Democratic Feminist Quotes

My father despises cats. He believes them to be Democrats. He considers them to be little mean hillary clintons covered all over with feminist legfur. Cats would have abortions, if given half a chance. Cats would have abortions for fun. Consequently our own soft sinner, a soulful snowshoe named Alice, will stay shut in the bedroom upstairs, padding back and forth on cashmere paws, campaigning for equal pay, educating me about my reproductive system, and generally plotting the downfall of all men.

The way she told it, she was such a criminal even the most God-fearing church ladies got bored of reporting on her; she did the marketing on Sunday, dropped by any church she liked or none at all, was a feminist (which Mrs. Asher sometimes confused with communist), a Democrat (which Mrs. Lincoln pointed out practically had "demon" in the word itself), and, worst of all, a vegetarian (which ruled out any dinner invitations from Mrs. Snow).

What the hell is this? Station after station, talk, talk, talk about the devil and the liberal democrats, what??? They still looking for communists? I dont believe this shit. Give me an amen and thank you jesus...whats with these people? This whole world is one big trailer park. They hate everybody. If theyre not hanging 'gays' they are hanging 'feminists', oh thank god for an 'off' button. Krist, my heart is pounding. Where am I? This cant be the same country I spent my entire life in.

It seems that a whole lot of people, both Christians and non-Christians, are under the impression that you can’t be a Christian and vote for a Democrat, you can’t be a Christian and believe in evolution, you can’t be a Christian and be gay, you can’t be a Christian and have questions about the Bible, you can’t be a Christian and be tolerant of other religions, you can’t be a Christian and be a feminist, you can’t be a Christian and drink or smoke, you can’t be a Christian and read the New York Times, you can’t be a Christian and support gay rights, you can’t be a Christian and get depressed, you can’t be a Christian and doubt. In fact, I am convinced that what drives most people away from Christianity is not the cost of discipleship but rather the cost of false fundamentals. False fundamentals make it impossible for faith to adapt to change. The longer the list of requirements and contingencies and prerequisites, the more vulnerable faith becomes to shifting environments and the more likely it is to fade slowly into extinction. When the gospel gets all entangled with extras, dangerous ultimatums threaten to take it down with them. The yoke gets too heavy and we stumble beneath it.

We seek in one another the assurance that there is just one correct interpretation of the world, that everything is so simple that anybody can see it unless they're malicious or stupid or willfully ignorant; and we punish one another for proving with our differing conclusions that the truth is not that easy. We think we must suppress dissension to present the unified front we need to gain power over our enemies. But there are pro-life Democrats, pro-choice Christians, feminists who love their families, and conservatives who care about poor people.

Kitsch has its source in the categorical agreement with being. But what is the basis of being? God? Mankind? Struggle? Love? Man? Woman? Since opinions vary, there are various kitsches: Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Communist, Fascist, democratic, feminist, European, American, national, international. Since the days of the French Revolution, one half of Europe has been referred to as the left, the other half as the right. Yet to define one or the other by means of the theoretical principles it professes is all but impossible. And no wonder: political movements rest not so much on rational attitudes as on the fantasies, images, words, and archetypes that come together to make up this or that political kitsch.

as neoliberalism has entered its current crisis, the urge to reinvent feminist radicalism may be reviving. In an Act Three that is still unfolding, we could see a reinvigorated feminism join other emancipatory forces aiming to subject runaway markets to democratic control. In that case, the movement would retrieve its insurrectionary spirit, while deepening its signature insights: its structural critique of capitalism’s androcentrism, its systemic analysis of male domination, and its gender-sensitive revisions of democracy and justice.

