BOOK REVIEW: “Feminism Is For Everybody” Confirms That Feminism Is Not For Everybody.

One area I found myself agreeing with Hooks was her condemnation of child abuse perpetrated by women. Hooks’s willingness to confront female violence is incredibly brave, even if she frames it with the absurd statement that this abuse only comes from the fact many women are “more patriarchal” than men. . . .

If women are the primary perpetrators of child abuse, and pass these patterns of abuse on to their children, the system of oppression Hooks opposes is actually matriarchal. It is a system perpetrated and passed down through bad mothers. Hooks calls her own mother “the strongest patriarchal voice in my life,” and frequently hints at an incredibly unhappy and abusive childhood. . . .

She projects oppression onto men, even defining her own mother’s abuse as masculine, so she can avoid truly confronting it, and continue to play out the pattern of powerlessness she learned as a child.

Also: “While Hooks advocates men playing an equal role in child rearing, most boys are now being raised in single-parent, or divorced homes, with most divorces initiated by women. Feminist policies have resulted in less involvement from fathers, and total matriarchal control of the household.”

Related: Book review: The Garbage Generation. “This is the central point of the entire book. Under Patriarchy, men have the socially created role as provider for his family. The feminists called it oppression, and engaged in a variety of ways to overthrow the Patriarchal ‘hegemony,’ but what they have really done, in essence, was to demean, marginalize and literally destroy the role of FATHER in the creation of the nuclear family.”