Girls Gone Wild – Sending You to the Easy Bake Oven

Libertarians, like everyone else, are familiar with how the same message gets more of an audience when delivered by a cute young thang, especially a cute young gal.  I can’t name any of the talented female vloggers and bloggers who benefit from this, since I’m friends with them.  One sometimes hears boy libertarians gripe about it.  (We need some older Objectivist scolds to hector them about how reality is what it is.)

So it should not have surprised anyone that years after many have forgotten (the late) manic Mary Daly, (the late) rotund Andrea Dworkin, or even pseudo-scholarly Catherine MacKinnon or best-selling Susan Brownmiller, a little blond twink (as we would describe her if she were a gay boy), Krista the Femitheist, gets covered in Vice and the libertarian blogosphere for proposing a radfem dystopia where Earth is genetically terra-formed into Serenity’s planet Miranda.  (I recommend, by the way, despite her schizophrenic misuse of Greek philosophy, Mary Daly books as beach and throne reading.  And the bloggers she has inspired are also fun to read.)

Femitheist is 22, had a baby as a teen, and isn’t exactly educated (she’s working on her undergraduate criminology degree).  So the fact that she adopts some radfem dystopian ideas isn’t that surprising. She might best be viewed as the XX version of an obnoxious teen boy troll, who also posts attention-grabbing vandalistic statements about sex and violence.  She’s back pedaling now, claiming she doesn’t advocate violence.  But it’s unclear how you achieve her ends without it. (She also says her ideas aren’t feminism.) No doubt she’s the kind of statist who thinks if she uses tax policy to nudge you (a tax on not aborting your male children?) she isn’t being violent.  (Think for a moment where she could go if she starts contrasting violent crime rates of different ethnic groups.)

That said, let me make two related observations: 1) her problem is not that she notices that male aggression has a link to war and crime, it’s that she wants to centrally plan its management, and so ends up on the road to serfdom and genocide and 2) radical feminism, to which I have been sympathetic, in its own way is akin to libertarianism, in that both claim to root themselves in wanting to found a society based on non-aggression.

Back to the first point – civilization has been largely about taming and educating aggression, and perhaps particularly male aggression, replacing war with trade, dictatorial rule with the rule of law, limiting government power, codifying individual rights for all genders and races and religions. (As Ayn Rand would say, replacing force with reason.)  Also by women, when allowed free choice, picking what kind of men they’d like to reproduce. This could certainly be aided by biotechnology. People might choose to have more kids, and boys, who have better impulse control, or whose aggression is channeled to exploration and not interpersonal physical domination. (Civilization is not about democracy or socialism – the world’s largest democracy is awash in gang rapes, and there have been war time rape camps in socialist countries.)

Her assumption that if we allow planning of this that she and the editors of Ms. will be in charge, instead of a state that produces docile, moderate IQ, incurious serfs, werewolvian soldiers, and subjects with expiration dates who die shortly after they can no longer breed or work, is a typically “progressive” assumption. If only her favorite leaders were the rulers…

She also assumes that “male” qualities like aggression are simply bad, and “female” qualities are better, and that she possesses the information needed to plan their optimum proportions and distributions in society. It seems possible that her project entails sending gay men to the gas chambers (at least through genetic counseling and abortion) and carefully eliminating or regulating the incidence of butch lesbians as well (who are after all just aggressive masculine personalities missing a non detachable penis).  Both groups seem inefficient for reproducing the next generation of female citizens she wants her State to plan.