I’m especially amazed that feminists will preach countless tales advocating for the empowerment of women in almost all ways except for the one that matters most—protection of their physical safety. Throw a firearm into the equation, and modern-day feminists adopt the patriarchal prejudice represented by Colorado Democrats: Women suddenly become stupid, weak little creatures, unfit to carry a firearm.

and I am now convinced that we need to think about a new way of going beyond capitalism, a new form of socialism, participative and decentralized, federal and democratic, ecological, multiracial, and feminist.

what makes the choice pressing for us now is the absence of any viable middle way. We owe the dearth of alternatives to neoliberalism: that exceptionally predatory, financialized form of capitalism that has held sway across the globe for the last forty years. Having poisoned the atmosphere, mocked every pretense of democratic rule, stretched our social capacities to their breaking point, and worsened living conditions generally for the vast majority, this iteration of capitalism has raised the stakes for every social struggle, transforming sober efforts to win modest reforms into pitched battles for survival. Under such conditions, the time for fence-sitting is past, and feminists must take a stand: Will we continue to pursue “equal opportunity domination” while the planet burns? Or will we reimagine gender justice in an anticapitalist form—one that leads beyond the present crisis to a new society?

My father despises cats. He believes them to be Democrats. He considers them to be little mean hillary clintons covered all over with feminist legfur. Cats would have abortions, if given half a chance. Cats would have abortions for fun. Consequently our own soft sinner, a soulful snowshoe named Alice, will stay shut in the bedroom upstairs, padding back and forth on cashmere paws, campaigning for equal pay, educating me about my reproductive options, and generally plotting the downfall of all men.

However, what stores like Urban Outfitters—and every mall goth’s favorite, Hot Topic—offer is unprecedented access to subcultures often out of reach for young people. Those in rural areas without a local witch shop or knowledge about the occultic side of the internet can be introduced to an entire subculture through these stores. Perhaps they will pick up a tarot deck first as a gag gift, and then look further into the ancient practice of divination, and maybe even learn about the feminist history of Pamela Coleman Smith, a member of British occult society the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, who is responsible for creating the iconic images on the ubiquitous Rider-Waite deck. Where democratic dissemination ends and exploitation begins is tricky territory.

When freshman Democrat congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib endorsed Bernie Sanders, they were chastised in both traditional and social media for throwing their support behind “an old white guy” rather than a woman. How is it that so many white feminists still cannot grasp the many factors that shape the politics of women from such diverse backgrounds?

McGovern’s revenge also represents the Democrats’ switch from a party of blue-collar workers to a party of urban elites—feminists, vegans, drug legalizers, untaxed hedge fund operators, and transgender-rights activists. Back when Democrats still claimed to represent working Americans, they opposed illegal immigration. Since being taken over by the Far Left, all that matters to them is changing the electorate to one that doesn’t mind liberal insanity.

they ignored the most critical element of the matter: it is impossible to be born the wrong social construct. This bears repeating: If gender is a social construct, you cannot be born the wrong gender. Feminist theorists must choose: either gender is a social construct, and therefore transgenders are a logical impossibility, or transgenders are real, and therefore gender is something you're born with. Feminists don't care for logic or science. Apparently, they only care about their agenda: destroy men and everything related to them, including ideas of masculinity.

Black feminist thought and practice respond to a fundamental contradiction of U.S. society. On the one hand, democratic promises of individual freedom, equality under the law, and social justice are made to all American citizens. Yet on the other hand, the reality of differential group treatment based on race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship status persists. Groups organized around race, class, and gender in and of themselves are not inherently a problem. However, when African-Americans, poor people, women, and other groups discriminated against see little hope for group-based advancement, this situation constitutes social injustice.

My mom had told me the stories about the first few years she’d lived here. The way she told it, she was such a criminal even the most God-fearing church ladies got bored of reporting on her; she did the marketing on Sunday, dropped by any church she liked or none at all, was a feminist (which Mrs. Asher sometimes confused with communist), a Democrat (which Mrs. Lincoln pointed out practically had “demon” in the word itself), and worst of all, a vegetarian (which ruled out any dinner invitations from Mrs. Snow). Beyond that, beyond not being a member of the right church or the DAR or the National Rifle Association, was the fact that my mom was an outsider.

All those feminists who had hoped that women’s liberation could be brought about by putting pressure on the state and thus getting more social welfare for women, or by demanding equal opportunities for women in the job market, particularly in the higher ranks of this market, or by increasing women’s participation in political and other decision-making bodies, find their expectations shattered. They have to realize today that the fundamental democratic rights, the claim to equality and freedom, are also fair-weather rights, as far as women are concerned, and that these rights, in spite of the rhetoric of their universality, are suspended when the accumulation needs of capital require this.

