The International Herald Tribune notes that feminism is put to the test… and fails:
As one of the world’s most gender-equal countries – a land where 80 percent of the women have jobs, where about half of the members of Parliament are female – does Sweden need a feminist party?
Many people thought so this spring, when a number of high-profile Swedish women began Feministiskt Initiativ, or Feminist Initiative. Polls then showed that almost a quarter of the electorate would consider voting for the party in parliamentary elections next year.
Six months later, however, that backing has imploded as Sweden rethinks the politics of sex. Feminist Initiative is in disarray with the loss of several founding members who abruptly departed over the radical direction the party was taking. At its recent founding congress, for example, instead of tackling a mainstream platform as planned, the party presented proposals to abolish marriage and create “gender-neutral” names.
Support for feminism took another hit this summer with the airing of a Swedish television documentary called “The Gender War.” A wrenching debate was set off by the film, which showed militant feminism to be widespread, reaching into official circles: Ireen von Wachenfeldt, the chairman of Roks, Sweden’s largest women’s shelter organization, for one, was shown asserting that “men are animals.”
Suddenly the belief that politics, business, even private life should be reformed to allow a more equal society – a belief that has permeated Swedish politics for several decades – is being openly questioned.
As I have repeatedly written, calling a feminist a feminazi is an insult to the German National Socialist Worker’s Party. The serious ones are every bit as insane as the hard core communist true believers. Fortunately, the feminists’ ideal society is even less viable than that of the communists and begins to fall apart before it’s close to being fully implemented, so we won’t have to put up with them for much longer.
The one genuinely nice thing I can say about them is that for all their rhetoric, they don’t have a taste for openly aggressive violence; even the most lunatic wing of the Sisterhood is unlikely to pull a Pol Pot in desperately attempting to bring about their societally suicidal vision.
It will probably take another three or so generations for the evolutionary dead-ends to completely kill themselves off. By then, the West will either have recovered from the unsuccessful equalitarian experiment or they’ll all be in chador.