A Thermodynamic Interpretation of History: Division Two An Archaeology of the American Feminist Intraworldly Messianism CHAPTER 11: A Genealogy of Feminism 11.3. Cultural Feminism's Transition to "Victim Feminism": Feminist Fear-Mongering ACADEMY | previous section | Table of Content | next section | GALLERY

Copyright © 2004, 2005, 2006 by Lawrence C. Chin. All rights reserved.

The cultural feminists of the first wave, as "earthly gnostics" engaged in a secularized "salvational" pursuit within an eschatological history derived from Christianity, thus came to share only superficial congruence with liberal feminists but diverge from the latter fundamentally in ways that soon became manifest. What the two had in common was the exhortation for women to participate in the public sphere and the effort to demolish the barriers to such participation. But the purpose of the opening of the public sphere to women was for the cultural feminists not for the sake of women's fulfillment of their essentially male soul as it was for the liberal feminists, but for the purpose of the development of the female "gnosis" inside (like the Philosopher's Stone) and the perfection of the world outside into the Eschaton. E.g. the case of Crystal Eastman in the beginning decades of the twentieth century, with regard to the perfection of inner gnosis: "Agreeing conditionally that woman needs a 'free soul' -- if such is defined as 'a certain emotional freedom, a strong healthy egotism, and some un-personal sources of joy' -- Eastman nevertheless argues that such freedom cannot come only from within. 'Conditions of outward freedom' must be created ' in which a free woman's soul can be born and grow. It is these outward conditions with which an organized feminist movement must concern itself.' Eastman believes the main social changes that would effect such 'outward freedom' were: opening all professions to women, change in early socialization of boys and girls, government subsidies for child rearing, and 'voluntary motherhood' or birth control." (Josephine Donovan, ibid., p. 57) With the inner gnosis perfected, the women participating in the world would be transforming it into perfection, and this Eschaton was, as said in contradistinction to the Aryanists, understood as the pacifist paradise of happy dissipation under motherly love. "In her 'Program for Voting Women', Eastman declares that the primary task of politically enfranchised women must be to end war: 'What we hope... is to bring thousands upon thousands of women -- women of international mind -- to dedicate their new political power, not to local reforms or personal ambitions, not to discovering the difference between the Democratic and Republican parties, but to ridding the world of war.'" Or again, "[t]he purpose of a pacifist, she wrote in 1915, must be 'to establish new values, to create an overpowering sense of the sacredness of life; so that war will be unthinkable." (Ibid.) In the matter of praxis, "[Eastman] organized the Women's Peace Party of New York in 1914 and was later one of the founders and executive director of the American Union Against Militarism, which became the American Civil Liberties Union." (Ibid.) Eastman's effort should be seen within the larger context, the formation of the Woman's Peace Party "in 1915 with Jane Addams as its national chair", whose Preamble stated the gnostic status of the female savior ("As women, we feel a peculiar moral passion of revolt against both the cruelty and the waste of war. As women, we are especially the custodians of the life of the ages. We will no longer consent to its reckless destruction." Cited by Donovan, p. 58) and whose platform "included a series of proposals for ending the hostilities in Europe (World War I was by then well under way) and the establishment of a permanent peace". (Ibid.) Also, the International Congress of Women at the Hague in May 1915, "attended by 1,136 voting delegates (almost all women) from nearly every country in Europe as well as the United States. The American delegation included Jane Addams, Emily Greene Balch (both later received the Nobel Peace Prize), Sophonisba Breckinridge, and Alice Hamilton... [M]any of [the Hague resolutions] were adopted by Woodrow Wilson in his... 'Fourteen Points' doctrine... [e.g.] no transfer of territory without the consent of the inhabitants, recognition of the right of all peoples to autonomy, self-determination and democratic government", and others, like "a general disarmament and the use of 'collective sanctions' against aggressor nations", the education of children in the ideals of peace, and this sort of things. (Ibid.) One of the key "proposals of the Hague conference which Wilson failed to specify in the 'Fourteenth Points'" is the right of women to vote -- but, in contradistinction from the agenda of liberal feminism, this demanded from the gnostic standpoint of cultural feminism, women the savior by virtue of being in unique possession of a world-saving gnosis simply as a function of their being women. "Since the combined influence of the women of all countries is one of the strongest forces for the prevention of war, and since women can only have full responsibility and effective influence when they have equal political rights with men [-- and so here, by imagining themselves as the savior, these feminists fell into the trap of power, facilitating the integration of the state, and eventually the mobilization of women into the mass economy, through summoning women to participate whole-heartedly in the business of state and society], this International Congress of women demands their political enfranchisement." (Cited., ibid.) "The women also demanded they be included in the World War I peace conference and announced that in any event they would meet simultaneously with that conference, which they did. (Indeed, at their 1918 Zurich conference the International Congress of Women issued the first condemnation of the Versailles treaty, within days after it was passed; the women charged, prophetically, that the treaty did nothing but sow the seeds of future discord." [Ibid.]) "The International Congress of Women, itself, remains an embodiment of the cultural feminist ideal" and hence of the eidos of an "earthly gnostic sect": "a model separatist women's network unified by a belief in common female interests and values" of the salvational type -- as said, there is never anything objectionable about claiming to have a secret knowledge about the path toward salvation as any human spiritual pursuit always ends in the gnostic type (at least in regard to the second mode of salvation); the perversion occurs when "salvation" is only understood as happy and unalienating dissipative processes of life rather than the negation of these processes altogether, and it only becomes dangerous -- risks being harmful rather than doing good -- when the "saving sect" tries to actively transform the world, this world -- its members are not trying to save humanity for the other world, the world after death -- in accordance with its presumed secret knowledge -- "and dedicated to extending that heritage into the public, androcentric world." (p. 59) The cultural feminists, just like the communist revolutionaries, were essentially mediocre thinkers living in a distorted imaginary world, and would completely miscalculate the actions of women when they did enter the public world in large number half a century later. These would just be Mass Women unleashing their destructive (noo-spheric) defecative capacity. It was simply fantasy to think that a group of mindless, ordinary people but designated as special -- whether it be women, the proletariat, or the "Aryans" -- would somehow be "soteric" because of their fancied "specialness" and do the world much good.

"1920 is a landmark date in the history of American feminism. On August 18, the Anthony or suffrage amendment was ratified by Tennessee and became part of the Constitution [the 19th Amendment]." (Ibid.) But this victory was really of liberal feminism, not cultural. The fact was that the economy was not yet ripe for full participation of women in society beyond that of the political: the structure of nation-state was sufficiently integrated like an organism on the level of the Person that it was ready for, and in fact required, a direct relationship between women and the state between which hitherto a middle-man (the husband) stood in the way; but the metabolism of the nation-state was not yet so massive as to find "man-power" deficient but need "woman-power" as well. At this point the case of Britain calls for comparison.

During the period that marked the end of laissez-faire, when the English society also started going on the path of the managerial state, it expectedly "was confronted with a new question, that of woman's suffrage. Since the Industrial Revolution the position of women had been changing; the new conditions made it necessary for them to be more independent economically, as the average family could no longer support or find room in the home for dependent aunts, cousins, and sisters. [The breakdown of extended family into nuclear households, increasing the units of consumption.] Also... the number of women in industry had been steadily increasing. In education they were admitted to take examinations at the University of London in the late 60s, not long after at Cambridge, and finally at Oxford, where eventually separate colleges were established for them. Agitation for the enfranchisement of women had been proceeding quietly ever since the middle of the 19th century, but without gaining many converts. John Stuart Mill had been the only man of importance to advocate with any warmth votes for women. In 1903, however, Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, Sylvia and Christabel, decided on a change in tactics. The Women's Social and Political Union, which they sponsored, determined to wake up England. Its members, not content with signing and circulating petitions, began to interrupt public meetings and to heckle politicians and statesmen in order to draw public attention to their cause. Such conduct in England, on the part of women, was unheard-of, and the suffragettes... were derided and denounced. This served only to stiffen their determination. For five years preceding the World War they alternately amused and angered the British public, annoyed and worried the British Parliament. Year by year the women grew bolder. They padlocked themselves to the grillwork of the visitors' gallery in the Commons, concealed the key, and shouted 'Votes for Women!'; they climbed public statues and repeated the trick; they laid siege to Parliament square; they put chemicals in mail boxes, broke the display windows of Bond Street stores, smashed porcelains in the British Museum, and slashed a Venus at the National Gallery. They refused to pay fines, but went to prison and became martyrs... [Then] the suffragettes... went on hunger strikes as soon as arrested. The authorities resorted to force [by pouring] milk down rubber tubes through the women's noses... The nuisance effect of these pioneer suffragette activities was not... to be the decisive factor in the suffrage victory in 1918." (Hall, Albion, Pope, The History of England and the British Empire, p. 818) What then was the decisive factor? World War I was certainly the first modern, i.e. mass warfare in the European theatre, requiring the mobilization of the nation's resources in entirety -- what the nation-state was made for -- and the second such war in the world, after the American Civil War. (The Russo-Japanese war of 1905 may be considered also a mass warfare, at least from the Japanese standpoint.) "England and her empire were taxed to the limit of their human and material resources in the World War, which surpassed all previous conflicts in its magnitude and in its direct influence upon the people of almost the entire world... Armies were reckoned by the millions, instead of by tens or hundreds of thousands as in earlier wars." The time of professional armies of two states fighting one another was by-gone; the modern war was the pitting against each other of two populations (i.e. the supraorganisms in their entirety). "Altogether, some 65 million men were mobilized... At least 10 million men were killed... Ammunition and supplies of every sort were expended with unheard-of lavishness." This required that "[n]ot merely... armies fight armies, but peoples oppose... peoples, whether in front-line trenches or at home. The older men, the women, and the children remaining behind... took up tasks hitherto performed by able-bodied men, and the armies at the front depended upon them to 'carry on.' Women toiled even in the munitions factories and on transportation systems." (p. 852 - 3) Again, the enormous power of the modern nation-state depended on the mobilization of women in time of war for production just as in time of peace for production and consumption of consumer products. It was thus then that the "fourth Reform Bill" was passed in Britain in 1918 after the war's end, giving "the suffrage to all male citizens over 21 who had been resident in a Parliamentary division for at least 6 months, by including the small group which had been left without the vote in the third Reform Bill, of 1884, but --... it at last had extended the franchise to women. This was not a concession to Mrs. Pankhurst and her troublesome suffragettes as it was a recognition of the splendid accomplishments of women in many difficult spheres of activity during the war. It came almost simultaneously with the granting of woman suffrage in the U.S., Germany, Russia, and elsewhere." (p. 903)¹ The nation-states all over had integrated women directly into themselves, firstly politically, and then economically half a century later, in order that, as they had learned from total war, they may have more population-resources to extract energy from. Why, then, did the women activists see this as "liberation"?

Certainly, in classical patriarchies where women were really and very oppressed, those that could no longer withstand oppression were always allowed a way out. Thus, in imperial China, a woman, despairing of life, of the hardship associated with the female role, could always withdraw from society, shave her head, and join the order of nuns at a Buddhist monastery. The point is that this path was sanctioned by the patriarchal society because the ascetic orders frequently lived off people's (and so society's) donation. Thus a woman may have achieved liberation. For an outsider, then, the British and American women activists appeared really strange when, un-satisfied with their female role, they attempted to participate in the patriarchal society even further, and yet called this "emancipation" or "liberation". What strange idea of "liberation"? Note the utter incompatibility between East and West thinking here, the Chinese woman liberating herself from patriarchal oppression by becoming the ideal type of femme-oisive (the nuns did absolutely nothing all day except some chanting, while living off parasitically the resources of the patriarchal society) which the middle class English-American women activist, who were already (although less ideal type of) this, took to be precisely their oppression and attempted to reverse into femme travaillante which became identified as "liberation". What would people in general, women in particular, and feminists especially, say of a true femme oisive in today's society of more or less sexual equality? A woman, that is, who lives off society's charity, and does nothing all day but some chanting to soothe her mind? It's okay if that's what she wants? But why the "paralysis", a victim of parental abuse, of patriarchal oppression? A lazy woman? A woman who has failed to live up to her human potential (e.g. getting into a "profession") which has been made known to reside in women also, at last, thanks to feminism? A decisive factor in the origin of feminism, then, was a change in attitude toward work (Beruf), inherited by the feminists to make a "feminist work ethics", so that the integration of women into the politics of society and public production may be termed "women's emancipation movement" (Kate Millett, Sexual Politics). Note that even in John's apocalyptic vision of the coming God's Kingdom, the salvation proper to Christianity, as cited earlier, that is, when we are "saved", work was something to be negated: "kai o qanatoV ouk estai eti oute penqoV oute kraugh oute ponoV ouk estai eti, oti ta prwta aphlqan"; "and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow (penthos), nor crying, neither shall there be any more work, for the former things are passed away." (Revelation 21). Ponos: hard work, drudgery, pain of body and mind, was vaguely but incorrectly translated as "pain" in the King James. Feminism therefore presupposes an utterly irrational ideology -- or maybe not so irrational, if what the feminists are seeking is not liberation, but power over others? (see below) -- which must then trace its origin in the Reformation, with the sudden exaltation of work in the Protestant work ethics, i.e. with the Protestant perverted inversion of Christian value.

In any case, for the reason of the stagnation of women's movement after the granting of female suffrage rights, "[m]ost feminists and historians have come to regard 1920 as the end of 'first wave' feminism. However... [f]eminism did not simply die out in 1920 and re-emerge in the 1960s. In fact, the 1920s and 1930s were a period of continuing feminist activity. While little was developed in the way of feminist theory during these years, much of the earlier theory was being put into practice... [T]he cultural feminists of the prewar period channeled their ideas into progressive legislation during the 1920s. Not all this legislation was enacted; some of it languished until the New Deal... [T]he cultural feminists of the 1920s [formed] an important link in the chain from the progressive era to the New Deal... '[They] worked up an agenda for reform in the Progressive Era and in the 1920s, which required the emergency climate of the New Deal for passage'." (Ibid.) As we saw earlier, the American republic was further integrating at this time (in the words of the Old Right, becoming a "managerial state", i.e. totalitarian), so the gnostic programs of transformation (salvation) of the cultural feminists, usually amounting to governmental intervention to improve the livelihood (i.e. "living standard") of the population, fit quite well into these operations of power and so merged with the latter as at the time of New Deal. Thus these feminists were also called "social feminists". But since power was only making use of feminist exhortations in piecemeal and opportunistic fashion instead of incorporating the "female gnosis" (the "women's culture"), cultural feminism of the first wave could not strictly speaking be considered successful.

