Libertarians on Feminism

*"Stop making yourself look like fucking sex clowns to milk money out of men's dicks." -Stefan Molyneaux*

Libertarianism has an inexplicable, but undeniable, correlation with being male. But there is hope! Assembled here is a list of quotes to prove that misogyny is not part of the libertarian tradition, and women are more than welcome in their ranks.

## Quotes

"The U.S. government has just announced that women will be allowed to take on all roles in the military. No longer will they be banned from any of them. This will undoubtedly weaken this institution, as criteria for acceptance will be lowered, as Walter E. Williams has so brilliantly demonstrated. (A similar situation occurred when “firemen” became “firefighters” so that women who could not carry at person weighing 190 pounds up or down stairs to escape from fires were allowed to participate anyway). Then, too, biological imperatives for men to protect women will kick in even the more, instead of fighting the enemy. Also from this perspective the natural tendency of males to compete with each other for the attention and affection of females will further deflect them from the presumed goal of the army, to defeat the enemy.

[...]

There is another focus from which to view this new initiative of promoting female participation in the military other than the libertarian. This is the biological. Women are the limitation of population, and its growth. It is not for nothing that the farmer keeps 50 cows and one bull, rather than the reverse. If there were 50 bulls, 49 of them would be superfluous. If there were one cow, all the bulls in the world could not by one iota increase the size of the flock. In other words, females, at the margin, are much more important for increasing the size of the human race. They are the precious limitation on population growth. Why is the latter to be preferred? That is because in order to create another Mozart, or Mises, or Einstein, or Rothbard, or Salk, or Bach, or Gates, we need millions of new babies. The more of them the better." -Walter Block

"Another type of pinching or sexual harassment is that between a secretary and her boss. Although to many people, and especially to many people in the women’s liberation movement, there is no real difference between this pinching and the pinching that occurs on the street, the fact is that the pinching that takes place between a secretary and her boss, while objectionable to many women, is not a coercive action. It is not a coercive action like the pinching that takes place in the public sphere because it is part of a package deal: the secretary agrees to all aspects of the job when she agrees to accept the job and especially when she agrees to keep the job. A woman walking along a public sidewalk, on the other hand. can by no means be considered to have given her permission, or tacitly agreed to begin pinched. The street is not the complete private property of the pincher, as is the office. On the contrary, if the myths of democracy are to be given any credence at all, the streets belong to the people. All the people. Even including women.

There is a serious problem with considering pinching or sexual molestation in a privately owned office or store to be coercive. If an action is really and truly coercive, it ought to be outlawed. But if pinching and sexual molestation are outlawed in private places, this violates the rights of those who voluntarily wish to engage in such practices. And there is certainly nothing coercive about any voluntary sex practices between consenting adults. The proof of the voluntary nature of an act in a private place is that the person endangered (the woman, in the cases we have been considering) has no claim whatsoever to the private place in question, the office or the store. If she continues to patronize or work at a place where she is molested, it can only be voluntary. But in a public place, no such presumption exists. As we have seen, according to accepted theory at least, the public domain is owned by all, women included. It would be just as illegitimate to assume that a woman gave tacit agreement to being molested on the public street because she was walking there as it would be to assume that she gave tacit agreement to an assault in her own house, because she happened to be there." -Walter Block

"It is high time, and past due, that someone blew the whistle on “Women’s Liberation.” Like The Environment, Women’s Lib is suddenly and raucously everywhere in the last few months. It has become impossible to avoid being assaulted, day in and day out, by the noisy blather of the Women’s Movement. Special issues of magazines, TV news programs, and newspapers have been devoted to this new-found “problem”; and nearly two dozen books on women’s lib are being scheduled for publication this year by major publishers. [...] In the meanwhile, the male “oppressors” are acting, in the manner of Liberals everywhere, like scared, or guilt-ridden, rabbits. When the one hundred viragos of Women’s Lib bullied their way into the head offices of the Ladies’ Home Journal, did the harried editor-in-chief, John Mack Carter, throw these aggressors out on their collective ear, as he should have done? Did he, at the very least, abandon his office for the day and go home? No, instead he sat patiently for eleven hours while these harridans heaped abuse upon him and his magazine and his gender, and then meekly agreed to donate to them a special section of the Journal, along with $10,000 ransom." -Murray Rothbard

"For whether or not 'encouragement' took place, it strikes me as crystal-clear that if the girl did not say no and did not physically resist, then sex did indeed take place by 'clear mutual consent.' What do the feminists want? Will they only be satisfied if (a) the two parties sign an express consent form before the act, and then (b) sign another one immediately after? And have them both notarized on the spot, with forms sent in triplicate to their respective attorneys and to the county clerk? If so, the notary publics in college towns are in for a thriving business, plus some Peeping Tom (or Tomasina) opportunities on the side.
[...]
There are several ways by which this terrible crisis on the campus can be solved. One, we can go back to the prohibition of alcohol, which our culture is almost ready for in any case. Two, we can go back to the good old days of campuses before the 1950s, especially in the South: not only the banning of coed dorms, and abolishing coeducation altogether, but insisting on official chaperons for girls on every date, on dance-cards filled out in advance and cleared with the chaperon, on boys being barred from the entire girls’ campus except the official room, etc. And finally, why not go the whole hog toward Left Puritanism and define all sex as per se coercive? That would clear up all the fuzziness and sex, or at least hetero-sex, could be outlawed completely. Or is that the point, after all?" -Murray Rothbard

## References

1. ↑ "Women in the Military." https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/12/walter-e-block/women-military/
2. ↑ *The Libertarian Forum*. https://mises.org/library/complete-libertarian-forum-1969-1984
3. ↑ "The Great Women's Liberation Issue: Setting it Straight." https://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/11/murray-n-rothbard/the-oppressed-gender/
4. ↑ "'Date Rape' on Campus." Scare quotes original to Rothbard. https://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/09/murray-n-rothbard/date-rape-on-campus/