Combatting Feminist Ms-Information
Robert Sheaffer
Refuting the Most Common Feminist Lies and Pseudo-Scholarship
NEWS:
It's official now: Science Magazine and the University of Chicago Press own up that the
"Peaceful Ancient Matriarchy" on Crete
was just a politically-inspired fantasy. (But remember how fiercely it was defended by so many
"intellectuals" just fifteen years ago! Remember the fuss over Gimbutas, Eisler, etc.?)
Is There Anything Good About Men?
by Dr. Roy F. Baumeister.
An invited address given to the American Psychological Association on August 24, 2007,
it gives seldom-heard answers to feminists' charges that men are dysfunctional (or worse).
Bonobos are celebrated as peace-loving, matriarchal, and sexually liberated. Are they?
"Frans de Waal... who is the most frequently quoted authority on the species, has never seen a wild bonobo."
(And how did so many bonobos lose their fingers and toes if they're so "nonagressive"?)
My article in Skeptic Magazine
dissects the claims of The DaVinci Code,
with its "sacred feminine."
Now, if it were really the case, as Click here to read my article, Take Back the Campus: refuting the Read . My Debunking of Lenore Walker's As Feminists, bolstered by oceans of phony statistics, A wonderful expose' of how feminists have sabotaged and hijacked the fight Feminists can only get away with claiming that "domestic violence" Facts refuting feminist propaganda on (left) In her best-selling book on 'recovered memories', My debunking of the feminist "Recovered Memories" book, Feminists say that Dr. Ed Friedlander talks about My unmasking of a well-known feminist scholar's deceptions about In 1994 the New York Times reported the existence of In The Mismeasure of Woman, Prof. Goldberg explains the Is Some claim that Every claimed instance of a supposed Read Charlotte Allen's piece Detailed sources debunking the The best book debunking the Goddess nonsense is How historically accurate are the "Goddess" claims made in the best-seller Craving ever-greater Victim Status, Andrea Dworkin and Jack Kapicka's debunking of Both women and men were In Click here to view a Feminists often claim that Lady Ada Lovelace was Feminists also claim that Einstein's first wife Mileva Maric made substantial Michael Wright's critique of the use of The best-known of the Difference Deniers are Anne Fausto-Sterling, author of The noted Darwinist author (and feminist) Helena Cronin debunks the Difference Deniers: The Difference Deniers score a Big Win: MIT brain researcher Steven Pinker debunks the Politically Correct dogma of Some
The feminist movement as we have come to know it in recent decades
is fundamentally a "con." It is as filled with falsehood, inaccuracy,
and foolishness as astrology or parapsychology. As it is considered
treasonous to criticise a sister feminist, no standards of accuracy or
honesty are ever enforced. Hyperbole and deceit thus become the formula for
success, "peer review" playing no role in reining in misinformation.
Any would-be feminist who raises scholarly objections to the rampant
misinformation (
Christina Hoff Sommers
,
Camille Paglia
,
Wendy McElroy
,
Elaine Showalter
,
Erin Pizzey
,
Elizabeth Loftus,
etc.) is branded an 'enemy of women' and is
drummed out of the movement.
Various feminists proclaim that women are 'under siege', that a monstrous
social bias against them, if not a virtual war, is going on, that women
have little respect or power (Steinem, Faludi,
Tavris, etc.) Yet the notion of the American woman as
a powerless "victim" is one
of the most absurd notions ever foisted upon anyone. American women live,
on
average, seven years longer than men. They control 86 %
of all personal wealth [PARADE Magazine, May 27, 1990], and
make up 55% of current college graduates. Women cast
54% of the votes in Presidential elections, so they
can hardly claim to be left out of the political
decision-making process!
They win almost automatically in child custody disputes. Women suffer
only 6% of the work-related fatalities (the other 94% are
suffered by men).