These piecemeal reform legislations were mostly lobbied through "the Women's Joint Congressional Committee, an umbrella group formed in 1920 and comprised of 10 women's organizations, including the newly formed League of Women's Voters." Typical were "the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy-Protection Act (1921), which was later incorporated into the Social Security Act of 1935... the passage of a Child Labor Amendment,... never ratified by the states. These cultural feminists also fought for 'government ownership and operation of Muscle Shoals [later TVA], federal regulation of marketing and distribution of food, the cooperative movement, aid to education... pure food and drugs... collective bargaining, hours and wage laws, equal pay for equal work, [and] federal employment service.'" (p. 59 - 60)

"What they did not support, however, was the Equal Rights Amendment, which had been formulated by the National Woman's Party and introduced in Congress in 1923. The WJCC opposed the ERA because it saw the amendment as a threat to protective legislation for women. Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party, on the other hand, opposed protective legislation and supported the ERA. The clash between these two groups was in many respects a clash between liberal and cultural feminist theory. The supporters of the ERA believed that women were similar to men in capabilities and merely needed to be afforded equal opportunities and accorded natural rights. The opponents believed women were different and required special legislation to protect that differentness. Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, and other members of the National Women's Trade Union League, a reform-minded labor organization, had rejoiced over the 1908 Supreme Court decision (Muller v. Oregon), which upheld protective legislation for women (a 10-hour day). That decision had been based on the famous Louis D. Brandeis brief which stressed women's physical inferiority." (Ibid.) The conflict was between the progressivist on the lineage of Mary Wollstonecraft which was experientially (not sectarianly) descended from (as secularization of) the mainstream Christianity and the gnostic "savior-ist" on the lineage of Margaret Fuller which was experientially -- and ideally, not actually -- descended from (as secularization of) the fervent eschatological side-stream of Christianity developed on Continental Europe and imported into the English-speaking world.² Soon, however, the cultural feminists themselves realized that "[i]n the eyes of the law 'different' is too often interpreted as 'unequal', 'inferior', or 'incapable'... [so that] protective legislation could easily be used in a discriminatory way to bar women from various occupation... By the 1940s nearly all feminists had come around to this position [for an unadulterated Equal Rights Amendment], as nearly all feminists have today." (Ibid.) Since the second wave feminists are virtually always cultural feminists (or "difference feminists"), their demand becomes equal rights plus special legislative protection for women, which often appears bizarrely self-contradictory and grossly unfair to the men (and some women) who have no understanding and knowledge of the experiential origin of feminism in Christianity. But with this understanding and knowledge, the bent of cultural feminists appears quite predictable.

In view of this clash the concluding remark on the genealogy of cultural feminism of the first wave must mention the two essential characters of its which it actually must possess by virtue of its gnostic structure: the inaccessibility, to the outgroup, of the specialness it attributed to women and which made them the savior and yet the fragility of women precisely because of this specialness and which made them merit special protection. The first characteristic refers to the "question of what constitutes the 'differentness' between the male and female identity and epistemology. Is it biologically based, or culturally constructed?" (p. 60) As a matter of the very structure of (perverted) Christian gnosticism, the savior must have been pre-ordained as such and so come to possess the soteric gnosis, not by subsequent acquisition, but simply by nature, by birth -- the gnosis which the cultural feminists believed women possessed must be absolutely inaccessible to men by the reason that men were not born into it and could never learn it simply because they were born male: otherwise the savior status would be endangered, that is, open to competition and acquisition by other candidates. Women's special, soteric "culture" must be the product of nature and not nurture. Furthermore, if this culture, this gnosis, was the product of nurture, "if women have developed a humane value system in the context of [i.e. as a consequence of laboring within] the domestic sphere, will they retain this system when they enter a different context, the public sphere?" (p. 61) In other words, the lean toward nurture as the origin of female gnosis would also defeat the very program of saving the earth. This is why "[t]he 19th century cultural feminists more or less assumed that women's pacifist, reformist nature was relatively innate and that women would bring this perspective with them into the public sphere to 'purify politics'", and more importantly their soteric status in this way would not be open to challenge, or -- usurpation. Despite, as said, the non-identity and dis-continuity between the "female cultures" of the first and second wave, "the contemporary cultural feminist vein of radical feminism, especially as expressed by Shulamith Firestone, has [similarly] veered toward biological determinism" as demanded by its very gnostic structure. "Difference lies in the genes, or in the hormones, or as Gina Covina suggested, in women's 'right-brainedness'." (Ibid.) Josephine Donovan herself is wary of the destructive implication of biological determinism on human freedom, and, as has been seen (Ch. 4 "The Problem of Culture Feminism"), has sided with the liberal feminists in favor of nurture as the origin of "female culture", enumerating the hitherto universal conditions under which women have lived. "If male-female difference is not in the genes, then the assumption is that it must be a matter of social environment; if this is the case... [a] change in socialization, or education, or social circumstance would produce different gender identities or no such identities at all. We would all be 'persons' or androgynes. This is the liberal feminist position." (Ibid.) Biological determinism has however ruled the day. Whatever their concern, most contemporary feminists certainly act as if their soteric nature is inborn, and this attitude has trickled down to the level of ordinary women (Mass Women) although they have usually very little knowledge of "feminist theories". The entire American ideological climate, among the scientists and lay people, is leaning toward gender differences being rooted in the biologically determined sexual differences of (more precisely, the functioning of) the brain. This discussed already.

This inborn nature of gnosis experientially accounts for the "holiness" of the feminist literature for the feminists and their intolerance for criticism. In regard to Puritanism -- Reformation being the definitive beginning of the immanentization of Christian soteriological eschatology into political and social soteriological ideologies (the triad of left-wing communism, right-wing Aryan socialism, and middle-mixture cultural feminism) which substitute themselves for Christianity: Reformation as deformation -- Voegelin notes two essential characteristics of its dogmatism which apply equally to each of its triad-descendants: "(1) The systematic formulation of new doctrine in scriptural terms, making recourse to earlier literature unnecessary." This really accounts for the limitation of the consciousness of the (pioneering) second wave feminists to the experience of the formative period of Western nation-state only, as the majority of them rarely seriously study "male philosophy" in its own right. (This is not valid of the current, non-pioneering feminists in universities, who usually work out a female perspective or problematic in a traditionally "male" academic field, e.g. female Straussian, feminist classicist, etc.) "(2) Gnostic truth cannot abide criticism by the unfaithful. The instruments of critique must be banned. For example, the Reformation tabooed classic philosophy and scholastic theology. Western society has never completely recovered." (In Bill McCain's notes) What makes the communists, National Socialists, and the feminists so intolerant of (honest) criticism of their program is that the gnosis of being- and making-perfect is not taken as some knowledge learned but given once and for all in completed form, in the manner in which the religious fundamentalists take the Bible to be.

Regarding the genesis of the second characteristic of cultural feminism: since cultural feminism was a European continental import and mixture of Aryan racism and Marxist historical materialism -- adopting the intuitive and ecstatic soteric constitution of the Aryans from the former and the revolutionary role of the proletariat from the latter (in other words, white women were the "proletarian Aryan") -- it is again most illuminative to make comparison between American nativism (the American adoption of European Aryanism) and cultural feminism to see how the latter (in its early 20th century form) grew out from the former in the American context -- though not in the European context. "In the early years of the 20th century... many educated Americans accepted and propagated theories of race, thus both accompanying and influencing the growth of racial nativism in the United States. Racism supposedly reached its fruition in this country during the 1920's with the passage of immigration restriction legislation and the disruptive activities of the Ku Klux Klan. Among American intellectuals who imbibed heavily from the fountain of European race-thinking, added their own touches, and presented racism to the public, probably none is more important yet more neglected than Madison Grant of New York City." (Charles Alexander, "Prophet of American Racism: Madison Grant and the Nordic Myth", Phylon, 89 (4), 1984; p. 73) We shall consequently use Grant's racist ideas as the ideal type from which American cultural feminism of the first wave can be seen to have clearly derived their view of women as (soterically) special but fragile and thus requiring special protection (for the purpose of saving the world).

Combining the Foucauldian genealogical tracing of European (Aryan, Teutonic) racism (in Chapter 2) to bio-power and the above delineation of this racial ideology as a product of the degeneration of Christianity, it can be preliminarily stated that, just like feminism, the experiential origin of Aryan racism came from the disintegration of faith with Christianity (revolt against God after abandonment by Him) but that the historico-social function it served in the business of supraorganismic formation lay with the ensemble perversion-hérédité-dégénérescence, this pessimistic fear which formed the core of Aryan ideology and which, as the bio-politics maximizing the life-processes of the middle-class and maintaining its hegemony in the nation-state, facilitated the integration of the state and increased its power externally and its metabolism internally. As said, the importation of this continental bio-political, Christian-gnostic utopian ideology into America marked the period of further integration of the American republic through the use of this essentially socialistic ideology. But it had another dimension. Whereas in the European context the integrating recruitment of the lower class (the "trickling down" of bio-power into the lower stratum of society) as required by the further integration of the state and the growth of capitalism triggered the reaction of the bourgeoisie in the form of psychoanalysis, in the American context the reaction of the hegemonic middle-class to the same process took the form of nativist fear of immigration because the lower class was drawn from the new wave of (southern) European immigrants.

In this climate Madison Grant "joined the cause of the Immigration Restriction League and was elected to one of the League's several vice-presidencies in 1909. The League, founded in 1894 and centered in Boston, worked throughout the nation for the realization of its chief goal -- severe restriction of immigration from southern and eastern Europe... Grant also brought his prestige to the Eugenics Research Association, only one of several groups working for an increased birth rate among members of the upper classes and a curtailment of breeding in the lower social and economic strata." (Alexander, ibid., p. 75) Thus eugenics too, unlike in Europe, formed part of this reactionary package. "By 1910 Grant had formulated most of his racial concepts, a process that paralleled the general maturing of American nativism, of which racism was an indispensable part." (Ibid.) As said, this reactionary period also corresponded with the transitional period of the further integration of the American republic. Before the full blossoming of this transitional period, "European theories stressing the fixity of personality traits in racial groups, such as those of Gustave Le Bon, the Comte de Gobineau, and Vacher de Lapouge, impressed only a scattered few Americans, of whom the New England politician and intellectual Henry Cabot Lodge was an example." (Ibid.) But, as said, the period was already begun when the continental democratic tradition became merged with the British-American (Chapter 5, "The Origin of Democracy and Totalitarianism"), which coincided with the first emergence of cultural feminism in America. "Until the 1880's Anglo-Saxon idealism absorbed and mitigated any loss of confidence in the old 'melting pot' or assimilatory notion about immigration [the functioning ideology for the formation of American republic before the transition and reactionary period due to the rise of large-scale industrial production and massive corporate business conglomerates]. In the late 70s concern over the appearance of an embryonic organized labor movement stimulated a vague fear of foreigners and the spirit of radicalism which seemed to attach to many of the new arrivals. The next step came with the realization of a distinction between northern and southern European immigration, the assumption [the emerging new functioning ideology] being that southern and eastern Europeans did not share the Anglo-Saxon's ancestral qualities, as did the northerners... The appearance of this idea, which was accepted by such intellectuals as Nathaniel S. Shaler, dean of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard University, Francis A. Walker, president of [MIT], and Henry Cabot Lodge, marked the beginning of modern American racism as distinguished from ever-present anti-Negro feelings." (p. 75 - 6)

"In 1899 Walker published an erudite two volume study entitled Discussions in Economics and Statistics, the last few chapters of which were devoted to an examination of the effects of immigration on the development of the American economy. Walker gave racism an essential ingredient by proclaiming that the new immigration was not only foreign to American culture, but that it brought to the U.S. 'beaten men from beaten races, representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence'. The declining birth rate among the native American stock was resulting in the replacement of the superior type by the unfit offspring of the unfit foreigners. Here was the genesis of the American eugenics movement, which had as its impetus a desire to limit the growth of inferior stock while encouraging breeding among prime representatives of Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic civilization. The formation of the American Breeders Association in 1903 marked the official beginning of the eugenics movement. In 1906 human geneticists took over the organization and established a eugenics section." (Ibid.) The program of the reactionary was thus set. It however had to wait after the passing of the "crusading spirit behind the Spanish-American War and then the idealism and optimism of the Progressive era [which] blunted much of the animosity engendered by the new racial ideas." (Ibid.)

"In 1916 Grant brought forth his magnum opus under the sweeping title The Passing of the Great Race, or the Racial Basis of European History." The huge influence it exerted was borne out by the fact that "[d]uring congressional committee hearings on immigration restriction in the early 1920's, race-minded legislators frequently brought Grant's volume into the committee rooms and read vitriolic passages from it. There was nothing very new about [this book]; Grant's views were essentially a reiteration of the earlier racial polemics of the Comte de Gobineau in France and Houston Stewart Chamberlain in Germany... [And here h]e bade farewell to Christian and democratic values, thus separating himself from 'earlier nativists,' who had 'always tried either to ignore the conflict or to mediate between racial pride and the humanistic assumptions of America's major traditions. Grant, relying on what he thought was scientific truth, made race the supreme value and repudiated all others inconsistent with it.'" (p. 77 - 8) Thus the abandonment of the source (Christianity) and the favoring of collectivist, totalitarian tendencies as mechanisms for the further integration of the state, even while reacting to the integration of the lower class to the supraorganism.

