Third-wave feminism and its battle against a patriarchy that no longer exists

[The following is part of the content of a talk given on March 9, 2022 at the Center for the Study of Argentine Constitutional History (CEHCA) in Rosario. This note includes two video excerpts]

The idea is to analyze the current hegemonic feminist discourse - and I say hegemonic not because it expresses the majority thinking of women, but because it is the one that official discourse, the one that the system promotes -, and to highlight some fallacies on which it is built.

It also shows the great differences between this current trend of feminism and women's struggles in past decades, since the end of the 19th century and throughout the 20th century. That is, how do we move from the right to vote to transgender.

I'm going to start with a quote from Simone de Beauvoir, who in the introduction to The Second Sex, the founding book of feminism, wrote: “In general, we won the game. We are no longer combatants like our elders (...) Many of us have never had to feel our femininity as a hindrance or an obstacle.”

Simone de Beauvoir wrote this in 1949. She would be very surprised to see that, 70 years later, there are women who take to the streets in Western countries to turn to the Patriarchate, to wage a fight that was won for her as early as the middle of the last century.

I like to return every now and then to the source, to the Feminism Bible, because beyond her vision of the feminist condition, unlike today's feminists, Simone de Beauvoir was a cultured woman, who knew the findings of anthropology, ethnography, history. Today's feminism, on the other hand, is characterized by a lack of historical awareness and in many cases also by ignorance.

We live in paradoxical times. Feminism is more radical, confrontational and violent in discursive matters just when women enjoy the same rights as men in the civil, economic, political, sexual...

And it is more ultra in countries where the freest woman is. That is, in Western and Judeo-Christian countries. Western women emancipated ourselves throughout the last century, in stages, at different rates depending on the country, but we entered the 21st century in the full enjoyment of our rights. It does not mean that there are no injustices, that prejudices do not persist, but this happens in many areas of life in our societies: labour exploitation, child abuse, marginality and poverty also persist, despite the fact that humanity has condemned all these injustices.

It is striking then that feminism is fanatical and bellicose where the rights of women, for which it is supposed to be fighting, are already guaranteed.

The book “What are they up to?” , whose author is Emmanuel Todd, historian and demographer, who says: “France is a country where the emancipation of women took place in the absence of a strong feminist movement, it is (a country) of positive relations, of mutual seduction between men and women, equal in terms of sexual freedom”. And she reflects: “Nothing predicted here the emergence of an antagonism between the sexes”, referring to what she calls the third feminist wave.

I felt very identified with Todd's reflection because the same can be said about Argentina. In our country, as in France, patriarchy, if it ever existed, fell quickly. And easy. No fight, no green tides on the street. In Argentina, there is no patriarchal law, no law that enshrines the supremacy of men over women.

And this was not the result of a war of the sexes, in the style that is being fostered today, because feminism today has a binary logic: women are good, men are bad. What does feminism tell us today? That all boys are rapists. The one who is not a rapist today will be a rapist tomorrow. All potential femicides.

This encourages a rift, one more, a social fracture that has no reason to exist.

A distinctive feature of third-wave feminism is the lack of historical awareness that is reflected in a skewed reading of the past, simplistic, binary, and in the ignorance of previous achievements. Feminism today is believed to be foundational. The Argentines were slaves until Elizabeth Gómez Alcorta came to a ministry.

The other day I listened to one of the gender courses that officials, legislators, etc. have to endure by law. I say “cheesy” because that is what they are: a set of superficialities, fallacies and simplifications. I took the trouble of listening to the whole class that, in the midst of the pandemic, the Minister for Women and so on gave to the national deputies in Congress. In 2020, because even the coronavirus did not stop gender-mania.

There it was said that it was international organizations and world feminism that came to the aid of the Argentine women who were subjected. The milestones of emancipation were the UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, in 1979; and in 1994, the Inter-American Convention on the Elimination of Violence against Women.

To say that in a pioneering country in women's political participation is what I call a lack of historical awareness. By that time, Argentines had already had a female president, Isabel Perón, in 1974, and since 1991, we had an advanced quota law that feminized the Argentine Congress long before the European parliaments.

But for Gómez Alcorta, equality for Argentine women “has taken a long time.” Although he later said that, in 1926, “when there were only men in Congress”, the first law on civil rights for women was enacted. How could a trouser congress vote anything in favor of skirts?

