The Pill Feminists Really Need

By Jake Smiley

Camille Paglia, and women like her, occupy an unusual liminal space within the debate about the place of women in our society. Hated and derided by liberals and feminists, they nevertheless insist that they are liberal feminists.

You see, all those screaming, blue-haired students; the viciously patronizing human resources director; the sanctimonious harpy in her ivory tower; these are not real feminists. It’s Paglia and her fellow “red-pilled” feminists who are the keepers of orthodoxy. In effect, they argue that if only The Movement could be rescued and returned to its glory days of the 60s, when feminism was about “free love” and putting women in the office and on the Pill, we’d all be much happier and saner.

Well, I’m here to dispel that notion: There is no such thing as a “good” form of feminism.

Moderate leftist thinkers like Paglia can see that there is something deeply wrong with today’s radical, hysterical youth and wish they could go back to the more familiar, normal, hippie forms of protest. What they fail to understand is that the “norms” they advocate, the kind of “good old feminism,” was never a healthy or sustainable idea for social relations between men and women.

These “red-pilled” feminists are right in saying that young people today have no idea how easy their lives are, no conception of the kind of history and social structure needed to produce that kind of ease, and that from this comes their absurd, arrogant belief that they can attack the foundations of society (by instituting utopian, atheistic, green-energy socialism, for example) and not cause everything to collapse around them. They are like people born in a skyscraper that start taking hammers to the foundation because they think it looks ugly, heedless of any warnings that this will topple the tower.

They don’t seem to understand that the shiny glass and plastic they so love also needs tough, ugly steel to hold it; they want the whole thing to be pretty and soft. To them, the building has always been there -- its existence is the default.

Paglia and her ilk are also correct to describe modern feminism as a philosophy that sees pathological vulnerability as the default female mode, in which men are not the equals of women but a separate class of oppressors and potential rapists. However, they go directly from this clear-eyed view of the self-destructiveness of what passes for modern feminism, to the stance that “the old feminism was good, it’s just the new feminism that’s bad.”

Feminism was never about the equality of women and men! It was about women obtaining more social and legal power - as though “women” were a social class or an ethnic group - and usually at the expense of men or with utter indifference to their needs and position.

The suffragettes that started it all wanted to vote like men, but did they want to be drafted? Did they want to police streets, clean sewers, drive tractors, or build houses? Did they want equal sentencing for crimes, equal custody of the kids, and equal division of property at divorce? Did they want to start paying an equal share of taxes?

No! The answer to all that is a flat-out “No.” They wanted the rights that men had, but they didn’t want to take on any of the attendant duties or responsibilities.  They didn’t want to put in the hard, dangerous, and dirty work that made modern society because, like too many young people today, they were used to the easy, civilized life and assumed it would always be there.

And how did those women and their daughters vote? Throughout the past century, they voted for ever-more-intrusive government - banning alcohol was one of the first things they supported. And they voted for ever-more-generous welfare, which women have always used in far greater rates than men, despite men paying the lion's share of the taxes.

Even today, what is the ultimate pillar of feminism but abortion? If a woman wants to opt out of parenthood without sacrificing her sexual libertinism or shelling out a few cents for The Pill, then she can kill her baby and the father has no say.  But if she wants to opt in, the father still has no say and is on the hook for the costs.  Should he decide to opt out of parenthood - merely by moving out, as opposed to murder - she can come after his money with all the fury of the state. There’s nothing remotely “equal” about that: it’s all about increasing the power of women at the expense of others, and that’s the way feminists have always been.

Further, the second-stage “sex-positive” feminism of the 60s and 70s that Paglia idolizes as the last gasp of the “good old feminism”, was in fact the starting point of the current blue-haired victim-brand of that ideology. What happened was a triumph of Enlightenment/progressive values over Christian/traditional ones, thanks to several new inventions, chief among them new contraceptives like the Pill and better surgical abortion techniques.

At last, young women could be as promiscuous as men without any of the biological consequences! Women could be the same as men, and have fun sleeping around just like men did! Yes, yes, #notall, but any fair observer would have to admit there was a great deal of penis-envy in women at the time, as well as throngs of men that thought: “Well shoot. These girls are givin’ it out for free? Sign me up!”

Beneath the lofty ideals of hippie-feminism was nothing but lust, coupled with excitement at the prospect of endless hedonistic pleasure-seeking now that law and technology had removed all the negative consequences for such behavior -- namely pregnancy and a shotgun marriage.

There is also a connection between capitalism and feminism, but it’s very foolish to describe it as a “liberating” one. Capitalists love feminism because if the women stop having kids, stop staying home to raise them, and instead stay in the workplace, then they’ve just doubled the labor supply without changing the labor demand at all! Can you say, “Wages have stagnated since the 1970s,” anyone?