The book, again, was to identify the master key to history in race, "to elucidate the meaning of history in terms of race; that is, by the physical and psychical characters of the inhabitants of Europe instead of by their political groupings or by their spoken language", thus wrote Grant (cited, ibid., p. 78). The spirit of the radical (cultural) feminists who no longer interpreted the history of oppression of women in terms of capitalism (e.g. in terms of economics in general) but in terms of patriarchy -- the historical sensibility begun by the first wave feminists already -- shows how among the triad of secular gnosticism of the Christian style the historical key could shift from Marxist to feminist but in no other directions; this offers lesson as to the coincidence and differences among them. But a different historical sensibility of Aryanism was about to disengage from the Christian type. "The key to Grant's whole theory was his basic assumption that 'moral, intellectual and spiritual attributes are as persistent as physical characters and are transmitted substantially unchanged from generation to generation.'" (Ibid.) The origin, necessity, of this second characteristic of Aryanism, the Aryan nature or gnosis as inborn, should appear obvious by now. "This premise [that racial 'personality' can only be inherited and never learned or cultivated] underlies virtually all race thinking; without the idea, concepts of racial superiority become meaningless" and so does the special mission of the gnosis-bearer. (Ibid.) "For Grant races had personalities, 'good and bad strains, just as nations do, or for that matter, sections and classes of the same nation.'" (Grant, cited, ibid.) "Grant organized his theory on the usual threefold classification of Europeans. He recognized three European races or 'subspecies' of mankind -- the Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean... [This term 'Nordic'] he borrowed... from a 19th century French natural scientist, Joseph Deniker. Grant conceived of the Teutonic and the Anglo-Saxon groups as the chief components of the Nordic race." Here is the disengagement of the peculiarly modified historical sensibility: "His thesis was that the Nordic race, although the superior subspecies, was heading toward destruction as a result of war, climate, alcoholism, disease, voluntary race suicide, and, in the U.S., intermixture with inferior immigrant stock. This was the 'great race' whose 'passing' he regretted." (Ibid.) Two important issues surface here.

First, this is where the Christian eschatological historical sensibility (history as progress and perfect-ion; the "optimistic history-making-sense") branched off into a history based on the biological model of growth and especially decline of which the consummation was reached with Oswald Spengler's Untergang, and to which even this thermodynamic interpretation of history may be assimilated as the latest expression. In this way the triad of "secular Christian gnostics" started to be altered, as feminism, together with Marxism, remained with the original eschatological, trinitarian historical framework (three periods of history) from which Aryanism, and its later white supremacist descendants, started to deviate.

Second, the tragic view of the superior, gnosis-bearer as endangered and fragile -- this third characteristic of secular gnosticism -- thus also appeared, which was shared by Aryanism and feminism but not particularly by Marxism: another a-symmetric feature of the triad. Let us first see how this characteristic developed with Aryanism and then secondly with feminism.

"[Grant] began the philippic with a repudiation of democracy, describing the manner in which inferior immigrant stock employed democratic principles to usurp power from the true rulers, members of the Nordic stock, thus corroding and eventually causing the down fall of Nordic civilization. He believed that universal suffrage made inevitable the selection of mediocre individuals for public office rather than 'the man qualified by birth, education, and integrity.'" (p. 79) This distaste for representational "mass government" did not differ very much from Hitler's, so its function -- how it would be beneficial for power -- could be more or less ascertained as hastened attempt to arrive at totalitarian society. "The democratic system propagated the lower type and caused a loss of efficiency in the community. The native Americans had 'sold their birthright' in return for cheap and abundant immigrant labor. They had started toward self-extinction by entrusting citizenship to people 'who have never succeeded in governing themselves, much less anyone else,' with the result that the Nordics no longer retained control of their institutions." (Ibid.) The danger came, firstly, from degeneration through intermixture of races as this always "gives us a race reverting to the more ancient, generalized and lower type." (Grant, cited., p. 80) But, secondly and more importantly, from the paradoxical fragility of the superior race in the current degraded conditions of existence. "To Grant races were in a state of perpetual competition against both environment and each other. Although intellectual and temperamental characters were fixed in races, a favorable climate was necessary to develop full racial potentiality." This is the problem of "development" as seen earlier with Margaret Fuller. ("Fuller's idea is that each individual is born as a seed with a unique design imprinted within (a favorite romantic image); it must be allowed [within the right environment] to unfold through one's life course." Donovan, ibid., p. 33) "The Nordic survived best in northern regions, where fog and long nights protected his 'delicate nervous organization' from heat and continuous sunlight." The most superior creature on earth was precisely on account of his unique and exclusive carriage of the "spark" (of divinity, of the soteric gnosis) also the most fragile, delicate, just as the cultural feminists would start to imagine (white) women to be. "Sharp contrasts in weather were essential for the retention of Nordic vigor. Alpines needed a temperate climate, while Mediterraneans were at home in tropical and subtropical conditions. Neither Alpines nor Mediterraneans could withstand extreme cold. Since the Nordics were inherently an aristocratic people, they could not endure manual labor under a blazing sun; neither were they suited to the harshness and the confining circumstances of factory work. Nordics needed room in which to develop their strength and leadership abilities." (Ibid., emphasis added.) Grant was clearly not reacting well to the rise of large-scale manufacturing industry and giant corporations which was transforming the (physical) landscape of American society and which disturbed the aesthetic sense of order for such middle-class professionals (the petite bourgeoisie) as Grant and his kind, creating for them the sense of alienation. Gnostic symbolism was the typical reactionary product of such circumstances. Hence current conditions of existence were symbolized as corrupt, one group singled out as perpetuating the corruption, another as bearer of a soteric epistemology (in this case, the special "racial personality" of the Nordics), but the incomplete faith in the eventual victory of the struggle between this good and that evil caused a tragic historical sensibility of decline to disengage from the soteriological type. It was this sense of alienation, the setting up of the current existence as corrupt vis-à-vis the perfection of the gnosis-bearer, which was responsible for the perception of the Perfect Man as fragile and endangered by the degenerating environment. That is, the gnosis-bearer was too good for the world, and the world too bad for him. The superior one was always surrounded by dangers all around that worked to corrupt him. This sensibility was further reinforced by the (already noted) aesthetics that had always accompanied the soteriological racism of the Aryan type: the perception of the Nordics as more beautiful fit well with their ideological identification as superior-fragile. "In setting up his classification of European races Grant used not only the traditional cephalic index, a device for measuring cranial capacity and head shape, but also such factors as eye, hair, and skin coloration, nose and lip formation, and stature. The Nordic and Baltic subspecies was generally long skulled, very tall, light haired, with blue, gray, or green eyes and fair skin." He was too beautiful to be put in hard, mindless, and repetitive labor, but more suited to ecstatic mind-work. "The Mediterranean or Iberian subspecies had long skulls, dark hair and eyes, swarthy complexion, and a distinctly smaller build than the Nordic. The Alpines of eastern and central Europe had round skulls, were of medium height and build, and had both light and dark eyes." The rough and tough looking of these "lower races" made them more suited for that hard labor but not for "mind work". "Nordics and Alpines had less body hair than the Mediterraneans. Thick lips and bridgeless noses were more present among Mediterraneans and Alpines than among the Nordics." (p. 79) Thus "Alpines and Mediterraneans adapted easily to the conditions of life in a highly industrialized society" as the mindless manual workers it required in ever larger number. "Nordics were stifled in such an atmosphere". The internal logic of such thinking then led to the "tragic historical sensibility": "thus [the condition of industrialization] was one of the elements of the present-day 'competition of races.' Grant conceived of the contest in Darwinian terms. 'The survival of the fittest... means the survival of the type best adapted to existing conditions of environment, which to-day are the tenement and factory, as in Colonial times they were the clearing of forests, fighting Indians, farming the fields and sailing the Seven Seas. From the point of view of race it were better described as the 'survival of the unfit'". (Grant, cited, ibid., p. 80) "A [second] more important aspect of racial competition was the declining birth rate among Nordics as opposed to the rapid expansion of inferior types. When this phenomenon was present in societies in which superior and inferior stock existed together, the ultimate result was that the lower completely replaced the higher type. The race was not just transformed; total replacement occurred." (Ibid.)

It is thus that cultural feminism (of the first wave) not only shared with the "Nordic myth" the world view of a perpetual struggle between an evil inferior Other and a perfected superior Self which bore a particularly soteric ecstatic and intuitive episteme vis-à-vis the analytical rationalism on which the corruption of the world was based, but also the sense of women (as the Chosen Self) as fragile and endangered by the corrupted external conditions of existence -- simply as a matter of the very structure of the gnosticism of cultural feminism. The gnosis-bearer, the ecstatically charged woman of Margaret Fuller -- she was too good for the world, and the world too bad for her. The cultural feminists, as white females, furthermore bought into the aesthetic evaluation, always prevalent, of whiteness as beautiful and special, and therefore unfit for the capitalistic jungle world of toil and competition. The white women which they hypostatized as the savior would then need special legislative protection in addition to equality in participation in societal affairs. This was the experiential origin of difference feminism. This is also why cultural feminists of the first wave could be racist and feminist at the same time, a tendency which the feminists of the second wave tried hard to disavow.³ In the process of disavowal, however, that peculiar ideology of the American culture, victimology -- that victims of "oppression" were automatically considered morally superior -- was born, by the reversal of certain elements of Nordic racism.

It has been said that the second wave (cultural) feminism was not the continuation of the first wave in that, whereas the latter derived "women's culture" from romanticistic collectivist tendencies (loosely, "German Romanticism") imported from continental Europe, the former obtained it by labeling "women's" the emerging new trend of Western culture which increasingly expressed itself with symbols derived from pre-industrialized cultures and the new sciences. But as soon as the second wave feminism broke out first in the form of radical feminism, the gnostic structure inherent in it remained the same as during the first wave. The gnostic structure dictated that the soteric gnosis-bearer, the superior one, was always surrounded by dangers all around that worked to corrupt and destroy her. A feminist obsession with rape, sexual harassment, or any particular gender-related crimes originated from this sense of the self as special, soteric, and yet fragile, and endangered. The continual reiteration by the feminists in the public discursive channels of their concerns with "violence against women" -- in the end these reduced to a variety of sexual crimes -- eventually trickled down to the general American white female population, who, although having very little knowledge of the discursive world of the (white) feminist theorists and advocates who wanted to save them and the world also, have nonetheless incorporated into themselves the general gnostic experiences of the feminists and begun to feel themselves as soterically special but fragile and endangered, becoming persistently concerned with (especially sexual) violence against them and living perpetually in fear of rapists, serial killers, and battering and raping husbands possibly dormant in every street corner and household. Note that, for an outsider, this sort of widespread fear among American white females makes just as little sense as Grant's fear for the southern European immigrants' intrusion upon and destruction and replacement of the "native" American Nordics, since these American white females rank among the longest-living, most wealth-holding groups of people in the world and, in addition to living under the highest living standard in the world, only constitute a small portion of the victims of violent crimes in American society (see crime statistics below), just as the men of northern European descent occupied the top of the rank of American society at the juncture of nineteenth and twentieth century and were hardly in the position of their "survival" being "threatened" by inferior, "less white" whites. In fact, such persistent white female and radical (and also vulgar) feminist obsession with violent sexual imageries against them exhibits close similarities with those of Hitler's in his Mein Kampf, as for instance in his vision of the "'bow-legged Jew bastards' lurking behind the corners of dark alleys in order to rape and therefore defile young Aryan girls". (Cited in Fischer, Nazi Germany, p. 168.) One simply has to substitute "men" for the Jewish men and "(white) women" for Aryan girls in this example to obtain the American white females' imagery of their predicament. (The media has certainly adopted this white females' gnostic perception of themselves also, as the rape-murder "news" that populate American "local news" almost always involve white females, or Hispanic females looking like white females, and almost never black or Asian females even though "[b]lack, white, and other races experienced similar rates of rape/sexual assault and robbery". Victim Characteristics, U.S. Department of Justice, crime statistics for 2002; see below.) Since in Hitler's case, as with all Aryan mythologues, this is essentially an expression of the (perverted) gnostic fear "about blood-defiling and blood-poisoning by demonic Jews", the American white females' fear of rapists is probably just similar fear of contamination and defilement in consequence of their self-designation as "special" -- which explains the prominence of sexual imageries in this fear, since it is through sex that the "essence" of one group may pass into another. It is important to search for this strand of (perverted) gnostic experiential component when engaged archaeologically with radical feminist writings on rape (and sex in general) which typically analyze rape and sex in terms of being an instrument of political oppression. E.g. Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will (1975): rape is the most useful instrument of male political oppression of female because "she could not retaliate in kind... It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear." (p. 5) "A world without rapists would be a world in which women moved freely without fear of men. That some men rape provides a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation, forever conscious of the knowledge that the biological tool must be held in awe for it may turn to weapon with sudden swiftness borne of harmful intent... police-blotter rapists have performed their duty well, so well... Rather than society's aberrants or 'spoilers of purity', men who commit rape have served in effect as front-line masculine shock troops, terrorist guerrillas in the longest sustained battle the world has ever known." (p. 229) Note that this political function of rape in favor of men -- denying the gnostic function of it in favor of women -- presupposes as its condition of possibility that, first, women have to care about getting raped, about sex, even about virginity, and that, second, they have to actually fear being raped. The political function of rape in keeping women in line has not materialized, say, among American black females because they, generally, do not feel themselves so special and so delicate as to fear, every moment in men's presence, being overpowered and raped. White females feel like this and so feel fear -- but only irrationally, as a result of fear-mongering, and the consequence of their fear is, rather than falling "in line", the acquisition of power to keep men in line. (See below.) The purpose of Brownmiller's statement seems more to be inciting fear among women, lest they actually fail to fear. Thus half-century before the nativists similarly attempted to incite fear about the southern Europeans' natural tendency toward the sentimental and consequently toward crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape, and sexual immorality. (Charles Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, p. 219) Davenport himself produced a typical example of the nativists' fear-mongering in a news paper editorial ("Protest against admission of imbecile immigrants," New York Times, 19 Sept. 1913, 8:5): "Once again a sensational murder is traced to a weakly inhibitioned 'moral imbecile', who was brought here in a ship from Europe... A day or two after the murderer is discovered we get from his home a full report of his family history: 'Several members confined in asylums for the demented; 4 suicides in the last 5 years... Not the moral imbecile who wielded the knife, but a society that fails to adopt an obvious precaution is to be blamed for this crime of lust and blood." The political purpose achieved by fear-mongering is only the surface of the story. The origin of such "female culture of fear", more and more generalized into the general "culture of fear" that has become quintessential of American culture, must have lain in the experiences created by the very structure of some ideology which serves a certain social function. If this ideology is identified as coming from the perverted gnostic feminism, what social function can it furthermore serve, besides the obvious social function of feminism in general (the mobilization of women for the sake of the integration and metabolic power of the state)?