It enumerated all laws for the benefit of women with one notorious omission: the 1991 Women's Quota Act. Why didn't you name her? This law was the first major push for political equality in this democratic period. But it was the initiative of a man and voted for by men. It was not a law torn from patriarchy. A legislator presented the bill, but in Congress thousands of bills can be presented and if there is no political will, nothing happens. Dora Barrancos, who today advises Alberto Fernández and has amnesia, acknowledged at the time that it was the personal involvement of President Carlos Menem, who called the deputies remissable one by one and sent his then Minister of the Interior, José Luis Manzano to convince them, which caused the law to be voted on. The Argentine Congress went from having 16 women and 266 men before the quota to having 41 women in 1993, more than twice as much, and in 1995, 74 women and 195 men. France, in 1997, still had less than 10% women in its Assembly.

Last year marked the 30th anniversary of the enactment of that law. What did feminists do? They praised themselves and didn't even name Menem. Why? Because in the current climate you cannot recognize anything positive about a man towards women. The men are in purgatory, all of them.

Feminists claim merits they don't have. In 1991 there was no active feminist movement in Argentina, there was no demonstration to press for this law. It was the work of a president and an overwhelmingly male Parliament that would cease to be so by its own accord. I mean, they were men voluntarily renouncing their power. Renouncing patriarchy. Sharing power with women.

Specifically, patriarchy, if it ever existed in absolute form, that is, the man who owns lives and hacienda, disappeared in a century without resistance. Potential rapists and femicides surrendered without a fight, gave up their privileges without violent, massive, unavoidable pressure. If we take irony to the extreme, we should conclude that patriarchy emancipated women.

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Indigestible to the current feminist narrative that is built on the basis of a war of the sexes, an antagonism that did not exist in the past, but does exist in its program.

In Argentina, there is no gender pay gap: equal work, equal remuneration; women freely dispose of their property; parental authority is shared and children can be registered with either the mother's or father's surname.

Feminism never had relevance in Argentina, and especially it did not play a role in the moments of greatest advancement of women: between 1947 and until the 90s. The bulk of our conquests are from that stage.

Another fallacy of third-wave feminism is the idea that genders have no biological basis and that heteronormative is nothing more than an invention of men to subdue women.

Recently, Alice Coffin, an LGBT activist from France, said: “Not having a husband [saves] me from being raped, beaten, murdered.” And he invited women “... to become lesbians.”

Beatriz Gimeno, also an LGBT activist, being director of the Spanish Institute for Women, added her contribution by saying: “Heterosexuality is not the natural way of experiencing sexuality, but a political and social tool (...) for women's subordination to men”.

An Argentine reference for NiunaMenos said: “The heterosexual couple is a risk factor for women's lives.”

Many feminists claim that they do not commune with these expressions, but they do not publicly distance themselves because they have to be on the wave, because it is easier to be carried away by the tide than to row against it.

Emmanuel Todd's book reviews all the anthropological studies of human societies and it is clear from them that “monogamy, the heterosexual couple, the male-female axis, is the statistically dominant structure in the species Homo sapiens since its appearance 200 or 300 thousand years ago”. “The nuclear family is almost as old as humanity,” he says.

For radicalized feminism, heterosexual marriage and the sexual division of labor are inventions of monotheism and capitalism. But anthropology and ethnography long ago shattered the claims that they are a construction, a conspiracy of men against women, or an imposition of the Church that, as we know, is to blame for everything.

According to Todd, the reason why this basic structure of human society is so widespread and so successful is that it was a male-female association for the raising and education of children. Unlike other mammals, human breeding is dependent on parents for a long time. It takes about 15 years for him to mature biologically. Male and female have then been associated since the beginning of time because that is the most efficient way to ensure the perpetuation of the species.

Ultrafeminists will say that Todd has no gender focus, but Margaret Mead (1901-1978), one of the most famous anthropologists in history, already maintained the same thing in her work Male and Female (1949), “Male and Female”, in which she confirms the universality of the male-female opposition in the organization of societies. The predominant model was the family whose center is the male-female couple, cooperating and supportive in the raising and education of children. The few exceptions that were and still exist (polygamy and polygyny) are only a confirmation of the rule.

