Sexual attraction is what the continuation of the species depends on, yet feminists don’t like it, nor are they honest when they say why they oppose any sign of it. But so much power do they have today that their mission to de-sex society succeeds.
In 2015 the Sun gave up its Page-Three girls after years of complaints from feminists, who said that the pictures demeaned women. What they really didn’t like was the fact that girls would happily take their tops off so that men could admire their breasts.
The following year an advertisement showing a model in a bikini was taken down supposedly because it “body-shamed” women less attractive than the model. Sadiq Khan said that it demeaned women. But no one called for pictures of beautiful gardens to be taken down for garden-shaming or demeaning people with less beautiful gardens. What Sadiq Khan and other feminists really objected to was just the fact that an attractive woman had posed for a picture that men enjoyed looking at, nor did normal women mind it.
The offending advertisement on the London underground
In 2018 an annual fund-raising event for wealthy men put on by the Presidents Club, where the men were waited on by attractive young women, was abolished under pressure from feminists who said that the waitresses were sexually harassed. By this they meant that the waitresses, who had been hired specifically to put the men in a mood to give as much to charity as possible, were willing to do things like sit on their laps. It was only a feminist who, having got herself hired as a waitress, wrote an article for the Financial Times saying that the waitresses were abused, that created the outcry that caused the craven Presidents Club to abolish the event.[1] What feminists really didn’t like was the simple fact that rich men enjoyed being served by attractive young women, who were happy to serve them.
Also in 2018, grid girls were taken out of motor racing, these being young women who held up signs. According to motor racing’s organisers, the girls were no longer “appropriate or relevant” and did not “resonate with our brand values”.[2] Such mealy-mouthed language was a sure sign that these were not the organisers’ real reasons for getting rid of the girls. The truth is that feminists wanted the girls taken out because men enjoyed seeing them holding up signs and the girls enjoyed being seen holding them up. Since feminism has the backing of the media, who could have put the organisers in a bad light if they had not obliged, the organisers obliged.
In the same year, darts girls were taken out of darts and the swimsuit round was taken out of the Miss World competition.
In each of these cases what feminists objected to was the complementary nature of the sexes, as in men finding women attractive and women liking to be found attractive. For feminists it is bad enough that rich, successful men enjoy being served by attractive young women. It only makes it worse that attractive young women enjoy serving rich, successful men. And if feminists object to something, it must be abolished.
Feminists continued their war on sexual attraction by trying to make women shrink from men in fear. When in 2021 a woman was murdered after being abducted from Clapham Common having set out to walk across it alone at night, perhaps believing as feminists tell us that women have no need of male protection since a woman can do anything a man can do, such as protect herself from an assailant, the media sent women all over Britain into a state of hysteria with the suggestion that men in general were dangerous predators. Harriet Harman, queen bee of British feminists, described murder as only “the worst end of a spectrum of everyday male threat to women”, giving as examples from the other end of the spectrum men asking women for their phone numbers or trying to get them to get into their cars.[3] Thus she presented perfectly normal male behaviour as threatening and encouraged women to run from men who showed an interest in them.
And so it seems that a wise man named Henry Makow, who has been saying for years that the goal of feminism is to promote lesbianism, might be right.[4] If feminism seeks to drive women away from men, who will they go to but other women? Apparently lesbianism is all the rage among high-school girls in America today.[5]
A staple of feminism is the notion that women want to be seen as people, not sex objects. This is one of the most absurd ideas that has ever been proposed. A woman may want to be seen as a person or she may want to be seen as a sex object. It depends on the situation. What is certain is that if she presents herself as a sex object and is not seen as one, she is dismayed.
Feminism makes women act against or worry about their nature. In the 1980s, feminists could be seen going up to men at parties whom they had never met before to open conversations, determined to act as a man might do towards a woman, having overcome their natural tendency to join the haggle of women that always formed at the start of such events to chat among themselves. Everywhere women could be seen consciously modifying their behaviour to bring it into line with the demands of feminism. Also in the 1980s, a woman at a feminist conference enquired whether there was such a thing as politically correct sex, meaning to ask whether it was unfeminist of her to find that her sexual gratification depended on being dominated by a man.[6]
In those days, feminists frowned on women who dressed to look attractive, preferring to see them wearing paint-spattered dungarees. Today they have no problem with women even into their fifties wearing skirts well above the knee as long as they don’t do it to appeal to men. They are supposed to do it for themselves, although quite how a woman is supposed to make herself look alluring for herself is not explained. What the new mode really means is that women should go as far as possible to present themselves as sex objects while being even more ready than before to complain if they are seen as such. This has resulted in a culture where female university students are subject to no dress code but can report male students to the authorities for just looking at them.
The BBC’s Emily Maitliss looking serious while presenting herself as a sex object at the age of fifty
Women enjoy telling each other about their successes in attracting men, which they can do indirectly by pretending to be outraged. Thus according to a woman, a waitress who notices a man looking down her shirt may tell the other waitresses: “Oh my God, what a pig! This guy was looking down my shirt! Can you take this check over to him? I just don’t want to see him any more.” So devastated is she by being found attractive that she must ask her sympathetic colleagues to relieve her. At a feminist conference in the 1990s, a woman said that builders looked at her as she walked down the street, seeing her as a “nice piece of ass”. She thereby told her audience not only that she was distressed but also that builders found her attractive.[7]
Many women of a certain age have admitted that they would find being whistled at more gratifying than offensive, but, illustrating the power of feminism, in Britain it was proposed in 2016 that wolf-whistling be made a “hate crime”.[8] Perhaps it now is one. As for looking up a woman’s skirt, some men would be tempted to do this if the opportunity arose, such as when following a short-skirted woman up an escalator. In Britain a man can now be sent to prison for two years for “upskirting”.[9] Gradually, thanks to feminism, any response by men to women’s sexual attractiveness is being criminalised, but not of course any display of this attractiveness by women. A woman who puts on a short skirt knowing that she will be going up an escalator is necessarily innocent.
