Defeminisation
Defeminisation
Women have been liberated from womanhood
This post is about the direction of travel of one of the most successful consumer identities of the twentieth century. It will argue that feminism in attempting the liberation of women has begun the process of erasing them completely.
Regular readers will be aware of the argument that delimited desire and the removal of restraints on personal choice do not result in liberty but in enslavement. Feminism is a progressive movement, meaning it must constantly find new barriers to break. This permanent revolution articulates the impulse to be free from reality.
As with every other so called progressive cause, it is concerned with destabilising the meaning of common words, of making ordinary people incapable of describing their lives with confidence. It mobilises around confusion and control, ultimately promoting inversions of reality as the latest radical chic. This is the fate of all social revolutions - once finished with the actual, they progress to wrecking the notional.
Contents:
Feminism as liberation - the idea of ‘Consumer Feminism’
Sister Act - who gets to be a woman these days?
The Power to Define - Authorisation is required to determine your identity
Nowhere Fast - what is the direction of travel?
Liberation = consumerism - Women and children as product
Sex sells - Pornography and OnlyFans
Child’s play - the demothering of a generation
Babies for sale - Who are the women with wombs for rent?
The Handmaid’s Tale - Role playing as victims
What business is it of yours? - Privacy and production of social ills
How feminine is feminism? It cannot and does not defend the most basic facts of womanhood. It is a movement destroying itself over the colonisation of the female by men, which it promotes. The fact that feminism is promoting the replacement of women by men is both astonishing and illustrative of the endpoint of Liberal individualism. This leads in all cases to strange paradoxes which destroy meaningful categories in the service of some extreme identity group. Black identity is about whiteness, rainbow rights are about the attitudes of normal people, feminism is about men.
Feminism as liberation
Women now vote, work, spend their own money. In fact, women consume far more than anyone else.
Globally, they control about $20 trillion in annual consumer spending, and that figure could climb as high as $28 trillion in the next five years. In aggregate, women represent a growth market bigger than China and India combined—more than twice as big, in fact.
The point of a consumer society is purchasing. Women get the point.
The idea of ‘consumer feminism’ is not new and, although unfashionable today, has never been more successful. It means the emancipation of women through conspicuous consumption. Shoes, clothes, makeup, holidays, cars, jewelry, beauty treatments, electrolysis, bleaching, wellness, pampering - me me me. It is hugely successful and women do indeed make for the best consumers - of all this and of everything else.
Now, ‘empowerment’ is defined by a woman’s spending capacity. How much money a woman can make – and spend on status items like clothing, accessories, beauty products and procedures – has become the yardstick for gender parity.
Consumerism is anti-life. It aims for a selfish, hungry dot in place of a person. It does not free women. It makes them miserable.
When the 1999 results were published, there was concern that the incidence of common mental disorders such as anxiety, depression, panic attacks and anhedonia (loss of capacity to experience pleasure) had significantly increased for girls from 19% to 32%. The increase for boys was much smaller, at only 2%. But the latest set of results are even more dramatic. There has been an increase for both sexes: boys are now on 21%, and girls are at a staggering rate of 44%.
Stevenson and Wolfers found that American women – of all social classes, ages and whether they worked, stayed home, had kids or did not – had seen a decline in happiness since the early 70s. Thirty years ago, women reported higher rates of subjective wellbeing than men in the US. This advantage has been entirely eroded, and in many instances it is now men who are happier than women. So how did women manage to end up, after a generation of advances in gender equality, less happy typically than their mothers at their age?
How indeed? Replacing your social relations with retail therapy is replacing life with dust. It is an addiction model which must be reproduced to repeat a fading neurochemical reward. What kind of person needs repeated rewards like this? Someone who cannot find them elsewhere, because there is nowhere else left outside the self to look. Why is this the case? Let us look what has happened to the second sex.
Sister Act
Many women have been attacked for failing to accept their own annihilation. Suzanne Moore and JK Rowling are but two examples. If this seems too strong a word, consider what it means for women for the women’s movement to cancel you for objecting to men taking over your identity.
Camille Paglia is another woman who is blamed for putting suicidal thoughts in someone’s head - someone who thinks they are a woman (but are not). Who put that idea in their head is a question we never ask. How have men come to believe they are - in fact - women? There are no facts, in fact, which support that. It is an assertion from fancy, a fetish, an insistent desire. They compel you to accept this destruction of reality because to do so humiliates you.
