Unlike the media, I have not exactly been fawning over the huge box office numbers this past weekend. But even I must admit that it’s rather fascinating to see this kind of success for a film that centers around one of the most devastating and deadly inventions in the history of the human race. Indeed it is not every day that audiences flock to see a movie about a weapon of mass destruction. And of course lots of people also went to see “Oppenheimer.”
But “Barbie” was the bigger film, and it tells the story of a vastly more destructive force. I don’t mean the Barbie doll, but rather feminism. Not every man-made weapon of mass death is as obvious as a nuclear bomb. Mushroom clouds are easy to comprehend; the significance is obvious. But the more abstract, intangible threats to human life can be far deadlier than nukes.
With that in mind, a few days ago, I tweeted this factually true statement. Here it is:
“This is a good time to remember that feminism has killed far more people than the atomic bomb. It is perhaps the most destructive force in human history. Trans ideology, its offshoot, is competing for the title.”
That’s what I wrote. Predictably, there was outrage from the Left. That was always going to happen, of course, no matter what I said. I could tweet something really obvious like “two plus two equals four” or something really innocuous like “I enjoy pancakes” and they’d still call me a bigot and report my account, demanding that I be deplatformed. So it was no surprise that this admittedly slightly more provocative statement meant that I would trend on the site for multiple days as the outraged masses had a series of temper tantrums about it.
I don’t need to give you examples of their responses. They’re exactly what you expect. “Matt Walsh is a fascist. He hates women. He’s a misogynist.” Etcetera and so forth. The only mildly interesting feedback came from the so-called “gender critical” feminists — the feminists who oppose trans ideology — who reacted to my statement as if it was some kind of deep betrayal. We are on the same side on the trans issue, which means that I am apparently required to pretend that feminism is good. This is a contract I didn’t realize I signed. But we’ll return to the gender critical set in a few minutes.
Let’s get, first, to the substance of my claim. As far as that goes, feminism’s status as a historically destructive force in human history is as clear as day. To begin with, if you accept that unborn babies are human beings (which obviously they are, because they can be nothing else), then we can directly blame feminism for 60 million deaths in the United States alone. When I pointed this out, Martina Navratilova, tennis legend and outspoken feminist, responded:
“A fetus is not a baby, what a moronic thing to say. You spout about language used by the trans lobby and then do the same calling embryos babies! Hypocrite much?”
Well, Martina, I guess I need to ask you an even more basic question than the one I ask trans activists: what is a human? Can you answer that, Martina? I bet you can’t. I guarantee you cannot come up with a coherent definition of “human” that excludes unborn children. You cannot coherently define “human” or “person” in a way that allows you to be one, but leaves unborn humans out in the cold. The word “fetus,” Martina, simply means “offspring.” You are pretending that there is some sort of innate, definitional distinction between “offspring” and “baby” — a distinction that you believe is so important that it gives us the moral right to destroy “fetuses” en masse. But a baby is the young offspring of two human parents. They mean the same thing. The only thing that the word “baby” does is stipulate which stage of development the offspring is currently going through. A human in the womb is in a stage of human development. A 6-month-old outside the womb is in a stage of human development. Same for teenagers and middle-aged former tennis players. These are stages of development, they are ages. If you say it is okay to kill “fetuses” but not babies you might as well say it is okay to kill 41-year-olds but not 42-year-olds. The position makes no sense.
We are left with the harsh reality that abortion has killed 60 million human beings — a death toll that can be laid squarely at the feet of feminism, since feminism has made the defense and promotion of this atrocity into one of its core tenets. That already puts it at least in the running for “most destructive,” competing perhaps only with communism. But the distinction between feminism and communism is not absolute. These are related ideologies. Marx and Engels called for the abolition of the nuclear family, just as many modern feminists do. We’ll get into that soon.
WATCH: Why Feminism Is One Of The Deadliest And Most Destructive Forces In Human History
In the past century, feminists have succeeded in destroying the nuclear family to a degree that American communists could only dream of. According to a study from Child Trends, just 9% of children lived with single parents in the 1960s, before the rise of modern feminism. By 2012, that number had increased to nearly 30%. In 2019, Pew found that the United States has the highest rate of children living in single-family homes of any country in the world.
Divorce is a major factor driving these numbers. From the 1960s to the 1980s divorce rates in the U.S. more than doubled. You’ll often see studies showing that, in the last few years, divorce rates are down — but that’s because many people aren’t bothering to get married in the first place anymore. Given what we’re seeing, it’s impossible to argue that the family unit hasn’t been dramatically weakened due to the influence of feminism. If you accept that the family is an essential building block of civilization, then we’re left with an ideology that has murdered enough children to fill 800 football stadiums and eaten away at the very fabric of civilization in the process.
Feminism’s defenders, even on the Right, will point out that in spite of all of this, feminists gave us women’s suffrage and allowed women to take out mortgages and credit cards. But even if I agree that we needed feminism, specifically, to bring about these changes — and I don’t — they still don’t begin to outweigh the cost. If I could trade in women’s suffrage to get back the 60 million humans that feminism killed, I would do it in a heartbeat.
Another defense you’ll hear from feminists, and many on the Right, is that “first wave feminism” was good, and the second wave was okay — but the others were where it went off the rails. These people will attempt to argue that the first and second waves of feminism are somehow distinct from the modern incarnations. All they cared about, supposedly, were basic human rights. This is a common misconception. Even the blessed “first wavers” were generally anti-man and anti-family.
Mary Wollstonecraft, considered one of the founders of the feminist movement, had so much disdain for marriage that she wrote two novels about it.
