We will re-establish the patriarchal structures
Michelle Goldberg points out that Anders Breivik’s hatred of women hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention as his hatred of Islam (and Muslims in general) has.
Rarely has the connection between sexual anxiety and right-wing nationalism been made quite so clear. Indeed, Breivik’s hatred of women rivals his hatred of Islam, and is intimately linked to it.
…
A terror of feminization haunts his bizarre document. “The female manipulation of males has been institutionalised during the last decades and is a partial cause of the feminisation of men in Europe,” he writes. He blames empowered women for his own isolation…
Castrating bitches driving men into tragic lonely corners, when they could have been so happy if only there were enough doormats to choose from.
He picked up the argument that selfish western women have allowed Muslims to outbreed them, and that only a restoration of patriarchy can save European culture. One of the books he references approvingly is Patrick Buchanan’s The Death of the West, which argues, “[T]he rise of feminism spells the death of the nation and the end of the West.”
…
…the right clings to the idea that feminism is destroying Western societies from the inside, creating space for Islamism to take cover. This politics of emasculation gave shape to Breivik’s rage. Thus, while he pretends to abhor Muslim subjugation of women, he writes that the “fate of European civilisation depends on European men steadfastly resisting Politically Correct feminism.” When cultural conservatives seize control of Europe, he promises, “we will re-establish the patriarchal structures.” Eventually, women “conditioned” to this new order “will know her place in society.” His mad act was in the service of male superiority as well as Christian nationalism. Those two things, of course, almost always go together.
“Almost always” is too strong. Christian nationalism is probably almost always in favor of male superiority, but male superiority is not almost always Christian nationalist. We’ve been seeing a lot of the secular variety lately.
Oh, that’s always a fun conversation.
“I’m a victim of the feminist exploitation of men! That’s why I never get laid!”
Yes. Yes, you’re the real victim here. Let’s drop everything and talk about you, and your very special needs, and your kooky opinions. I’m sure they will be both unique and enlightening!
Oh this sounds so familiar. Woman’s highest purpose is motherhood; to produce children to people the new Reich and make it strong! Start handing out Mutterkreuzer….Kinder, Kueche, Kirche! Oh so familiar……And the men hard as Kruppstahl!
I guess all the males he killed were collateral damage.
No just nasty liberal “women-lovers”.
Ophelia, only slightly off-topic (since this also refers to men being “castrated” by feminists) you may get a kick out of this:
http://nojesusnopeas.blogspot.com/2011/08/i-win-argument-with-dan-cooper.html
https://plus.google.com/u/0/112338623495927395206/posts/WfVbbE2evXK
Traumatised by those childhood knitting classes, he was, traumatised I tell you!
/sarc
I’m sorry, this kind of pathetic grizzling would be a misogynistic version of the ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch (‘I’ll tell you how badly those feminists treated me! Just you listen!’) and potentially funny…
Except he killed 76 people.
You gotta love the argument that feminism is paving the way for misogynistic Islamic domination. On the surface it almost seems an appeal to feminist values, but it’s not that so much as it is a smug declaration of victory. It serves as both strategic justification for, and license to engage in, limitation of women’s rights, all the while condemning feminism as a kind of Fifth Column. It’s no wonder Breivik approved of it.
I wish I could laugh at it, but it chills me to the bone, and it seems to be everywhere. It’s always about other people’s problems, but women still hardly get considered. They are always overlooked, unless they step out of line. As soon as they start to establish themselves in society as actual persons lots of men, and even some women, start howling about it. The assumption really is that women are supposed to serve men and men’s ambitions. And it’s in the Genesis, so that proves it.
We all know by now that when unattributed snippets of his manifesto dealing with Christianity were posted online, a number of American conservatives supported the sentiments. I wonder how people on some of the blogs I’ve recently become aware of would respond to unsourced excerpts of his writings on ’empowered women’ ? Sadly, it’s probably not that big of a mystery, is it?
Well, it would be easy enought to post disguised extracts around and see what happens. But I don’t think I want to know.
I wish that somehow it could be made very clear to everyone that misogyny is anti-human. But of course, we will immediately get loads of men whining “We’re human too! We’re being deprived of our humanity!” It isn’t only complete and utter selfishness; it’s also unutterable stupidity.
