BIG SISTER: REWRITING THE RULES OF SEX
NOTE: Neil Boyd, a professor at Simon Fraser University, where he teaches courses related to law, crime and criminal justice policy, is currently working on The New McCarthyism, a book about the threats posed by radical feminism.
Mr. Boyd, writes that, for more than a decade the destructive, untenable and dishonest ideology of radical feminism has flourished in North America. In our courtrooms and boardrooms radical feminism has gone largely unchallenged, offering a view of male-female relations that has poisoned work environments, embraced an unthinking rigidity in sexuality, undermined family stability, and wrongly transformed the rules of sexual conduct. In this provocative book criminologist Neil Boyd argues that a small band of female extremists has been remarkably successful in reworking both the rules of sexual conduct and our notions of fairness and equality within the frameworks of criminal and family law - and in undermining a longstanding and socially valuable feminism.
The law and everyday practice have been altered in ways that threaten free speech, bring a code of Puritanism to male-female relationships, alter our common sense understandings of sexual consent, infantilize women, increase female dependency, and jeopardize the stability of gender relations within our culture.
http://www.neilboyd.net/pages/mcc.html
Big Sister: Rewriting the Rules of Sex will be published by Greystone Books in the spring of 2004
BIG SISTER: REWRITING THE RULES OF SEX
About the book:
This book is about the dark side of feminism, a view of sex and gender that has been largely unchallenged. The apostles of this movement have poisoned work environments, embraced an unthinking rigidity in sexuality, undermined family stability, and wrongly transformed the rules of sexual conduct. In this provocative book criminologist Neil Boyd argues that a small band of extremists has been remarkably successful in reworking both the rules of sexual conduct and our notions of fairness and equality within the frameworks of criminal and family law – and in undermining a longstanding and socially valuable feminism. The law and everyday practice have been altered in ways that threaten free speech, bring a code of puritanism to male-female relationships, alter our common sense understandings of sexual consent, infantilize women, increase female dependency, and jeopardize the stability of gender relations within our culture.
More specifically, Boyd points to significant changes in criminal and family law –- the areas of pornography, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and domestic violence all demonstrate the difficulties we face from a potent amalgam of puritans and ideologues. Through descriptions of specific cases, Boyd makes the point that the law and practice in North America are being rewritten and restructured in ways that do not reflect the beliefs, attitudes, or values of the overwhelming majority of women or men who believe strongly in gender equality. The law is being hijacked by a new wave of McCarthyites, who practice sectarian divisiveness and argue that collective rights must always trump individual rights -- and that longstanding principles of equality, neutrality and individual autonomy are no longer of relevance, as they are soaked in the poison of “patriarchy”. Their mission: to create fundamental change in the criminal and family courts through lessening the burden of proof, changing the rules of evidence, and infantilizing women by presenting them as the inevitable victims of male tyranny.
This new wave of thought has now left the ivory towers of academe and stretched its tentacles into the real world, in ways that matter to all of us. Converts have graduated from the law schools and social science departments in which these ideas first developed and have moved into positions of influence: they are lawyers, judges, politicians, academics and policy-makers, and their thinking can be seen in decisions across the legal landscape.
Through the use of stories that are both amusing and chilling, Neil Boyd describes the ways in which our definitions of pornography, harassment, sexual assault, and domestic violence have been altered by this new wave of sexual puritanism, anti-male sentiment, and ivory tower lunacy, the building blocks of the new McCarthyism.