In Culture of Fear Barry Glassner points up the strange American habit of fearing for the wrong things: over the supposed epidemic of youth crime even in face of "the steep downward trend in youth crime throughout the 1990s"; over the miniscule possibility of terrorist attack; over crimes against elderly even when "in actuality people over sixty-five are less likely than any other age group to become victims of violent crime-about sixteen times less likely than people under twenty-five, according to statistics from the Justice Department"; and "worrying disproportionately about legitimate ailments and prematurely about would-be diseases". In an interview with him, Glassner indicates the way to seek the origin of all this "fear-mongering" by asking who benefits from it. In regard to "the hysteria over school shootings", for instance, in view of the fact that "this was occurring at a time when there were fewer deaths at schools than in the past -– at a time, in fact, when the rate of youth violent crime was falling precipitously", "All those groups profited that were able to put the sorts of policies toward youth in place that they found politically appealing: for example, those who wanted much more surveillance and supervision of schoolchildren. Obviously, another group that profited is the security industry that was able to sell devices ranging from metal detectors to camera equipment, to the services of security guards. Probably the biggest beneficiary was the television news media, as is often the case, because they had a dramatic story that they could run with for a very long period of time." But the most important social function achieved by this fear seems to be the first, the increased surveillance and control over school children. The irrational fear for crime-epidemics (or even terrorist attacks) achieves the same social function of increased prisons, surveillance, and control of population. Thus the American society becomes more and more like that peculiar prison house, the Panopticon of Jeremy Bentham, as described by Michel Foucault in Surveillir et punir. Note how well Foucault's description of the effects of the Panoptique fits with the surveilling atmosphere of school, public places, and neighborhood in American society as a whole,: "induire chez le détenu un état conscient et permanent de visibilité qui assure le fonctionnement automatique du pouvoir. Faire que la surveillance soit permanente dans ses effets, même si elle est discontinue dans son action; que la perfection du pouvoir tend à rendre inutile l'actualité de son exercice... [que la situation et la technologie de surveiller soient à créer] un rapport de pouvoir indépendant de celui qui l'exerce; bref que les détenus soient pris dans une situation de pouvoir dont ils sont eux-mêmes les porteurs" because, everyone, in the spirit of mass tyranny, watches over everyone else as a potential youth mass-murderer, a terrorist in our midst, a child-molester. Power "automatisé et désindividualisé". (p. 235) Fear-mongering reinforcing mass-tyranny, the population disciplining itself with such spirit as embodied in "citizen arrest": "Peu importe, par conséquent, qui exerce le pouvoir... Plus nombreux sont ces observateurs anonymes et passagers, plus augmentent pour le détenu [here ordinary people] le risque d'être surpris et la conscience inquiète d'être observé." (p. 236; "it matters little, consequently, who exercises the power... The more these anonymous and passing observers, the greater, for the person held [the ordinary people here], his risk of being surprised and his anxiety about being observed".) This new form of positive power, in contrast to the old form of negative power, as said, has the purpose "d'établir une proportion directe entre le 'plus de pouvoir' et le 'plus de production'. Bref, il fait en sorte que l'exercice du pouvoir ne s'ajoute pas de l'extérieur, comme une contrainte rigide ou comme une pesanteur, sur les fonctions qu'il investit, mais qu'il soit en elles assez subtilement présent pour accroître leur efficacité en augmentant lui-même ses propres prises." (p. 241; "of establishing a direct proportion between the 'more of power' and the 'more of production'. In short, it accomplishes that the exercise of power is not added from outside, like some rigid constraint or weight, on the functions in which it is invested, but that it is sufficiently subtly present in these to increase their effectiveness by augmenting their self-control.") The irrational fear over ailments then also achieves the function of increased surveillance and promotion of health, a bio-politic measure to make the citizens more productive, their productivity reinforced by surveillance and control to prevent any behavior deviating from working to increase the (economic) power of the state.

This is how power has an interest in fear-mongering. The best instrument it has in promoting fear among its subjects is, again, their Christian tradition, which contains within it that mentality of end-of-the-world. This is very visible in American society because here Christianity still has a large-scale foothold, unlike in the thoroughly secularized Europe where it is marginalized and the experience of its tradition exhausted by the destructive wars caused by its secular forms of nationalism, racism, and communist revolutions. Thus both during the Gulf War of 1990 and the millennium bug of 2000 the fundamentalists vocalized extensively about "prophesies coming true", "end of the world near", inciting fear. This could no longer work in Europe. Neither in the East can there be such effective "culture of fear" because of its lack of an eschatological tradition. Both with the Chinese Mandate of Heaven (the beginning of a dynasty and time of prosperity, decline and social disorder due to the exhaustion of the moral virtue [Mandate] of the dynastic house, then the new dynasty inaugurated by a different house to which the Mandate had shifted) and the Mesopotamian New Year Festival the cosmos, inclusive of the human society, was experienced as in the process of restoring its equilibrium during time of social disorder, not as coming to an end entirely.

This then teaches us about the secondary aspect of the feminist "fear mongering" (violence against women, the neglect of women's health, the special disadvantage of women divorcing) and a peculiar feminist connection with the culture of fear -- insofar as all the criminals feared over are males. The propaganda of violence against (or economic disadvantages of divorce for) women will not only increase special legislative protection of women, thus satisfying their gnostic fantasy about the specialness and fragility of women (just as the fear for the decline and replacement of the Nordic race helped push through legislations of immigration-restriction, maintaining the middle-class supremacy), but also promote legislations for increased surveillance and control of men (and in the case of divorce, further taxation of them). Foucault's description of the Panoptique again may serve to describe the social consequence of the widespread female -- and so societal -- fear of men, as every one of them could be a rapist, a stalker, a serial killer (of women especially), a child-molester, etc.: "Un assujettissement [de l'homme, évidemment] réel nait mécaniquement d'une relation fictive. De sorte qu'il n'est pas nécessaire d'avoir recours à des moyens de force pour contraindre le condamné à la bonne conduite" in face of a woman for every man knows that a wrong move on the date or in intimate situation could land him in jail for rape, a slant glance at work elicit charge of sexual harassment, a slightly more aggressive pursuit be prosecuted as stalking or attempted sexual assault. In fact, "il devient le principe de son propre assujettissement." (p. 236; "he becomes the principle of his own subjection.") They are "put in line". (Note, however, that this "putting men in line" through something like a reign of terror has the effect of making them more machine-like, more efficient in production in addition to being more docile in interpersonal relationship, just as the elimination of sexual harassment at work-places serves the primary purpose of eliminating behaviors wasteful and irrelevant to production and so increasing the efficiency and productivity of the workers, and only then the secondary purpose of making the work-places more equitable to women.) Here is then emerging the third reason (mentioned earlier, first being personal experience, second, historical sensibility) why feminists believe in their ideology, the most simple and straightforward: the will to power vis-à-vis especially white men. (White) women and the (white) feminists promoting them thus come to dominate the society more and more, with the goal, mostly, of increasing their living standard, consumption rate. This greed for power and consumption (the material meaning of life) is of course nothing particularly extra-ordinary, but does reveal precisely the non-specialness of women (they like domination just as much as men do) or reversely the human, all-too-human nature of the American (white) women who have incorporated within themselves in vulgar form the gnosticism of the feminists.⁴ Will some day the feminist fear-mongering dissipate as ridiculous just as the nativist fear for contamination by "southern European beaten race" appears today, the hair-splitting delineation between different shades of "whiteness" making people wonder how it had ever come about in the first place?

We have touched on the essential here: with the feminists not only is liberation irrationally identified with work, but finally and perversely with the acquisition of power. Under the heading, "The Myth of the White Middle-Class Woman", the radical feminists argued against the male Left dismissal of "the independent stand on the female liberation struggle" as embodied in "the 'abusive statement, 'They are only a bunch of white, middle-class women'", and propounded, "This implies that the primary position of women in the society is due to white privileges... But it is white males only who are in positions of power and control in all of the institutions of the society. Women are excluded from control and decision-making, are discriminated against in jobs more than any other group, get the lowest pay, are defined as inferiors and as a sexual caste, etc." (Barbara Burris, et al, "The Fourth World Manifesto") Even in such seemingly common sense statement the identification is already made between liberation and work-power (the complaint is about "not in position of power, not in control of institutions...", not about "not free..."). Be reminded that this is secondary power that women now possess. As said, the new gender relationship can be instituted, white women can get on top of white men (and everyone else), just as men could have power over women in the past, only if this reinforces the primary power, supraorganismic integration or metabolism. It is to be noted that at the same time that men have become more and more disciplined, respectful, and "in line" in their behaviour toward women, women themselves are disciplining themselves with the (vulgar) feminist work ethic, for even the shallow ones who still prostitute themselves for their date's money think it imperative that they have some sort of a job, be it as meaningless as secretary or sales woman at the mall. The new power wants discipline of productive citizen. Men less likely to mis-behave, women more productive, the total productivity of society has been increased. The new female CEO who works 12 hours a day, a life without leisure -- the heroine of vulgar feminism, no doubt -- or women in the military dying on the battle-field -- possible heroines for liberal feminists, though not necessarily approved by a feminist of strict cultural orientation -- these, from the pre-modern standpoint, outside the Protestant ethic, would be ridiculous examples of "emancipated" women. They, of course, just like men in the past, have purchased power at the price of enslavement. Women nowadays feel shame for non-productivity, however much they may like to taste the thrill of power through exaggerated claims to victimizations ("victim feminism": below).⁵ The inversion, of Protestant origin, of the traditional notion of liberation -- in the traditional framework "liberation" was precisely the negation of work and power -- as most embodied by feminism thus makes sense as the (primary) power's mobilizing manipulation of women for its augmentation.

Feminist fear-mongering among white females has very little basis in reality, but produces positive effects in social order. The crime statistics of the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice reveals a dramatic decrease in violent crimes since the commencement of the second wave feminism. Overall, American society is becoming safer -- for whom? As always, men have been more susceptible to violent victimizations than women have, but the situation is changing. In 1994, for every 2 female victims of violent crimes there were 3 male victims (5 million vs. 6.6 million), declining from 1974, when for every 2 female victims there were 4 males. The break-down (1994), per 1,000 people 12 years old and older (U.S. DOJ press release, Dec. 18, 1996; below):

Among these, females were more likely to be victimized by someone they knew (62%) than by strangers, and at a private home (their own, neighbors', friends', relatives') than in public, while males, just the reverse, were more likely to be victimized by strangers (63%) and in public than by intimates, etc., and at private homes. In fact, the "violence against women" was most usually intimate violence crime: 1998, 72% of the victims of lethal intimate crimes were females, and 85% of the victims of non-lethal intimate crimes were females. In 2001, 20% of all non-fatal violent crimes experienced by women were intimate partner violence (for men, 3%). (This kind of crime itself has been declining: from 1993 to 2001, female victims of non-fatal intimate crimes dropped from 1.1 million to 588,490; for men, from 162,870 to 103,220.) In recent years, 33% of female murder victims but only 4% of male murder victims were killed by an intimate. In general, 6 out of 10 rapes or sexual assaults experienced by women are by an intimate, a relative, a friend, or an acquaintance. Moreover, "women age 16 - 24 experienced the highest per capita rates of intimate violence" (19.6 per 1000; "Women age 16 to 24 were the most vulnerable to non-fatal intimate violence, whereas women age 35 to 49 were the most vulnerable to murder by an intimate partner." BJS Press Release, Oct. 28, 2001). This means that females (especially the mature ones) are much safer walking in streets and public places than males are and are usually attacked by partners, friends, and acquaintances. Annually (1994), approximately 1 out of 270 women 12 years and older has experienced rape, 1 out of 240 robbery, 1 out of 29 assault, and 1 out of 23,000 homicide (U.S. Department of Justice, Press Release, Dec. 18, 1996). Note the gap between this reality and the feminist fear-mongering statement such as Catherine MacKinnon's in 1989: "Almost half of all women are raped or victims of attempted rape at least once in their lives..." (Toward A Feminist Theory of the State, p. 176, cited in Warren Farrel's The Myth of Male Power, p. 316)⁶ Ordinary white females have incorporated such fear in erroneously believing something like "1 out of 3 women has been raped in her life..." Note especially that "any given black man is 3 times as likely to be reported a rapist as a white man." (Farrel, ibid., p. 310) In white females' imagery the black man has taken up the role which the "bog-legged Jew bastard" has in Hitler's imagery. The experience which has thus created such imaginary reality among ordinary white females and (white) feminists alike must be the sense of the specialness of the self set over against the corruptness of reality. What, then, about race? "Black and white women experienced intimate partner violence at similar rates for every age group except age 20 to 24. Among that group, there were 29 violent victimization per 1,000 black women compared to 20 per 1,000 white women." (BJS Press Release, ibid.) For violent crimes in general experienced by women in 1994, "the rate of blacks (56 per 1,000) was significantly higher than those of whites (42 per 1,000) or of persons of other races (36 per 1,000)... However, multiple year analyses demonstrate higher rates of serious violent victimization for blacks and Hispanics." (BJS special report, "Sex Differences in Violent Victimization, 1994", Sept., 1997, NCJ - 164508; the general background of violent victimization for both men and women: "in 2002, persons age 12 to 24 sustained violent victimization at rates higher than individuals of all other ages. Beginning with the 20 - 24 age category, the rate at which persons were victims declined significantly as the age category increased... Per every 1,000 persons in that racial group, 28 blacks, 23 whites and 15 persons of other races sustained a violent crime." BJS Victim Characteristics) Note finally that "women in families with incomes below $10,000 per year were more likely than other women to be violently attacked by an intimate." (BJS Press Release, Aug. 16, 1995) So much for middle-class white females' fear of stranger-rapists and serial killers in street alleys, which is really based on their (perverted) gnostic sense of their specialness, their narcissism, than on reality. (If their fear were based on reality, white women would be more afraid to go home to their husbands or boyfriends than to walk in the narrow street before some stranger man.) But consider the larger picture, the overall pattern of decline of crime rates (from BJS):

Violence against men has been declining rapidly while violence against women declines only slightly. Keeping in mind that most violences against men are perpetrated by strangers, i.e. professional criminals, and against women by those they know, i.e. non-professional criminals, we learn from this that the overall effect of the three decades of feminist and white female fear-mongering has been the elimination of criminal elements from society through aggressive law-enforcement, surveillance of the population, and long imprisonment of professional criminals -- incidentally making the world a safer place for men, who are the usual victims of mindless violence. (Ignoring for now other accidental factors affecting crime rates, e.g. the more or lesser proportion of young males in a given population.) Again, this shows how the primary objective of power is the discipline of the population for greater and more efficient productivity, the secondary power-exercise by the feminists merely an instrument for this end.