Actually, he killed 77 and injured on the order of 150 (mostly from the bomb blast, and many of them not seriously, but still …). Several are still in intensive care (as of a few days ago, anyhow) and undergoing surgery. Some have complicated injuries due to the nature of the bullets the bastard was using.
To return on topic, he does indeed think abortions should be banned, except “in case of rape, if the mother’s life is in danger, or if the baby has mental or physical disabilities”. How generous of him. More generous than the Catholic church?
Oof. (What were we saying about epithets? I know it’s a standard trope you’re quoting.)
As for Gordon’s suggestion at #10 above, it’s already been done, again highlighted by David Futrelle over at Manboobz. Portions of the text were posted around a few “manosphere” sites shortly after the 1,500 page tract was publicised and received substantial agreement, even if a few commentators (rightly) suspected the author was unhinged.
don’t want to know don’t wan… well, actually, I suppose it’s just as well I do now, thanks. And thanks to Elly yesterday I’ve now found David Futrelle. One good thing.
Jen Phillips@9:
That experiment’s been done: http://manboobz.com/2011/07/25/excerpts-of-norwegian-terrorist-anders-breiviks-manifesto-go-over-well-on-reddits-mens-rights-subreddit/
Harald @12:
Oh crap. I should have checked first. Sorry.
Don’t know how I missed Philip’s response on that, but at least the link makes my post not wholly redundant.
Moewicus: You gotta love the argument that feminism is paving the way for misogynistic Islamic domination.
Never understood that one either, but it seems to be a talking point of the religious right in many countries. Guess the idea is that everybody who is not us is the same, and part of the same conspiracy.
Ophelia: Christian nationalism is probably almost always in favor of male superiority, but male superiority is not almost always Christian nationalist. We’ve been seeing a lot of the secular variety lately.
Yup, because somebody not getting what is so bad about a clumsy guy asking a question and graciously accepting the answer is exactly the same as somebody who wants to take away womens’ reproductive rights and self-determination. Seriously, the more I look at that, the more obvious it becomes that half of this discussion is an exercise in the slippery slope fallacy.
Obviously there are cases where it is not a fallacy to invoke the fear of people trying to move the Overton Window. But for that you need to have at least some kind of evidence that your opposition is actually trying to end up way beyond the place the current discussion takes place in. So assuming that a movement that openly wants independence will only use your concession of autonomy as a stepping stone instead of being happy with what they got is reasonable. But lumping people like Russell Blackford, Miranda Celeste and Richard Dawkins with Christian misogynists is exactly as reasonable as assuming that Eric MacDonald is really all about killing defenseless seniors against their will, because there is just as much indication that the former want anything but full equality and liberty for everybody as there is that the latter wants anything but self-determination for everybody.
Please, oh please try not to fall into the aforementioned trap of assuming that everybody who does not have your exact perspective is promoting patriarchy.
“Clumsy”
“Graciously”
The more I hear about this man the more of a sweetheart he seems.
Screechy, my #10 was being composed on my iPhone over the first coffee of the day, which makes conducting searches and handling web links tricky, so I’m totally overjoyed that you’ve backed me up with the link to the “mens rights subreddit”. In that case, the commenters didn’t know the author was Breivik. In other cases (I won’t name sites), the author was known to be Breivik, yet portions of the text were being favourably received.
Alex SL
…………………………………What?
Did I miss a step? Or six steps? What’s any of this got to do with Blackford and co?
Oh, I see – it was the “We’ve been seeing a lot of the secular variety lately.”
But what on earth made you think I meant Blackford and co? I meant the hard-core dreck at ERV and that bad faith fella and the dreck at his place. I do think Blackford and co are cluelessly oblivious to that (at best) but I don’t think they’re male supremacists.
julian wrote:
Just as long as you remember that it was unskeptical of Watson to impute characteristics to EG for which she had no evidence.
Jen wrote:
Actually I wasn’t, although thanks to those who brought up manboobz, that place is great. Even worse than the people agreeing with anonymized Breivik quotes is what they say when they actually know where the stuff is coming from. And guess what, she’s a woman, too.