Women are the victim of only about 35% of violent crimes,
and only about 25% of all murders, yet
because of our society's exaggerated concern and respect for
them, special
legislation has been passed to punish "violence against
women" as if it were a more heinous crime than "violence
against men". (Feminists claim to want "equality", and
this is an example of what "equality" means to them,
i.e., preferential treatment to address their concerns).
Two out of every three dollars spent on health care
is spent on women, and even if you don't count
pregnancy-related care, women still receive more medical
care than men
- yet feminists still
holler that womens health is being "neglected", and far
too many of us credulously believe them.
Of the 25 worst jobs, as ranked by the
Jobs Related Almanac based on a combination of salary,
stress, security, and physical demands, 24 of them are predominantly,
if not almost entirely, male, which might explain why
men commit over 80% of all suicides.
(Most of these statistics
come from
The Myth of Male Power
by Warren Farrell.)
feminists claim, that men have selfishly arranged everything to be
wonderful for themselves, absolutely ignoring womens' legitimate
concerns and needs, would the above be true?
Of course not. It is much
more realistic to suggest that women have cleverly seized the upper
hand by pretending to be helplessly trapped below!
Looking at the full picture, and not the tiny, distorted one
that feminists and those they have duped present, we see a
very different picture: The American woman emerges as perhaps
the most privileged large group in history, enjoying a never-before-
seen level of affluence, power, leisure, and health, supported by
the work, discipline, and self-effacing, life-destroying exertions of
a group they have bamboozled - their men - into believing their
cries of "victimization". The links below will help you
to start finding
your way out of the familiar maze of feminist lies.
Feminism, The Noble Lie
Ten Most Common Feminist Myths
(which are more accurately termed "lies," because feminists just keep on promoting them with reckless disregard for truth, no matter how many times the falsehood of these claims is pointed out to them.).
Read my article
Bill Clinton and the Gender Gap,
in the August, 1996 issue of
The Backlash
Magazine.
Steven Goldberg's
article,
Feminism Against Science
Falsehoods about 'Domestic Violence'
In Feminist Writings, Men are "Batterers" and Women are "Victims" -
But Reality is Much More Complex
The Superbowl Battering Hoax
- first promoted by "FAIR" and by "battered woman expert" Lenore Walker.
The Battered Woman,
a preposterous and indefensible work of pseudo-scholarship that has
nonetheless attained near-icon status within so-called 'Womens Studies'.
Christina Hoff Sommers
shows, the famous
"Rule of Thumb" for Wife Beating
is really just a feminist lie.
Laura Flanders of a group calling itself "FAIR"
(which played a major role in promoting
the "Superbowl Battering" hoax) made a big stink,
accused Sommers of misrepresenting facts.
Read
Sommers'devastating reply to Flanders.
(To this day, Politically Correct feminists still try to use Flanders'
accusations to bash Sommers in attempting to presuade people they believe
to be naieve, even though they know the charges aren't true.
If you show them that you've read Sommers' refutation of the charges, they'll
quickly shut up, or change the subject.)
are now trying to seize Valentine's Day (a day traditionally for
celebrating good relations between the sexes) and re-define it as
V-Day,
a day to protest supposed systemic patriarchal violence against women.
(Feminists always have had a big problem dealing with heterosexuality.)
Fortunately,
Christina Hoff Sommers has shown
how phony their male-bashing claims are.
(It might be a good idea to check out V-day's list of sponsors and boycott them.)
Every Seven Seconds,
a Feminist tells a Lie about Domestic Violence. Noted researcher
Richard J. Gelles tries to set the record straight.
against Domestic Violence, turning it into a weapon for use in their
war against men, is found in
"Prone to Violence"
by
Erin Pizzey,
who founded the first Domestic Violence shelter in the U.K.
equals "men beating up women" because people are unaware of the
massive documentation of female-instigated domestic violence.
Family Violence
by Family Resources and Research.
'Recovered Memories' and other False Accusations Against Men
Michelle Remembers
what Satan looks like.