To return to the 1920s: Although the tragic sense of historical decline was already in-grained, Grant nevertheless wished to "fix" the problem by advocating "sterilization of undesirable elements and caution[ing] against improving conditions of health for the unfit; rather they should be allowed to die off through disease and poverty. At the same time there was need for repression of alcoholism and tuberculosis among the Nordics. The great race had lost some of its finest members as a result of overconsumption of alcohol, 'a peculiarly Nordic vice'" (p. 81). In the same way radical feminists and vulgar feminists have been excited about, e.g. Laurel Galana's "Radical Reproduction: X without Y", wherein she was "interested in the possibilities... for 'seizing the means of reproduction'", i.e. parthenogenesis. Recently (April, 2004), a Japanese team has reported success with reproducing mice from two eggs, without sperms (one egg fertilizing another, giving birth to, of course, another female: X + X = 2X), which again has got some vulgar (white) feminists happy about the possibility of dispensing with men altogether in the process of life. Presumably, if parthenogenesis should ever become a wide-scale practicality, (white) radical and vulgar feminists would dream of letting men die out and leave the earth solely for women. Extermination of the group designated as the evil contagion of the good, chosen one always forms part of the (perverted) gnostic program of salvation, thus the communists exterminated the bourgeoisie, the Aryanists the Jews, and the feminists want to exterminate men. Furthermore, the need to take care of the special and peculiar needs of the carrier of secret knowledge and the perfected creature of evolution (the therapeia of and by the secular gnostics) shows up among the feminists in their persistent dissatisfaction with the studies and care of "women's health" by government health institutions.⁷

The gnostic structure also dictates that for both the racists and the feminists, separatism had to be instituted for the gnostic bearers to hone their gnosis without the interruptions by the external corrupting and corrupted world which persistently and perpetually impinged on them. For the (cultural) feminists, women needed to reside separately from men and free from the latter's continual impingement in order to perfect their female culture just as "the Nordics needed room in which to develop their strength and leadership abilities." This has been remarked upon in the case of Margaret Fuller. The rebirth of feminist gnosticism in the form of radical feminism during the second wave predictably then made female separatism such an issue that caused the fissure in the National Organization of Women ("one of the largest, earliest and most influential feminist organizations in the U.S." which was under "the strong influence of radical feminism" and "[c]reated in 196[6] with Betty Friedan as president"). "By 1968, the New York chapter lost many members who saw NOW as too mainstream. There was constant friction, most notably over the defense of Valerie Solanas. Solanas had shot Andy Warhol after writing the SCUM [Society for Cutting Up Men] manifesto, seen by many as a passionately anti-male tract calling for the extermination of men. Ti-Grace Atkinson, the New York chapter president of NOW described her as, 'the first outstanding champion of women's rights'. Another member, Florynce Kennedy represented Solanas at her trial." (Feminism) In October 1968 Atkinson then resigned as president of the New York chapter of NOW and formed her own group, "The Feminists". They "held that since marriage is a 'primary formalization of the persecution of women,' 'we consider the rejection of this institution both in theory and in practice a primary work of the radical feminist'. To this end the Feminists established a membership quota whereby no more than a third of the members could be living with a man." (Donovan, ibid., p. 143) This fear for male contamination of the "spark" within female gnostic revolutionaries if they intermingled with men, formulated as resistance against political oppression in the personal sphere, was in terms of experience no different than white supremacists' fear of contamination of "white culture" by the inferior races if the races intermingled. Lesbians, by their "purity", were then expected to be the ideal feminists (lesbianism is the "essential feminist idea"; "a woman who actually slept with a man was clearly consorting with the enemy and could not be trusted." Jo Freeman, ibid., p. 550; c.f. the same tendency among the Puritans, later), and, after overcoming much of the conservatism of NOW, came by 1992 to constitute 40% of its membership. "However NOW remains open to male members in contrast to some groups." (Feminism) The more radical, i.e. the more gnostic, the group, the more likely it is to be devoted to the purity of its female membership, some even refusing membership to transsexuals who were formerly males, because, so is said, anyone who was once born a man cannot possibly understand women's oppression and perspective, i.e. the gnosis was given by and only at birth. The issue of the determination of membership by feminist organizations again reminds of the Thule Society, generally regarded as the precursor to the Nazi party. "The society grew out of a voelkisch sect called the Germanic Order (Germanenoren), founded in Munich in 1913 and reorganized as the Thule Society in 1918... Admission to the Thule Society required filling out a form indicating the degree of hairiness of various parts of the body and leaving the mark of a footprint on a separate sheet of paper as proof of Aryan descent." (Fischer, ibid., p. 107 - 8) One can imagine how the Thule society or the Aryan Nation may react if there should ever be a race-changing surgery allowing a "non-Aryan" to be transformed into an "Aryan": He who was once not born white can never understand the Aryan way of seeing the world and embody the Aryan noble personality. The point is that, when all a man has to do to join the "special group" is get some surgery, then the saviorist status, the specialness of the group, becomes endangered again. Thus feminist organizations are really just weibisch sects. This would not be acceptable to a liberal feminist who hasn't lost her sense of reality, e.g. Naomi Wolf (more below): "When I went with a profeminist boyfriend to hear Andrea Dworkin speak, he was almost dismembered by a mob that begin to mutter, 'We don't want men here.' Men who take women's-studies classes are sometimes told, 'You'll never understand -- you are the oppressor.' [More like the Aryanists' barring of non-whites, 'You'll never understand -- you are the polluter of white civilization.' The feminists are also compensating their sense of alienation with the ideology of superiority based on in-born chosenness.] When theologian Mary Daly lectures, she refuses to take questions from men." (Fire with Fire, Random House, NY, 1993, p. 188) When, again, trickled down to the general white female population, this sort of gnostic principle has created waves and series of women's clubs, programs, and organizations that bar male presence in them as a matter of principle, on the model of exclusive "Aryan" membership of white supremacist organizations which fear the corruption of their "special" racial qualities by inferior races -- this even at the same time that feminist organizations are forcing men's clubs to open their doors to women. This asymmetry helps the women in women's groups to feel themselves "special".

The rebirth of the gnostic tendency during the second wave feminism was the result of the experience of alienation and its origin was traced by Jo Freeman (ibid.) in what she calls "the rap group" ("developed initially in New York and Gainsville, Florida... [then] spread throughout the country", p. 549). She explains the second wave as originating independently in two branches, the older branch composed mostly of middle-age (white) women who were active and influential politically and social policy-wise because they created institutions through which to act (foremost NOW, but also Women's Equity Action League, Federally Employed Women, the National Association to Repeal Abortion Laws, the National Women's Political Caucus); and the younger branch composed of 20 something (mostly white) women who departed from the New Left movements due to the male-chauvinism of the male members thereof, and who resisted forming organizations out of their disdain for (especially hierarchical) organizations which they felt copied male patriarchal model (c.f. Atkinson's example below). Out of this spirit of structureless movements was born the rap group, e.g. the "consciousness-raising" groups. "Women come together in groups of 5 to 15 and talk to one another about their personal problems, personal experiences, personal feelings, and personal concerns. From this public sharing of experiences comes the realization that what each thought was individual is in fact common, that what each considered a personal problem has a social cause and probably a political solution [hence the radical feminist slogan, 'the personal is political']. Women see how social structures and attitudes have limited their opportunities and molded them from birth. They ascertain the extent to which women have been denigrated in this society and how they have developed prejudices against themselves and other women." (Ibid., p. 548) Although this reminds most of Marxism (e.g. during WWII the Chinese communists gathered together the peasants in the areas they controlled in order for them to talk about their experiences of exploitation by landlords and possible solutions to the problem), the contemporary small gatherings of white supremacist groups in America to talk about the usurpation (or pollution) of "white (superior) culture" by inferior races are essentially of the same type. Small Bible fellowship gatherings where young Christians study the Bible together and decide the meaning of the events in their life in accordance with the Book are also of this. After the communist take-over in China the party still held small "self-critique" gatherings constantly wherein every member of the society was to bring to consciousness what traces of bourgeois values (pollution) were left in their mind and behavior and so to purge these; this second stage of "the communist rap group" then serves the function of the homogenization of "people's" consciousness in order to make them more exploitable by the state so as to increase their productivity and consequently the power of the state. When the articulations of the more or less authentic experiences of the young white females born out of the rap groups have become fossilized and repeated literally by the next generation of the young feminists without consideration of the changing social context in which white male chauvinism has dwindled and been condemned as politically incorrect, the evolution of the rap group technique will have entered its second stage where it degenerates to ideology serving the function of creating an imaginary reality, homogenizing social consciousness to such reality, and thereby strengthening the discipline of the population for the sake of increasing production. Consider what the following description of the results of the first stage of the rap group would mean during the second stage: "The need for any movement to develop 'correct consciousness' has long been known... This experience [born out of consciousness-raising] is both irreversible and contagious. Once women have gone through such a resocialization, their views of themselves and of the world are never the same again, even if they stop participating actively in the movement." (Ibid.) At the second stage, "thought-reform"; thus is formed the basis of action on which the individual becomes unshakably determined to transform social existence according to her "gnosis", that is, to reinforce the productivity of the society and the power of the state, even, or rather especially, towards its subjects. "Women come to believe that, if they are the way they are because of society, they can change their lives significantly only by changing society." (Ibid.) But this gnosis for soteric transfiguration of existence always leads to separatism. "Sisterhood was not the initial goal of these groups... Originally, the idea of exclusion [of male participation] was borrowed from the black power movement... [and then] reinforced by the unremitting hostility of most of the new-left men at the prospect of an independent women's movement not tied to radical ideology [Andrea Dworkin discusses this hostility in The Right Wing Women, Ch. 3, "Abortion"]. Even when this hostility was not evident, women in virtually every group in the U.S., Canada, and Europe soon discovered that, when men were present, traditional sex roles reasserted themselves regardless of the good intentions of the participants. Men inevitably dominated the discussion and usually would talk only about how women's liberation related to men, or how men were oppressed by sex roles. In all-female groups, women found the discussions more open, honest, and extensive. They could learn how to relate to other women, not just to men." (p. 548 - 9) The logical conclusion of such thinking of "the younger branch" was then eventual conversion to lesbianism and the movement became "no longer directed at educating or recruiting nonfeminists... but rather... aimed at building a 'women's culture' for themselves. While a few groups engaged in outreach through public action on issues of concern to all women (e.g. rape)... most of the small groups concerned themselves with maintaining a comfortable niche for 'women-identified women' and with insulating themselves from the damnation of the outside world... thus their impact on the outside world is now limited [but not so when considering the spread of this 'spirit' among the general (white) female population]." (Ibid., p. 551; emp. added.) This is like the Puritans, who, despite being the "chosen ones", could not transform, save the world from damnation, and thus came to a new world to construct their own godly paradise.