Okay, sorry then; although I also strongly doubt that the ERV blogger is pro-patriarchy. I think women who go all “there is no need for [insert feminist issue of your choice] any more, because we do not need them any more, and [issue] is patronizing anyway” are a bit on the naive side, but – again – not at all to be equated with those who say “I am against [issue] because women should be in the kitchen anyway”.
Intent and effect do not always coincide.
Alex, ERV isn’t just going all “there is no need for [insert feminist issue of your choice] any more,” she is also going all “fucking bitch Twatson smelly snatch a drunk” and vowing her love for people who call Watson (and me, for that matter) all that and more. I really don’t care what her worked-out ideas on the subject are. She’s an energetic source and encourager of misogynist word salad.
I also don’t want to talk about it though. I don’t want to have to fumigate all the threads every morning.
MartinM,
yes, but you would still not treat a murderer the same way as somebody who has caused a traffic accident, even if the effect would be identical.
What kind of structures are those? Can we make mine a condo on Lake Tahoe?
But make sure to put the title in my wife’s name; she already knows her place in society.
Hamilton Jacobi:
Here’s an example: Biblical patriarchy
James Tiptree, aka Alice Sheldon in The Women Men Don’t See:
” When the next real crisis upsets [men], our so-called rights will vanish like—like that smoke. We’ll be back where we always were: property. And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was. You’ll see.”
“The Women Men Don’t See” = Pure and Unadulterated Win. I know Sci-Fi is generally considered low or middle brow literature, but that story should absolutely be required reading in colleges everywhere. It’s clever and well-crafted both in content and style, which work so well together to give the story all it’s nuances [/gushing]
Jadehawk: That and The Screwfly Solution. Required reading.
Actually, better yet: Houston, Houston, Do You Read? I had reason to refer to this (Fathers versus Sons thinking, both along exclusively masculinist lines) in an essay I wrote about epic fantasy.
Literature is generally considered low or middle brow literature. 90 % of everything is shit.
[…] From Ophelia Benson, at Butterflies & Wheels: […]
I’m disappointed that his anti-Islam beliefs have gotten all of the media attention and his anti-liberal, anti-women, anti-secular beliefs have been ignored. His target wasn’t a mosque. it was the government quarter of the center-left government and a Labour Party youth camp. He wanted to attack everything that modern, secular, gay-and-women friendly liberal society believes in. His suit has a “Marxist Hunter” patch on it. I don’t know why the right-wing violence angle has been downplayed and all of the coverage has been about his anti-Islam beliefs.
This is why I’m always suspicious when fundamentalists/extremists of a different religion say they are concerned about women in Islam. Odds are, they just want women to be discriminated against based on their own religion rather than a different religion. I’ve seen interviews of people who have left Islam (e.g. Ayaan Hirsi Ali) or who are criticizing Islam from the inside (e.g. Irshad Manji), in which the host is rather polite or even nice to them, but when that same host is talking about feminism or about groups that criticize discriminatory views in Christianity, then the host is hateful and bigoted.
[Example: Ayaan Hirsi Ali speaking with Glenn Beck (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3tgY_eI_P0)]
In addition to being hateful towards women, the view that one group has to breed in higher numbers to defeat another group also seems rather racist. It assumes that people must have particular views based on their birth — that their views can be predicted and that the views of people in other groups can be assumed to be identical to the views of the worst person in that group. This outlook sees no opportunity change the minds of others, but rather just sees everyone of a different group as an enemy to be defeated, as people who are incapable of understanding an argument.
OMFG, how can it be that I’ve never read that story!? Oversight corrected now. And that essay is bookmarked for future reference, since I’m unfamiliar with most of the writers suggested in it (except for C.J. Cherryh, whom I know from her SF writing and only started reading her fantasy after I ran out of SF written by her)
Breivik is nuts and so are a good deal of feminists.
Ophelia posted an item several weeks back about a school in Toronto where the cafeteria was turned into a mosque on friday for gender-segregated worship. Girls menstruating were instructed to inform the imam so as to not sully the procedings.