As for the history of female emancipation, which is not exactly the same as the history of feminism, I want to highlight something that Simone de Beauvoir also says, whom the feminists of the third wave have obviously not read. I say this because there is currently no march or meeting of women without some group of exalted women targeting the nearest church, arguing that it is “enemy” of the female cause. They should note that the greatest achievements of women in the area of political rights have taken place in societies with a Judeo-Christian cultural imprint. But everything that does not fit into the dogma they have adopted must be denied.

That is why I rescue the intellectual honesty of Simone de Beauvoir, who in her book, when she reviews the history of the female condition, recognizes that early feminism, that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that of the suffragists, those predecessors who did fight, that first feminism was nourished by two aspects: a” revolutionary”, left-wing, socialist, and the other “a Christian feminism” -he says so verbatim- and recalls that the then pope, Benedict XV, spoke in favour of the women's vote as early as 1919 and that in France the propaganda in favor of that vote was carried out by Cardinal Alfred Baudrillart and the Dominican Antonin Sertillanges. In other words, the French church campaigned for the female vote as early as the 20s of the last century. In other words, in addition to left-wing suffragists, lay women, Marxists, socialists, there were Catholic suffragists. And the Church supported them.

“Christian feminism,” says the author of the feminist Bible.

In the same year 1919, an open letter from the Italian National Women's Union said: “Democratic parties give their eye to feminism, from time to time they show themselves as their champions, but they do not offer any organic and lasting contribution in the field of thought or action. Only the clerical and socialist parties (...) accommodate women even in their economic and political organizations”.

Historical amnesia is what allows feminists today to attribute achievements they do not have and ignore that the main advances in women's rights were not the result of a struggle of feminist groups, but a natural progress of society, or the result of cooperation between the sexes.

There is general agreement that there were two major waves of progress in the area of women's rights.

The first focused on political rights, the demand for participation in the public sphere, voting essentially, full citizenship. With church-backed suffragism.

The second wave of women's conquests occurred in the 1960s and 70s in the field of labor and sexuality. The contraceptive pill was a much more effective tool than all feminist activism in this emancipation because it allowed women to regulate procreation, decide their motherhood. And he equated her in sexual freedom with the male.

At that time there was a massive entry of women into the labour market, also facilitated by this increased birth control.

Since the 1990s, great progress has been made in the participation of women in positions of legislative and executive power.

And a trend that had come from afar is consolidated: the supremacy of women in university education. In other words, more women than men graduate from universities in almost every country in the western world, and Argentina is one of them. Feminism doesn't say anything about this because you can't give good news in this matter.

In particular, the process of female emancipation was quite rapid in the West, and there was no male resistance to this process.

The first and second feminist waves were not anti-masculine. They did not consider antagonism to males as the axis of their action. And many references of that classic or historical feminism strongly question the current movement. Recently Elisabeth Badinter, a historical feminist reference in France, spoke of a “warrior neo-feminism” that dishonors the cause of feminism. He said they have a “binary thinking” that leads us straight to “a totalitarian world.” “They have declared war of the sexes and, to win it, all methods are good.” Such as sacrificing principles as universal as the presumption of innocence and the right to defense.

If the achievements of previous stages are clear, let us ask ourselves what the benefits or achievements of this third wave have been and where this aggressive binarity comes from.

One of the “achievements” is a climate of social tension, a gender enmity, a product of which all men are prosecuted, not only for the abuses that some may commit today, but for all past, real or imagined grievances.

It is not a question of women's rights, but of imposing a vision of the world, of completing deconstruction, that operation that seeks to take forward universal truths and values of our culture.

The issue was not the emancipation of women but of questioning the biological origin of any difference between the sexes and denying any natural cooperation between them.

In Todd's words: solidarity and complementarity between the sexes is replaced by antagonism and a binary vision in which women embody good and men embody evil. The man is guilty, because he is a male.

The obsession with erasing biological sex also explains what the French historian and psychoanalyst Elizabeth Roudinesco called the “transgender epidemic”. Of course they jumped into the jugular, and even the justice intervened that finally acquitted her. For Roudinesco, “today the anatomical difference in the name of gender has been eliminated”.

It is known that, since there are transgender males, that is, women who have made a transformation in their bodies to look like men but still have wombs and can therefore be born, feminists of the third wave consider that the word women discriminates against these people, and therefore call us “pregnant people”. And the one who protests is thrown the pack, like J.K. Rowling, the author of Harry Potter.

