How feminists have weaponised androgyny
by Melanie Phillips:
The culture war now raging over issues such as women’s pay, transgender or inappropriate sexual contact graphically illustrates the phenomenon I identified two decades ago.
I wrote a book called The Sex-Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male. In this, I argued that the contract between the sexes had been destroyed, that women’s equality was being confused with identical outcomes, and that masculinity was being run out of town altogether with men being reduced to little more than sperm donors, walking wallets and occasional au-pairs.
You’ll doubtless be amazed to hear that no publisher would touch it. The book was eventually published by a think-tank, the Social Market Foundation, which at that time was aware of the damage being done by the onslaught against bedrock civilisational values – and for which I had written a pamphlet along these lines two years previously. By 1999, however, when The Sex-Change Society was actually published, the think-tank had changed hands and ideological colour and did its best to bury the book. It is now out of print.
In the cause of providing some context for the current uproar, I shall be reproducing here some edited extracts from the book which I hope will be of some interest. I start with passages from the chapter which spelled out the cultural disorder behind today’s explosive transgender issue.
The Myth of Androgyny
“Androgyny not only took feminist thinking a stage further. It arose out of the founding feminist belief that gender roles were socially constructed and that biology had little part to play. The question ‘nature or nurture?’, whether people are born with a fixed and unchangeable character or are moulded and shaped by experience, is one of the most profound and hotly disputed of all human inquiry. As Andrew Heywood has written, most feminists believe that sex differences are minor, and that human nature is androgynous with each sex possessing both male and female traits.
Gender roles thus become artificial constructs. Simone de Beauvoir wrote: ‘Women are made, they are not born’. What makes them, apparently, are society’s stereotypes, nailed firmly into place by the traditional family. According to Kate Millett, boys and girls were conditioned into roles within the family, ‘patriarchy’s chief institution’.
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