Cathy Young (1)

Radfem, womanism, gender feminism... Whatever the terminology used to describe it, there has been a whole trend of feminism which, over the past few decades, has broke away from traditional and liberal feminism (the battle for equal rights with men and through the empowerment of women) to, on the contrary, systematically portray women as disempowered, in a misandre and dividing scapegoating game whereas men are nothing but cruel patriarchs. You know the drill: according to such view, women show more are supposedly so 'disempowered' that they are, in fact, 'oppressed' by a still all-powerful patriarchy, and so deserve a 'victim' status which must be reason enough to grant them special rights through special legislations and policies. It's a radical and bullsh#t form of feminism for sure (if it can ever be called 'feminism' at all!) yet which has gained powerful momentum, to the point of having some of is core tenets now accepted like a credo.

Domestic violence? Men! They're the majority of abusers! The justice system? Prejudiced against women! It's men's fault! Parenting and families? Prejudiced against women! Mothers have it tough -it's men's fault! The gender pay gap? Men's fault! Health and medical care? Women's health problems are overlooked! It's men's fault! The workplace? Sexual harassment! Rape culture! Men's fault! Crime and delinquency? Women get killed! It's a 'femicide'! Men's fault! Men's fault! Men's fault, and blah, blah, blah...

Now, of course, anyone caring a tat about scientific evidence and official data knows full well that domestic violence is not gendered (women are as abusive as men; half of abusive relationships involves in fact bidirectional abuse); that the justice system is certainly not prejudiced against women (if anything, women get away with lighter sentences than men for the same crimes -if they are sentenced at all- in what has been termed 'chivalry justice'); mothers overall still have it better than fathers thanks to sexist parenting stereotypes leading to dads still being treated like second class parents; the so-called 'gender' pay gap is everything but a gender issue (to start with, women with children earn less than women without, making it a problem of 'motherhood penalty' more than 'it's-men's-fault-they-are-sexists!'...); women's health is taken care of as much as men's; and, goodness!, we certainly don't live in a society plagued by a 'rape culture', let alone one encouraging a 'femicide'! The 'gender feminist' and her bonkers claims, then, surely need to be debunked, an endeavour which Cathy Young undertakes here in a more than welcomed book relying as much on statistics as upon common sense.

The thing is, true gender equality won't be achieved by leaving the field to looneys, so wrapped up in sexist prejudices that their agenda is counterproductive. Such feminism, in fact, and as the author brilliantly shows, is as toxic to women as misogyny is (it actually peddles misogynistic tenets, even if unconsciously). Women are not 'disempowered' -they actually make better than men in many domains (education is a case in point). Sure, the patriarchy was harmful to them; but it has hurt men too, and as genders don't evolve each in a vacuum, alien to each others, if we want to solve women's problems then we also have to take into account men's ones (and vice versa). Nothing illustrate this better, for example, than the issue about parenting and father's rights (where such feminism is particularly poisonous, at the expense of our children's wellbeing...). The gender feminist, then, can claim to help women; yet, she does nothing of such. On the contrary, she is fuelling a gender war based on scaremongering stereotypes, as rubbish as the solutions she proposes to tackle issues.

If you're fed up with what part of feminism has turned into, and the gender hysteria we now seem to dabble in and which has stemmed from such idiocies, then here's a must read! 'Ceasefire!' is a powerful indictment of a whole toxic ideological trend. show less

2269 Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood, by Cathy Young (Ekaterina Jung) (read 20 Feb 1990) This is a 1989 book by a 1988 college graduate, who tells of her life in Moscow until she and her parents and grandmother came to the U.S. in 1980. I found the book extremely interesting for the different insight it gives to life in Russia. Of course, she was not there under Gorbachev, but her comments in an epilogue to her story are insightful and bring home to a person how far show more things have to go for Russia to have a free society. The author's home was always hostile to the regime, but one has the idea those hostile to the regime have a lonely time in Russia. But, then, those hostile to Hitler must have felt the same way in Germany before 1945--and now one can't figure out how Hitler stayed in power since everyone apparently was against him! The author of this book was 16 when she left, and now talks English without an accent--and her writing is impeccable--which may only mean that she has a good editor. But one can see good things about Russia which the author didn't--for instance, pornography doesn't get on TV in Russia, etc. There is, it seems clear, less crime, etc. This book says nothing about any difficulties the author has in the U.S., and so maybe that is being deliberately downplayed. She is an extraordinary girl--very interested in literature--the day she left Moscow she took an hour and a half to visit a bookstore and buy a book of Coleridge! A very worthwhile book! show less