Jane Addams, another much-celebrated first-wave feminist, supported eugenics.
Margaret Fuller, one of the most widely cited first-wave feminists, wrote extensively about marriage. But she also argued that unmarried life leads to a greater connection with the divine. Here’s a passage from her book “Woman in the 19th Century,” in which Fuller praises unmarried women, who she calls “old maids,” because they aren’t shackled to their husbands.
“Not needing to care that she may please a husband, a frail and limited being, her thoughts may turn to the center, and she may, by steadfast contemplation enter into the secret of truth and love.”
There are many more examples, but really, all you need to do is look at what happened after “first-wave” feminism. Just a few short decades later we got the legalization of baby murder nationwide, as well as overt calls for the abolition of the nuclear family.
They weren’t exactly subtle about it. One of the most famous second-wave feminists, Kate Millet, is known precisely because she wanted to destroy marriage and the traditional family unit. That was her whole pitch. Here’s a quote from Millet’s dissertation “Sexual Politics.”
“A sexual revolution would require … an end of traditional sexual inhibitions and taboos, particularly those that most threaten patriarchal monogamous marriage: homosexuality, illegitimacy, adolescence, pre and extramarital sexuality. … The goal of revolution would be a permissive single standard of sexual freedom, and one uncorrupted by the crass and exploitative economic bases of traditional sexual alliances.”
Millet goes on to admit, in the understatement of the century,
“It seems unlikely all this could take place without drastic effect upon the patriarchal proprietary family.”
She also argues that the nuclear family is an obstacle which precludes a “woman’s contribution to the larger society” and complains that “the traditional method of child care” — i.e. a mother taking care of her own children — is “unsystematic” and “inefficient.” This is feminism, 50 years ago, outwardly opposed to the nuclear family, the very foundation of human civilization itself.
It goes without saying that Millet was also a big proponent of abortion; she said she considers the legalization of abortion to be one of the great achievements of the feminist movement. This is the belief system that virtually all second-wave feminists endorsed — destroy the family, and kill children.
Now, ask yourself this question: If feminism was such an obvious good in its original incarnation, then how in the hell could it have devolved into an anti-family, pro-abortion feeding frenzy in the span of a few decades? It’s like saying the Bolsheviks had the right idea, but who could have predicted the gulags?
If most people will agree that every wave of feminism was a disaster except for the first one, then a thinking person must start to wonder whether that first one was really so great after all. A thinking person might start to see that even in its first wave there were the kernels, the poisonous seeds, that would soon sprout into this hideous, deformed tree that we all see today. A tree with many branches, and one of those branches is trans ideology.
The “gender critical” feminists, mentioned earlier, are critical of trans ideology but they don’t understand how their own movement created it. The feminists are the ones who first argued that men and women are basically the same aside from meaningless anatomical differences. They are the ones who declared that most sex differences are “social constructs.” They don’t want to admit any of this, of course. So, some gender critical feminists have tried to flip this around and say that those of us with “traditional” views on sex have been the ones to set the stage for trans ideology. The feminist writer Helen Joyce made this argument last year when she was asked about my film “What Is A Woman?” Watch:
Helen Joyce articulated perfectly the problem with Matt Walsh and how he is part of the problem of trans ideology. They might want to watch.https://t.co/aILq2gPLLe
— RachelKnewBest (@RachelBowljiffy) July 25, 2023
That’s interesting, Helen. You are saying that rigid gender roles give rise to trans ideology. Well, Helen, did you watch the section of the film where I go to the Masai tribe in Kenya? They have extremely well-defined gender roles, and have for literally thousands of years, and yet they’ve never even heard of transgenderism. In fact, my “traditional” view of sex was the dominant view across the entire world, everywhere, in all places, since the dawn of human civilization up until just this past century. And yet for thousands and thousands and thousands of years “traditional gender roles” never led to any woman cutting her breasts off in an attempt to identify as a man. Have you thought about this Helen? If my view of sex is old and ancient — which it absolutely is, I admit that proudly — and if my view also leads directly to trans ideology, then why isn’t trans ideology also old and ancient? Do you see the problem here?
No, trans ideology came about directly on the high heels of feminism. Why? Because, again, feminists are the ones who first argued that men and women are effectively the same, aside from what they considered insignificant anatomical differences. Feminists are the ones who declared that all gender roles and gender stereotypes are social constructs. For many decades if anyone argued that women can compete with men in sports, and do everything men can do, it would have been a feminist. Now that argument primarily comes from trans activists, and you want to pretend that they aren’t saying exactly what your club has been saying for like a century. It’s absurd.
Helen, you say that I understand that a man is a male person and a woman is a female person, but that I think “a whole bunch of other things follow from that.” Yes, you are exactly right. I think that being a man means something, and it means more than just anatomy. And being a woman means something, and it means more than just anatomy. What you don’t understand is that your rejection of this principle, your claim that a whole bunch of things DON’T follow from being a man or a woman, that being a man or a woman has essentially no significance aside from differences in sex organs, means that you and your ideology are to blame for exactly the thing you pretend to be fighting against.
But it’s no surprise that such a murderous and evil ideology refuses to be honest with the world. Feminism has brought about destruction, misery, and confusion. So much confusion that it is even confused about itself. Which is why, so often, the feminists themselves seem to understand feminism least of all. This is what you get from an ideology whose primary goal is to dismantle and destabilize. A goal that it has certainly achieved.
It was Oppenheimer who said the words — quoting Hindu scripture — but feminism has a much greater claim to the title: “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” And that is feminism in a nutshell.