Betty Friedan: Communist homewrecker?
Ladies Love Cool Joe (Stalin)
Last week marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which inspired a flood of commemorative essays everywhere from Slate to the New York Times.
It also inspired what I think is one of the most hilariously dumb sentences I’ve ever read on The Spearhead. In a post talking about Friedan’s “youthful Bolshevik activism” – she spent a number of years as a labor journalist – Spearhead head boy W.F. Price offers this assessment of the book that jumpstarted feminism’s second wave:
Although I haven’t read the book, it apparently stresses the need for women to engage in work outside the home, which is a basic Communist tenet.
Yeah, that’s why most women work. Not to pay the bills, but because they are pawns of the worldwide communist conspiracy.
Weirdly, Price is well aware that he’s full of shit here, and that most women throughout history have worked, not because of Communism but because of economic necessity. Indeed, he even points this out in his post. But he follows this acknowledgement with more thoughts on Friedan’s evil commie ways:
[I]t looks as though Betty Friedan was one of the many dedicated Communists who caused so many problems immediately after WWII. I once looked up a list of known Communist front groups in the US, and noticed that quite a few of them were women’s groups. Combined with accounts I’ve read from former Cheka agents, it makes for pretty convincing evidence that feminism was deliberately fostered in the US by Soviet agents. It makes sense to use women in that manner, because authorities are not as suspicious of women, and they can operate under the radar far more easily than men. Women also make excellent spies.
Although I’m sure resurgent feminism would have emerged in one form or another with or without Betty Friedan, it is interesting to note second wave feminism’s Cold War origins in Marxist infiltration of US society. …
It turns out she was little more than a loyal Bolshevik pawn who suddenly stumbled onto success by writing a thinly-veiled Marxist critique of American capitalist society from a woman’s perspective.
In the comments, TheTruthishere enthusiastically agreed with Price’s feminism-was-a-Soviet-plot thesis:
You are right a read the same thing on another site … feminism was thought up in a russian thinktank to basically destroy the family as the states smallest cell. Basically so communism could be introduced in the western world. Well, it worked, it just took them longer than expected. By the way the Rockafellas are involved in this as well
RockEfellers. Not RockAfellAs. Or even RockAfellERs.
Uncle Elmer gave us this weird socio-sexual fantasy:
Speaking of Freudian, all feminists have a major clit-boner for “1963”, though it was not technically part of the mythic “50s”. Based on their persistent mention of that era, it’s clear they would gladly trade in their Birkenstocks for a chance to be slapped and rogured by Ward Cleaver.
They didn’t call him “The Cleaver” for nothing.
And Towgunner, for some odd reason, used the opportunity to express his disdain for “female” – in quotes – music composers.
I have a lot of classical music as my pandora stations, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Debussy, etc. So, guess what gets inter-mixed with the play sets from time to time…yep, the token “female” composer. I’m usually doing something else while listening and this never fails – I always know its a female composer because it, well, is bad music. Also, all of the female composers I’ve heard basically sound the same. All things aside, forget I’m an MRA, it has very little aesthetic value for anyone, except for those who think talent is the same thing as “social justice”. female composers create music that is akin to cold coffee left over from breakfast and now its 2:00 PM. And its not after a few minutes, I can tell a female composer in the first few seconds…that too never fails. Many of them painfully subject their listeners to simple scales and scattered and disagreeable harmonies…kind of like the background music for greys autonomy or any chick flick. Above all, it’s not, even in the slightest, original…frankly female composers are a perfect case study in that you can hear the innate female tendency towards conformity.
By the way, here are some songs by female composers – sorry, “female” composers. I’m not sensing a lot of conformity here.
Posted on February 22, 2013, in antifeminism, creepy, misogyny, MRA, the spearhead and tagged antifeminism, men's rights, misogyny, MRA. Bookmark the permalink. 226 Comments.
I actually enjoyed pretending (knowing almost nothing about Paris Hilton) that she was pulling an elaborate performance on everyone. Like trolling, only way more lucrative.
Also, Kittehs, oh god, you know of Tom of Finland. God, now there is an artist that I wish hadn’t been as popular as he was; his art style is grotesque to me and it influenced so much gay male art, argh. I am haunted by gigantic dicks and inflated pectorals at night. *shudder*
I don’t like the Tom of Finland art much either, but he was a friend of mine’s neighbor for a while and she said he was a really nice guy. For what it’s worth.