There are very dark forces in female envy. The drive in some men to emulate women often produces intense feelings of hatred and resentment provoked by the femininity of women:
Feminism is now a struggle against itself, having exhausted its complaints about reality and now subsumed in the embittering sciomachy of grievance politics, where the imaginary enemy is found in book titles, whiteness, the exclusion of increasingly niche lifestyle weirdoes. Make it about me whispers the Liberal spirit, forging links between fantasies of oppression to chain you to itself.
Life has been for several generations a vector of self and fantasy. We are led away from the real into a world of desire, in which the self becomes subject to imagination. The limits on being and having are dissolved. You should want whatever you can. You should be whoever you say you are. A life without limits. These limits were first perceived in personal freedom and are now discovered in language and the basis of reality itself. The word ‘woman’ is a controversial term, and now they are coming for ‘female’.
The Power to Define
This is not a phenomenon of the fringe. The recent nomination for the US Supreme Court, Kentanji Brown Jackson, famously declared that she could not say what a woman was - as she was not a biologist. In the UK, Stella Creasy, a leading Labour politician, opined that women can in fact have penises.
These are powerful members of the elite with the authority to legislate their ideas into being. This will change the legal basis of reality, giving further authority to the professionally offended to ruin your life if you are reckless enough to speak the truth out loud.
What does this mean? It means that this form of liberation - from the limits of reason and of common sense - deprives ordinary women and men of the capacity to describe their own lives as they see them. To express an opinion which heretofore was banal - that ‘this is a woman’ - is to risk the permanent destruction of your livelihood.
Our celebrated values are defended by a pack of Furies who will destroy you if you dare to speak outside the latest approved terms of description - and these terms are constantly updated. There is a pharisaic class of self appointed commissars whose purpose in life is to make sure you can no longer recognise reality. Is this liberty? It is a refinement of oppression unimaginable even to Stalin, whose show trials exemplified the impulse to not just break - but also to humiliate - the enemies of the ruling ideology.
How free is anyone if they fear on pain of ruin to describe the basic nature of reality? How liberated a woman who describes herself? ‘Woman’ is a label now, applied on the basis of power and its preferences, increasingly dictated by the perverse distortions of the worst kind of men. These men - men who emulate women - display femininity in its most basic tropes. Wigs, garish makeup, pantomime dame parodies of the female idea, which for them is the only womanhood they will achieve. A grotesque reduction of the female to its sexual characteristics through dressing up, hormones, surgery. For these men ‘woman’ is a costume to wear. It is a mask which replaces the face it represents. If you are a woman, this vanishing face is yours. You have been reduced to a product to be consumed by men. This is the final victory of feminism - the complete liberation of ‘woman’ - from womanhood.
Nowhere fast
Feminism has moved women away from home, from men, from their children and from each other. It is female individualism with a strong message of independence. Women’s Liberation is how it styled itself in the past. Earlier still was Suffragism, itself a movement empowered by the Women’s Temperance Leagues organised around Prohibition.
These days you don’t have to be a wife nor a mother to be a feminist. You don’t have to be a woman, either. The marketing campaign coextensive with the movement has brought women to the apex of consumer promise - everything that is ‘woman’ is for sale. The subject of this piece is the trap of Liberal freedom, which imprisons as it ends, in the sale of an object where once there was a soul.
Liberation = consumerism - The Consumer Feminist
Eventually both women and children have been commodified, reduced to symbols and products and services. Woman has become something you can be - you can buy the hormones, surgery, clothes, wigs, dilator. Children and babies are hived off to ‘carers’, so they do not get in the way of the liberated woman’s lifestyle. This lifestyle has liberated her from womanhood, from the family, from life. Just as the professions have been hollowed out by the managerial strategy of fungible degree-holders and the endless churn of employees this creates, so too has motherhood been deskilled by the now-normal and liberating practice of handing your children over to some minimum wage mother by proxy.
Women are losing the habit of mothering. It is described by feminism as labour - and labour it is. Yet instead of pursuing the recognition of the gold standard of social cohesion and child development - maternal attachment and the stable family - it celebrates a house that is less of a home and more a dormitory for mutual strangers, who each go their own way every morning.
