Punching Gloria Steinem: inside the bizarre world of anti-feminist women

[ismnotwasm]

(I'm bringing this up for awareness, just in case these women are used as reference to make some kind of point. Like Men's Rights Activists, they seem more pathetic than powerful, but as the backlash against feminism continues, especially as more and more young women and women from developing nations embrace it, it's good to know who the idiots behind the backlash are.)

Obviously "women" aren't a monolith, and neither are the issues that they care about or believe in. But anti-feminist organizing is based on a deep hypocrisy and selfishness - an ideology built to assure conservative women that as long as they are doing just fine, other women will make due. And they're putting up roadblocks to progress right in the middle of a renewed feminist awakening, with retrograde sexism that's ultimately not too different than that of their male counterparts.

Last week, for example, the US supreme court's Hobby Lobby decision left most women's groups livid. Terry O'Neill, president of the National Organization for Women, called it "a shocking disregard for women's health and lives." The co-president of the National Women's Law Center, Marcia Greenberger, said the ruling gave companies "a license to harm their female employees in the name of religion."

But the Independent Women's Forum (IWF) - a conservative women's group with at least a quarter-million dollars in financial ties to Rush Limbaugh - called the decision "undoubtedly good news". The group's director of cultural programs, Charlotte Hays, told a crowd outside the court, "This is a great day," and called the ruling a victory "for anyone who believes in freedom of conscience." This from the same woman who has written that women shouldn't be astronauts and that rape culture on college campuses is all "inflated numbers" and "hysteria".

This latest crop of female anti-feminists - powerful, Washington-based organizations like IWF and Concerned Women for America - want to repeal the Violence Against Women Act and argue that pay inequity doesn't exist. These organizations, along with a handful of popular writers and authors, want to convince women that it's men who are the underserved sex. They want to convince you that inequality is just a trade-off.

And as much as feminists are accused of obsessing over women's sexuality - as if by putting so much effort into abortion and birth control, we're reducing women's issues to those below the belt - it is the well-funded, poorly researched anti-feminists who can't seem to get their minds off sex.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/07/anti-feminist-women-hobby-lobby-decision-great

[hlthe2b]

1. if there is anything worse than anti-feminist women advocating to reduce (other) women to chattel,

it is the ugly anti-women men who exploit them to make some kind of perverted point. Anyone here remember a recent thread or two doing so here on DU?

I'm sure one of them will quickly mansplain it to me as to why I'm wrong.