A great liberal betrayal is afoot. Unfortunately, many “fellow-travelers” of Islamism are on the liberal side of this debate. I call them “regressive leftists”; they are in fact reverse racists. They have a poverty of expectation for minority groups, believing them to be homogenous and inherently opposed to human rights values. They are culturally reductive in how they see “Eastern”—and in my case, Islamic—culture, and they are culturally deterministic in attempting to freeze their ideal of it in order to satisfy their orientalist fetish. While they rightly question every aspect of their “own” Western culture in the name of progress, they censure liberal Muslims who attempt to do so within Islam, and they choose to side instead with every regressive reactionary in the name of “cultural authenticity” and anticolonialism. They claim that their reason for refusing to criticize any policy, foreign or domestic—other than those of what they consider “their own” government—is that they are not responsible for other governments’ actions. However, they leap whenever any (not merely their own) liberal democratic government commits a policy error, while generally ignoring almost every fascist, theocratic, or Muslim-led dictatorial regime and group in the world. It is as if their brains cannot hold two thoughts at the same time. Besides, since when has such isolationism been a trait of liberal internationalists? It is a right-wing trait. They hold what they think of as “native” communities—and I use that word deliberately—to lesser standards than the ones they claim apply to all “their” people, who happen to be mainly white, and that’s why I call it reverse racism. In holding “native” communities to lesser—or more culturally “authentic”—standards, they automatically disempower those communities. They stifle their ambitions. They cut them out of the system entirely, because there’s no aspiration left. These communities end up in self-segregated “Muslim areas” where the only thing their members aspire to is being tin-pot community leaders, like ghetto chieftains. The “fellow-travelers” fetishize these “Muslim” ghettos in the name of “cultural authenticity” and identity politics, and the ghetto chieftains are often the leading errand boys for them. Identity politics and the pseudo-liberal search for cultural authenticity result in nothing but a downward spiral of competing medieval religious or cultural assertions, fights over who are the “real” Muslims, ever increasing misogyny, homophobia, sectarianism, and extremism. This is not liberal. Among the left, this is a remnant of the socialist approach that prioritizes group identity over individual autonomy. Among the right, it is ironically a throwback from the British colonial “divide and rule” approach. Classical liberalism focuses on individual autonomy. I refer here to liberalism as it is understood in the philosophical sense, not as it’s understood in the United States to refer to the Democratic Party—that’s a party-political usage. The great liberal betrayal of this generation is that in the name of liberalism, communal rights have been prioritized over individual autonomy within minority groups. And minorities within minorities really do suffer because of this betrayal. The people I really worry about when we have this conversation are feminist Muslims, gay Muslims, ex-Muslims—all the vulnerable and bullied individuals who are not just stigmatized but in many cases violently assaulted or killed merely for being against the norm.

Donald Trump is rape culture's blathering id, and just a few days after the Access Hollywood tape dropped, then Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton (who, no doubt, has just as many man-made scars as the rest of us) was required to stand next to him on a stage for a presidential debate and remain unflappable while being held to an astronomically higher standard and pretend that he was her equal while his followers persisted in howling that sexism is a feminist myth. While Trump bragged about sexual assault and vowed to suppress disobedient media, cable news pundits spent their time taking a protractor to Clinton's smile - a constant, churning microanalysis of nothing, a subtle subversion of democracy that they are poised to repeat in 2020. And then she lost. (Actually, in a particularly painful living metaphor, she won, but because of institutional peculiarities put in place by long-dead white men, they took it from her and gave it to the man with fewer votes.

Take Canada again: why does Canada have the health-care program it does? Up until the mid-1960s, Canada and the United States had the same capitalist health service: extremely inefficient, tons of bureaucracy, huge administrative costs, millions of people with no insurance coverage―exactly what would be amplified in the United States by Clinton's proposals for "managed competition" [put forward in 1993].21 But in 1962 in Saskatchewan, where the N.D.P. is pretty strong and the unions are pretty strong, they managed to put through a kind of rational health-care program of the sort that every industrialized country in the world has by now, except the United States and South Africa. Well, when Saskatchewan first put through that program, the doctors and the insurance companies and the business community were all screaming―but it worked so well that pretty soon all the other Provinces wanted the same thing too, and within a couple years guaranteed health care had spread over the entire country. And that happened largely because of the New Democratic Party in Canada, which does provide a kind of cover and a framework within which popular organizations like unions, and then later things like the feminist movement, have been able to get together and do things.

