Why Does the Left Hate Women So Much?

I once took a Soviet film class where we were introduced to the brilliant propaganda of Sergei Eisenstein and the later films of “the thaw.” The “thaw” period in the Soviet bloc was marked by films that included elements or subjects no one would have dared touch just a few years prior.

What was one of the thaw-period films we watched? A daring film for the time and place called Commisar in which a female party appartchik decides to become—gasp!—a mother. It gets more shocking: she finds motherhood fulfilling. Any Russian film showing a woman embracing motherhood over party would have previously gotten a director frog-marched to a Siberian labor camp. Since Stalin was dead, Commisar’s director only got accused of “social parasitism” and banned for life from ever making films again. Apparently, the communist country had not thawed that much. Having the mother finally abandon her baby at the end of the film to rejoin the revolution was not enough to placate the Soviet censors. The film did not see the light of day until decades later as communism crumbled.

A woman’s natural biological devotion to her children interfered with the Marxist ideal of a mechanistic “laborer” in a new utopia. Leftist fellow travelers in the United States shared Soviet disdain for what they considered excessive female devotion to home and family life. American communist party activist Betty Friedan even plagiarized from Marxist theorist Friedrich Engels when writing The Feminine Mystique. After gaining fame, Friedan interviewed fellow Marxist Simone de Beauvoir who declared: “No woman should be authorized to stay at home to bring up her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.”

In the West, the chemical means to realize leftist dreams arrived with the advent of the birth control pill. Scientists first tested their experimental pill on poor minority women. Three of the women died in the study. No problem. They brought it to the mass market for millions of women across the globe. It makes women depressed and deadens their libidos, but it is all in the name of female progress. (Researchers recently tested a pill for men. Many of the men in the study became depressed or experienced problems with their libidos. Scientists immediately canceled the study.)

But to really follow their misogynist Marxist idols, the American left had to push for outright cruelty and legalize abortion. (The Soviet Union legalized abortion in 1920.) So they portrayed a woman’s womb as an unfair biological burden. After rhetorically establishing a woman’s body as a biological inferiority, they demeaned her life-giving capacity by portraying the child in her womb as less than human. For extra effect, they called the unborn child who is her unique gift to nourish a mere “parasite,” “zygote,” or “tissue.” While doing this, they were sure to sweep under the rug all the great early feminist thinkers who fought for the protection of the unborn child.

That was more than enough misogyny for the late twentieth century, but with the dawn of the twenty-first century the left decided to double-down on new ways to hate women. Who could have imagined anything as scornful of women as the latest left-wing ideological fad of transgenderism? In her book The Whole Woman, Germaine Greer wrote about “men who believe that they are women and have had themselves castrated to prove it, because they see women not as another sex but as a non-sex. No so-called sex-change has ever begged for a uterus-and-ovaries transplant; if uterus-and-ovaries transplants were made mandatory for wannabe women they would disappear overnight. The insistence that man-made women be accepted as women is the institutional expression of the mistaken conviction that women are defective males.” For her apostasy, Greer has since been pushed to the sidelines of polite company among the left.

Caitlyn Jenner, the movement’s most celebrated star has regularly reduced the idea of womanhood to one of dressed-up doll or pin-up. After being celebrated as Glamour Magazine’s “Women Of The Year,” Jenner said, “The hardest part about being a woman is figuring out what to wear.” Tell that to those who were actually born female.

The Marxist second-wave feminist movement unleashed forces against nature that are now beyond their control. Transgenderism is the natural consequence of reducing the biological beauty of womanhood.

Feminist author Susan Faludi offers a brutally honest description of the underlying male-to-female perception of women. In her memoir, In the Darkroom she recounts her father’s post-op transition to a transgendered female. According to the New York Times, “Faludi describes her father’s new self as ‘a transgender id in which becoming a woman was thoroughly sexualized, in which femininity was related in terms of bondage and humiliation and orgasm, and the transformation from one gender to another was eroticized at every step.’” Her father even pastes his new face onto a picture of a “maid’s outfit, this one belonging to a little girl, who was being disciplined by a stern schoolmarm in tweeds and lace-up boots.”

This eroticism is the elephant in the room the feminist movement refuses to deal with. If you accept the transgendered argument that they are in fact really women, you will be embracing a stereotyped, overly-sexualized notion of womanhood that is a hallmark of transgender culture.

Even more shockingly, appropriation of a coquettish pseudo-female stereotype is now being encouraged in confused male children. In Stafford County, VA a boy who identified as transgendered was allowed to wear high heels, dresses, make-up and jewelry in class. But real 9 and 10-year-old girls generally don’t dress to excess that way in school because they want to be able to play in the recess yard. You cannot jump rope in heels. The poor, troubled boy had clearly been fed a Disney princess cliché of girlhood, one that ultimately insults all the girls in his class. Femininity is not a default setting when masculinity becomes too frightening or difficult.

The transgendered movement is also on track to destroy women’s sports, the very sports liberals supposedly fought to encourage with Title IX. From Alaska to Connecticut, boys who could never beat other boys in a race are pummeling women in track meets, stealing away these girls’ chances for scholarships and first place glory. Here at Crisis, Paul Kengor described one boy who did not even bother to take hormones, make any physical changes or even shave his mustache before declaring himself a “girl” and beating the female competitors in state track finals. The real first place female cried, but did not dare protest.

Now the International Olympic Committee is encouraging men who identify as women to compete in female categories. (You will not see women who identify as men try to compete with men in any Olympic sports categories. I guarantee it.)

And so the long march demeaning women in radical new ways continues into the twenty-first century. The ideological left demeaned our wombs, mocked the beauty of the lives growing within us, and unleashed a hormonal revolution that further encouraged men to see women as mere sex objects. To add insult to injury, they are now claiming that men who know nothing of our unique physical and emotional selves rooted in our DNA are really just like us. The “pantomime dames,” as Greer called them, grace our magazine covers, advertise our make-up and overtake our sports. Apparently, biological females are not valued enough to even represent other women anymore. For bonus points, the media continue to write ludicrous articles about “pregnant men” just to get more swipes in at women’s unique life-nourishing gift. The left can never prove enough how much they despise women’s special capacity for motherhood.

Yet no matter how bad it gets I still see my left-wing acquaintances post their “Mighty Girl” memes while parroting the anti-women left’s lines. Dissenters are accused of “internalized misogyny.” If only these leftist women knew that it is they, not the dissenters, who are tools in a global misogynist agenda.