Now, not everyone has gone mad, and there are even transgender people who question this. I would like to quote Debbie Hayton, a brave British teacher and trade unionist who, despite being trans, denounces transgender ideology and the dogmatism that leads to denial of biology. She says, “I'll never be a woman, I can only look like it. I am a biological man who prefers to have a body similar to that of a woman.”

Debbie Hayton also criticizes gender transitions without proper psychological evaluation, the hormonization of minors or that there are trans competing in women's sports. All the excesses of the transgender epidemic that Roudinesco talks about.

For Emmanuel Todd, we are facing “an identity self-destruction”. “Society offers young people today an uncertain relationship with their sexual identity,” he says. [I clarify before they treat Todd as homophobic that in the same book he argues that the only species in which absolute homosexuality exists is human; that is, that is also natural]. But today confrontational feminism has launched a proper attack on the heterosexual that is associated with the artificial, violence and female domination.

When the President of the Nation says that he has met more heterosexual rogues than homosexuals rogues, he is joining this binary ideology that defines evil and good for gender. It's called discrimination.

Today's gender-mania is not a contribution to the status of women nor has it improved our societies. It is an erroneous response to the frustration of illusions that the end of the cold war may have aroused in our nations. We continue to suffer from very serious social injustices, marginality, violence, illegal trafficking, unemployment. Third-wave feminism is a distraction, a cover, that takes us away from the real problems. A non-existent gender pay gap is reported while doctors and teachers - men or women - earn unworthy wages.

Let's say it clearly: it is easier to fight against what does not exist - patriarchy, the gender pay gap - than against what really hinders our present and compromises our future.

Today we women have the doors to participation open; the answer cannot be to unleash a war of the sexes. The answer is to add the feminine element in the composition of the decision at all levels. It would be regrettable if female emancipation had the effect of discord, social fragmentation, gender enmity.

The challenge is to demonstrate that, in public accountability decision-making, our participation will lead to more dialogue, more understanding, harmony and peace.

But we are bombarded by international power plants that aim to denature the human race and by a feminism that wants to sectarize us, reduce us to the struggle for menstruation management and other absurdities of the kind that are basically the antipodes of the emancipation they preach.

How long are we women going to allow the exponents of this aggressive neo-feminism and the enemy of men to speak on our behalf?

Just as confrontational feminism is globalized, we must generate a networked counterculture so that these currents that promote gender enmity do not continue to arrogate representations and merits that they do not have. It does not matter that today this supposedly feminist discourse seems dominant; it does not represent the thinking of most women.

I was never very affected by the word feminism because I do not associate it with the achievements of women throughout history, which, in many countries, and in Argentina in particular, were not the result of a “collective” of women but of male-female cooperation. But even so, it is a term that is supposed to be associated with strength, participation, and the emancipation of women.

So I ask: can a movement that underestimates women be called feminism to the point of postulating that we need them to speak to us in inclusive order to take us for allusions?

Is it possible to call feminism a movement that by regulation forces 50% participation in decision-making places, not on merits but by quota, thus weakening the plot structure of the struggle for equality?

Can we call feminism this trend for which the entire history of humanity is explained in the key of the war of the sexes, of men exploiting women; that promotes sexual apartheid, which postulates that a woman can only be represented by another woman; that heterosexual marriage is a danger, which is hidden in every male a female predator?

Can we call feminism a movement that cannot even name us, that calls us a pregnant person, a menstruating person or a pregnant body?

Can we call feminism a movement that says it comes to give us power and that treats us as disabled and permanent victims?

Can we call feminism a movement that postulates that being born a woman is a disgrace and that the opposite sex is not our complement but an absolute antagonist?

Can we call this a movement to fight for women's rights? Are the interests of women represented in this current of such media visibility?

Can we continue to tolerate the fact that, under the excuse of gender, politicians and governments, at all levels and of all signs, distribute perks and positions, and use us as an excuse to avoid the solution to the real problems?

We have to say enough and, if we feel, if we are, emancipated people, as we are, take on the challenge of taking charge, together with men, of all the problems. We are not a collective. We're not just concerned about our menstruation. We put everyone's cross on our shoulders. No problem in our country, of our compatriots, men and women of all walks of life, can be alien to us.

[The video of the full talk can be seen on the CEHCA YouTube channel]

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