The attack on normative heterosexuality — led by male homosexuals and lesbians, and invariably disguised as a movement for ‘rights,’ piggybacking on the civil rights movement of the 1960’s — is fundamental to the success of Critical Theory, which went straight at the hardest target (and yet, in many ways, the softest) first. The reason was simple: If a wedge could be a driven between men and women, if the nuclear family could be cracked, if women could be convinced to fear and hate men, to see them as unnecessary for their happiness or survival — if men could be made biologically redundant — then that political party that had adopted Critical Theory could make single women one of their strongest voting blocs.
And so Eve was offered the apple: In exchange for rejecting a ‘traditional’ sex role of supposed subservience and dependency (slavery, really), she would become more like a man in her sexual appetites and practices (this was so called ‘freedom’), and she would be liberated from the burdens of motherhood via widespread contraception, abortion on demand, and the erasure of the ‘stigma’ of single motherhood (should it come to that) or spinsterhood. Backed by the force of government’s fist, she would compete with men for jobs, high salaries, and social status, all the while retaining all her rights of womanhood. the only thing she had to do was help destroy the social order.
The results has been entirely predictable: masculinized women, feminized men, falling rates of childbirth in the Western world, and the creation of a technocratic political class that can type but do little real work in the traditional sense. Co-educational college campuses have quickly mutated from sexually segregated living quarters to co-ed dorms to the ‘hook up culture’ depicted by novelist Tom Wolfe in I am Charlotte Simmons to a newly puritanical and explicitly anti-male ‘rape culture’ hysteria, in which sexual commissars promulgate step-by-step rules for sexual encounters and often dispense completely with due process when adjudicating complaints from female students.
Crucially, at every step of the way, ‘change,’ from the old norms was being offered as ‘improvement’ or ‘liberation’ — more fulfillment, more pleasure, more experience. And yet, with each step, things got worse — for women. Eve’s bite of the apple sent humanity forth from the Garden, sadder but wiser. Today’s transgressive Western woman is merely sadder and often ends her life completely alone, a truly satanic outcome. G. K. Chesterton’s parable of the fence comes to mind, in the ‘The Drift from Domesticity,’ in The Thing (1929):
In the manner of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which probably will be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law, let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this, let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer, “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
A splendid example of Chesterton’s Fence was the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, championed by Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. “Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will non inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area,” said the Massachusetts Senator. “In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think … The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.” Half a century on, those predictions have proved dramatically wrong: the question is whether Kennedy and his fellow leftists knew quite well at the time that there forecasts were bogus — although (as someone or other famously said) what difference, at this point, does it make?
In the same way, much of contemporary, ‘reform’ is marked by impatience, ridicule, and haste, cloaked in ‘compassion,’ or bureaucratic ‘comprehensivity,’ disguised as ‘rights’ prised out of the Constitution with a crowbar and an ice pick, and delivered with a cocksure snort of derision against any who would demur.
Michael Walsh
The Devil’s Pleasure Palace; The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West — pg. 88 – 89
