Women’s Liberation, as modern feminism was called when it erupted from the New Left in the late 1960s, was still rather a new phenomenon in 1970 when William F. Buckley Jr. was invited to debate Germaine Greer at England’s Cambridge Union. Buckley later recalled the problem:
She insisted that I formulate the resolution, which I attempted to do from this side of the Atlantic, using what was then known as Western Union. The trouble was that she rejected my first three proposals on the grounds that they were, if I remember stupid, asinine, something similar for the third. The ‘telephone call from the president of the union was now desperate. The BBC, which was filming the encounter needed to know the resolution before noon the next day, when their guide went out to print. I sat down at the typewriter and typed out “Resolved: Give Them an Inch and They’ll Take a Mile.”
In that, Buckley was exactly right, and was prescient in discerning the essential problem with feminism, namely that it has no logical stopping point. Give them every demand they ask today, and feminists will return tomorrow with a new list of demands.
Feminists originally claimed to seek “equality” and yet, once this was achieved, it was not enough. An absolute majority of U.S. college students (57%) are female, and women are 33% more likely than men to earn a college degree. As college education is widely considered a chief socioeconomic indicator of middle-class status, one might suppose such statistical evidence would suffice to satisfy feminist demands.
Alas, there is no limit to their totalitarian ambition, and feminists have lately begun demanding that male students be stripped of due process rights on campus. “Last year California passed a law that defined nearly all sex on college campuses as rape unless proven otherwise,” as Ashe Schow has observed. The anti-male climate in higher education has become so intense that one college student in Oregon found himselfbanned from parts of campus because a female student said “he reminded her of the man who had raped her months before and thousands of miles away.” Of course, if there aren’t enough actual rapes to justify this kind of hysterical paranoia, feminists have proven they are willing to exploitfictional rapes in order to justify their anti-male jihad. The wholly imaginary “Haven Monahan” was used to frame Phi Kappa Psi fraternityat the University of Virginia and, in response to this highly publicized lie, the university’s president shut down all fraternity parties on campus.
Feminism’s implacable hostility toward males is by no means limited to university campuses, however. BuzzFeed recently offered “23 Writers With Messages For Straight White Male Publishing.” These messages, from attendees at the annual Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference, suggested that the employment of heterosexual males in the publishing industry is a social injustice:
In fact, the book publishing industry is overwhelmingly dominated by females. A 2010 survey by Publisher’s Weekly found that “85% of publishing employees with less than three years of experience are women.” In other words, women are 5 out of every 6 recent hires in the industry. Yet women writers seem to believe that this is not enough. Apparently, feminists won’t be happy until all editors are females and allpublished books are written by women authors. And after they ban male students from college campuses, we suppose, feminists will then make it illegal to teach boys to read. Because . . . EQUALITY!
Living in Anglo-America 