by Kathryn Ennis-Carter

Hi Maree and Marty

Great to have you back on RCR again – we've missed you.

A couple of things that maybe you'd like to pick up/comment on some time.

The Sexual Revolution

Very interesting discussion about this topic. Thank you for the book review on this subject, Maree – great content summary, and I'm keen to read the book. And really interesting comments from Marty.

I've set out some thoughts of my own below about the evolving focus of feminism over the years:

In the 1950s/60s – The ‘women's liberation movement' was all about freeing women from the prison of domesticity and the implicit disadvantages of women's biology. The focus was about the right of 50% of the population to be able to engage in all aspects of society, instead of being channelled into only three roles in life (primarily that of wives/mothers, although teaching and nursing were regarded as appropriate occupations for women as well). Of course the ‘sexual revolution' fuelled a resistance to all that because women could now control their own reproduction by popping a pill.

To the 1970s – Continuation of the above with focus on women in the workforce, and campaigning for equal pay (which was enacted in about 1973/74 I think).

The 1980s – This was when all the stuff about ‘the patriarchy' really started to take over the ideology and everything was about power. This was also when some of the ‘hate stuff' towards men really started to emerge, some of it fuelled by Women's Studies courses that became rampant in academia.

Remember all those silly cartoons about things like ‘A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle'? At university in the 1980s, I remember one ‘feminist protest' in Wellington where we all met and were supposed to join hands, and walk around the Cenotaph and I was told I wasn't allowed to by some of the women there – because I was married, and was therefore ‘consorting with the enemy'. Promotion of the ‘Girls can do anything' mantra dominated everything and there was silly stuff about how parents should make sure female children got cars and trucks to play with as well as dolls. The 1990s – Some of the ‘backlash' stuff was starting to be felt.

Some of it introduced a softer note – remember the best-seller book about ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus'. That was pop culture stuff, but some more serious research also started to emerge then about innate differences between men and women, some of which was really interesting, and allowed for biologically-determined differences to come back into the frame. I remember reading research about ‘the female brain' and the ‘male brain' and some of it had real substance behind it. Professional environments were full of ‘management development' courses for women, again based mostly on the dynamics of power.

In the 1990s-2000s, there was an extended focus on ‘women's rights' – going well beyond getting more women into the workforce, and into positions of power e.g. management, the boardroom and politics. This was the period when I think the ‘women's movement' started to come off the rails, become confused about its core principles and develop hypocrisy of focus – with particular examples of that being:

• supporting the ‘rights' of women to engage in prostitution and pornography if they chose to (while at the same promoting ideology about exploitation of women), and
• upholding the rights of Muslim women to wear hijabs as a ‘fundamental human right', focusing on the rights of women to wear what they choose (ignoring the significance of the hijab as a symbol of oppression).

The 2000s-2010s were full of stuff about recognising differences between men and women (based on biology as well as social conditioning) fell away and it was back to treating men and women as somehow androgynous, with escalation of women playing sports traditionally recognised as men's – rugby, boxing etc.And now the 2020s – The era of ‘identity politics'.

And the incursion of ‘trans rights' into the feminist movement, with focus on ‘What is a woman?' And suddenly we've come full circle, and instead of women fighting for the right not to be confined by their biology, now women are having to fight for the right to be recognised for their biology. Suddenly it's all about ‘trans rights are human rights' – with the result that language has to be androgynised and female sexual identity and functions are not allowed to be spoken about as only pertaining to women. So we have – ‘pregnant persons', ‘people with a cervix' etc.
And while it's supposed to be about neutrality and inclusion, suddenly it's (mostly) all about men's rights again – this time about the rights of men who want to be women and have the right to be recognised as such, rejecting the reality of biology. It's about the rights of women who want to identify as men as well, but most of the fuss is about the rights of men who want to claim identity as a woman.

So, now it's really timely to examine where the sexual revolution and the consequential ‘feminist movement' has got to, and the consequences for society.

Emerging Early Election Campaigning in the Media

If you don't regularly read ‘The Listener', please take a look at recent issues from December through to Jan/Feb.
The Listener has always been the bugle to the middle class, and their focus is demonstrably left-wing. Their audience is clearly comfy middle-class, left-leaning Jacinda-following types clinging on to vaguely ‘socialist' ideals, who buy into all the current narratives about Covid, the Treaty, climate change, trans stuff etc., and who think everything can be changed if we all hold hands and focus on ‘equity'.

I've also always been interested in the clear connection between the Listener, RNZ and TV1 news coverage. Very often things featured in The Listener are also featured on RNZ, and TV1 News picks up the tone of both.

I've attached a recent letter I've written to the Listener about this – the content is truncated because they only want about 250 words. I'd have liked to say a lot more, but with that word limitation do much except express a few headline thoughts.

But please in particular, take a look at the featured articles under the title ‘Right Turn' in December (issue dates in the attached letter) and in late January about Erica Stanford's Education reforms. And in that same issue – an article attacking Winston Peters titled ‘The Eye of the Crocodile'. The latter is a doozy – note the implicit suggestion in the second to last paragraph on Page 10, that the ‘intelligentsia' is left-wing and therefore not to be found co-existing with right-wing anything, and reinforcing how bad ‘populism' is.

And now in the current week's issue – two articles on ‘climate change'. It's really clear – they're making an early start on escalating the ‘progressive left' propaganda. In an election year, it can only get worse. So we should let them know we know what they're doing!