A Blueprint For a Genocide of Existence

A new breed of zealots has forged fourth-wave feminism, and it’s far more rabidly anti-family, anti-male, and anti-civilization than previous iterations of the ideological movement. You’d think because of its petty maliciousness and deranged radicalism, its appeal would be narrowly limited to the faculty lounges of liberal arts colleges. Yet since the inception of the #MeToo movement, the crazed foot soldiers of fourth-wave feminism managed not only to take their worldview mainstream, but also to put a headlock on the commanding heights of American culture.

This is as impressive as it is terrifying. These new nihilists are seething with toxic femininity, and the further spread of their noxious sentiment could likely spell the death of our country as we know it. Increasingly prevalent is their practice of exploiting female agency and identity to wage a blanket attack on society and men, to abolish the labor market, and to advocate for the end of the family. They are achieving these goals while simultaneously promulgating the idea that the family is by nature nefarious, and that female advancement can only come through the wholesale annihilation of heteronormative constructs of capitalism, work, and the family. The destructive consequences for relationships at every level of society—from the basic couple to the community to the nation—will be vast and irreparable.

In Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, feminist philosopher Sophie Lewis writes: “[But] I can’t wait to see what comes after the family. I also know I probably won’t live to see whatever it is. Still, I hope it happens, and I hope it is a glorious and abundant nothing.”

Lewis is convinced that the concept of family is a cancerous blight on existence and that nothing should replace it.

Families are just awful phenomena for Lewis; she urges everyone to abolish his or her own. If you were in doubt as to what abolitionists really want, Lewis assures you of their implacable goals: “What do abolitionists want? Abolitionists want to abolish. We want things not to be. We want an absence of prisons, of colonizers. We desire the non-existence of police.”

The evidence to the contrary, of course, is on record. Prior to 1970 black men and black women were both more likely to be married than their white counterparts. In the 1950s, after at least seventy years of rough parity, African American marriage rates began to fall behind those of whites. In 1950, the percentages of white and African American women (aged fifteen and over) who were currently married were roughly the same: 67 percent and 64 percent, respectively.

But Lewis is not interested in statistics or facts. She has very little respect for them or the lived experience of real people. Chapter 3 of her book is devoted to a detailed history of leftist feminists from the Leninist-Stalinist Alexandra Kollontai, who dreamed of liberating sex from reproduction, to the deranged New York feminist Shulamith Firestone, who fought for the abolition of the emotion of love itself along with the labor force.

What is interesting in Lewis’s self-centered and nihilistic rampage to annihilate the family is a curious absence of the real welfare of children. Aside from some cracker-barrel, platitudinous reference to default collective parenting in which birth certificates are abolished and “the obligations of parents to their children shall wither away gradually…until society assumes the full responsibility because parental rights are done away with,” the psychological concomitant of this abolitionist insurgency is neglect. Lewis pays no real attention to child welfare. She quotes and endorses Kollontai, who writes: “The narrow and exclusive affection of the mother for her own children must expand until it extends to all the children of the great proletarian family.” Kollontai and Lewis both envision a planetary insurgency of red love, which is a social love: a love of many in many ways.

Their motives are obvious. Genocide of the family, and obliteration of motherhood have one consequence: the annihilation of the human race. Infanticide is not advocated openly; that would not be an easy sell. Abolish motherhood and the family instead. State outright that you have no intention of replacing the family with anything, save nothingness. Then the attention is—except those whose minds are constantly on the welfare of children—focused on a group of women who have had some personally horrific family lives and manufactured a trauma economy to justify dismantling the family for everyone else.

And further: when a social worker can tell medical students that if they challenge her on whether systemic racism exists she will not tolerate debate and simply “shut that down,” and that she views any challenge to her as a virulent display of racism, we know that the nihilists have already won.

Abolish The Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation is a work of evil. It is evil because of the comprehensive nature of its genocidal reach. I remain struck, however, by her gleeful hope that the family will be replaced not just by a “glorious and abundant nothing,” but also the “nothingness” that comes after the family: the existential void and the abyss. I think of the fright of the children, looking not for hope, not even for love: but for Mom and Dad; for Grandma; and for their brothers and sisters —for those who offer simple gestures of affection and reassurance long after they have been abandoned in “protest kitchens” and syringe-infested parks that “welcome active drug users.”

Sophie Lewis’ book is an apocalyptic warning. It is the voice of a misanthropic harridan bearing the shriveled face of a barren invert who screams from every page: humanity has come to an end, and human faces have become terrifying things to look upon.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-blueprint-for-a-genocide-of-existence/