Granted that this is a way for these white female, self-proclaimed chosen ones to feel "special" apart from the "damned" in order to compensate their ressentiment resulting from earlier sufferings at the hands of male chauvinists, and even granted that, whatever (white) female empowerment and equality (but not liberation) has been achieved by feminism, the total effect has been increased production and consumption and the reinforcement of capitalism, can one not see this rap group separatism as justified in the beginning? We must say the crystallization of separatism, and the accompanying continuing fundamentalist application (literalization) of what may have originally been authentic experience -- both without reference to the changing social context -- have the effect of the destruction of the human mind and individuality through homogenization across human consciousness of an imaginary reality, so that even while we increase through our own actions the metabolism of the social organism and its power to control us, we may honestly believe that we are doing just the opposite, the dismantling of this oppressive system. Naomi Wolf is one feminist still maintaining contact with reality -- unlike the gnostic feminists who have lost touch with reality altogether, precisely because the continuation of the originally justifiable exclusion of male perspective has fossilized into an entrapment within their own perspective which has degenerated into an imaginary reality anyway -- when she demonstrates her capability for "stage-thinking", i.e. the ability to see the process in which events form parts rather than just individual events with fixed meaning independent of the process (context) from which they derive their meaning: protesting against some women's distortive formulation as "rape" of their experiences of psychological manipulation by their male partner to give in to his sexual appetites, and against the similar attitude among the counselors at the rape crisis centers, "it's rape if she thinks it's rape" (so typical of the secular gnostics' attitude, "reality is as I will it to be": the manifest aggressivity toward and domination of reality), she writes, "But guidelines for those who are comforting become dangerous when they are translated without modification into the public realm. A sensibility that is harmless -- even healing -- when expressed by a powerless person, becomes a wild card when that person begins to have power." (Fire with Fire, p. 193) Another example: "A postcard [by Ms.] shows a girl asking her mother, 'Is it true that sex is all men have on their minds?' The mother answers, 'Men don't have minds, dear.' These sentiments might have been cute and subversive once, but no longer. If a man wants to be a feminist, he should not have to lay down his basic self-respect... Coming from powerless people, such comments are good jokes. Coming from those who are beginning to take the reins of the country, they're sexism." (Ibid., p. 189)

By refusing to buy into the "gnostic" tendency of contemporary feminism, Naomi Wolf (in this case, that is) extricates herself from the status of the ideologue (definition, c.f. footnote 1 of Ch. 13). What we have identified as "gnostic feminism" (cultural feminism, difference feminism) she calls "victim feminism", which "casts women as sexually pure and mystically nurturing, and stresses the evil done to these 'good' women as a way to petition for their rights." To this she opposes her "power feminism", which "sees women as human beings -- sexual, individual, no better or worse than their male counterparts -- and lays claims to equality simply because women are entitled to it. Victim feminist assumptions about universal female goodness and powerlessness, and [equally universal] male evil [and powerfulness: the hallmark of secular gnosticism], are unhelpful in the new moment for they exalt what I've termed 'trousseau reflexes' -- outdated attitudes women need least right now." (Ibid., p. xvii.) In the chapter "Victim feminism's recent impasses" of her Fire with Fire, she documents, and protests against, much of the exaggerated and distortive feminist formulations of instances of victimizations (like the previous one of "rape") which here are identified as acts of "feminist (or white female) fear-mongering".

This is the gnostic sentiment of the good trapped in the world of evils threatening it constantly and from all directions. Such fear-mongering technique as of the NOWLDEF is the same as the mental health industry's classifying as mental illnesses more and more behavioral phenomena hitherto considered normal vicissitudes in leading a life, getting at finer and finer details of the already classified illnesses, and finally screaming about the tremendous increase of human mental health problems and a "crisis" in human evolution. Wolf protests, "I would rather my daughter learn to talk back or yell back or tease back than that she try to grow up in an environment in which a new code of conduct based upon her powerlessness and delicacy hampers her and 'protects' her like invisible stays and petticoats." (Ibid.) Wolf protests against "victim feminism" because she sees it as hurting the female's growing and maturing into a fearless, independent human being (in this respect her "power feminism" converges with liberal feminism), and she diagnoses its cause as "ideology run-away" (continual, literal application of outdated worldview based on outdated experiences). So in the case of Mrs. Harris driving to her rich husband's palace to commit suicide -- he had cheated on her with a younger mistress -- but ending up shooting him 4 times and killing him, and yet being championed by the feminists as the revolting but really angelic victim of patriarchal oppression -- another gnostic conclusion: the good never does evil and the evil is never victim -- she points out: "This 'feminist' reluctance to assign women responsibility for their actions, evil as well as good, mirrors the opposition's traditional claim that women are children, incapable of signing a contract, managing their own affairs, bearing witness in court, or voting. One of the injuries on the list of injustices set forth by power [i.e. liberal] feminists in Seneca Falls Convention's 'Declaration of Sentiments' was that men withhold from women the right to be held accountable for crime: 'He has made her, morally, an irresponsible being, as she can commit many crimes with impunity, provided they be done in the presence of her husband.' Accountability for crime sounds, from a victim [gnostic, cultural] feminist point of view, like an odd 'right' to demand. But the moral adulthood of power feminism knows that real justice is not a sentimental pardon, but a contract or covenant, and that the sword of justice has two sides." (p. 201) Once again, the conflict between liberal and cultural feminism. Finally with respect to the case of "Azalea Althea Cooley, a wheelchair-bound African-American lesbian, and her white partner, Susan Soen" -- the former staged racist threats against herself, gained widespread sympathy from the activist groups in Portland, Oregon, then was found out... --Wolf traces Cooley's motivation: "The worse her afflictions, the greater, she found, was her prestige... Would she have been rewarded the same way if she had displayed to the community, not a string of injuries, but a string of sparkling achievements? The fashionable lapse in logic among the left right now is that you can't identify with victims of oppression unless you identify as a victim. There is a search for a spurious authenticity -- the most harmed woman is the real woman [the logical conclusion of the gnostic structure, the good trapped in the world of evil]... [The case demonstrates 'victim' left or feminists' strange] weakness for glamorizing the status of she-who-is-harmed at the expense of honoring she-who-can-cope -- and even triumph." (p. 203) Our focus however shifts from this to the way in which this "new code of conduct" based on fear-mongering and paranoid witch-hunt disciplines the individuals and increases their productivity by eliminating from them ordinary behaviors emanating from natural passions (flirting, eyeing), and thereby turning them into emotionless machines robotically performing their given routines. Even in the case of mental health fear-mongering, although the immediate benefit of it seems to be more mental health services consumed and more medication sold and increased profit for the pharmaceutico-psychiatric industry, the larger social result is the aggressive elimination of the slightest behavior interfering with a person's productivity.

Naomi Wolf also must be credited with calling her version of liberal feminism "power feminism", since the purpose of feminism is really the acquisition of power for women -- by naming correctly, she keeps in contact with reality. The purpose of "gnostic feminism" is really and solely the acquisition for (white) women of as much power as possible; that of liberal feminism both the acquisition of power and the search for gender equality (which the gnostic feminists really don't care about); and, finally, none are about the "liberation of women" -- because in the end they are all about making women more useful to society in order to increase its power. The three are not identical: power, equality, and liberation. Only "do-nothing" feminism (not implementable on large scale) can be said to be about the "liberation of women".

Back to cultural feminism. It cannot be overemphasized that groups that hate each other the most are so frequently revealed to be brothers and sisters under the skin, that they hate each other precisely because of their profound similarity, although groups that are similar to each other don't necessarily hate each other. Thus the feminists and white supremacists detest each other (for the white supremacist, white woman is just a womb, her duty, purpose of existence is the reproduction of the superior, gnostically soterically special white male), so do Muslims Jews, Christians Muslims (especially American Evangelicals and Islamist "terrorists"), Marxists Christians, American southern whites blacks (both are "lower class"), Serbs Croatians, and so on, although feminists and Marxists were usually unified in a "unhappy marriage".⁸ It thus should not cause surprise that feminism bears such resemblance to Aryanist racism, the two fighting over "who is the special one". The non-conflict between feminists and Marxists is then due to the fact that the "special ones" for the Marxists, the proletariat, include women as well, the unhappiness of the marriage being due to the feminist perception that women really constitute the essential and primordial kernel of the proletariat. ("A cardian thesis [of radical feminism] was that the politically oppressive male-female role system is the first and original model of all oppression." Donovan, ibid.) The feminists then diverge from the white supremacists by remaining, with the Marxists, within the original framework of Christian soteriological eschatology, seeing history still as redemption, which they are able to do by substitution of the sensibility of oppression for that of degeneration and decline: whereas the Aryans slid gradually from domination due to the slow degradation of the world, of the conditions of struggle, women fell at a primordial time from rule because of patriarchal usurpation. This was how victimology, that being oppressed was the index of the presence of moral gnosis, was born when other subordinate groups in America began to take over the feminist gnostic symbols and when white males too began to accept the symbolization as valid after their gnosticism died out. For the reversal in cultural feminism of certain elements of Nordicism we then return to the beginning of the twentieth century.

That the cultural feminism of the first wave bore such resemblance to Aryan racism at the time was simply, to put it another way, because people were products of their culture. But they could be expressing different strands of the same culture, so that while Grant and his likes adopted one strand of social Darwinism, Charlotte Perkins Gilman another, though both were social Darwinists. "Social Darwinism was not necessarily implied in Darwin's own theory but applied Darwinian notions -- in particular 'the survival of the fittest' (a phrase he did not use) -- to societies, races, or individuals. It was necessarily a conservative philosophy for it implied that whatever or whoever was on top deserved by inexorable design to be there. It also implied that the race was furthered by aggressive and competitive males. Some social Darwinists carried this farther to argue that evolution or 'progress' is sustained by murderous competition and war. Herbert Spencer, the main proponent of Social Darwinism, concluded that wars were a mechanism of social evolution and progress. While acknowledging the horrors of war, he concluded 'we must nevertheless admit that without it the world would still have been inhabited only by men of feeble types sheltering in caves and living on wild food.' The theory that life progresses by means of vicious competition and war became a convenient justification for American capitalists like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie who saw in them license to pursue their business machination ruthlessly." (Donovan, ibid., p. 43) "There was, however, another less heeded vein in Social Darwinist thought, even in Spencer's work. It saw the race evolving toward a more collective organization which required more cooperative than competitive skills. It required altruism, not egoism. Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid (1890) was the primary exponent of this thesis, and it was this aspect of Social Darwinism that Charlotte Perkins Gilman came to stress." (p. 44) This is how (cultural) feminists, before as today, of the first or the second wave, have always been pacificists, in reversal of the racists.

To sum up the general gnostic (perverted salvational) structure which feminism has in common with Marxism but especially with Aryanism: (1) World-history is the process of the fall from perfection and the redemption from this fall through the victorious struggle of a group of special people against another group of evil and inferior pollutants who caused the fall. This is how bio-politics, with its reversal of the traditional meaning of life (life led, things done, war fought for the sake of such abstract as the glory of king or of God) into the modern, secular one centered around metabolic processes of life (things done, war fought for the sake of "survival", "living space", "resources"), has merged with Christian eschatology, so that the process of eternal salvation degenerates also into a story of struggle for existence, i.e. for the maintenance and maximization of metabolic processes such as eating and finding resourceful lands and shelters. The feminists thus share with the Aryanists and the communists the same preoccupation with violent images of "struggle" or "battle between the sexes", of "surviving" ("survivor" of rape, incest, domestic violence), of "fighting". (As one vulgar feminist said [2004]: "Life isn't fair and that's the only thing we all seem to agree upon. Someone always gets more than they deserve while another gets less. We all have to find our own ways to fight it." So the feminists fight, presumably.) Compare this with the Buddhist orientation around "suffering", or the Daoist around the human tendency to excessively impose design on nature. The most well-fed people (certainly so were American white women of 1960s and 1900s) are so concerned with survival while people living in a time of precariousness of life (life so easily cut short by famine, accidents, the sword of the prince unbridled by those modern constitutional or judicial restraints) were thinking about other aspects of life. (2) The special group is soteric because they are the unique possessor of a special gnosis, which, in the case of cultural feminism and Aryanism, becomes identical with their biological constitution -- forestalling all possibilities of usurpation by anyone outside the group. The imagery of the specially soteric group is inherited from Medieval alchemy, the "savior" being the human Philosopher's Stone: "a certain pure matter [Aryan or Woman] which, being discovered and brought by art to perfection [Woman or Aryan, when cordoned off from contaminations by Man or inferior races, is able to let her or his true, gnosis-self bloom to perfection], converts to itself proportionately all imperfect bodies [the world thus polluted by Man or inferior races] that it touches [Woman infusing the world with her gnosis, or Aryan dominating the earth] (illam solam perfectam invenimus, quae postquam per nostrum magisterium est ad veram fusionem deducta, omnia quae tangit ducit ad verissimum complementum)."⁹ (3) With both Aryanism and cultural feminism the gnosis is conveniently taken to be some ecstatically charged intuitiveness set over against an analytical, logical rationalism, because logical reasoning is something anyone, by making an effort, can learn whereas intuitiveness is something one is born with and gives its possessor a direct and immediate access to truth, bypassing the longer road through logical reasoning, so that the savior status of its possessor may not be open to challenge or usurpation. (4) What Joachim Fest characterizes the S.S. corp as, a "secular monastery sect" with its members charged with an eschatological sense of moral mission (Hitler, Interpolation 2, "German Catastrophe..."), also characterizes well not only the Aryan Nation but also the ideal cultural feminist organizations, e.g. Atkinson's The Feminists, or NOW after the conservatism of its founder, Betty Friedan, was overcome and it was taken over by the more radical elements. Milder forms of this monastery ideal have been adopted everywhere by the proliferating women's groups and colonies (such as Kate Millett's women artists' colony). (5) The emphasis on egalitarianism in contradistinction to the hierarchical and despotic character of the corrupted external society. Thus Chamberlain emphasized Germanic people's unique love of freedom which caused them to create institutions based on the respect of civil liberty (e.g. as manifested in Magna Carta, "a solemn proclamation of the inviolability of the great principle of personal freedom and personal security... a general law of conscience has gradually grown out of it, and whoever runs counter to this is a criminal, even though he wear a crown." The Foundations, p. xxxiii.) and which was wholly absent among the inferior races who inevitably veered toward institutions of a despotic, authoritarian, slavery-like character. In the same way, "[s]ince Atkinson's main bone of contention with NOW had been that it replicated the hierarchical power structure of male organizations, the Feminists were determined to be a non-hierarchical, fundamentally democratic organization. Lots were drawn, for example, to determine who did the 'shit-work' or uncreative work, as well as who would serve as chair, secretary, and treasurer for the month." (Donovan, ibid., p. 143) Note that a feminist sect differs in flavor from a white supremacist sect because, as seen, feminists have followed the "co-operation strand" of social Darwinism whereas the Aryanists the "competitive strand", so that Atkinson's vision of egalitarianism lacks the aggressiveness of Chamberlain's vision of equality which is based more on compromises between competitive, self-interested equals (like social contract, justice, Kohlberg's) than on relationships of care (like Gilligan's). In this way, Aryanist organizations seldom seem egalitarian in structure, though always promulgating an egalitarian spirit. In the end, it can be seen that feminism is as much as Aryanism and Marxism a secular substitute for Christianity, replacing God's Paradise of no work, no pain, and no death with an earthly paradise of happy working, happy eating, and happy (noospherically) defecating.

