Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women,   ISBN:9780684801568

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I'm 44 now, but as early as around age 18, I've been bewildered at what is called 'feminism' today.

I always had a great admiration for women working to bring 'equality of opportunity' since the suffragette days, and currently. Women have made amazing strides in our culture. I feel that further work needs done, but, this is something that men should be as much involved with as women at this point.

And yet, the modern women claiming that feminist label always seemed irrational, paranoid, hyperbolic, often with a pre-set overwhelming paradigm that everything logical, or traditional, was 'masculine', and everything male was 'bad'. As if that wasn't bad enough, a huge anti-democracy socialism politic always seemed to wend through it.

Particularly in some colleges, there is a clear quasi- religious/political cult indoctrination; an insidious fifth-column style pervasive brainwashing of college youth and a women's-mafia-without-the-guns-style "pressure and leverage" put on anybody else who does not buy their victimization-as-salvation obsession. I've heard about this from others for years but hadn't believed it could be that bad. After reading ths book I'd say apparently in some schools it is.

The 'infiltration' from people for whom this is an entire worldview and evangelistic drive, into positions of administration and authority, creates a fairly massive lock on money (funding) and power to rewrite history, revise education, and repress any view that is not thier party line (and do real damage to any person not just not agreeing, but not actively supporting them). It's pretty successful, enough to make scientology's most uncharming points of infamy look downright wimpy and unaccomplished by comparison.

As a woman with a daughter who will be entering college in a few years, I think I want to find the school rated 'worst for women' by modern feminism standards and make sure she attends that one. That way nobody will be indoctrinating her with socialism and whiney-ism in the name of intro english classes. Nobody will be rationalizing why women 'think differently', or considering traditional subjects like math and science just part of that "logical" way of thinking that is so bad and much of how da-man keeps us women down. That's precisely the anti-female crap that DID keep women down for centuries, doing needlework instead of science for the most part because women weren't supposed to worry their little heads about things like real education.

Modern feminism comes off not like an informed opinion, but a pathology out of control.

It seems to me a relatively small group of women have managed to pass off to the media their own opinion as somehow representative of women. Unless a perspective represents nuns and housewives and catholic moms and retired 50-years-married women, just as much as it represents unmarried mothers and lesbians and businesswomen, it does not represent enough women in our culture to deserve any voice 'on behalf of' anybody.

And why it isn't obvious that making men 'bad' is just as retarded as making women 'bad' is beyond me. The species is designed for these two to survive together, and anything that injustly treats either of them is not healthy. There are several points in our culture in which men are in a position of real injustice too and these things on both sides should be corrected.

Every time I hear or read some feminist speech/writing, I'm seized with the urge to yell, "Would you grow up!" It's like a bunch of little rich kids with a huge sense of entitlement and nothing but griping about how nothing is fair to them and it's always someone else's fault. A woman doesn't give any inspiration to being considered an equal when she acts irrational and manipulative. People like that are poison to any society, from a family to a church group to a whole culture.

It's amazing any man who survives one of the heavily feminist-controlled colleges doesn't come out of it vastly more against women than he could possibly have gone in. If these people had been the representatives of 'women's rights' historically we would still be fighting for the right to vote and own property. Thank goodness the original suffragettes were nothing like the modern day claimants.

Sommers does in this book what needed doing: taking several of the most 'famous statistics' allegedly proving just how horrifying females have it, and makes it clear that they are pretty much the same unfactual hyperbole that most of the so-called 'feminist' movement is infamous for. (Note the tags suggested for this book here on amazon, like 'delusional' and 'hateful'. Nothing that might lead to or relate to facts mind you; just name calling, which is about the mental age level we're dealing with from that side. As if it's perfectly ok for them to relegate half the population (men) to everything-bad imaginable, even without their doing anything at all; but should anyone merely disagree with a woman in that group, they're "hateful.")

The author differentiates between what she calls "Equity Feminism" -- that is apparently what I've always innately been in line with -- and "Gender Feminism" -- which is the man-bashing women-as-whiney-victims socialist and manipulative BS that "stole feminism" as their own label in the media... forever making it something more people sneer at and don't take seriously, than the term of respect the women of prior days earned for it.

She also listed several other women who are "Equity" feminists who I will make a point to learn more about. Ironically I have read a lot more from the 'gender feminist' side and I actually thought this represented feminism, and all my life wanted nothing to do with it as a result. (I don't think these women need more equality, I think they need more therapy.) I'm a bit cheered up to think there may be more women who are not irrational, hysterical and anti-men, but who recognize what's come before for women and what still needs to come and are interested in the subject. I guess I thought the dark side was all there was. I kinda wish I'd been aware of this equity vs. gender difference a long time ago.

I don't know enough about the 'equity' side of this equation (I mean officially) to know how the book rates in that regard, but I found it very interesting and somewhat educational, and leading to doorways of further exploration.

Customer Rating: 

In an age, where the media rapes Sarah Palin and her children while NOW stands by and lets it happen without even a whimper the truth of this book rings loudly.

In an age, where hoochie whores trot on to Good Morning america to cry woe is me at bein an adulteror with Tiger Woods while he betrayed me with yet other women, and her fellow women do not cry out these whores names in the street or make it a point to protest her book signings etc. you know feminism is dead.

