Feminist Attacks PolitiChicks & Phyllis Schlafly for Defending Women’s Rights
Monday morning I received multiple tweets regarding a “hit piece” about PolitiChicks on Salon.com written by Amanda Marcotte. The article, titled “7 women working tirelessly to attack equal rights for women,”begins:
“A lot of people assume the term ‘female misogynist’ is an oxymoron. How can a woman be opposed to the fight to help women achieve equality? The sad fact of the matter is, as long as there has been feminism, there have been women who find it personally advantageous to reject feminism and instead argue for continuing social systems that perpetuate women’s inequality, male dominance and even violence against women. (There were even plenty of women who were willing to argue against women’s suffrage back in the day.) Here is a list of nine women who have made a career out of opposing women’s struggle for social, political and economic equality.”
(By the way, among many other mistakes, in the title the writer says there are “seven women,” but later says nine.)
The “attacking women” listed are, in order are:
1) Christina Hoff Sommers, author of the 2001 book, “The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men.”One of the reasons Sommers is on the list is because she “accuses feminists of ruining young men’s lives by oppressing them through the educational system.”
2) Cathy Young is on the list because her work “focuses on minimizing the problems of sexual abuse and harassment of women.”
3) Jill Stanek because she blogs that “pregnancy prevention is a uniquely modern evil,” and because she “celebrated domestic violence, arguing that men should hit women who have abortions.”
4) The Politichicks. Marcotte writes, “Ann-Marie Murrell, Morgan Brittany and Dr. Gina Loudon are Internet video hosts who run a show called Politichicks and have a new book out arguing that women don’t actually want the equality feminists are fighting for. They laid out their philosophy recently on Fox & Friends. ‘Beyoncé’s argument,’ complained the host, ‘is that it’s OK for women to be sexual beings just like men are sexual beings.’ The Politichicks agreed that this was absolutely outrageous, arguing that feminists are actually ‘sexualists’ and that feminist insistence that women like sex just like men do encourages violence against women.”
5) Janet Bloomfield is the PR representative for the “anti-feminist website A Voice for Men,” which, according to Marcotte, was created “in order to make it look like feminists hate men.”
6) Lila Rose. Marcotte writes, “Rose concentrates most of her energies on demonizing Planned Parenthood in hopes of cutting off state and federal funding, so that low-income women lose access to affordable contraception and reproductive health-care services. Rose’s strategy is to do ‘undercover’ videos, which are usually deceptively edited, to build the claim that Planned Parenthood’s services are evil and need to be terminated.”
7) Phyllis Schlafly. From Marcotte: “Phyllis Schlafly is the OG (original gangster) of women who hate other women, spearheading the fight against the Equal Rights Amendment and helping invent the modern conservative movement in the process.”
While I am honored to be listed among such brave, strong women and would love to break down each of Marcotte’s arguments against each of them, I’ll focus on what I know best: PolitiChicks, and my book, “What Women Really Want,” written with my PolitiChicks co-anchors Dr. Gina Loudon and Morgan Brittany.