RE: cloudiah
Huh, really? I’m glad he was a nice guy. Unfortunately, it doesn’t change that I have a visceral dislike of his art style. (Robert Crumb brings out the same response in me.) Then again, I’d much rather have a nice person who made art I dislike than a douchebag who made art I adore.
Yeah, I remember going to an art exhibit that had a whole room full of Tom of Finland stuff, back in the 80s. I think they were going for “edgy”. I just kind of backed slowly out of the room.
Not to be mean, but if you meant this literally it would be hilarious, someone’s dreams being haunted by terrible artwork. I’m imagining you moaning “noooooo, the proportions are all wrong” in your sleep.
RE: cloudiah
Yeah, that’d be too much for me. It’d be like getting my brain pistol-whipped with a giant rubber dong.
RE: CassandraSays
That is pretty much EXACTLY how it goes.
“No… no… waist… waist too small… everything too… NO DON’T PUT YOUR PENIS THERE!”
LOL about Tom of Finland! His drawings certainly don’t do the “whoa, sexy” thing for me, either. They’re just … well, good for the occasional quick look at for something strange. Giant penises and grotesque pecs are not my idea of beautiful or sexy either. I do like the prettiness of some of the faces, but it’s all in a totally-not-for-me world of gay fantasy.
Totally with you about Robert Crumb. Can’t stand his stuff.
RE: Kittehs
Yeah, I can handle Robert Crumb’s art style… until I think around 1975? Then the visceral, “DO NOT WANT” reaction gets stronger. It’s nothing to do with quality of work, either, it’s just something about the style that hits some weird “NO” button in my brain. I get it with music too. (Can not ABIDE that song ‘Someone That I Used To Know,’ can’t even listen to it all the way through because the singer’s voice hits the same nerve.)
I’ve never heard more than a phrase from that song - I know about it, of course, the media here’s all over the bloke, but the couple of lines I heard left me very “meh” and not at all interested in hearing more. I’ll stick to Mr Springsteen.
Crumb’s style leaves me cold and I loathe the content. He, or at least his art, just seem totally creepy.
RE: Kittehs
Yeah, Crumb is a sighmaker for me. Since I’m a comics creator and reader, he is of course a little tin god because he was at the head of the counter-culture comics movement, fighting the Big Two US comics publishers of DC and Marvel and making comics for adults, et cetera et cetera…
…but yeah, mega-creepiness. And no, I don’t think it’s just the art either. I was reading one of the counter-culture comics later down the line, done by a woman. They were fictionalized stories of child molestation, based on her own experiences, and Crumb was her idol, and so he wrote the preface for her book. All good, right?
Except THEN he pretty much uses the preface to be like, “Oh, she was a teenage girl, and she was molested which of course is totally terrible, but oh, woe, I am such a bad person because I wanted to have sex with her!” And it was just so fucking creepy and D: making for me. It’s like, dude, this preface is supposed to be you saying how awesome this book is, not flagellating yourself for wanting to bang her as a teenager!
He’s just one creator of a whole genre of comics I avoid that I call “Neurotic Men with Issues About Women.” I tend to avoid all of them.
Neurotic M[a]n With Issues About Women seems to sum up everything I’ve read about Crumb. I apply brain bleach every time I read anything about him. Keep your skeevy porn fantasies to yourself, dude.
RE: Kittehs
Yeah, it’s weird, can’t say I’ve much encountered a gender-reversed trope of it. (Just as well. I don’t think I’d enjoy a comic all about a woman masturbating furiously to idealized visions of masculinity, all while also feeling dirty about it and flagellating herself over it.)
::bloork::
@pecunium
That you for that Larry Niven info. I had read everything he had written up to that time. Lucifer’s Hammer had more than one WTF MRA moment (don’t get me started on the Girl Scout troop….ARGGGH!) I never read crap like that in any book where Niven was the sole author, so I presumed it was Mr P’s contribution. It still left a bad taste in my mouth that a distinguished author like Niven would read that and think, yes that is ready to publish.
Neurotic Man with Issues about Women sounds like the world’s second-worst superhero.
The worst is, of course, Florida Man.
Reminds me of that old song about Irving, 142nd Fastest Gun in the West.