The National Organization for Women routinely claims that it has 250,000 to 500,000 members and a budget of $10 million, but are those figures accurate? That’s what Marie-Jose Ragab of the renegade Dulles, Virginia, NOW chapter, wanted to know. Based on NOW’s required 501(c) filings with the IRS, Ragab claims the figures don’t even come close.

As Ragab notes, almost all nonprofits exaggerate their membership figures somewhat, but NOW appears to be one of the select few who take such exaggerations to outrageous levels. Ragab notes that in its 501(c) filing for 1999, NOW reported income from memberships at $2,903,383. Since a yearly individual membership to NOW costs $35, that would yield about 89,500 paying members.

It is true that NOW has a sliding scale of memberships that allow some people to pay as little as $15 for membership, but even if we assume that everyone pays just $15 to be a member and nobody pays the $35 fee, that’s still just over 190,000 members — not even close to the recent claims it has made of 500,000 members.

There are similar distortions in the overall NOW budget. Although NOW claims to have a budget approaching $10 million, in fact its IRS filings puts its highest level of income over the past five years at just over $5.5 million, and that figure has seriously declined. Ragab reports that NOW’s IRS forms show that NOW’s annual revenues declined by almost $1 million from 1996-1999, with most of the decline in revenues coming from a decline in memberships. Ragab believes that the decline in revenues was linked to NOW’s position (or lack thereof) on the Monica Lewinsky affair, noting that NOW revenues declined by an astounding $660,000 from 1998 to 1999.

NOW’s level of exaggeration is nothing compared to the closely-associated Feminist Majority Foundation, however. That group claims to have 100,000 members, with an annual membership costing $35. But its 1998 tax returns show that its total revenues for 1998 were a mere $318,000 which would give the foundation at most one-tenth the number of paying members it claims.

A likely explanation for how the figures are inflated is that they count past members who are no longer contributing to the organization. A number of other non-profits such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals claim astounding levels of membership by counting anyone who has ever contributed money to the organization over, say, the last five years.

Source:

Ten Million Dollars Budget? 250,000 Members? Think Again! Marie-Jose Ragab, Dulles Now, April 5, 2001.

Back in January, Wendy McElroy gave an excellent speech at a conference about the European Union that was later published on the web, Equality vs. Freedom. McElroy does an excellent job of laying out the case for favoring freedom over equality in general, and highlights an excellent example of feminist hypocrisy on freedom.

Toward the end of the article she writes about debating Kathleen Barry about prostitution. McElroy believes that any sex between consenting adults — including sex for money — should be allowed, whereas Barry is well known as an outspoken opponent of prostitution (as McElroy notes, Barry was asked to write the part of the United Nation’s Code of Human Rights that deals with women).

Anyway, at their debate both Barry and McElroy argued that prostitution should be decriminalized. McElroy writes that by decriminalization she means that laws against prostitution should be eliminated. Barry had a similarly though twisted version of decriminalization. McElroy writes,

Barry meant that no laws should be applied to women involved in prostitution. Only the men should be arrested and punished. In other words, when a man and a woman commit the same act, the same crime, only the man would be legally liable.

This is very different from having one law that is applied unequally to men and women. The law being proposed would specifically and pointedly create two categories of people and two categories of punishment for the same offense: women who are exempt, men who are guilty. For committing the same act. This is a hideous development.

And, of course, a development that is all too common among contemporary feminists.

Source:

Equality vs. Freedom. Wendy McElroy, The Mises Institute, January 22, 2001.

Women’s eNews recently published a long screed by National Organization for Women counsel Isabelle Katz Pinzler dedicated to a single proposition — even when men and women receive equal opportunity, it’s unfair unless women and men also achieve equal outcomes.

This is such a strange turnaround for feminism. At one time women were the victims of this sort of double standard. In the 1950s, for example, a woman who had a given score on the SAT had far less educational opportunities, simply because she was a woman, than a man who had the same score. Elite universities such as Yale would simply turn away people they otherwise would have admitted based solely on their sex.

And, of course, this was repeated in any number of areas, especially in obtaining employment. A woman who could perform just as well as any male candidate nonetheless had a much lower chance of obtaining employment in any number of fields simply because of her sex.

You would think, then, that feminists would want to defend the principle that decisions about college admission, job hiring, etc. should be based solely on qualifications rather than sex. But in fact Katz Pinzler and other feminists argue against this principle with the same vehemence that feminists formerly argued against special barriers that kept qualified women out of positions.

For Katz Pinzler anytime a test of any sort results in different outcomes for men and women, this is prima facie evidence of discrimination. Katz Pinzler writes,

But many supposedly impartial practices have a tremendously discriminatory impact on racial and ethnic minorities, as well as women, girls and other protected groups. Examples include racial profiling by police, placing potentially toxic plants or waste treatment facilities in minority neighborhoods, height and weight requirements for employment and other selection procedures, such as written tests, and so on.

To Katz Pinzler, standardized tests for college admissions are no different than racial profiling by police. She writes,

It is a known fact, for example, that women tend to score lower than men on the SAT, despite the fact that women tend to get higher grades in college, which is what the aptitude test is supposed to predict.

Since women, on average, receive lower scores than men, on average, on the SATs, that means by definition the test is biased and requires a legal remedy.

One of the biggest problems with this is that, in fact, disparate outcomes often have very little to do with any bias or discrimination. This happens to be the case with SAT scores.

As Christina Hoff Sommers has noted, the reason that women as a group have lower scores on the SAT than men as a group is that far more “at risk” girls take the SAT test than do “at risk” boys which skews the average score results for each group. There are also a number of other factors that work to ensure that far more poorly performing girls take the test than poorly performing boys.

