I find the case persuasive on two levels.
First, Marxism as an ideology disrupted the relations between classes. While this in itself is a catalyst for widespread misery and suffering, it can often be mitigated by lots and lots of money. Increased standards of living for all classes tend to lessen class conflict. However, any form of politicized sexuality disrupts something infinitely more intimate and inescapable; the relationship between individual men and women. This relationship, upon which all civilization springs forth, is the explicit target of feminism and other forms of politicized sexuality (GLBT month!), with its destruction as its ultimate goal.
From the essay:
Many have discerned a similarity between feminism and Marxism, but few appreciate how feminism extends the socialist logic and may actually exceed its intrusive potential. “Women’s liberation, if not the most extreme then certainly the most influential neo-Marxist movement in America, has done to the American home what communism did to the Russian economy, and most of the ruin is irreversible,” writes Ruth Wisse of Harvard. “By defining relations between men and women in terms of power and competition instead of reciprocity and cooperation, the movement tore apart the most basic and fragile contract in human society, the unit from which all other social institutions draw their strength.
Even Marxism can foresee a replicable (even if nigh impossible at this stage) restitution for its grievances. After all, humanity was indeed a classless society at one point in its long prehistory. But man has never been without woman, and woman without man. To destroy the relationship between these two by reducing the timeless reciprocity and cooperation of both with the other into a dialectic of competition and power acquisition is to undermine something of the very nature of humanity itself. Where feminism wants to go, no human being has ever, and can ever, go. I don't care how much the academe bleats about the potency of feminist frameworks (for one can always assert the same thing about any framework that suits one's hard-coded biases), feminism is both intellectually dishonest and practically insane. It is one thing to want the right to vote or to want equal pay; it is a different matter entirely to talk about one's vagina while the world burns.
On another level, Marxism as an ideology was very beatable. It may have taken 70 years, but I did see the Berlin Wall fall on TV. Feminism, on the other hand, has subtly undermined our way of living in so many ways that we barely realize. From casual sex and contraception to the ongoing break up of the family (and coming soon, ultimate gender neutrality, brought to you by the Vikings' nuttiest descendants), these are changes and compromises that have taken hold of our lives unopposed. Lenin at least had to fight the White Army. Feminism steamrolled onto our lives and we never had a choice in it. Russia could become capitalist to some degree; even China is getting there. But I do not see how we can go back to an age without feminism and sexual politics. You can shoot a Red Army soldier, but you cannot just shoot a girlfriend who decides to "liberate" herself from "patriarchal tyranny" by shacking up with her butch women's studies prof.
From the essay:
The early feminist attack on marriage and the family is now largely forgotten or dismissed. “We can’t destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage,” Ms. magazine editor Robin Morgan wrote in her 1970 book, Sisterhood is Powerful. Sheila Cronin, head of the National Organization for Women, said that “Freedom for women cannot be won without the abolition of marriage. Linda Gordon elaborated in a famous 1969 article in WOMEN: A Journal of Liberation. “The nuclear family must be destroyed,” she declared:
The break-up of families now is an objectively revolutionary process.… Families have supported oppression by separating people into small, isolated units, unable to join together to fight for common interests.… Families make possible the super-exploitation of women by training them to look upon their work outside the home as peripheral to their “true” role.… No woman should have to deny herself any opportunities because of her special responsibilities to her children.… Families will be finally destroyed only when a revolutionary social and economic organization permits people’s needs for love and security to be met in ways that do not impose divisions of labor, or any external roles, at all.
While such statements are often dismissed as the ranting of extremists, a glance at the state of marriage and the family today reveals that this is precisely what feminists have achieved. But they achieved it in ways much more subtle than these screeds indicate. While Germaine Greer famously urged women to refuse to marry, that strategy could achieve nothing. It was by participating in marriage that feminists destroyed it.
It is easy to destroy a distant ideological enemy. It is easy to condemn a Stalin, or a Pol Pot, or a Mao Zedong. But, how does one condemn a wayward wife, or sister, or husband, or brother? The fact that it hits so close and destroys relationships so intimate, while being so hard to escape from, makes feminism far more nefarious and insidious than Marxism can ever hope to become.
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