But surely, say these good apostles, you aren't going to discredit reality in the eyes of those who already find it difficult enough to get by, and who surely have a right to reality and the fact that they exist? The same objection for the Third World: surely you aren't going to discredit affluence in the eyes of those dying of starvation? Or: surely you aren't going to run down the class struggle in the eyes of those who haven't even had their bourgeois revolution? Or again: you aren't going to discredit feminist and egalitarian demands in the eyes of all those who haven't even heard of women's rights, etc.? You may not like reality, but don't put others off it! It's a question of democratic morality: you must not demoralize the masses. You must never demoralize anyone. Underlying these charitable intentions is a profound contempt. First, in the fact of instating reality as a kind of life insurance or a burial plot held in perpetuity, as a kind of human right or consumer good. But, above all, in crediting people with placing their hope only in the visible proofs of their existence: by imputing this plaster-saint realism to them, one takes them for naive and feeble-minded. In their defence, it has to be said that the propagandists of reality vent that contempt on themselves first of all, reducing their own lives to an accumulation of facts and evidence, causes and effects. Well-ordered resentment always begins at home.

In the real world, however, the claim that censorship or enforced orthodoxy protects minorities and the marginalized has been comprehensively disproved, again and again and again. “Censorship has always been on the side of authoritarianism, conformity, ignorance, and the status quo,” write Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman in their book Free Speech on Campus, “and advocates for free speech have always been on the side of making societies more democratic, more diverse, more tolerant, more educated, and more open to progress.”30 They and former American Civil Liberties Union president Nadine Strossen, in her powerful book Hate: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship, list the horrors and oppressions which have befallen minorities in the name of making society safe from dangerous ideas. “Laws censoring ‘hate speech’ have predictably been enforced against those who lack political power,” writes Strossen.31 In America, under the Alien and Sedition Acts, authorities censored and imprisoned sympathizers of the opposition party (including members of Congress) and shut down opposition newspapers; under the Comstock laws, they censored works by Aristophanes, Balzac, Oscar Wilde, and James Joyce (among others); under the World War I anti-sedition laws, they convicted more than a thousand peace activists, including the Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, who ran for president in 1920 from a prison cell.32 In more recent times, when the University of Michigan adopted one of the first college speech codes in 1988, the code was seized upon to charge Blacks with racist speech at least twenty times.33 When the United Kingdom passed a hate-speech law, the first person to be convicted was a Black man who cursed a white police officer.34 When Canadian courts agreed with feminists that pornography could be legally restricted, authorities in Toronto promptly charged Canada’s oldest gay bookstore with obscenity and seized copies of the lesbian magazine Bad Attitude.35 All around the world, authorities quite uncoincidentally find that “hateful” and “unsafe” speech is speech which is critical of them—not least in the United States, where, in 1954, the U.S. Postal Service used obscenity laws to censor ONE, a gay magazine whose cover article (“You Can’t Print It!”) just happened to criticize the censorship policies of the U.S. Postal Service.

the Democrats’ switch from a party of blue-collar workers to a party of urban elites—feminists, vegans, drug legalizers, untaxed hedge fund operators, and transgender-rights activists.

My father despises cats. He believes them to be Democrats. He considers them to be little mean hillary clintons covered all over with feminist legfur. Cats would have abortions, if given half a chance. Cats would have abortions for fun.

It would be half-wrong to say it started with Sigmund Freud. It did not really start, in America, until the 1940s. And then again, it was less a start than the prevention of an end. The old prejudices -- women are animals, less than human, unable to think like men, born merely to breed and serve men -- were not so easily dispelled by the crusading feminists, by science and education, and by the democratic spirit after all. They merely reappeared in the forties, in Freudian disguise. The feminine mystique derived its power from Freudian thought; for it was an idea born of Freud, which led women, and those who studied them, to misinterpret their mothers' frustrations, and their fathers' and brothers' and husbands' resentments and inadequacies, and their own emotions and possible choices in life.

