Icelandic women strike led by ‘feminist’ science
Thousands of women in Iceland Tuesday went on strike to protest “unequal pay” and “gender-based violence.”
Trade unions which organized the strike urged women and “non-binary people” to stay home from work. Approximately one hundred thousand women, including Iceland Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdóttir, obeyed. Schools, banks and shops shut down for the day, while other institutions remained understaffed.
Iceland has been ranked by the World Economic Forum (WEF) as the most gender-equal country in the world for 14 years in a row. But Icelandic feminist operatives say women still suffer a host of oppressions.
“[Y]ou don’t have to dig deep to see that we have problems of discrimination, misogyny, sexual violence, domestic violence, ‘himpathy’, the wage gap, the authority gap, the orgasm gap, pornification, gendered racism and inequities of emotional labour,” wrote María Hjálmtýsdóttir, an Icelandic feminist who participated in the strike. “Some troubling statistics: in our country women on average earned 21% less than men in 2022, while just over 62% of the victims of sexual violence are under 18 and just under 92% are women.”
But feminism has long relied on selecting such data while excluding others.
For example, while Icelandic women earned 21% less than men in 2022, they also worked less than men. According to Statistics Iceland, women on average worked a total of 32.6 hours per week while men worked at least seven hours more. Estimates from Statista show that between 2010 and 2021 men actually worked eight hours more than women per week — meaning that women have been working 23.5% less but making only 21% less in pay.
Feminist protests against “gender-based violence” are also puzzling. Research shows women are at least as violent as men in relationships, with teenage girls even more so.
But publishing such findings has become taboo. Since 1980, when evidence of equality in intimate violence began to surface and threatened the feminist narrative of an “oppressive patriarchy,” researchers faced criticism, abuse, falsehoods and threats from feminist operatives.
Researcher Kate Fillion wrote in her 1997 book Lip Service: The Myth of Female Virtue in Love, Sex, and Friendship of a COVID-era suppression of scientific evidence:
Currently, findings on all types of female physical and sexual aggression are being suppressed; academics who do publish their research are subjected to bitter attacks and outright vilification from some colleagues and activists, and others note the hostile climate and carefully omit all data on female perpetrators from their published reports.
Moreover, feminist messaging on “gender-based violence” — which portrays women as the victims and men as the perpetrators — was born out of a myth still believed today, says researcher Dr. Malcom George.
In 1976 Del Martin wrote the feminist treatise Battered Wives which helped spark the narrative that a looming “patriarchy” has historically allowed men to batter their wives. As proof, Martin wrote about the “Rule of Thumb,” a law from Victorian England which supposedly allowed men to beat their wives with instruments no wider than their thumbs.
Women’s studies textbooks, science journals, legal journals, and media articles began citing “Rule of Thumb.” In 1982, it was featured in the title of a report to the United States Commission on Civil Rights.
But there was never any such law, says George, who traced English common law and found that it had no origin:
[E]ach writer relied for his evidence of the law's existence on some previous author, who had also made the same supposition about the law's existence ‘some long time before.’ Nowhere could any such real law be found, nor could it shown [sic] to have developed as common law. Indeed many instances were found showing that women enjoyed some protection under the law against violence by their husbands and that wife beating was seen by many as unacceptable and unmasculine.
Several legal precedents from the 1600s show that women who were beaten by their husbands in fact found protection from the courts. In 1674, for example, the wife of Lord Liegh prosecuted her husband for beating her and won a judgment against him for £200 per year in alimony, the modern equivalent of about $47,000 a year.
Similarly, in America, men who beat their wives were despised, even if not legally prosecuted. By the 19th century wife beaters were subjected to formal or informal justice, which included public beatings.
But by the 1980s, the “patriarchy” myth had already taken hold.
“Propaganda about the ‘Rule of Thumb’ myth was so powerful that it . . . provided a sense of outrage that would be a driving force in the advancement of ideological feminism,” wrote George.
Nevertheless, researchers who tried to present other data were subjected to abuse and humiliation:
[I]ntimidation and abuse would be heaped on academics who dared expose male victimisation and female violence, for it is the public exposure of male victimisation that is the real ‘crime’ that potential[ly] undermines patriarchy.
