NCFM NOTE: If you are not a believer or don’t know what damage the feminist crusades have caused in creating the Women Industries and Feminist Jurisprudence then one day you may awake in bed with a SWAT Team pointing machine guns at you because you passed gas when leaving a hearing at your local family law courthouse; or, worse, disagreed with a Women Studies Professor. This book explains why. Plus, it’s a great read; and, a great book review by Mr. Svoboda, as usual.
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The Feminist Crusades: Making Myths and Building Bureaucracies. By Frank S. Zepezauer. Bloomington, Indiana: AuthorHouse, 2007. www.authorhouse.com. No stated price on book but website gives price as $15.70.
Octagenarian (as of September 2008) Frank Zepezauer has published The Feminist Crusades: Making Myths and Building Bureaucracies. (Full disclosure: Frank and I collaborated together and were friendly acquaintances for a number of years in the now defunct Northern California chapter of the still alive-and-well National Coalition of Free Men, of which I am Public Relations Director.)
The Feminist Crusades is fundamentally a broad review book of the men’s movement and the feminist forces against which we are acting. Before I read this book, I might not have thought it possible for a writer to come along with a book that goes more or less where a number of authors have gone before and yet which is as fresh, as good, and with as many new things to say as this book.
Well, Zepezauer has done it. He does it in a number of ways, by drawing out rarely seen statistics, and by retelling familiar tales that seem new through his rare facility for detail and nuance and his knack for inspired insights.
Zepezauer starts the book by observing that the feminist movement has divided itself into battalions focusing on different issues, and then proceeds to examine the work of each battalion.
Feminist twisting of self-esteem data? Zepezauer can tell you about it. A breathtaking misrepresentation by authors of a study had them claiming that girls were suffering from teachers calling on them 8-10 fewer times than on boys, when in fact–according to the writers’ own research–girls received 8-10 times fewer reprimands. We never hear that the Equal Rights Amendment was supported by manufacturers and opposed by organized labor, but Zepezauer tells us. (And actually when you consider that women’s rights doubled the potential labor force and resulted in transformation of the family wage into the individual wage, it isn’t that surprising.)
Mind-bogglingly, a pamphlet that is one hundred pages long is now available listing federal programs benefiting women. While the “vast” majority of those who seriously mistreat young children are female, 97% of people incarcerated for doing so are male.
We may have suspected feminists cared only for themselves, i.e., wealthy white women, and not for other females, minorities, etc., but Zepezauer comes through with some hard data showing that child care has further stratified the economy. In seven deft pages, he tells the horror stories of three male victims of rape accusation witch hunts—Dr. Patrick Griffin, college student Adam Lake, and college professor Ramdas Lamb. Later he excellently recounts the outrageous, lesser-known story of California painting contractor Bruce Wendt, falsely accused in 1995 of raping an 11-year-old girl. Perhaps the biggest shock of all is the nonchalance with which some of the rape and sexual harassment industry experts blandly justify such witch hunts, regardless even of the truth of the accusations.
Zepezauer’s aim could not be better with his apt observation that child protective services struggles with whether it is law enforcement or public health, as in effect it metes out punishment now for a crime that might occur in the future. In a similar process on a different battlefront, sexual harassment orthodoxy (according to feminists) was absorbed and accepted by general society with a downright shocking speed.
To “prove” cases of Satanic ritual abuse when that craze was in its heyday, confessions were extracted through torture, including withholding needed regular meals from a juvenile diabetic. Zepezauer writes that “victims by the hundreds of thousands” were affected and while that number strikes me as a bit high, I defer to his expertise as he is right about virtually everything else.
One outstanding distillation Zepezauer includes is “five specific legal reforms” that feminist activists sought and obtained, some of them quite outlandish and contrary to established legal principles: elimination of spousal exclusion in sexual offenses; rape shield laws; elimination of requirement for corroborating evidence in rape cases (just victim’s testimony alone now enough to convict); elimination of requirement of physical resistance in rape cases; and definition of consent as meaningful and knowledgeable assent, not mere acquiescence.
Zepezauer also displays admirable initiative when he tracks down and interviews Air Force psychologist Charles P. McDowell, who found a huge false rape accusation rate in and outside of the military. As a result, feminists including Congresswomen Pat Schroeder ended his career. The author further traces how feminists made rational, even-minded discussion regarding rape law impossible. The same charged environment that encourages authentic victims to come forward has also flushed out confused or self-serving women with a small regard for accuracy and a victim’s right to fair treatment.
The author offers up a portrait of former Harvard University president Lawrence Summers as a courageous, intellectual man and a great friend of women and even of feminism. This accentuates the tragedy of his feminist-orchestrated downfall for what in truth were some rather undeniable observations about differences between men and women.
By the end, the author observes that his military analogy is imperfect: “In the case of the feminists, they have won their battles not by playing the role of a soldier in combat but as a victim appealing for mercy in the court of public opinion.”
To make more forcefully a point the author suggests, surely no other social movement in the history of the world has ever effected such stunning, far-reaching changes so quickly and powerfully. In Zepezauer’s words, “Women who once pined for a ’room of their own’ now had a ‘bureaucracy of their own.’” Yet in 1991 the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) revealed that 59% (more than half) of sexual harassment cases were found to have no cause. As the author observes near the end of his magnum opus, “Never in the history of political movements have so many people been so wrong on so many points so often. Or so effectively.”
In a brilliant and invaluable coda the likes of which exists nowhere else so far as I know, Zepezauer adds a 78-page appendix that lists and analyzes many different pieces of the feminist bureaucracy.
Two minor critiques: After such a great ride, The Feminist Crusades ends somewhat abruptly, with no real conclusion pulling together the different pieces of the story and drawing the take-home messages I know the author could make. If this book were a movie, the film would suddenly pop out of the sprocket with no warning. Secondly, Alibris essentially facilitates self-publishing, which means that books like this that might previously never have seen the light of day receive fairly professional-looking formatting and production values. Unfortunately, a competent editor does not seem to have been provided, as, for example, a large number of periods are missing from the ends of sentences, distracting from the reading experience. Also, Adam Lake’s and Dr. Griffin’s names were misspelled.
These are small points indeed. Frank Zepezauer deserves to have his name inscribed near the top of a list of writers of truly monumental men’s rights books. The Feminist Crusades provides a trenchant, highly critical, yet measured examination of feminism and belongs on the bookshelf of everyone who cares about gender fairness.