[W]hat is historically new is the alliance with the cultural left. Back in the 1960s, many economically minded New Deal liberals and even socialists wanted nothing to do with the cultural warriors of the New Left, thinking them shallow and feckless. No more. There is today not much distance between the postmodern cultural leftists and the democratic socialists like [Bernie] Sanders who want to focus mainly on economics. The two sides can run afoul of each other, as Sanders did at a Netroots Nation conference in July 2015 when black activists shouted him off the stage. But these disputes have more to do with different priorities than with ideological divisions. Philosophically there is not much daylight between Sanders and the hard-core cultural warriors of the post-modern left. The same is true for Hillary Clinton. She, in fact, tries to appeal to both sides at the same time. She sells herself not only as a postmodernist feminist candidate who will be the first female president of the United States, but as a classic fighter for the economically downtrodden. The fusion has been the strength of her candidacy, because is represents the broadest appeal to all the constituents of the Democratic Party.

(The Christian doctrine of Original Sin holds that all humans have an inborn “perversion of will and defect of reason” — as St. Augustine stated it. The Feminist revision of Original Sin holds that only 49 percent of humans have these incurable inborn defects: the males. The Nazi version attributes Original Sin to about 12 percent: Jews and Slavs. I don’t like any of these notions, but the Christian version at least has the “democratic” spirit in spreading the heritage of guilt equally among all of us.)

For those who lack the classical education of New York’s early butchers and bakers, Xanthippe was Socrates’ wife, and has gone down in history as an atrocious nag. Socrates’ equanimity in enduring (ignoring) her is regularly held out as a proof of his nobility of character. Graves begins by pointing out: why is it that for two thousand years, no one seems to have asked what it might have actually been like to be married to Socrates? Imagine you were saddled with a husband who did next to nothing to support a family, spent all his time trying to prove everyone he met was wrong about everything, and felt true love was only possible between men and underage boys? You wouldn’t express some opinions about this? Socrates has been held out ever since as the paragon of a certain unrelenting notions of pure consistency, an unflinching determination to follow arguments to their logical conclusions, which is surely useful in its way--but he was not a very reasonable person, and those who celebrate him have ended up producing a "mechanized, insensate, inhumane, abstract rationality" that has done the world enormous harm. Graves writes that as a poet, he feels no choice but to identify himself more with those frozen out of the "rational" space of Greek city, starting with women like Xanthippe, for whom reasonableness doesn’t exclude logic (no one is actually *against* logic) but combines it with a sense of humor, practicality, and simple human decency. With that in mind, it only makes sense that so much of the initiative for creating new forms of democratic process--like consensus--has emerged from the tradition of feminism, which means (among other things) the intellectual tradition of those who have, historically, tended not to be vested with the power of command. Consensus is an attempt to create a politics founded on the principle of reasonableness--one that, as feminist philosopher Deborah Heikes has pointed out, requires not only logical consistency, but "a measure of good judgment, self-criticism, a capacity for social interaction, and a willingness to give and consider reasons." Genuine deliberation, in short. As a facilitation trainer would likely put it, it requires the ability to listen well enough to understand perspectives that are fundamentally different from one’s own, and then try to find pragmatic common ground without attempting to convert one’s interlocutors completely to one’s won perspective. It means viewing democracy as common problem solving among those who respect the fact they will always have, like all humans, somewhat incommensurable points of view. (p. 201-203)

Egyptian feminists, writes Salem, felt their Western counterparts “were not putting into practice the democratic principles that they consistently spoke of and encouraged” by failing to speak out against the colonization of Palestine.

We could never predict what moment in the service would trigger a full-blown crisis of faith. Once, it was the kids’ choir singing “Nothing but the Blood” during special music. “Surely I’m not the only one who thinks it’s creepy to hear all those little voices singing about getting washed in the flow of someone’s blood,” I muttered as Dan and I escaped out the double doors. Another time it was a prayer about God granting our troops victory over their enemies as they served him in Iraq. “Don’t you think the Iraqis are just as convinced God is on their side?” I whispered. Sometimes it was just the way people chatted in the fellowship hall about “those liberals,” as if feminists or Democrats or Methodists couldn’t possibly be in their midst. Often it was the assumption that women were unfit to speak from the pulpit or pass the collection plate on Sunday mornings, but were welcome to serve the men their key lime pie at the church picnic.

