The Protocols of the Elders of Feminism (Or, Gloria Steinem Didn’t Really Say That)

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I‘m continually amazed by the amount of time and energy that antifeminists put into fighting monsters of their own creation — that is, the imaginary feminists in their heads who bear about as much resemblance to real feminists as the rapacious, Machiavellian characters in The Protocols of The Elders of Zion do to real Jews.

I’ve made the Protocols of the Elders of Zion comparison more than a few times before, but I ran across an example of antifeminist monster-making earlier today that parallels the Protocols so exactly that it’s kind of unnerving.

The original Protocols, as many of you no doubt know, were an anti-Semitic forgery concocted in Russia by the Tsarist secret police around the turn of the twentieth century, purporting to offer proof of a plot by a cabal of Jews to take over the world. The document offered what it claimed was a transcript of a secret meeting of the aforementioned Elders that took place at some point late in the nineteenth century; in fact, most of the dialogue was plagiarized from works of fiction published many decades earlier.

Basically, the so-called Protocols are a collection of cartoonishly eeeeevil fake quotes from imaginary Jewish Elders. But millions of people, including Henry Ford and a certain Adolf Hitler, believed them to be real. Or at least acted as if they did.

Much of what Men’s Rightsers and other antifeminists believe about feminists is similarly bogus. I’ve written before about the collections of dubious “evil” quotes from feminists that regularly make the rounds on the antifeminist web (and that any number of antifeminists have cut-and-pasted into the comments here).

And I’ve written about the deliberate disinformation campaigns started by #GamerGaters and MRAs by spreading made-up quotes attributed to feminists like Jessica Valenti and Anita Sarkeesian.

So today I ran across yet another example, this time in the form of an “infographic” featuring an obviously fake quote purportedly from Gloria Steinem that was being passed around by a couple of A Voice for Men Twitter soldiers today.

I’ve pasted it above, though, as you may have noticed, I’ve taken the liberty of adding the words FAKE QUOTE in big red letters in case the picture gets into someone’s image search results sometime in the future.

So how do I know the quote is fake? Well, there’s the fact that it obviously is. But, to be sure, I used my highly sophisticated internet search skills to type part of the first sentence of the fake quote into a website called “Google.”

Looking through the results, I discovered that the “quote” originally appeared in a post with the ungrammatical title “Are Chimps smarter than Feminist?” on a little blog called The Waterpipe.

The Waterpipe is not a source that inspires much confidence. The blogger behind the site made only four posts in total, all of them attacks on feminism; the site’s “about” page contains the dummy text that WordPress expects bloggers to replace with their own bios.

The “Are Chimps smarter than Feminist?” post begins — shades of the original Protocols! —  by plagiarizing a hefty chunk of text about chimpanzee tool use from the website of the Jane Goodall Institute.

The “author” then goes on to suggest that chimps are in fact smarter than “feminist” because

The chimps have demonstrated an ability to conduct their parasitical relationship with termites in a sustainable manner as to not exhaust the termite nest and thus increase chances of survival, this survival instinct is not present in feminist. …

the feminist movement has made it its primary objective to eradicate masculinity. Ironically women in their 30s who are childless, unmarried and on a steady supply of anti-depressants are now questioning “Did we overdo it”

As evidence, of sorts, for this contention, the author presents us with the similarly ungrammatical lament of an obviously fictional character named “Clara Strongwoman,” who declares

I was willing to be a good wife, cook and clean while the man bought home the bacon, but you lousy feminist had to ruin it for all of us with your endless victim-hood, outrageous demands and out of control sense of entitlement.

While it’s pretty clear that the blogger here seriously believes the MGTOWish crap he’s peddling, it’s also pretty clear that he means “Clara Strongwoman” to be a joke.

He follows her obviously fake quote with an obviously fake dialogue amongst famous feminists, which he introduces as follows:

Top feminist from different organisations were secretly recorded by an anonymous user called Agent Orange on a debate with each other if they exhausted their parasitical relationship on men.

In other words, these famous feminists are purportedly discussing what to do now that they’ve driven men away with their endless demands.

Here’s a portion of the dialogue, purportedly between Steinem, radical feminist and anti-porn activist Gail Dines, and someone called “Bonnie Grabenhoffer” (two f’s) — who is presumably supposed to be NOW Action Vice President Bonnie Grabenhofer (one f).

As you’ll notice, the blogger doesn’t bother to try to make the discussion sound even vaguely convincing; it’s basically a very crude satire. The fake Steinem quote from the infographic is right in the middle of it all; I’ve put it in bold.

>Gail Dines: We pushed them too far and now there’s no going back, we had men right where we wanted, they worked long hours while we could play hide and seek in our pajamas with the kids, they went to die in wars, while we did easy house chores with our washing machines, dishwashers and vacuum cleaners.

>Gloria Steinem: I agree with Gail we even had chivalry, a fu**ing social etiquette that was heavily enforced which disposed men to heroic actions for the benefit of women, but now chivalry is being associated with beta behaviour.
Of course I agree with everyone in this room that emasculating and degrading men was the right thing to do, but we should have left a little bit of dignity in men so that they were still useful to us

>Bonnie Grabenhoffer: We could try shaming tactics but even the dumbest men still have an adequate survival instinct
We are trying very hard to rebuild society by removing male spaces but now we have things like Men Going Their Own Way and male rights groups popping up

>Gail Dines: Why? We cant even shame men into doing things anymore, they have little masculinity, how can a man even sink lower? I think what we need to also do is destroy the male survival instinct. Then they will start marrying women again.

Yes, that’s right: it’s a secret cabal of “top feminist” trying to figure out … how to get men to marry women again. Frankly. the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were more convincing.

Yet this ridiculous blog post got picked up by other antifeminist blogs and passed around by assorted antifeminists on Facebook. Now the fake quote is making the rounds on Twitter.

One atheist/Linux blogger reposted some of the dialogue above as if it were authentic, taking particular umbrage at the fake Steinem’s fake “stupidity.”

These so-called feminists put men down for doing just that to women for centuries. What’s their answer? If women are to be happy and productive, women need to do to men what women thought was horrible when men did it to them. I see no difference between Steinem and some chauvinist pig who thinks women should be in the kitchen cooking, barefoot and pregnant. …

I have a suggestion for the Steinems of this world: help free humanity from its primitive roots and stop spreading this bucolic bacchanalia about making slaves out of men.

Fake quote, real anger. See how that works?

People believe what they want to believe. When it comes to feminism, a lot of people are determined to believe the worst.

The more gullible anitifeminists believe the fake quotes are real; the more cynical antifeminists may be well aware the quotes are fake, but they’re happy to spread them anyway, knowing that their more gullible comrades will swallow the lies wholesale.

As the forgers of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion knew all too well, if your aim is to spread hate, lies are much more effective than truth.