"After the First World War intolerant nationalism and its concomitant, racial nativism, emerged with a vengeance in American society." Only too interesting that this period when Grant, staying "busy at his task of keeping the Nordic America awake to the danger of contamination of the last stronghold of the Great Race by 'bad strains'", won enormous public praise for his book, coincided exactly with the height of cultural feminists' pacificist campaign and fight for socialistic, governmental intervention to promote the welfare of the population (Crystal Eastman, Jane Addams, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman). Thus they were two strands of the general trend, at the time, of aggressive and progressive tactics of therapeia of the American population -- for the sake of the power of the state. This is how power made use of the "gnostic tendencies" of the people of the Western nation states. "The largest and most powerful nativist organization in U.S. history, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, enrolled perhaps 8 million members during its turbulent career. Anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, and general mistrust of 'foreigners' pervaded the thinking of probably a majority of the citizenry." (p. 86) Just as soon as power made use of these social gnostics, however, it abandoned them when the purpose was achieved. Nordic nativist racism branched into the eugenic movement in America, all finally succeeding in obtaining the passage by the Congress of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, 4 years after the granting of voting right to women. On this elsewhere. Afterwards, "the latter 1920's saw a marked decline of American nativism... Beginning about 1926 the Ku Klux Klan disintegrated rapidly. The immigration restriction act... supposedly an effective check on the entry into the U.S. of inferior Alpines and Mediterraneans, gave Americans a feeling of assurance that their institutions were no longer in danger. Most Nordic Americans eventually realized that there was neither a papal conspiracy nor an international Jewish financial plot. They were content to enjoy the rampant prosperity of the 20's and saw little need for pursuing the nativistic tangent further" (p. 87). Together with feminist ideological activities, racist doctrinaires like Grant lingered into obscurity, although piece-meal socialistic reform legislations were continually enacted. What happened, then, seemed to be that the transition to large corporate manufacturing capitalism had been completed, the restructuration of population required by it achieved equilibrium, importation of cheap labor stopped, and the newly emergent managerial state taking shape, built up little by little by the socialists and social feminists. The lower, working class had evidently been properly integrated, as the mass production of products resulted in a saturation of the market which induced the increase of their wage in order to enable them to consume the excess, just as is to happen again in the 1970s. The gnostic fear of the contamination of the Good by the Evil-corrupted as exhibited by the nativists, then, would not appear again until a second massive expansion of the market in the 1960s when the American society needed once more to undergo re-structuration due to the emergence of a global consumerist economy, or more precisely to the shift of the economic center of vitality of the globe from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Because the European nations did not have immigration problem and consequently experienced the problem of the integration and mobilization of the lower, working class in other forms (psychoanalysis, so said Foucault), the racial gnostics there would frame the pessimism over racial degeneration in different terms. Here may be utilized the example of G. V. de Lapouge, "La race chez les populations mélangées" (in Eugenics in Race and State, the Second International Congress of Eugenics, vol. 2, 1923): "La proportion des races dans une population varie sans cesse. J'ai montré... que cette variation était due au jeu des sélections sociales et non aux conquêtes et aux immigrations comme on le pensait autrefois." In this he differed definitively from American nativists. "C'est ainsi qu'en Grèce il ne reste plus guère de descendants des anciens Hellènes, dont le type était à peu près identique à celui des grands dolichocéphales blonds de Suède et d'Ecosse. De même en France la population actuelle, où domine l'H. alpinus, n'a aucunement la composition de celle de l'époque du cuivre, où dominait l'H. contractus, encore abondant cependant dans l'ouest, ni du haut Moyen age, où dominait l'H. Europeus, dont la descendance achève de s'éteindre."

"D'une manière uniforme, les sélections sociales tendent à substituer aux races supérieures, riches en eugéniques, les races inférieures. Les premiers, dont les besoins économiques sont plus grands, ne peuvent pas élever de nombreux enfants, parce qu'ils coûtent trop cher à instruire et à établir; les races inférieures dont la postérité ne demande que quelque années de nourriture et de vêtement, et qui bénéficient en outre l'assistance des autres, peuvent se permettre une descendance nombreuse." This is, again, how the chosen one is precisely fragile or disadvantaged because of their specialness. American white women have adopted similar attitude by calling men's sperm "cheap" and their eggs "expensive", which is, of course, biologically speaking, not wrong. But the experience is the same, specialness leading to the sense of fragility. "En France, la guerre a porté aux éléments supérieurs un coup qui peut être mortel. Les meilleurs de nos jeunes gens ont péri ou sont revenus invalides, dans la proportion d'au moins 2 sur 3... Beaucoup de celles-ci vont s'éteindre, le dernier mâle ayant été tué. Dans les mêmes milieux les filles ne trouvent pas à se marier, parce que les garçons ont disparu en partie et parce que la cherté de la vie fait que leurs dots sont trop petites pour pouvoir, jointes aux gains d'un mari, fournir les ressources suffisantes pour fonder une famille. Il faut savoir que chez nous les salaires réels des intellectuels sont inférieurs à ceux des ouvriers. Si l'on fait la somme des salaires de l'existence entière en déduisant les frais d'études et d'entretien jusqu'au premier salaire, cette infériorité se voit avec évidence." The same tone seems to be echoed by women's complaint of their low salaries compared with men's for the same work, the basis of which in reality might not be so clear-cut.¹⁰ The underlying sentiment in both cases, then, seems to be the sense of entitlement to "more than others" (men or lower class) on account of their being "more special than others", "more fragile", and "needing more resources". "Nous assistons à une crise des races supérieures et des eugéniques, menacées de disparaître au moment où il faudrait une abondance de surhommes." The same fear-mongering as among the feminists regarding "violence against women", "inequality of pay", etc. But then the pessimism of the tragic historical sensibility is about to disengage which the feminists, essentially optimistic, do not share. "Le temps n'est plus où la terre fournissait aisément le nécessaire. Dans quelques siècles, il n'y aura plus ni métaux, ni charbon, ni pétrole, ni des aliments suffisants pour la population du globe. Dans la vie sociale, les problèmes à résoudre par l'homme d'état, le chef d'industrie, de commerce ou de banque deviennent d'une complexité qui dépasse les limites de la mentalité présente. Demain vous ne trouverez plus un homme qui soit à la hauteur de certaines tâches nouvelles, et j'ose dire que les meilleurs d'aujourd'hui se sont bien mal tirés des difficultés présentes." (The similarity between the contemporary pessimism about the destruction of the environment and the atmosphere and Lapouge's about the eugenic crisis is certainly interesting; while his appears today as quite unfounded, just fear-mongering, can one however deny the reality of global warming?)

Because of this pessimistic sensibility of decline, the future bifurcates into one possible path of salvation and another of extinction: "L'heure est venue où l'homme doit choisir s'il deviendra un demi-dieu, ou s'il retournera à la barbarie des contemporains du mammouth." Reaborbing the projection of God into oneself. "Un mouvement immense se fait dans les races et les classes inférieures, et ce mouvement qui a l'air d'être tourné contre les blancs, contres les riches... contre la civilisation elle-même." Too interesting Lapouge's hope of salvation: "Américains, il dépend de vous, je l'affirme fortement, de sauver la civilisation et de faire sortir de vous un peuple de demi-dieux." He would not have expected this role of semi-god to be taken up by (white) women in America.

POSTSCRIPT: We have mentioned (Summary Introduction) that the gnostic structure of American cultural feminism is exactly identical with that of Calvinism-Puritanism. In cultural feminism not only is "predestination" reborn but this doctrine has reached its perfection. Consider Max Weber's description of the "gnostic" structure of Calvinism (with correspondences with cultural feminism in brackets):

The Puritans thus shunned their neighbors, did not associate with the rest of society more than required by their business dealings, and detested the general gay English culture around as evil and as potential contamination of their purity. Today the American Evangelicals have the same attitude toward the "Hollywood" "fornicating" culture around them. The cultural feminists similarly see the patriarchal culture around them as potential source of contamination destructive of their feminine goodness (Goddess) within. An elder lady living downstairs from me, a cultural feminist writer even with the look of Mary Daly, always walked with a prideful disdain of everyone around and avoided commerce with anyone not of her kind. This indeed reminded me of the Puritans who took themselves to be unconditionally superior to, and displayed an air of arrogance and contempt toward, others around who were not of their kind, and it is for this reason -- in addition to their different business practices -- that the Puritans were hated and persecuted by their English compatriots. Coming to the New World they displayed the same arrogance, self-assigned superiority, and contempt toward the Native Americans, took advantage of the latter (who were innocent and naive enough to help the white wanderers), or otherwise wiped them out with diseases with a good conscience ("God has abandoned these savages"). The cultural feminists' sense of superiority to and contempt for the world of course is less disgusting than that of the Puritans or the contemporary Evangelicals because, at least, their attitude is somewhat reactionary toward an actual oppression in the past. The American cultural feminists' and white females' exaggerated and irrational fear of dangers and violences by men against them all around (victim mentality, fear-mongering) is here shown to be a fear of contamination that is born when they see themselves as too good, too special, too precious, and the patriarchal surroundings as too evil, too corrupt: the same "Empfindungsweise" as the Puritans'. It is argued elsewhere ("The Second Law of Thermodynamics and the Problem of Evil", "Thermodynamic Genealogy of Primitive Religions", "Phaedo") that this fear of contamination is derived from the human experience of the thermodynamic structure of the universe and is a fear for the locally concentrated order (precious because it is formation uphill, against the arrow of time) to reach equilibrium with the disordered surroundings (mundane, profane, not-precious because it is the "more natural" state downhill, in accordance with the arrow of time). Goodness, just like life in general, is "an island of low entropy in an increasingly random universe", hence precious and always endangered. The fear for an order, whether of the society or of the personal soul and preciously constituted uphill or against the arrow of time, to reach equilibrium with the environment is a (thermodynamic) experience constitutive of the human experience of good and evil in general and of human religious forms in particular, from the tribal religions through the salvational movements of the First Axial all the way to the Protestant sects of the Reformation and the Evangelicals of contemporary time; and now it constitutes cultural (gender, victim) feminism as well and prompts these feminists to fear-monger about violence against women -- the impure external environment threatening to dissolve the order of the precious pure ones -- and more particularly about sexual types of violence that are first of all especially suited to the imagery of pollution and dissolution from outside, and second of all reflect the new human condition within which the modern secular religion of consumerism operates: as mentioned, whereas the primitives fear being eaten (and destroyed through plague) by gods and monsters as expression of this (religious) fear for the dissolution of their order, the moderns, led by the feminists, now fear the rape and molestation of women and children by male sex-predators as their means to express the same core-experience (c.f. "Bio-power in Contemporary American Society"). This is how the religious core of "gnostic" feminism not only helps build up the systematic discipline of the population into emotionless robots geared entirely to mindless production and consumption -- repeating that great achievement of the Protestant ethic (c.f. Introduction) on a new Messianic plane -- on which we have focused here, but also makes feminism blend into, and become an especially effective reinforcement mechanism in, the general dispostifs sexuels of the consumerist order: this chain of "deployment", all these obsessions with sexual deviants, serial killers, child molesters, etc., by which the consumerist society regulates the sexual behavior of its populous in accordance with the norm adapted to the maximized consumerist life-leading. In this way feminism takes care of both the productivity-consumptivity of the population and the reproduction of the next generation of healthy and efficient producer-consumers: feminism as a religion of consumerism. Our problem with this "Empfindungsweise" has always been that the power structure gets reinforced and the destruction of the world intensified precisely when a group of in reality mediocre people, due to ignorance and spiritual depravity, somehow come to think of themselves as more special and morally superior than others -- and immutably so -- by some not-so-special but definitely demarcating criterion (the "order" that they fear might reach equilibrium with the surroundings if no measure is taken to partition it off: disciplined hardworking and orderly lifestyle in the case of the Puritans and, contemporaneously, the Evangelicals; the more aesthetically pleasing look [white skin, blond hair] in the case of the Aryanists; and the female physiognomy and presumed nurturing instinct of women in the case of American cultural feminists) and start transforming the world and imposing their way on others without the possibility of ever being dissuaded therefrom by reason. One should not think that one occupies the moral high ground because one possesses some superficial, external marks (white skin, ability to menstruate and possession of an uterus, more disciplined and orderly "life-leading" [Lebensführung] or subscription to some salvational drama conceived 2,000 years ago) -- but only when one does occupy the moral high ground via intellectual and moral maturity inside.¹¹

Addenda (Sept. 2005). The incorporation by the general white female population of the fear-mongering gnosticism of the (second wave) cultural feminists has thus produced among the white females in the English-speaking world (especially in North America, the center of world-consumerism) what can only be called white female supremacism, which has today replaced the traditional "white male supremacism." The everyday manifestation of it, as said, is white women's either whining about sexism, discrimination, or the difficulty of the life of a female when all economic indexes indicate their life to be (almost) the easiest among all peoples of all racial and gender categories, or fearing that every man around of all races is a psychopathic rapist serial killer intending on eating them for breakfast (hence their fascination with profiling eccentric men around as serial killers). The purpose of all this irrational indignation and fear -- since they are of the best of lives among all and next to being the least endangered (in America, East Asian females are in fact the least abused and assaulted) -- is, as indicated, to establish their superiority before all other peoples, both materially (i.e. having the highest living standard) and culturally (i.e. being the most respected and desired).

