Wolf, Huffington,… all come from the white upper economic classes, their so called progressivism is quite shallow especially when it comes to economic class sensitivity and yes, feminism. (And honestly, I question their racial sensitivity and homosexual sensitivity as well- it’s more they’ve simply replaced the old negative stereotypes with positive stereotypes that are every bit as false, which is why they have such extreme verbal reactions when their mindsets are questioned- plus it’s only certain groups that they are “sensitive” about racism, they sure as heck aren’t sensitive about not making racist remarks againist Asians, Asian Americans or the peoples of the many Native American tribes. (I’ve witnessed that racism firsthand on places like Kos and Huffington. I am of mixed Scottish American and Native American ancestry and look Ameriasian- was even called a racial slur as a child because of that, so I’m aware on a persoanl level of racism directed toward Native Americans and Asian Americans. Last year the fauxgressive blogs let slurs against Asian Americans and Native Americans run freely because Asian Americans and Native Americans tended to back Hillary fairly strongly.

Real world liberal feminists grew up lower middle class or poor. We’ve experienced the sneering classism of the upper class fauxgressive feminists all our lives. We were a big core of the PUMA movement. What last year taught us is even a conservative Republican who grew up in the lower economic classes (Sarah Palin) is more a real world feminist than those fauxgressive feminists like Wolf. I don’t know if the conservative feminist women who we met and saw a sisterhood with in PUMA (we both wanted Hillary as our president, and shared many feminist ideals) will hold that in their hearts the way we liberal/progressive/leftist/socialist feminists are- the conservative feminists have gone back to their old political homes, but I’m hoping that working besides us real world left of center folks rid them of some of the stereotyped images they had of us left of center folks, the same way working along side them rid us real world left of center folks in PUMA of our stereotypes about all conservatives.

I despise fauxgressives like Wolf, Olbermann, Huffington, Markos, almost all the Air America hosts, etc… because they are as rife with misogyny as right wing media people like Beck, Limbaugh, Coulter, Ingram, etc… These media blowhards on either side don’t represent the reality, they reinforce the stereotypical images one side paints the other with.

Ms. Wolf is a strange case- back in the day she wrote “Beauty Myth” she appeared to at least get the truth about the sexism in the Western world (not just the US, but western Europe as well) Something very odd seems to have happened when she got married and had a baby boy. Her intelligence and awareness seems to have been sucked away and she started writing fauxgressive drivel and in recent years even seems to have begun exhibiting mental illness- her paranoid essay about Sarah Palin and secret police squads last year being a prime example.

http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/trends/n_9437/

“I will never forget a visit I made to Ilana, an old friend who had become an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem. When I saw her again, she had abandoned her jeans and T-shirts for long skirts and a head scarf. I could not get over it. Ilana has waist-length, wild and curly golden-blonde hair. “Can’t I even see your hair?” I asked, trying to find my old friend in there. “No,” she demurred quietly. “Only my husband,” she said with a calm sexual confidence, “ever gets to see my hair.”

When she showed me her little house in a settlement on a hill, and I saw the bedroom, draped in Middle Eastern embroideries, that she shares only with her husband—the kids are not allowed—the sexual intensity in the air was archaic, overwhelming. It was private. It was a feeling of erotic intensity deeper than any I have ever picked up between secular couples in the liberated West. And I thought: Our husbands see naked women all day—in Times Square if not on the Net. Her husband never even sees another woman’s hair.

She must feel, I thought, so hot.”

“Social progress can be measured by the social position of the female sex.”

Portion of the left now denies, and even regrets, that Marx had ever said that!

I’m an old guy, closer to 70 than 60, who took one of your first classes during the evening at Richmond College back in the day.

If I recall there were only 3 males in your class and I’m not sure all of us made it to the end. I did.

You opened my eyes then and continue to do so today. My wife and I raised our daughters to take care of themselves.

Best Regards

P. S. You gave me an “A” – probably because I stuck it out and took my punching bag status with good grace.

Thanks for reminding me why I stopped reading Salon long ago.

Anti-intellectualism, militantly enforced self-loathing, and minority-identity-based superiority cults are the norm in women’s studies programs throughout the United States. Most troublingly, these programs do more to promote a false version of recent feminist history than feminism’s enemies — a consequence of unchecked sexism in the Left, I believe. The response to Phyllis Chesler is typical, and tragic, given what she has contributed to the actually transformative feminist politics she helped bring about.

How did this happen? As recently as the early 1980′s (and still today, in other parts of the world), women academics, journalists, politicians, and other applicants for policy and intellectual work were routinely discriminated against by precisely the same people who had championed civil rights for blacks. This nostalgia-based ethical incontinence — which, let’s face it, infects many on the right as well — perverted justice movements and thus political norms at a crucial historical crossroads.

So I guess it’s unsurprising that the feminist movement and feminist academia descended so quickly into decadence: like intellectuals under Stalin, you can best survive by making yourself both irrelevant and useful to the status quo. Thus, women’s studies conferences on the self-fulfillment of turning tricks and Salon articles on raping Sarah Palin or having orgasms while giving birth (the latter was the last day I could even stomach reading those pathetic court-monkeys).

There are many intelligent, accomplished people emerging from women’s studies programs — you can get an education anywhere; you can get a very good education by observing anti-intellectualism — but these people cannot impact the practice of women’s studies anymore, and they are never hired to teach. Such departments are spinning their own irrelevance, and the sooner the better. Movements change, and there is a new feminism emerging, despite the fact that we are embattled on many sides.

I have been pleasantly surprised to encounter readers of Pajamas Media — you can come to this site and discuss (traditionally) feminist subjects in challenging ways, and find, despite a few reflexively dismissive people, commitment to hearing people out. That simply does not exist in publications like Salon magazine, which will eventually sink under the weight of its unexamined prejudices and politics of self-loathing.

I’m glad Chesler’s fighting this fight — it takes a tremendous amount of backbone to spar in warped environs. And anyplace that calls Larry Flint a freedom fighter and Naomi Wolf a feminist intellectual is painfully warped.