Sex sells
Feminism leaves the woman free to consume, to enjoy a no-strings life, with no mutual obligation. It is transactional, meaning it seeks to replace real-life relationships with businesslike consumer exchanges. In the business of feminism the customer is always right, whatever she chooses to buy.
“Consumer feminism” is the term applied to the conspicuous consumption of the liberated woman. It celebrates the spending power of the woman unchained from womanhood, replacing her traditional roles and bonds with consumer goods, services, pampering, surgery, wine boxes, proxy children in pets. It has collided with the obscenities of the internet age to valorise the display of women for financial gain as another aspect of liberation, so that squatting in your underwear on OnlyFans is owning the men, You Go Girl!
The broader issue of the sex industry is another paradox of feminist theory which seems baffling to common sense. How on earth is it liberating to sell your body to men for money? As any sane person knows, pornography is degrading and ultimately evil, reducing the human form to a machine displayed for momentary gratification. It commodifies an impulse proper to the production of life, subtracts this factor, replacing with raw fetish the basic miracle of existence. The sex industry and its pervasive influence has barbarised women and men alike, promoting the instant objectification of everyone into a hypersexualised commodity. We are reminded by the Marquis de Sade that repeated cheap stimulation leads to a jaded appetite, fuelling further excesses in debauchery. As we are well aware by now, they are coming for the children next.
Child’s play
Children are a feminist issue. Increasingly, women do not give issue. They remain ‘childfree’ - leaving more disposable income to spend on me.
Childless women are more common than ever in the UK - as feminism promotes the individual, the career, the social life and the perpetual youth of an expressionless, doll-like face. Once feminism defended women from the idea of objectification - it now celebrates surgery and botox - and the surface value self appraisal to which it panders. The woman of substance has none. She is an artefact of services. The very fact of ‘woman’ is a matter for controversy now, as the market has now expanded to include men.
One idea central to feminism was the rejection of women as mere ‘baby factories’. With the commodification of female experience it was inevitable that we would come to the point where babies and women’s bodies - inside and out - became wholly commercialised in a process again celebrated by consumer feminism.
Babies and children are lifestyle accessories - or impediments to that desired freedom. They are no longer commonly raised by their mothers. Instead, strangers (who are often foreigners) are paid to warehouse them in brightly coloured pseudo homes for a price which often means women are going to work to pay for the childcare - so they can go to work.
Homosexual men now announce “we are pregnant”, when what they mean is that they are buying a baby from a woman whose name will never be known, and whose face is always absent from the photos. Who are the women who produce these babies?
The European capital of surrogacy is Ukraine. There are many companies offering this service to people who want to rent a womb. Here is one, showing some of their success stories. Below is a quote from their website, which gives an interesting example of how money minus morality moves the law:
Brilliant Beginnings has been at the forefront of championing LGBT+ parents for many years, and helped win legal recognition for same-sex parents conceiving together through surrogacy and donation in 2008. We have helped many gay dads to become parents and know that those starting out often have lots of questions.
This is fine, because another company which sells babies to gay men tells us that same sex parenting is in fact better for children.
This company caters for anyone who wishes to buy a baby. The cost is advertised as between £40 000 and £65 000, and according to the BBC in 2018 up to £20 000 of this goes to the woman bearing the child.
Babies for sale
A new market for babies has recently opened - for single gay men.
This BBC article about Stephen avoids any mention of his homosexuality until Stephen mentions a Facebook group for would-be single dads
There's a Facebook group for single men, not just gay but straight men too, and people are coming forward and saying, 'You know, I want this as well, this is my dream.
We have become a community of single men who want to become dads.
This German homosexual spent £150 000 on becoming a dad, which is how buying a baby is invariably branded.
I eventually chose to do it in California. I went through an agency, which matched me with a surrogate, and I found an egg donor. She became pregnant through IVF and then in 2016 – a year after I started the whole process – I was a dad.
It turned out to be a huge financial risk though..
Here’s 50 year old and single Kevin Moran, who was interviewed in 2012 by the Irish Times about the twins he bought.
Moran engaged an LA-based surrogacy agency, Growing Generations, dedicated to building “families of choice” among a worldwide, chiefly gay clientele.
