‘A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.’ – Gloria Steinem

The famous feminist author is raising an interesting point here, but it’s not the obvious point in relation to Playboy magazine.

Feminist speakers often use nazi imagery in their rhetoric. It’s an easy way to stir up passion in the listener – there are few who are ambivalent of the horrors of World War Two.

‘the women who ‘adjust’ as housewives, who grow up wanting to be ‘just a housewife,’ are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps….’ – Betty Friedan

I would like to draw my own parallel.

A perpetuation of a myth of national victimhood was one of the tools the Nazi party used to push its agenda forward.

‘Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it’ – Adolf Hitler

Contrary views were quickly silenced, first with derison, then with force. 

This ‘victimhood’  inspired a great zeal that led many people to do terrible things in the name of ‘revenge’, or ‘righteousness’ – or, in other words, because at the time these actions were deemed ‘politically correct’.

Does any of this sound a little like feminism to you?

~o0o~

‘I have little sympathy for men. Like a Jew just released from Dachau, I watch the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach and I look briefly and walk on. I don’t even need to shrug. I simply don’t care. What he was, as a person, I mean, what his shames and yearnings were, simply don’t matter.’ – Marilyn French