A debunking of Michelle's story
was published in the London Sunday Mail on Sept. 30, 1990.
The Courage to Heal,
that has sold millions of copies, bringing
discord and misery to many thousands of families
across North America.
Women Don't Lie About Rape,
but in reality no other crime has
as high an incidence of false reporting.
False allegations of child abuse
that he has encountered (and gives valuable references).
Falsehoods and Foolishness about Supposed 'Nonpatriarchal Societies'
All Human Societies, Without Exception, are Patriarchal, so Feminist
Writers Routinely Resort to Obfuscation and even Deceit to Conceal this
Embarrassing Fact
a supposed
Native American Gender-Equal Society
that has been widely taught in Womens Studies classes.
another supposed
Gender-Equal Society in the South Pacific.
But this claim appears highly dubious as well.
Carol Tavris
attempts to blow smoke in the readers' eyes about the realities
of male dominance.
Steven Goldberg
cuts through the fog.
logic, and some of the fallacies,
associated with discussions of Patriarchy.
Patriarchy Avoidable?
Professors Ridley and Goldberg dispute.
the Iroquois
represent an Exception
to Universal Patriarchy.
Here Prof. Goldberg examines that claim.
"nonpatriarchal society"
is examined in
Why Men Rule
by
Steven Goldberg.
(Chicago: Open Court, 1994)
Not one such claim stands up to critical scrutiny.
Goddess Pseudo-History
Unable to find any "Matriarchies" in the present day, many feminists
resort to inventing an idyllic Lost Matriarchal Paradise in the
dim mists of pre-history.
Even though there is no acceptable scholarly
evidence for this, it has become an accepted fact in "Womens Studies"
Supposed 'Old Matriarchal Village' at the U.N.
Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing, 1995
My debunking of
The Goddess Remembered,
a pseudo-historical documentary widely seen on PBS during
'pledge weeks'. (Hint: If they're broadcasting this garbage,
Don't Pledge!.
Instead, call them up and explain why you won't pledge)
demolishing feminist/neopagan "Goddess History"
in the January, 2001 issue of
The Atlantic Monthly.
Goddess Garden of Eden
myths promoted by Marija Gimbutas, Riane Eisler, etc. These are unscholarly
claims that are routinely taught in "Womens Studies" classes as
if they were established fact.
However, the newly-online
Encyclopedia Brittanica article on "matriarchy"
refutes these claims, and
states plainly that "the consensus among modern anthropologists and sociologists is that a strictly matriarchal society never existed."
Goddess Unmasked
by
Philip G. Davis.
Read
my review of the book.
The DaVinci Code?
Not at all,
as we see in this article from a Catholic magazine.
The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory
by Cynthia Eller. "Why an Invented Past Won't Give Women a Future."
Faces of the Goddess
by Lotte Motz.
The Pagan religions of the Ancient British Isles -
their Nature and Legacy.
by Ronald Hutton. Scholary refutations of wildly-inaccurate contemporary neopagan claims.
Pseudo-History About Witchcraft
other feminists invented a
pseudo-history of a 'Womens Holocaust' in the Middle Ages.
Turning upside-down the tactics of the 'Holocaust Revisionists', who
claim that a real genocide never occurred, the feminists claim
to be the victims of a genocide that wasn't.
This myth, complete with a fabricated pro-feminist Pre-Christian Age,
is taught as if it were true in so-called "Womens Studies" classes.
The Burning Times,
another pseudo-historical documentary often shown on PBS during
'pledge weeks'. (Again: If they're broadcasting this garbage,
Don't Pledge!.)
accused
of 'witchcraft,' and men make up
the majority of those accused of 'heresy.' Both groups were brutally
tortured by the Inquisition. Furthermore, most of the accusers
of supposed witches were women.