The disparate impact test fails both as a moral standard and as a practical standard, and should be soundly rejected by people who care about genuine equality between the sexes.

Sources:

High court ruling may hurt minorities, women. Isabelle Katz Pinzler, Women’s eNews, May 2, 2001.

The War Against Boys. Christina Hoff Sommers, The Atlantic, May 2000.

Unless you’re a comic book fan, you probably don’t know who David Sims is. Sims is the creator of the long running independent comic book, Cerebus. At a time when comic books were still dominated by the super hero genre, Sims launched his independent, black and white book that proved there was a market for comic books beyond big breasted women and supercharged characters. Unfortunately, Sims is also a subscriber to an extremely noxious form of traditionalist anti-feminism.

Sims recently expounded on his views in a lengthy copyright-free essay which was published online by Comics Journal. The essay, Tangent, is one long misogynist screed against women (the essay is so bizarre that it is very understandable why Carol West, and administrative assistant at the company Sims set up to publish Cerebus quit, according to Sims’ account, after typing in a draft of the first two parts of the essay).

Sims writes in the sort of broad generalizations to which only true believers can subscribe. To Sims, for example, it is a simple, obvious fact that “women are emotion-based beings,” from which it clearly follows that “any female-centered or female-originated political movement – more precisely, “political” “movement” – will lack sound intellectual footing.”

This site often challenges the claims made by feminists. For Sims, this is a waste of time — in his mind, he need only point out that the claims are made by women which proves that, regardless of whether or not the claims are true, they cannot be based on any “sound intellectual footing.”

Sims’ version of traditionalist anti-feminism is extreme even for this position, but he is not that far from more widely read advocates of this position such as George Gilder. Sims seem to think his version of anti-feminism is the wave of the future, but fortunately his views (and that of other traditionalist anti-feminists) are really nothing more than the last gasp of a philosophy of women that is as wholly irrational and wrong as anything coming out from the worst radical feminists in academia.

Source:

Tangent. David Sims, Comics Journal, March 16, 2001.

In April the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled that a sheriff who ignored a cross-dressing women’s rape report could be held liable in civil court for neglect.

The case, which was the basis for the movie Boys Don’t Cry, involved the rape and murder of 21-year-old Teena Brandon. Brandon was a cross-dresser who posed as a man and called herself Brandon Teena.

In 1993, Brandon went to Sheriff Charles Laux and reported that two friends of hers discovered that she was, in fact, a woman, and had subsequently raped her. She also reported that her acquaintances said they would kill her if she reported the rape.

Laux did not arrest the alleged rapists nor conduct a serious investigation of Brandon’s claims, but he did subject her to a tape-recorded interview that the Nebraska Supreme Court described as “demeaning, accusatory and intimidating,” including referring to the Brandon as “it.”

A week after reporting the alleged rape, Brandon’s two acquaintances — John Lotter and Marvin Nessen — murdered her at a farmhouse. Lotter was sentenced to die for his part in the crime, and Lott was sentenced to life in prison, though neither man was ever charged with rape.

Brandon’s mother, Joan Brandon, sued Laux in civil court, arguing that he acted negligently by not arresting Lotter and Nissen immediately and by not offering Teena Brandon protective custody. She won a $17,360 judgment. Laux appealed the judgment, but the Nebraska Supreme Court found that he had acted negligently and bumped the judgment up to $80,000.

Source:

‘Boys Don’t Cry’ Sheriff Negligent. Kevin O’Hanlon, Associated Press, April 20, 2001.August 3, 1994

I don’t think I could have written a more bizarre story than that written by Elliott Balch for the Harvard Crimson. The story outlined a plan by the Radcliff Union of Students to host a sex toy party for Harvard women, as Balch put it, “to emphasize women’s sexual independence.”

The kicker to the story is the role that one of the organizers apparently thought such an event would have in fighting “the patriarchy.” Balch reports that RUS president Elizabeth Vogt sent an e-mail to all RUS members saying that among other things, the sex toy part would give women a way to “challenge patriarchal society.”

“If you know that you can satisfy your own sexual desires without relying on someone else, you can gain a lot of power in romantic relationships,” Vogt wrote in her e-mail message.

Interesting how some feminists have no problem conflating sex with power — a view that traditionalists were long criticized by feminists for maintaining.

Source:

RUS Plans Women’s Sex Toy Event. Elliot W. Bach, The Harvard Crimson, April 20, 2001.

A good example of how effortlessly feminists denigrate anyone who disagrees was recently provided by Feminist.Org’s Daily News Wire in a brief story, Article Reveals Bush Connections to Independent Women?s Forum. Feminist.Org is apparently bent out of shape that several people affiliated with the IWF are under consideration for positions within the Bush administration.

Here many of us thought that one of the most important goals of feminism was to expand opportunities for women to serve in a variety of roles, including public service within the government, but now Feminist.Org informs reminds us that only women with a sinister agenda would want to serve in a Republican administration.

In fact, Feminist.Org is on to the truth about the IWF — these women are just a front for men. According to the brief story, “Its [IWF's] purpose was to be the counterpoint to feminist groups, providing a female face for the far-right, anti-women’s rights agenda.” The notion that women of a conservative bent could come together to voice their concerns is, of course, absurd. There must be some nefarious anti-woman conspiracy.

Ah, sisterhood is powerful indeed, especially when it turns into an Inquisition aimed at anyone who dares dissent from the party line.

Source:

Article Reveals Bush Connections to Independent Women?s Forum. Feminist Daily News Wire, Feminist.Org, May 1, 2001.