FrontPage Magazine has published an interesting interview with Phyllis Chesler, who has been a major force in pushing the gender feminist (GF) agenda for decades now. In her new book “The Death of Feminism: What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom,” she is turning around and lambasting her sister- GFs as being sell-outs to the lure of academic and leftist prestige, etc. I don’t much sympathize with her “ringing the bell in the night” over how feminism has gone wrong since she is one of the reasons it went so many miles off course. Her media-proclaimed “brave” book that turns on GFs just as their movement is clearly dying raises my cynical hackles. For one thing … good timing! It is like buying a rising stock when it is low and then selling-short when you see an inevitable collapse. Of course, on Wall Street, Chesler would be arrested for insider trading, as she is in a position to influence the decline of the GF stock by publicly excoriating it. Her
interview (and book) are one more indication that gender feminism has lost its hold on society and will be fading fast in the next few years, leaving the rest of us to clean up the mess. Now its former leaders are trying to make a buck and preserve their prestige by distancing themselves from the failure that is their legacy.
Chesler’s heart bleeds so profusely for Third World women that she is proposing “a feminist foreign policy.” She criticizes GFs “because they refused to work with a Republican administration” and, so, shut themselves out of foreign policy. Aha . . . I begin to see where an enterprising ex-GF can make a new buck and acquire new prestige. I have
When you express wrenching compassion for the poor and oppressed, may I suggest that your accompanying photograph not show you in a glistening evening dress?
a suggestion for Chesler: how about repairing the damage you have wrought to gender relations in your own society first? Oh, and when you express wrenching compassion for the poor and oppressed, may I suggest that your accompany- ing photograph not show you in a glistening evening dress with a glass of wine cradled in your hands? Actually, forget my last suggestion. It gives the reader important information.