Feminist claims that witch-groups actually
existed, and were "healers", are not supported by scholarship, nor
is the claim that accused witches were actually the remnants of a
gentle, female-centered pagan religion. Historian Norman Cohn
debunks the pseudo-scholarship of Margaret Murray who is the principal
source for those "neopagan" claims, noting that Murray selectively quoted
from her sources, citing those passages tending to support her
thesis, while ignoring or deleting intervening sentences that
invalidate her claims.
(Europe's Inner Demons.
New York: Basic Books, 1975).
T.M. Luhrmann reached a similar conclusion after examining Murray's claims in
Persuasions of the Witch's Craft
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989),
suggesting that
"those accused of witchcraft in early modern Europe were very likely
innocent of any practice."
Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft
(Viking, 1996),
Oxford professor Robin Briggs writes,
"Historical European witchcraft is quite simply a fiction, in the sense that
there is no evidence that witches existed, still less that they celebrated
black masses or worshiped strange gods... On the wilder shores of the feminist
and witch-cult movements a potent myth has become established, to the effect
that 9 million women were burned as witches in Europe, gendercide rather than
genocide. This is an overestimate by a factor of up to 200, for the most
reasonable modern estimates suggest perhaps 100,000 trials between 1450 and
1750, with something between 40,000 and 50,000 executions, of which 20-25%
were men."
Portrait of 3 Men Condemned by the Spanish Inquisition
(68K GIF). The caption reads: "1., Garment of one who is to be burned
alive. 2., Garment of one who has escaped being burned by confessing
before being condemned; 3., Garment of one who has avoided the fire by
confessing after his condemnation." (from an 18th-century French
history book).
Other Feminist Pseudo-History
"the world's first programmer."
While she was no doubt very intelligent, her accomplishments have been
grossly overstated, for reasons of ideology. Read an article
debunking the feminist 'Ada myth'.
"All of the programs cited in her notes," writes Allan Bromley of the
University of Sydney, "had been prepared by
Babbage from three to seven years earlier."
contributions to his historic Relativity Theory.
Allen Esterson got PBS to withdraw many unfounded claims made in its 2003 documentary
Einstein's Wife
(and indeed the Australian Brodcasting Company withdrew the documentary itself, although US PBS did not). Many unfounded claims still remain on the PBS website.
"Womens Studies": Political Propaganda and Deception
Masquerading as "Scholarship"
Who Stole Feminism?
by Christina Hoff Sommers
Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Womens Studies
by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge.
Feminism Under Fire
by
Ellen Klein.
(
Prometheus Books,
1996.) "Modern-day feminism is intellectually dishonest and
scandalously unscholarly," says this
professor of philosophy and one-time academic feminist.
bogus statistics by the Womens Studies Department
at the University of Oklahoma (and the university's complete unwillingness to
hold them accountable in any way!)
The "Difference Deniers"
Under the auspices of "Womens Studies," feminists run a cottage industry of
"Difference Deniers," claiming (variously and usually inconsistently) the the
observed cognitive and even physical differences between women and men are
either
A) not real,
B) wholly socially constructed,
C) diminishing,
D) insignificant, or
E) have already disappeared!
Myths of Gender,
and Carol Tavris, author of
The Mismeasure of Woman.
Modern science, of course, is moving precisely in the opposite direction, documenting
more and more innate and intrinsic male/female differences with each passing year.
Getting Human Nature Right.
Science Magazine pulls an already-accepted
article
by a respected developmental biologist explaining innate male/female brain differences
because it allegedly did not "lead to a clear strategy about how to deal with the gender issue."
In other words: "feminists will kill us if we run this article." (And people still talk about
an alleged 'Republican War on Science'!
Read the
censored article
here - it has been attracting a great deal of attention).
the mind as a
Blank Slate.
references on Sex differences,
which if the Difference Deniers were correct, would be an empty list. Also, the
peer-reviewed scientific publication
Hormones and Behavior
would contain nothing but empty pages!
Sex differences in the distribution of mental ability.
(According to the Difference Deniers, such differences can't possibly exist.)
Next Page
