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January
11
2020

The New Politics of Sex
Paul Craig Roberts

Several years ago four of us who were high school and Georgia Tech classmates got together for a reunion to remember the fun times of our youth while we could still remember.  A day or two before our reunion there had been one of those massive “gay pride” marches in New York or San Francisco.  One of us asked where so many members of the Queer Nation had come from as we had experienced high school and college without ever encountering a homosexual.

We poured over our high school class and the people we knew at Tech—in those days there were only 5,200 male students at Georgia Tech, most from Georgia as it was a state supported college—and couldn’t come up with a homosexual.  Someone joked that there weren’t enough closets for the numbers of people in the gay pride parade to hide in.  We all agreed that we didn’t have any idea where so many homosexuals had materialized from, acknowledged that we in our youth had suspected that homosexuals were a mythical creature like unicorns,  and went on to more interesting topics.

Having just finished reading Stephen Baskerville’s book, The New Politics of Sex. I found myself remembering the puzzlement of our classmate reunion and wondering if Baskerville had given us the answer. Has radical feminism driven men into each other’s arms?  Has the relationship between male and female become so unsatisfying and loaded with danger for men that men have developed erotic interest in men?

Perhaps this is a politically incorrect question. It would be impossible to investigate, because, as Baskerville points out, any reasonable, even evidence-backed, criticism of feminism, is regarded as a personal attack on women.  

Even in universities where free inquiry and free speech has, in the past, had the widest scope, opposition to feminist pronouncements can mean termination, tenure not withstanding.

In short, radical feminists rule academia.  Even areas of science are being politicized. Academic feminists are proud of their power and boast about it in the same way that Israel’s leaders boast about their power over the United States. 

The feminists’ power extends into the broader society.  The cover of the Atlantic Monthly boasts “The End of Men,” and Hanna Rosin proclaims “women are taking control of everything.”

Unfortunately, this is not a false claim.

Feminists have politicized sex. They teach that heterosexual intercourse is men oppressing women.  If the female partner doesn’t understand that she is being oppressed, it is because the “male world” has brainwashed her. Radical feminist Catherine MacKinnon has declared all heterosexual sex to be rape. 

Inexplicably, heterosexual male legislators are legislating a radical feminist legal system in which a man who asks a woman for a date can be quilty of sexual harrassment, and a man who shows realization of an attractive woman is quilty of “eye rape.”

Feminists have destroyed marriage and the relationship between men and women, due process for accused men, and they have brought government into the family, endowing bureaucracy with the power to seize, with federal subsidies, children from parents, and to put them in foster homes where they are sedated and, according to some investigators, sometimes leased or sold to pedophiles.

Feminism has degenerated from the vote for women and acceptance in the work place of men –which is what many women who are not paying attention regard as feminism–  into an attack on men.  Heterosexual men have no greater enemy than  feminists.  Catherine MacKinnon makes that completely clear.

The marginalization of men, and perhaps their extermination, is the explicit goal of radial feminism.

Baskerville wonders if men are so weak and defeated that they will accept their demise.

Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.

He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.

Dr. Roberts' latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions - The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.

Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper's, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: [email protected]

 

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