THE FRUITS OF FEMINISM

Based upon recent statistics, Nicole M. King has concluded:

·       “Women’s Liberation”—the push to get every able-brained woman into a cubicle—has not turned out to be all it was cracked up to be. (Salvo, Fall 2018, 23)

What is her assessment based upon? King wrote that “According to Julie Phillips of Rutgers University, the rise in female suicides has been evident since about 2000.” King adds, “Women are now twice as likely as men to be on a psychiatric drug of some sort, and a long-time use is common.” She also cites Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers’ “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness”:

·       By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. (23)

Stevenson and Wolfers explain this decline in terms of “decreased social cohesion.” This might seem surprising since women now “enjoy” increased professional affiliations. King, however, focuses her sights upon a particular “social institution”:

·       A 2015 study by the Pew Research Center found that the “Christian share of the U.S. population is declining, while the number of U.S. adults who do not identify with any organized religion is growing.” In a mere eight-year period (2007-2014), the share of Americans who identified themselves as “Christian” dropped by eight percent. The fastest growing segment across all generations is the “religiously unaffiliated”…In 1948, only two percent of Americans described themselves as having no religious affiliation. In 2017, that number reached 20 percent. In 1952, 75 percent of Americans said that religion was “very important” in their lives. …since 2012 [that percent] has been hovering at around 56 percent.

Feminism has brought destruction, as hatred usually does. It not only unleashed a full-scale assault on the traditional family and patriarchy, it also undermined the essence of true feminism. It degraded what the female did best, forcing her, instead, to wear suit and tie and compete with the male. The female had to become more like the male and the male more like the female, condemning them both into an alien androgynous world of unappealing sameness, in which females modify their voices to sound more masculine.

However, our philosophical commitments are highly reason-resistant and die slow deaths, often taking their fans with them.