Here we have pointed out how the dominant group has the tendency to cry about their imaginary "victimization" in order to reinforce their social dominance. In America this dominant group used to be the white males, and now it is the white females. One simply has to think about what happens when a white female (especially an attractive one) disappears: the whole community of her origin and the FBI get mobilized to look for her, and the media, with its constant report, spreads frenzy among the entire society; in the end the affair may turn out to be a hoax¹²; in a real case even the State Department may get involved (the case of Natalee Holloway, summer, 2005). One never hears of a case of a male or an African American woman from the ghetto disappearing, the entire community and the government looking for her, but all turning out to be a sham in the end, because those of these other castes know that their similar stunt would elicit no interests from the public. We similarly never hear the media reporting about those hundreds of Hispanic American girls who went back to Mexico for a visit and then disappeared. There was no media frenzy for them, and no government or community effort to look for them.

But white women would like to scream about their victimization... in order to reinforce their high social ranking and thus maintain control of societal resources to take good care of themselves.¹³ Malcolm X has called white people the "devils" (the white devils). It seems that just as the white males have ceased being the devils, white women have picked up this function and become the new white devils: their covert racism combined with overt genderism. This devilish function of course refers to the increased aggression and desire for domination which has become the essence of Western culture ever since it has entered the phase of the formation of nation-states (as noted in relation to the origination of Protestantism). This degeneration of humanity into raw aggression and a shameless quest for superiority and domination -- manifested negatively as the gnostic fear of corruption by the inferiors¹⁴ -- is now thriving especially in the Anglophonic world and has passed out of the white male population into the white female population in consequence of the consumerization of society and culture. The gnosticism of cultural feminism represents the intermediary in such transition.

Finally, the phenomenon deserves its designation as "white female supremacism" because its place of origin is the American white female population, i.e. despite an increasing number of American-born minority women starting to imitate white women in fear-mongering in order to feel that they have moved up in social ranking.

Footnotes:

1. "There was, however, a joker in the British act. There were about 2 million more women than men in England, partly as a result of war casualties. Some of the alarmists foresaw a danger of 'petticoat rule.' Consequently the minimum age for women voters was set, not at the conventional 21, but at 30, possibly in the hope that many might stay away from the polls rather than admit that they had reached that age. This situation lasted for 10 years until, in 1928, the fifth Reform Bill, or 'Flapper Franchise Act,' gave the vote, under the usual residence requirements, to all women who had reached the age of 21. The granting of universal manhood suffrage in 1918 realized the fifth of the six old Chartist demands, and the 'Flapper Act' rounded the movement which had begun in 1832." (Ibid., p. 904)

2. The conflict can be seen as between the representatives of the two camps: Alice Paul and Florence Kelley. Paul, "after an apprenticeship in the British suffrage movement", came back to the U.S. in 1913 to join the umbrella of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, under which "95% of the participants in the [women's] suffrage movement were organized", but soon "broke off to create a separate Congressional Union" to work for suffrage (Jo Freeman, "Feminist Organization and Activities from Suffrage to Women's Liberation", in Women, a Feminist Perspective, 4th ed. 1989, p. 541). After the passage of the 19th Amendment, NAWSA disbanded, and CU "reorganized itself into a new National Woman's Party"; Paul then "decided that the next step was removal of all legal discrimination against women and that the most efficient way to do this was with another federal amendment." (Ibid.) Thus she proposed the ERA. "The ERA was aimed at the plethora of state laws and common-law rules that restricted women's jury service; limited their rights to control their own property, to contract, to sue, and to keep their own name and domicile if married; gave them inferior guardianship rights over their children", etc. "It was vigorously opposed by progressive reformer Florence Kelley and her allies in the National Consumer League, the Women's Trade Union League, and the League of Women Voters, because Kelley feared it would also destroy the protective labor laws for which she had spent her life fighting. The preponderance of these laws limited the hours women could work each day and each week, prohibited night work for women, and removed women from certain occupations altogether. Some states also required minimum wages for women only, although the Supreme Court declared this unconstitutional in 1923... The NWP was not initially hostile to protective labor laws... [but] Paul concluded, protective labor laws really hurt women more than they helped, because they encouraged employers to hire men... Behind [this battle] was a fundamental disagreement over the meaning of equality. The NWP favored absolute equality of opportunity. Women would never achieve economic independence as long as laws treated them like children in need of protection.." (p. 542 - 3) How liberal feminists lost to cultural or social feminists had much to do with the ERA's loss of favor within the increasingly socialist climate of American society. "Hindered by declining numbers and influence, the NWP kept the feminist flame burning through some very hard times. The Depression led to an upsurge of extant public opinion against the employment of married women... thought to be taking jobs away from men, who had families to support. The advent of the Roosevelt administration brought to power Kelley's disciples Francis Perkins and Molly Dewson... their strong opposition to the ERA was based in part on their perception that it was primarily a class issue and not one of sexual equality. As social reformers, they argued that requiring equal rights under law would favor upper-class professional and executive women at the expense of working-class women who needed legal protection." (p. 543 - 4)

3. The best known example is Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who, in With Her in Our Land, the sequel to Herland, had Ellador, the female from the utopia Herland, follow Van (from our world) in a tour to see this world of ours after the Great War. "She, with her disarming logic, causes Van, and presumably the reader, to see the world afresh." "Gilman's views of immigrants, blacks, and Jews [as spoken through the utopian], however typical of her time and place, are sometimes unsettling and sometimes offensive..." "On the matter of immigrants, Gilman is just this side of xenophobic, and sometimes her foot slips badly. Genuine democracy will not be achieved in the U.S., Ellador comments, on the basis of an 'ill-assorted and unassimilable mass of human material,' not immigrants, 'but victims, poor ignorant people scraped up by paid agents, deceived by lying advertisements, brought over here by greedy American ship owners and employers of labor.' From a reasoned objection to the exploitation of unskilled immigrant workers, Ellador moves to a notion of stages of development, suggesting that 'only some races -- or some individuals in a given race -- have reached the democratic age.'" (Ann J. Lane in her introduction to Herland, xvii - xviii) She shared the same sentiment with Madison Grant.

This is however not valid of the racism of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, which seemed merely reactionary. "Perhaps in bitterness over what she regarded as the abolitionists' betrayal, perhaps as a political tactic, Stanton in particular engaged in racist rhetoric" (Donovan, ibid., p. 23).

An example of radical feminists' attempt to eradicate "whiteness" from among the characteristics of the savior was their particular criticism of racism in beauty contest within their general protest against "the image of Miss America, an image that oppresses women in every area in which it purports to represent us... We protest: 1. The Degrading Mindless-Boob-Girlie Symbol... the nervous animals are judged for teeth, fleece, etc., and... the best specimen gets the blue ribbon... So are women in our society forced daily to compete for male approval, enslaved by ludicrous 'beauty standards'... 2. Racism with Roses. Since its inception in 1921, the Pageant has not had one Black finalist, and this has not been for a lack of test-case contestants. There has never been a Puerto Rican, Alaskan, Hawaiian, or Mexican-American winner. Nor has there been a true Miss America -- an American Indian." ("No more Miss America!", 1968, in Sisterhood Is Powerful, p. 521 - 2) Despite the white feminist attempt to extend the membership of the gnostically soteric special group to non-white women, the non-white feminists during the 1980s nevertheless withdrew and formed their own "third wave".

4. The gnostic structure, that the good is always the good and evil always the evil, that the good is trapped in the world of evil, and that moreover the membership of the good (women) and the evil (men) is pre-ordainedly fixed (like the "predestination" of the Calvinists and Puritans, c.f. Postscript below) -- this structure has been infused into and adopted by the American culture in general and the American legal system in particular through the discursive and legislative efforts of the cultural feminists to result in the current situation of which many complain: any woman, after sex, can accuse the man of rape and sexual assault and have him ruined; if the accusation is proven false, no consequence awaits her but the man remains ruined through cultural stigmatization. The police responding to domestic violence calls are required by law to make automatic arrest of the (allegedly) abusive male partner even before any evidence is presented for the validity of the accusation by the victim female. How much of accusations of rape are false? Farrel: "When the U.S. Air Force investigated 556 cases of alleged rape, 27% of the women eventually admitted they had lied (either just before they took a lie-detector test or after they failed it). Because other cases were less certain, the air force asked three independent reviewers to review these cases. They used 25 criteria that were common to the women who had acknowledged they lied... Their conclusion? A total of 60% of the original rape allegations were false." (Ibid., p. 322) Wendy McElroy commented that estimated false accusations of rape constituted anywhere from 2% (Susan Brownmiller's estimate!) to 40% of all the accusations filed (False Rape Charges Hurt Real Victims, July 22, 2003). In "False Rape Allegations" (Archives of Sexual Behavior, Vol. 23, No. 1, 1994, p. 81-90) Eugene J. Kanin, Ph.D. studies "45 consecutive, disposed, false rape allegations covering a 9 year period" in a small metropolitan area (population = 70,000) in the Midwestern United States. "These false rape allegations constitute 41% the total forcible rape cases (n = 109) reported during this period. These false allegations appear to serve three major functions for the complainants: providing an alibi, seeking revenge, and obtaining sympathy and attention. False rape allegations are not the consequence of a gender-linked aberration, as frequently claimed, but reflect impulsive and desperate efforts to cope with personal and social stress situations." "In addition to the foregoing, certain other findings and observations relevant to false allegations warrant comment. First, false allegations failed to include accusations of forced sexual acts other than penile-vaginal intercourse. Not one complainant mentions forced oral or anal sex. In contrast, these acts were included in approximately 25% of the rounded forcible rape complaints. Perhaps it was simply psychologically and socially more prudent for these women to minimize the humiliation of sexual victimization by not embroidering the event any more than necessary." Farrel (ibid., p. 330) cites the strange story of Cary Dotson and Cathleen Webb: Webb accused Dotson of rape; and with Dotson's imprisonment she eventually acknowledged, out of guilt -- she found God! -- that she fabricated the story; amazingly she wasn't believed and much lucky coincidences had to converge to make possible a retrial for Dotson. The feminists' resistance to paying attention to such possibility of false accusation is a reflection of their gnostic gendered view that the preordained good is always good and always trapped in evil: hence inflexibility (compare with the Puritans again). But the extent to which society refuses to consider such possibility illustrates how much the feminist gnosticism has permeated the entire culture. This makes possible the adoption by the society of the rape shield laws (shielding a woman's sexual past from being used against her in court without doing the same for the man, Farrel, p. 332) despite their obvious violation of the constitutional right to due process and the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. It also makes possible the requirement in California that "a rape conviction can be based on the accuser's testimony alone, without corroboration." (Farrel, ibid.) We have yet no data on this -- but this "gnostic" model of feminism as the white females' ploy to increase their living standard and control over society's resources (including mates) predicts that most false accusers are white females. (Is this true?) Interpersonal relationships with white females in America would then be a risky business. This is the same as the Nativists' use of "racial" (Southern European immigrants) fear-mongering in the 1920s to maintain their professional middle-class hegemony in society (secondary power). However we here pay more attention to how such feminist fear-mongering disciplines men to become more docile and machine-like in behavior so as to increase their productivity (primary power).

5. C.f. Christina Hoff Summers' Who Stole Feminism (1994). This liberal feminist begins her documentation of the cultural feminists' gross exaggerations of the extent to which (white) women in America are "under siege" first with their lamentation over the 150,000 female deaths from anorexia in America annually, initially appearing in Gloria Steinem's Revolution from Within, Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, and Joan Brumberg's Fasting Girls, then widely circulated in media, and which results from misquotation of the American Anorexia and Bulima Association's "150,000 to 200,000 sufferers (not fatalities) of anorexia nervosa" (p. 12); then secondly with the rumor started in November 1992 by Deborah Louis, president of the National Women's Studies Association, but again widely reported in media subsequently, that "According to [the] last March of Dimes report, domestic violence (vs. pregnant women) is now responsible for more birth defects than all other causes combined" (p. 13): March of Dimes denied having ever made such claim. These are just some examples. Below the analysis of feminist fear-mongering and white female paranoia will be focused just on claims of rape.

6. Note that the DOJ's statistics is annual rate, and MacKinnon's statement is concerning the chance of being raped in a woman's lifetime. Hence the former needs to be multiplied to get the latter. Taking white females' average life expectancy, 80, as the norm (i.e. as the upper limit, since they live longer than other females), the upper limit of the chances of a woman getting raped in her life time is lower than 70/270, i.e. around 1/4, which actually comes close to the "feminist myth". This is the highest number around. Farrell's number (1993) is far lower: "The rape rate is 1.2 per 1,000 per year based on the most recent year of the National Crime Survey Report. See USBJS, National Crime Survey Report, Criminal Victimization in the U.S., Annual (1973 - 1988), p. 15. This means women have more than 80 chances in 1,000 of being raped in a lifetime -- or about 1 in 12. Since 62,830 women per year are victims of completed rapes versus 67,430 per year who are victims of attempted rapes, about 1 in 25 are victims of completed rapes in a lifetime, about 1 in 23 are victims of attempted rapes in a lifetime..." (p. 418 - 9) Elsewhere the statistics of BJS vary: 1 rape or sexual assault for every 1,000 persons age 12 or older for 2002, i.e. around 1/500 women (?). (Criminal Victimization, 2002). Another for 1992 has 43 rapes per 100,000 inhabitants, or less than 1 out of 1,000 women. (Press Release, Aug. 9, 1998) This is even lower than Farrell's number.

"...Catherine MacKinnon says that a woman's 'yes' cannot be considered genuine. Why not? Because she is forced to say 'yes' in order to survive" (Farrel, ibid., p. 316). The resultant broadening of the definition of rape and increase of incidences of rape through classification measures are the product of the gnostic structure of MacKinnon's world-view, that the good is so helplessly trapped in the world of evil. Again, we emphasize here less on the unfairness of such feminist tactics to acquire more power for (white) women (through greater governmental intervention in interpersonal relationships) but more on the role of such tactics in the overall scheme of society: disciplinary measures to increase the productivity and consumptivity of the population in the consumerist social order.

Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers, in "Researching the 'Rape Culture' of America", also analyzes the phenomenon of definitional change:

14. And positively, as said, in the "might makes right" climate of mass-tyranny where everyone attempts to rob as much as possible from everyone else regardless of right and wrong.