd be all over her.
But no, because she wasn't socialist.
She was anti-socialist. And therefore, the radical egalitarianism that is sought by many mainstream feminists simply can't occur in the free market.
Can't. And so, again, you could come up with many, many other examples, but these just happen to be two.
I mean, did you even see a lot of feminists writing encouragingly about Michelle Bachmann?
The only woman on the Republican stage debating all of these photocopied old white guys.
Not all old, but no.
You see, because she's a neocon, she's right-wing.
I mean, go to the National Organization of Women's Look at the political action committee website.
Look at who they're endorsing.
All Democrats. All Democrats.
I mean, you just have to look at the facts.
You can get upset at me for pointing it out.
But that's just another way of saying I don't like that you're right.
I mean, show me some facts of the contrary.
I'm happy to revise my opinion.
But that's what I've seen.
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