And the landlords and bankers get excited because that’s more people renting apartments and taking credit cards and loans for cars or houses. Sure there’s fewer and fewer kids, but a) the resultant demographic crisis won’t hit until a few decades, by which time they’ll have made their millions and be long dead, and b) the country can always just import more people to replace them.

By the way, guess what demographic overwhelmingly votes for more third-world immigration? Hint: it’s absolutely not married men and women, for whom the target of their parental instincts aren’t the ‘poor downtrodden minorities’ but, you know, their own natural children.

I’ll never understand why feminists thought "freedom" was working all your life in an office until you died alone. “Just think, in a different time, I could have been ‘enslaved’ to a loving husband and children!” she croaks. “Thank goodness for feminism,” are her last words before her hungry cats eat her.

But I guess that’s okay for Miss Paglia, who has no husband and no children, but gets to make Powerpoint lecture slides until she's eighty and probably had loads of fun trysts with her lesbian lover (oops, make that “ex-lover” as of 2007) Alison Maddex, whose biological child Paglia has adopted. Despite being transgender, I can assure you that Miss P is in fact not the father.

Anyway, the problem is that the old feminists got their wish.  It was, however, a rather stupid, ill-thought-out wish they had made.

First of all, even if women can now escape the biological repercussions of promiscuity by artificially sterilizing themselves or paying doctors to murder their children...well, they have to deal with some 65 million years of evolution that kind of says, “That’s not how mammal pregnancies work.” Cue the resultant psychological distress that churns out the anxious, paranoid SWJs that squeal about how “all men are rapists,” and “farting is a microaggression,” and so forth.

As a perfect example, recall the Aziz Ansari story from a year ago: in which a young, female groupie accompanied a C-list actor back to his penthouse apartment, gave him a quickie, and later wrote an anonymous pity-post for the newsrags about how she had suffered a “kind of, but not really, sexual assault.” You see, since the 60s, our youth have been told that consent is the only standard. Sex is just one of many generic adult activities people do for fun and, thanks to the pill and the pliers, has no greater meaning or consequence than sharing a cigarette.  So ladies, “if it feels groovy, do it!”

Yet our brains don't work that way. Contrary to all assertions of “social constructs” and “moral relativism,” one can’t just turn off all that evolution. The woman that shtupped Ansari was just a whore, and her body was telling her that she had acted like a whore and should feel guilty about it.

But her indoctrinated mind couldn’t process that fact. She had been told that she was supposed to enjoy promiscuity, and since she and her body actually didn't, she tried to bash the square peg of thottery into the round hole of rape.  The only way she could express the discomfort she felt, was the only way her culture had taught her to: it was sort-of consensual, but not; it was kind of, but not really, sexual assault.

That, fundamentally, is why modern feminism is all about victimhood: women are victims, but victims of feminism, not the “patriarchy” that died in the 60s.

Young women are simply not supposed to be promiscuous. It isn’t psychologically healthy to post half-naked pictures of yourself on Tinder, drink yourself to oblivion at frat parties, and screw as many guys in college as the age listed on the fake driver’s license you use to get into campus bars.

It isn’t good to spend the first 30 years of your life studying in preparation for your “career,” racking up hundreds of thousands in debt so you can enjoy the “college experience” of downing 15% alcohol on a Wednesday night and living alone in a sprawling cosmopolis as you try to “find yourself” at a soulless desk job.

And it certainly isn’t healthy to sterilize yourself with pills or murder your children with pliers, or to live day to day in a country where millions of other girls do that and think, “It's fine, they’re just expressing themselves! Live your best life, girlfriend!”

Camille Paglia only hates the pussy hats because their bitching and moaning about “rape culture” is getting in the way of her utopia in which men and women can all be sluts together. Well sorry, you frosty tart, but that’s never going to happen! Women weren’t meant to be thots, deep down they don’t like to be thots, and they’re rebelling against thottery in the only way they know how.

After all, what are “#metoo,” the “campus rape epidemic,” and objections to “the male gaze” but attempts to reestablish sexual mores in an America that basically doesn’t have them anymore? The only problem is that decades of feminist indoctrination have so warped the minds of our young women that, even as they rebel against promiscuity, they aren’t able to explain what promiscuity is other than “sex the woman doesn’t like.” Of course, somehow that is all the men’s fault.

I pity the deluded. Either one day enough will understand the real problem and they’ll come to our side and help us fix it; or the whole rotten system will come crashing down, and Muhammad will come show them how a real patriarchy does things. Sex-crazed hippies like Paglia started this mess: they wanted to throw a massive bender and thought if they just charged it all to their credit card it’d be like they never had to pay.

Well, party’s over, you crusty old dykes; the bill is coming due.