Mr Watkins blogged about his urges as a single gay man and his baby buying journey:
Sometimes I mention to the clinics I’m gay and sometimes I don’t. When the conversation seems to hang; when the processing time for my request to create embryos seems to be a millisecond too long, I offer up my sexual preference by way of explanation, some kind of compensation for the oddity of my circumstance.
Do they view my need as valid as a woman who cannot have children, or a loving couple who have been together years? I feel myself that in me, I have both mother and father energies, that I have the strength and passion of both.
Rewind to Friday October 30th 2015. I remember sitting at the kitchen table, completely ready to go ‘all in’ and try whatever I needed to do to be a Dad. I followed a link given to me at a fertility show. I found the Surrogacy UK (SUK) website and I downloaded the application form to enter the forums. Over the next few months, I skirt around the non-member section for a bit, completely overwhelmed. But I quickly realise that it is futile. Single people, I learn, can’t sign parental orders. They can’t become full members of SUK. My brand new journey through surrogacy is immediately at an impasse. Nothing can be done.
And yet still, I urge to be a father. I cannot switch this off, cannot ignore it. I throw myself into creative writing. But I end up writing up fatherhood. I try to increase my hours at work. It’s no good for I work in schools.
There is a happy ending, as in July 2020 he successfully bought a baby. Happily there is a surrogacy centre founded by gay men who brought the first gay dads to the UK in 1999. This means no gay man will have to suffer as Watkins did on their shopping trip.
Here is Circle Surrogacy’s first gay dad, with his 19 year old motherless son. Born in 2000, he is now of marriageable age.
The Handmaid’s Tale
Activist women are often seen dressing up as handmaids to visually suggest their subjection to the will of men is endangering their bodily autonomy. Atwood’s book is routinely invoked by women who overlook the purchase of babies, polygamy and the legal and cultural subjection of women in reality by men who are not white. They don’t matter. They are not what is the matter, either.
This is because feminism is never about them - it is always about me. It is narcissism as virtue, and the same values which underpin the purchase of babies motivates these attention seeking displays. Detached from any wider moral framework, both performance feminism and the purchase of babies rest on the notion of rights as complete liberation from any limits on personal desire. It is no accident that feminism tesselates with consumerism. Feminism does not only champion consumerism - it is itself a product.
Feminism is anti-babies, anti-mothering, and anti-feminine. It is, like every consumer mode of the modern personality, anti-life, seeking to displace relational habits of being with transactions. In its urge to take off it grasped the balloon of the consumer promise - that purchasing was liberation - and this is the reason that babies and women alike have been reduced to mere products.
You can buy a woman, buy into being one, rent a womb. ‘Woman’ is a dirty word. The terms of description of yourself can be obtained from someone with the authority to tell you what you are.
What business is it of yours…?
The common argument to defend absolutely abhorrent practices goes something like this: “What business is it of yours what people do in private?”
There is no privacy any more. Secondly, what people do personally accumulates to sweeping social changes. This argument is the argument of a narcissist, who maintains their absolute freedom to act as if no one else were real. It is an argument usually employed in defence of destruction. Here it is the destruction of woman, of the family, of the sanctity of life and of the fundamental basis of a stable society.
Personal decisions do not play out in isolation and behind closed doors. What begins at home becomes the nation. It is remarkable that this ersatz argument is paraded at all, in a time when privacy has been eliminated.
What has happened to the family is that it has shrunk from an extended clan to one person. This change has taken place in public due to the actions of people in ‘private’.
Ever easier divorce, two wage households, gay marriage, the promotion of single parenthood, polyamorous parenthood, ‘throuples’, migration to centres of population churn, care homes, day care, wraparound school clubs, the belief that your ‘career’ is what matters - these are all issues which are decided ‘in private’ and whose definition is shaped by propaganda. The State wants you to be incontinent, frivolous, single minded and alone - because isolated and unstable people spend more.
The less independent, the more services you buy. If you have no relatives or friends you rent an expensive stranger to listen to you. Our culture is being replaced by sales and marketing, which commodifies every basic human need and replaces the genuine artefacts of life with a substitute product or service.
Babies and children are now accessories to the job which brings home the bunkum. Childrearing is boring work best outsourced to strangers. Motherhood is something to be escaped, like a ball and chain, whose ties must be dissolved in pursuit of the satisfaction of limitless desires. It is an escape into nothingness.
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