This isn’t limited to just one school in Toronto. There are about a dozen such schools in Ottswa alone where a situation similar to that found in Margaret Atwood’s novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” is to be found.
Not a single mainstream feminist has come forward to denounce this, the same feminists who, only a few years back, were so instrumental in banning Christian prayer from public schools. There is a blatant double stsandard, a real anti-christian bigotry on the part of these gals that radical Muslims adroitly exploit to promote an agenda of gender apartheid.
Listened to an interview with a schoolboard trustee who promoted these cafeteria mosques. She was a feminist and a progressive who cited religious freedom as her justification for giving this practice the green light. And this even though one of the principle mandates of board she works for is the promotion of gender equality.
Breivik’s rampage, and the hay that so many progressives are making with his Christian fundamentalism shouldn’t detract from the fact that Islam is probably the biggest threat facing womens rights these days. When western, secular feminists actually aid the implementation of islamist gender apartheid in our public school systemes under the auspices of ‘freedom of religion’, then there’s reason to be deeply troubled.
Male misogynists are dangerous, but what is truly devastating to women’s rights are when large groups of women willingly move to the back of the bus in the foolish belief that it’s their divinely ordained place.
Sonia, there are a number of assertions there that you’ve made – not the least the charge that somehow secularism is feminism (and that means that feminists banned Christian prayer in school). The two are not actually synonymous. Then on the other hand, feminism is accused of not doing enough. In doing so, it misrepresents the situation. There are also two coincidental issues there – that the school allowed an mosque to be set up, thus introducing religion and religious practice into the school setting. Then, within that, there was the institutionalised sexism of separating not only women and girls, but further separating those who were menstruating and not allowing them to participate. There’s been plenty of commentary on that, either dealing with both or one of those issues – such as this article: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/07/11/tasha-kheiriddin-religion-has-no-place-in-public-school-and-neither-does-sexism/#more-45163 (that being said, it’s probably easy despite being noted in other places as a feminist, that the qualifier ‘mainstream’ can be used to discount this by saying they were the wrong ‘type’ of feminist to suit the argument.)
In the interview, which is left impossible to find and verify the characterisation of the comments, it could easily be that the person was speaking to having the mosque set up full stop because it was from what I read a solution to a problem of children leaving school for prayers thus disrupting schooling rather than any intent to set up and support a religiously based sexist system. It’s not feminists moving to the back of the bus on this or secularists for that matter, it’s more a matter that the religious freedom argument can be used to deflect any criticisms about sexism and having the prayer sessions. It may have been better if the school had to deal with it, that instead of the school accommodating the religious group, that the religious group accommodated them but that not the way they worked it, and they’ve been criticised on that. Their only defence is the religious freedom one.
@Hemlock. There are a whole host of angles to this. For decades ( I’m well into middle age) I watched as secularists, many feminists among them, fought tooth and nail to have the Lord’s Prayer, something that takes all of 50 seconds to recite, banned from schools only to see, barely ten years later, these same schools set up on-site, gender-segregated mosques for entire prayer services lasting some 50 minutes, and this without a murmur of objection.
And since when does attendance at friday prayers justify truency? If these kids were skipping out of school they should have been given disciplinary measures and their parents warned that such behavior won’t be tolerated. Does anyone seriously think that had Catholic kids been skipping school to go to Good Friday mass, the school authorities would have responded by setting up a catholic church in the school cafeteria every first friday of the month?
Not on your life.
It just makes me question the sincerity, the committment these secularists and feminists actually had to the principles they espouse. If we are to judge by their vastly different reactions to religious encroachments on the public school space, if we examine their behaviors, their strategies and in particular their profuse apologetics for these mosques and their attendant gender-segregation, a lot of them come across as mere anti-christian bigots.
I’M not arguing for Christianty over Islam, I’m pleading for a semblance of consistency and uniformity when it comes to making and keeping schools neutral, secular spaces where learning and knowledge rather than superstition are the priorities.
@Sonia
Ummm, what? People are definitely objecting to it. At least in blogworld. I don’t live in Canada and don’t know exactly what’s going on there, but if no one objected to this, we wouldn’t be hearing about it on atheist blogs.