Anita Hill and the Wife of Clarence Thomas

A few months ago the wife of Clarence Thomas called Anita Hill to ask her why she had made false allegations against her husband. 

What we are seeing here is a classical Baptist con.

First let me say outright that I have no love of any kind for Anita Hill. She spearheaded one of the worst hysterias in the history of America. I call it hysteria not because it was led by women, but because of what hysteria is. A hysteria is a disease of society in which people's judgment and rationality are suspended through manufactured fear-mongering, and people are denied due process and get convicted by accusation. Thus, Salem witch trials and McCarthyism - neither of which was led by women - both qualify as hysterias. And so does what happened in 1990s, which was.

During the 1990s sex-harrassment hysteria, many thousands of men - mostly Chinese immigrants or unattractive engineers - lost their careers for looking at someone the wrong way or telling a coworker that she was pretty or for accusations that were blatantly false. These people were never the real, severe abusers of women. The same women who cheered on Anita Hill or took the opportunity to get their co-workers fired not only did nothing for hundreds of millions of women living in real, severe, ongoing brutality and oppression, but blamed such women for what was happening to them and kept them bound to those conditions by leading everyone to believe that they were weak or damaged or losers and would never be good for anyone else. The accusations made during the sex-harrassment hysteria were rarely investigated, and most of its victims were fired by accusation. One result of which has been, that now women can't get justice for real wrongs done against them because many people believe that all women are liars as a result of how many women had taken advantage of the 1990s sex-harrassment hysteria to lie.

But with 1990s behind us, it becomes more appropriate to look at what is obviously a more long-running and more entrenched form of evil. One much more sneaky, much more clever and much more ultimately powerful. While the Anita Hill supporters were haters of men, the women I speak of are exploiters of men. And they all do it in a way that leads uninformed people to see them as the epitome of virtue and goodness and those they do not like as one or another kind of villain.

The 1990s mysandrists spoke in the name of feminism and women's empowerment and led themselves to believe that they were independent and powerful women. Most of those women did not wind up with much long-term power. That is because hysterias get punctured, party lines get deconstructed, and attitude is cheap. Whereas knowing how to  con people and how to manipulate people psychologically while pretending to be the paragon of virtue can deliver astonishingly effective results. Wearing a plastic smile while carrying a dagger behind one's back makes for superior diplomacy over the long term than does overt hatred or screeching fear-mongering.

The women I speak of here do not ally themselves with feminism; they ally themselves with social conservatism. That is because they understand how to manipulate husbands and children in family settings and want other women to have no other options besides being in the setting in which they know how to thrive. This allows them to lord it over other women while leading everyone to look up to them as the source of virtue and goodness. Can one see how this can be a more viable path to long-term power than open mysandry?

This kind of woman is everyone's mother or everyone's grandmother. To her everyone owes their way of life - indeed their life itself. There is no possibility whatsoever that such a woman can ever be in the wrong. Who would dare challenge the very source of life and the very embodiment of the family and tradition? And if anyone does - no, they are not just the enemy of her; they are the enemy of the country, they are the enemy of the community, they are the enemy of "our" way of life, they are Antichrist and must be stomped out!

Why is this wrong? Well first of all because there have been thousands of traditions and ways of life in human history, and most of them have been wiped out by those who want unconditional submission to what they believe their tradition to be. That is the case in America as much as it is the case in the Middle East. Secondly, because countries such as America, Canada and Australia were never meant to be traditional societies but rather places where people freed from the shackles of their home countries' traditions could go to build meaningfully free lives. And finally and most importantly, because this attitude protects corrupt and illegal behavior on the part of people claiming traditional values and leaves most of those victimized by it powerless to address the wrongs done against them and in most cases bound for life by those perpetrating these wrongs.

So these "traditional" women then go through life conning people, subverting people, and getting power sideways through other people and then manipulating people against their adversaries. They pretend to be good people and know how to get people to think them good people until the reality of their actions shows through. In case of the wife of Clarence Thomas, she has attached herself to an obvious bully - an obvious bully who is also a super-conservative who wants all women in the kitchen, where she is herself comfortable, where she wants other women to be, and where she wants to coerce other women to be by making their lives miserable if they are anywhere else. 

In a previous neighborhood in which I resided, a Lesbian feminist graduate student told me that women in "traditional" settings had more power than do modern urban women, as they were in control of sex and reproduction, whereas modern urban women are fully at the mercy of male-dominated business culture. This is of course directly against the line of what is known as feminism, and it is of interest to see feminist Lesbian graduate students saying such things. Perhaps they have figured out some things that the folks in 1990s did not know. But it should not come as a surprise that, as knowledge builds, things get discovered that were not part of the party line and that challenge it or refute it.

Who, really, will get more power over the long run: The woman who is overtly hateful of men or the woman who knows how to manipulate and to con men? It is the nature of formative evil to make people see evil everywhere except in itself. This level of corruption is not an easy one to achieve, and one must grant it respect for having gotten to the level that it has attained in many places. Unfortunately it is very much corruption. And countries that claim to have liberty and integrity not only deserve to know corruption for corruption, but also have the presence of mind to treat it as such. 

So that when a "traditional" "family-values" woman has a relative murdered in a nursing home because he has married a liberal city woman, or arranges to get her granddaughter raped because her granddaughter believes in women's equality, or puts her daughter away in a mental hospital because she has spoken about sexual abuse that she has undergone as a child, or trains her son-in-law to beat up on her daughter because her daughter has liberal leanings, or teaches her son to brutally abuse her daughter-in-law because her daughter-in-law is of a different cultural background, or attempts to get custody of her grandchildren and in her campaign tells a bunch of strangers a load of lies about her daughter-in-law, or calls her husband's accuser with transparently false and manipulative demands, we know what it is that hides behind that pan-momma community-spirit family-values act.

The family values act for these women is nothing more than a front for what is extremely cold and extremely ugly. What is falsely identified as warmth and goodness is in fact nothing of the sort. And yes, it gets many of these women more power than was found by Anita Hill or by her supporters. Unfortunately it is neither an honest power nor a righteous power. And it is important that people know it for what it is in order that they see its character and not be vulnerable to its rackets.