Women must protect women when the cause is just. If someone is being attacked for being a women, even if her ideology differs from NOW, NOW still has a duty to defend her as a woman. NOW cannot sit back and allow a woman, her spouse, her children to be brutally attacked & humiliated by comics, the press etc. and let it go unanswerered.

IF some whore is willfully committing adultery and betraying fellow women, creating an air of its Ok to cheat (whether you are a man or a woman) as well as the tentative nod that it is perfectly fine to profit from such action then the femenist movement has lost its way.

Customer Rating: 

Someone gave me this book because I am a book seller, right here and elsewhere. I took a look at it and was shocked...I wonder what kind of woman felt the need to trash every famous feminist on earth...and then I decided Christina Hoff Sommers was really a man. So in the trash it goes..too bad for you whatever man who is so afraid fo women who wrote this book. Nobody else is reading this copy.

Customer Rating: 

Having recently finished Prof. Hoff-Sommers' masterpiece 'The War Against Boys' I regressed backwards and read this, her first notable publication. It is wonderful to see how she had developed her literary style and grown academically; the gulf between these two works is substantial. Although she does briefly touch upon and allude to topics and themes she will later address in 'Boys', this work is almost entirely independent in thesis. However, like 'Boys', this text also shares an obvious attention to detail, a meticulous researching and reference and a passion and zest for the Truth.

What the author did in this text, when it was first published a decade ago, was to light the first match that broke the darkness that had since the late '60s been slowly enveloping a number of sociological disciplines which have become known colloquially as 'feminism'. This is in itself, no small feat, especially when one considers that up until this point, legitimate topics such as those raised and scrutinised in the book, have been off-limits to close examination and serious academic inspection. Anyone who 'dares' to question the authenticity or authority of anything put out by the female-supremacist machine, is immediately publicly tarred and feathered and labelled 'misogynistic', 'sexist' or 'scared of change'. This is of course merely smoke and mirrors, a primitive, anti-intellectual ploy used to silence critics and divert the nation's attention away from the real Truths. One of which is the massive funding that paranoia and guilt receives in the name of supposed academic research under the 'equality' or 'gender studies' umbrella. Another of which is the disproportionate percentage of public funds which are being pointlessly squandered by white middle-class, educated women in positions of privilege. Funds that could and should be used to help poor, under-educated white and non-white woman, who are in dire need of services such as shelters, community centres, training facilities and such like. It is an utter sham and a total injustice how the white female elite have diverted funds away from their more needy sisters. Those cited in this book and being responsible for such waste should feel utterly ashamed at further contributing to the plight of the genuinely needy.

Hoff-Sommers' other notable achievement is that as a serious academic, she has the mental faculty to question not only the Empress' clothes, but her very existence too. Instead of a single Empress, what Dr. Hoff-Sommers reveals instead, is a horde of embittered new-age, touchy-feely, inner-child seeking, anti-intellectual impostors all eager for funding and thirsty for personal publicity. And a docile and unquestioning media that either is simply not doing their job, or that has been taken in and wishes to avoid being tarred as 'un P.C.'

Although this text is a decade old, it it certainly worth reading and should form part of the wider readings for any enquiring mind, any citizen who wishes to better understand the world around them, especially the failing of the media and the gullibility of trusting humans in the face of organisations who knowingly pervert the Truth and the facts.

The only really negative aspects to this otherwise creditable text are:
i) It was written in 1994, which in any academic field is just too long ago. Certainly any data-based conjecture she presented or any conclusions she drew are really no more than supposition in today's world.
ii) Hoff-Sommers' writing does tend to be rather myopic and somewhat repetitive, and this makes the book lose pace somewhat. Although to be fair, what she has done is to take a dry Academic discipline and turn it into a best-seller; she has taken Academia and made it palatable for the average person. In aspiring to and reaching such a noble goal, it is understandable that she has to alter her style somewhat.
N.B. This 'adaptation for the masses' is not apparent in her subsequent offering 'The War Against Boys'.

Finally, it is somewhat sadly ironic that the female-supremacist hold up every word Dr. Hoff-Sommers puts down on paper, to such rigourous examination. Wouldn't it be wonderful if they subjected their own biased, anti-intellectual half-truths and blatant falsehoods to such scrutiny. if they did, it might ultimately strengthen their cause.

Customer Rating: 

While I enjoyed Sommers' book, there was a certain narrowness of topic that frustrated. As with Wendy Shalit's book A Return to Modesty, Sommers presents a main point of critique and then uses the rest of the book to provide anecdotal evidence to support her critique. There is very little development of thought in the book or nuancing of points. I fundamentally agree with Sommers, but, because of the lack of complexity in her argument, I really doubt that anyone who didn't already agree to some extent could read her book and change his or her mind.

I understand popular books like Sommers' and the need for them. They give a very basic understanding of the differences in two ways of thinking, but again, from a very limited point of view, thus benefitting only those who, at some level, already agree. I have, personally, very limited experience with the sort of feminism she is attacking and would tend to think that they would not portray themselves in exactly the same way in which she portrays them. Thus, while at face value her critiques seem legitimate, I would encourage (for women, especially, since they are the ones Sommers exhorts to act at the end of the book) the reading of those Sommers labels "gender-feminists" so that, if you agree with Sommers, you can be sure to understand completely what you are critiquing.