“I wasn’t thinking when I wrote my domestic abuse statement in Virginia against my boyfriend.”
“Can I get a permanent protection order against my spouse’s lover?”
“How [do you] bait someone into violating a restraining order?”
—A few recent search terms leading to this blog
I stumbled upon a video presentation the other day by a self-styled anti-feminist activist Karen Straughan, who’s blogged for a couple years under the moniker “girlwriteswhat.” I thought her talk, “Feminism: Socialism in Panties,” was evenhandedly confrontational, nervy, and smart.
Responses from feminist quarters that I hastily gleaned yesterday suggest that this activist’s denunciations have raised some hackles. I noted, though, that more than one woman respectfully remarked that she’s “articulate,” if “biased.” She’s in fact very articulate. And something I don’t think her female critics are able to appreciate is that her “bias” is a counter-bias and that she isn’t employing rhetorical strategies that are any more tendentious or inflammatory than those used by the people she draws a bead on.
For feminists to argue that turnabout is foul play is silly, and it’s interesting to observe that when dogma’s challenged using its own tactics, it pitches a fit.
The same impulsive emotional reasoning exemplified by this foot-stamping is what’s suggested by the search terms that introduce this post (to which I could have appended thousands more of a similar nature).
The large-scale injustices perpetrated by the restraining order process (on both men and women) are the product of impulsive emotional reasoning, as is the process itself. What may have started out as a sober guard dog 30 years ago has transformed into a manic dragon that arbitrarily spits fire when fingers are snapped, particularly nail-polished fingers. It doesn’t warn its targets to back down; it torches them.
There’s an ancient philosophic principle called the golden mean that advocates avoidance of extremes (“moderation in all things”). According to this principle, if something gets too far off-kilter in one direction, you have to counteract the imbalance by excessively striving in the contrary direction. If the above-referenced activist strikes some as overstating her case, they might consider that she’s endeavoring to knock things back toward equilibrium.
Reading through online comments about her, I was familiarized with the acronyms MRM and MRA, which apparently stand for “men’s rights movement” and “men’s rights activist,” respectfully. One thread about her I found was titled, “What do Feminists think about YouTube blogger ‘Girl Writes What,’ a Female MRA?”
You see from this question how far abroad feminism has strayed and why equity feminists are appalled by what they call the “feminist establishment” (a.k.a. “The Sorority”). The motive of the feminist movement that was underway when I was a kid was to dissolve distinctions and dichotomies between the sexes. Yet as conversational prompts like this one show, today’s so-called feminism promotes division: Us versus Them. Its compulsion is to split everyone into camps. The original idea was to have everybody recognized as the same, irrespective of whether they had an innie or an outie between their legs.
The thrust of today’s mainstream ideological feminism is to blame, subjugate, and punish, not unify. Feminism has betrayed itself.
It has also betrayed women. Something that’s long been a source of curiosity to me is that while the feminist establishment is often criticized as misandronist (man-hating), it’s rarely criticized as misogynist (woman-hating).
Yet inducing women to self-identify as victims can hardly be called “empowering.” If the source of power isn’t you, the power isn’t yours. What inducing women to self-identify as victims is, rather, is denigrating to feminine self-respect. The feminist establishment doesn’t encourage women to cultivate or rely on personal agency; it infantilizes them and urges them to apply for paternal protection (and the abuse and domestic dispute industries have been glad to profit by the ensuing strife).
Contemporary feminism has conditioned women to identify themselves respective to men, namely, as their victims. It’s thoroughly preoccupied with men—to the point of fixation. (The online conversational threads I’ve just looked at either concerned bitching about men or bitching about women who don’t bitch about men.)
The original feminist platform argued that women should identify themselves as independent people. Feminism, however, has become entirely male-centric. There is no feminist identification independent of men.
Prejudicial laws and court processes criticized in this blog and elsewhere are a societal response to women’s conceding that they lack personal agency. Consider that the reason why infants cry for help is because they’re incapable of meeting their own needs (incapable, literally, of standing on their own two feet). Women are much more capable than they’ve been led to believe.
Restraining orders are by and large sought impulsively—in the millions every year. Both motives and the engine that generates them are virtually automatic.
Interesting to me, finally, is that men have adapted to the new status quo (“If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”). Most of the complainants of court abuses who’ve responded to this blog are women, some of whose lives have been shattered by lies and fraud. Men have hopped onto the abuse industry bandwagon, too, and the time may come that the equality that feminism is supposed to be advocating for is realized in the form of both sexes’ exploiting state protections to bash each other into a uniform goo.
Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com
TALKING BACK to restraining orders 
Posted on May 15, 2014
0