By Olivia Murray
The scene between Drew Barrymore and Dylan Mulvaney was like something out of an Arthurian legend where Guinevere clasped at the hem of her knight’s tunic, or a film that hearkens back to Hollywood’s earliest era where the gentle housewife fell in line with the 1950s iron-fisted husband:
A woman on her knees, pleading with a man as he sits on his throne of superiority; the spectacle all seemed rather misogynistic if you ask me. (One could reasonably expect a kissing of the signet ring would be next.)
Predictably, this event set conservative outlets abuzz because of its sheer ridiculousness — Barrymore advertises herself as a feminist and advocate for women. However, the text from the tweet above got me thinking: is this switcheroo really the “sneakiest trick the patriarchy ever pulled”? I’d argue it’s not.
Why I find this particular instance of prostration so gross is because it isn’t the first time females have been majorly played by domineering, and legitimately toxic males. Ever wonder how the “right” to murder children in the womb wound up as a rallying cry for women all over the place?
Enter: Bernard Nathanson and Lawrence Lader.
(Nathanson was a notorious abortionist who abandoned the practice when ultrasounds arrived in medical offices in the 1970s; Lader was a high-profile eugenicist known as the “father of the abortion movement.”)
In 1963, Betty Friedan’s most famous work, The Feminine Mystique, was published. Often referred to as the feminist’s “bible” the book laid the foundation for the brothel of feminism we see today — per reporter Jacob Muñoz writing for the Smithsonian Magazine:
Now a classic, Friedan’s book is often credited with kicking off the ‘second wave’ of feminism, which raised critical interest in issues such as…birth control and abortion….
However, what Muñoz failed to mention though, is how exactly Friedan came to adopt the notion that women’s “liberation” would come only once they threw off the chains of motherhood, slaughtering their babies at the altar of choice…a couple of White, leftist, men!
Rosemary Oelrich Bottcher, once the president of the national organization Feminists for Life penned a report titled: “Men Launched the Movement to Legalize Abortion” — from the text:
[Bernard] Nathanson was, by his own admission, not much of a feminist.
…
In 1967…he met Larry Lader, a ‘disciple’ of Margaret Sanger, at a dinner party. Lader wasn’t, Nathanson has explained, much of a feminist either; he was dedicated to removing all obstacles to abortion — legal, social, and moral — because he was convinced that abortion was an essential component in solving the looming problems of overpopulation and, as his 1971 book title proclaimed, ‘Breeding Ourselves to Death.’
…
Nathanson and Lader tenaciously lobbied state legislatures…to repeal nearly all prohibitions against abortion. Nathanson later admitted that they resorted to some rather unscrupulous tactics.
…
But their efforts were not very successful until Lader had a brilliant idea: linking legal abortion to the burgeoning feminist movement.
Now, here’s the clincher:
The first edition of Betty Friedan’s seminal book, The Feminine Mystique, did not even mention abortion. Legalizing abortion was not on the newborn NOW’s list of issues. In his 1979 book Aborting America, Dr. Nathanson recalled Lader saying, ‘If we’re going to move abortion out of the books and into the streets, we’re going to have to recruit the feminists. Friedan has got to put her troops into this thing — while she still has control of them.’
The intersection of programmable ladies and imperious, cunning men? Well, apparently biological women groveling to biological men who are appropriating all things feminine, and cold-blooded baby murder.
Of abortion Lader once said:
Once sex had been detached from pregnancy, Women’s Liberation could construct its own ethics on the ash-heap of puritan morality.
That “ash-heap of puritan morality” — kind of like traditional roles between the masculine and the feminine, right? Or, how about the truth that God cannot err? Barrymore’s embarrassing display just shows that women took the bait (again) hook, line, and sinker. Seems like we need to send the leftists to Sunday school to read Genesis chapter three, and read slowly.