Susan Sontag, one of Rushdie’s most loyal defenders, Daniel Pipes, an American conservative, and, later, Kenan Malik, a British historian of the struggles for free speech, all noticed the dangers of London and Washington’s stance. They were telling Muslim democrats, free-thinkers, feminists and liberals that human rights were Western rights, and not for brown-skinned people from a clashing ‘civilisation’. You can call this cultural relativism, but ‘racism’ is a blunter and better word.

However, even though I find much of this anti-essentialist-inspired analysis compelling, I nonetheless hope to illuminate two problems that arise when this form of criticism is uncritically wielded in the context of Indigenous peoples’ struggles for recognition and self-determination. First, using recent feminist and deliberative democratic critiques of Indigenous recognition politics as a backdrop, I demonstrate how normative appropriations of social constructivism can undercut the liberatory aspirations of anti-essentialist criticism by failing to adequately address the complexity of interlocking social relations that serve to exasperate the types of exclusionary cultural practices that critics of essentialism find so disconcerting. Second, and perhaps more problematically, I show that when constructivist views of culture are posited as a universal feature of social life and then used as a means to evaluate the legitimacy of Indigenous claims for cultural recognition against the uncontested authority of the colonial state, it can serve to sanction the very forms of domination and inequality that anti-essentialist criticism ought to mitigate.

From Harris’s lips we hear the word “democracy,” erroneously supposing that democracy signifies individual rights. But Harris is a woman of the left, a so-called “feminist” whose hatred of motherhood is seen in her advocacy for infanticide. In all this, she is a true democrat who believes that voting can make murder into a right. This shows that the Framers of the Constitution did not trust democracy for good reason. It was, after all, the system that put Socrates to death and ordered the Melian genocide.

both women writers and questions of gender and sex have been central to the development of Arab intellectual and political life beyond the confines of well-known debates about the status and rights of women. Specifically, it shows how a broad faith in middle-class women’s power as childrearers enabled Islamists, liberals, and feminists alike to contend with three questions that defined intellectual life: how to imagine futures after imperial rule, how to balance the promises of democratic politics with the interests of reformist elites, and how to stabilize existing social hierarchies under the shifting conditions of colonial capitalism. In other words, the story of tarbiya lays out some of the central contradictions of democracy and capitalism as they were encountered in Cairo and Beirut. On another level, the book attempts to think with the concept of tarbiya to analyze the broader questions of social and political reproduction that challenged Arab intellectuals and many others at the turn of the twentieth century, and that continue to challenge us today.13 It shows how writers, both men and women, turned to childrearing to understand

We need to understand how democratic peoples sometimes espouse what William ​James called in his own time American “stupidity and injustice,” arising from what he called an ethical “blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves.”21

Center of Southern Politics and Society found that, even though sexism was more common in white Republican men, “roughly 11 million white male Independents and Democrats feel enough animosity towards working women and feminists to make them unlikely to vote for one of them.”55 In the end, 12 percent of Sanders supporters ended up supporting Trump in the general election. When surveyed, almost half of those Sanders supporters turned Trump voters said they disagreed that white people have advantages in the United States, whereas only about 5 percent of Clinton voters disagreed that white people have advantages.56 Defection after a tough primary isn’t unusual. In the 2008 election, 15 percent of Clinton primary voters ended up voting for McCain in the general election, and many remember the racial tensions in that primary almost as vividly as they do the ones from the 2016 election.57 But the combination of the charged rhetoric of the 2016 election, the blatant sexism, ableism, and white supremacy of the Trump campaign, and the large policy differences between Trump and Sanders led many to expect that the number of voters who were willing to cross over to support the Republican candidate would be much lower than it had been in the 2008 election.

Judged historically, the free market is the most successful economic arrangement. Permitting people to trade and associate freely for productive purposes has created unparalleled prosperity, along with support for the democratic institutions on which other forms of individual liberty have been found to depend. It is inevitable that feminists reject the free market, however, because they must interpret the expressions of sex differences facili­tated by the freedom of the market as products of adverse socialization and discrimination.