Feminists don’t like women who are frank about seeing their sexual attractiveness as an asset, but they admire those who seduce men only to condemn them. They would take a dim view of the woman who told this story: “Last week I wore a shirt that really showed off my cleavage, and I had a co-worker help me with a problem. Then all of a sudden I look up and he’s staring at my chest, and I’m thinking, ‘OK, this bra works!’” But they applauded Charlotte Proudman, a young barrister who in 2015 denounced a man for complimenting her on a picture of herself that she had put up on the internet. The 57-year-old lawyer wrote that he was delighted to connect with her via LinkedIn and called her photo stunning. She replied: “I am on linked-in for business purposes not to be approached about my physical appearance or to be objectified by sexist men”.[10] And so, having availed herself of the opportunity LinkedIn gave her to display her appearance for professional gain, she then availed herself of feminism to condemn a man as “misogynistic”, as she put it, for responding. But this was not enough for her. Driving her stiletto further down into his neck, when he emailed to say that he sincerely regretted any offence caused by his remarks, she rejected the apology, saying that he had not in her view sufficiently “accepted the fact that his actions were incredibly sexist and on the basis of objectifying my appearance” [sic]. But her disapproval of objectifying people’s appearance had not stopped her posting messages on other social media drooling at pictures of good-looking men and congratulating women on making themselves look sexy.
The picture of herself that Charlotte Proudman put on LinkedIn
Many women know that they can gain something they value, such as attention, pity or an air of righteousness, by condemning men for finding them attractive. Thus the #MeToo movement was created by women in 2017 to shame men who had had sex with them, the suggestion being that this had occurred against their will. A supportive media painted a picture of shocked women being forced into physical intimacy with prestigious men. Gone was the concept of the casting couch, on which previous generations had understood that women might seek to advance their careers. Male predation was the only possible analysis of an irregular sexual liaison. Women who as schoolgirls had offered their male teachers sex in return for a good grade, a practice known in America as a lay for an A, could be sure of being covered in sympathy when stepping forward years later as victims of “historic sexual abuse”.
So ardently do feminists oppose any recognition of women’s tendency to exploit their sexual attractiveness with perhaps unfortunate results that in 2018 feminist campaigners got Manchester Art Gallery to take down a much-loved pre-Raphaelite painting of a naked nymph seducing a young man.[11] According to the gallery, this was “to prompt conversation about how we display and interpret artworks”. It did not explain how removing a painting from view could prompt a conversation about how it was displayed, but it wanted to challenge the “Victorian fantasy” of women as either passive and decorative or as femmes fatale.[12]
In their efforts to defeat the outworking of sexual attraction, feminists pretend to know nothing about the mating game. One of their great points is that when a woman says no, she means no. This is almost as ridiculous as the idea that women don’t want to be seen as sex objects. If a woman says no, she may mean it or she may not. Perhaps she only wants to show that she is no slut while testing a man’s desire for her. If he persists and she likes him, she may end up saying yes.
Altogether, feminism pits itself against reality. With its dishonestly conducted war on sexual attraction and its hatred of the men and women between whom it flows, it is a screwed-up, anti-human ideology. No wonder that in 2019 a feminist wrote a book calling for an end to human reproduction.[13]
[1] See Financial Times, no date, “The Presidents Club scandal”.
[2] RaceFans, Jan. 31st 2018, “F1 announces it will no longer use grid girls“.
[3] HUFFPOST, March 11th 2021, “‘Women are not the problem here’: MPs pay tribute to Sarah Everard”.
[4] See Save the Males, July 17th 2004, “The ‘Quiet War’ against Humanity”, where Henry Makow wrote that feminism promoted lesbianism while posing as the defender of women.
[5] So said a caller on Roosh V, March 21st 2021, “Roosh Hour #62 — Spring Call-In Special”.
[6] Reported in Edward Stourton, It’s a PC World: How to Live in a World Gone Politically Correct, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2008, p. 16.
[7] This was Sandra Lee Bartky. “I freeze”, she said, and “have been petrified by the gaze of the Other”. She had been “made into an object” (Christina Hoff Sommers, 1995, Who Stole Feminism?, New York: Touchstone, p. 27).
[8] Daily Telegraph, July 13th 2016, “Wolf whistling to become a hate crime: Nottinghamshire Police cracks down on misogyny”.
[9] Gov.uk, Feb. 11th 2019, “Upskirting: know your rights”.
[10] Daily Telegraph, Sept. 9th 2015, “Lawyer accused of sexism after complimenting barrister on ‘stunning’ LinkedIn picture”.
[11] The painting was “Hylas and the Nymphs” (1896) by J W Waterhouse. See Justine Brown’s Bookshelf, April 22nd 2018, “On Iconoclasm”.
[12] Manchester Evening News, Feb. 2nd 2018, “Manchester Art Gallery removes naked nymphs painting because of the way it portrays women“.
[13] CambridgeshireLive, Feb. 18th 2020, “‘The only solution for climate change is letting the human race become extinct’”. In The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene, Patricia MacCormack called for the self-extinction of the human race on the grounds that “humanity has caused mass problems and one of them is creating this hierarchical world where white, male and heterosexual able-bodied people are succeeding, and people of different races, genders, sexualities and those with disabilities are struggling to get that”. Alternatively her point, said this multiply tattooed and pierced “philosopher”, was that “mankind was enslaved to the point of zombiedom by capitalism”, which had damaged the world so much that we should phase out reproduction.
