Everything That is Wrong with Mainstream Feminism
January 7, 2019
Women controlling the military-industrial complex is not feminism, it's
toxic masculinity. The fruit of a sick valuing system that is poisoning our
environment and risking nuclear annihilation, writes Caitlin Johnstone.
By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com
Outlets like MSNBC and Politico have been excitedly running headlines titled
"The military-industrial complex is now run by women" and "How women took
over the military-industrial complex". Apparently four of America's five top
defense contractors are now women, whose names I will not bother to learn or
report on because I do not care.
These headlines are being derided by skeptics of the establishment mindset
for the cartoonish self-parody of the corporate liberal mindset that they so
clearly are, and rightly so. Pretty much everything in American mainstream
liberalism ultimately boils down to advancing mass murder, exploitation and
ecocide for profit while waving a "yay diversity" banner so that the NPR
crowd can feel good about themselves while signing off on it. But the fact
that these stories exist and have an audience can also be blamed more
specifically on the failures of mainstream feminism.
A lot of men (and the occasional cultishly servile woman) like to bitch
about the problem with modern feminism as though it is something that hurts
men, threatens men, demonizes men, or robs men of their place in society or
anything else they feel entitled to. This is all dopey nonsense which
amounts to nothing other than a childish temper tantrum over men losing
control over women that they never should have had in the first place; it's
people whining about losing their slaves. That imaginary piffle is not what
is wrong with mainstream feminism. What is wrong with mainstream feminism is
exemplified perfectly in a mass media parade celebrating the rise of women
to the top of the most depraved industry on earth.
Playing Men's Games
The problem that true feminism seeks to address is not that there aren't
enough women at the top of the corporate ladder, or that Americans refused
to elect a woman to do the bombing, exploiting and oppressing in 2016. The
problem has always been that we're trying to value women with a value system
created by a few very powerful men. By leaving in place the value system
created by patriarchy (i.e. capitalism), we are now valuing women but only
for their ability to play men's games. Nobody has ever become a billionaire
by being a mother, even the very best mother in the world, and nobody ever
will because capitalism was designed by men, for men, to value men's
qualities. This has created a species-threatening imbalance because
inequality is baked in to the system. When men reluctantly allowed women out
of their house-shaped cages in the '60s, they did so on the condition that
they would not change a thing about themselves. Women could play, but it was
the women who had to change. As usual.
Germaine Greer. (Wikimedia Commons)
It's interesting to go back to seminal texts like Germaine Greer's "The
Female Eunuch" and see how much time feminists spent back then thinking
about how women could be paid for domestic and child-rearing work. Fifty
years ago, feminists of the time could easily see how financial abuse runs
rampant through marriages because women don't get paid for the majority of
their work. They could see how if women were to ever be truly free, that had
to be fixed. If you're not getting paid, then you're not able to leave, and
if you can't leave, you're a slave. Despite all of feminism's gains, today
if you dare suggest that women be paid for bearing children, you will be
jeered at. It was decided somewhere along the line that, fine, you can be a
fake man if you want to, but don't expect us to value YOU. Men refused to
value women's work, which is why most of it is still essentially slavery.
And that was a crucial, planet-threatening mistake.
By refusing to value women and what skills they naturally bring, humanity
continued to not value the meta work of the feminine. We continued to not
value the health of our environment, the health of our social cohesion, the
mental health of each other. By refusing to place a hard and fast value on
cleaning, healing, networking, redistributing goods, disappearing problems,
restoring, reusing, collaboration, happiness and health, we are
strengthening all their opposites.
Many men will knee-jerk argue that they too are slaves to the
corporatocracy, and that's true. That's what you get when you don't change a
valuing system that was created by slave-owners to distract their slaves
from killing them and to keep them working anyway. That's what you get when
you insist everyone change to suit a system that was created by power to
keep power in place. We laugh about how indigenous people were fooled into
handing over vast swathes of their land for handfuls of shiny shells, while
we hand over our labor, our land, our rights and our freedoms for paper
rectangles, today.
True feminism doesn't hold that the world would be better off if women ran
things; shifting control from one gender to the other would change very
little as long as the current valuing system remains in place. True feminism
holds that all of humanity needs to change its valuing system to one which
rewards feminine work as much as masculine, instead of only rewarding women
when they succeed at climbing the ladder of the patriarchal paradigm.
Women controlling the military-industrial complex is not feminism, it's
toxic masculinity. It's the fruit of the sick valuing system that is
blackening our air, poisoning our water, filling the oceans with plastic,
bulldozing the rainforests, and marching us toward the brink of nuclear
Armageddon. True feminism means turning away from the toxic valuing system
which elevates the most ambitious sociopaths and toward one which values
empathy, collaboration, nurturing and peace instead.
Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper who
publishes regularly at Medium. Follow her work on Facebook, Twitter, or her
website. She has a podcast and a new book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia
Preppers. This article was re-published with permission.