Peterson argues that lessons on patriarchy tend to demonize boys, suppressing their natural competitive drive. “Our culture confuses men’s desire for achievement and competence with the patriarchal desire for tyrannical power, and that’s a big mistake,” he says. When an interviewer asserts that men own the vast majority of wealth and that women do more unpaid labor, Peterson responds that it is a tiny proportion of men. “A huge proportion of people who are seriously disaffected are men; most people in prison are men; most people who are on the street are men; most victims of violent crime are men; most people who commit suicide are men; most people who die in wars are men; people who do worse in school are men. Where’s the dominance here, precisely? What you are doing is taking a tiny substratum of hyper-successful men and using that to represent the entire structure of Western society. There’s nothing about that that’s vaguely appropriate.”17 Peterson says the feminists’ labeling of the entirety of Western civilization as a patriarchy just because it contains some corruptions and imperfections that might be called “patriarchal” is irrational and unjust.

At first, feminists were assumed to be only discontented suburban housewives; then a small bunch of women’s libbers, “bra burners,”3 and radicals; then women on welfare; then briefcase-carrying imitations of male executives; then unfulfilled women who forgot to have children; then women voters responsible for a gender gap that really could decide elections. That last was too dangerous, so suddenly we were told we were in a “postfeminist” age, so we would relax, stop, quit. Indeed, the common purpose in all these disparate and contradictory descriptions is to slow and stop a challenge to the current hierarchy. But controversy is a teacher. The accusation that feminism is bad for the family leads to understanding that it’s bad for the patriarchal variety, but good for democratic families that are the basis of democracy.

Should we be the least bit surprised when we, along with some biblical writers, find ourselves wandering beyond the words in the Bible as we think about what God is like, sensing that the God we see there made sense for that time but not necessarily for ours, and that the God we were introduced to in the Bible is not in every way the God we believe in here and now? My answer to that rather convoluted question is, “No, we should not be surprised.” God is relentlessly reimagined all around us. American Christians have reimagined God as feminist, environmentalist, capitalist, refugee, soldier, Republican, Democrat, socialist, and on and on. Some portraits of God I agree with more than others (and let the debates begin), but the act of reimagining God in ways that reflect our time and place is self-evident, unavoidable, and necessary.

My friend’s dad was a teacher in the local public schools, a loyal member of the teachers’ union, and a more dedicated liberal than most: not only had he been a staunch supporter of George McGovern, but in the 1980 Democratic primary he had voted for Barbara Jordan, the black U.S. Representative from Texas. My friend, meanwhile, was in those days a high school Republican, a Reagan youth who fancied Adam Smith ties and savored the writing of William F. Buckley. The dad would listen to the son spout off about Milton Friedman and the godliness of free-market capitalism, and he would just shake his head. Someday, kid, you’ll know what a jerk you are. It was the dad, though, who was eventually converted. These days he votes for the farthest-right Republicans he can find on the ballot. The particular issue that brought him over was abortion. A devout Catholic, my friend’s dad was persuaded in the early nineties that the sanctity of the fetus outweighed all of his other concerns, and from there he gradually accepted the whole pantheon of conservative devil-figures: the elite media and the American Civil Liberties Union, contemptuous of our values; the la-di-da feminists; the idea that Christians are vilely persecuted—right here in the U.S. of A. It doesn’t even bother him, really, when his new hero Bill O’Reilly blasts the teachers’ union as a group that “does not love America.

For many enslaved Africans, the Bible only became an avenue of resistance because it was one of the few books available to Black folks in a white, Christian-dominated society that prohibited Black literacy. Reading the Bible and applying its lessons of redemptive suffering, salvation, and struggle aided African Americans in their revolutionary fight against the “contradictions” of chattel slavery in a so-called democratic nation.

But when we turn it outward and focus it on the powers that would crush us into submission and give back to us a mangled image of ourselves, Black women’s rage is a kind of power that America would do well to heed if it wants to finally live up to its stated democratic aims.

Radical feminists regularly insinuate that accepting the empirical evidence that children fare better with their fathers in the home suggests that women ought to remain in abusive relationships if they become pregnant. This is a twisted, neoliberal assessment that works to devalue the presence of men, through the argument of an extreme.