Hopefully, the cooked controversy over Brett Kavanaugh will prove to be a watershed moment in the history of our country generally, and that of the so-called “Me Too” movement, specifically.
The national discourse—or, perhaps more accurately, the cluster of talking points and soundbites—to have arisen from this disgrace of a spectacle has reinforced the conspicuous and conspicuously painful absence from it of critical thought.
First, and most fundamentally, the world has gotten the opportunity to see the flagrant contradiction at the very core of “feminism.”
Feminists—who from this point onward we will call, simply, “Feminist Woman”—have been insisting for decades that men and women differ from each other only insofar as their genitalia are concerned. Women are every bit as strong, physically and mentally, and every bit as professionally competent and occupationally capable as their male counterparts. Whatever disparities exist between men and women are “socially constructed,” the legacy of “patriarchal oppression.”
Women don’t need for men to hold doors, help them with their bags, or otherwise engage in any chivalric actions toward them. Chivalry is itself an instrument of oppression. Feminist Woman, in other words, claims that it is only equality with men that she desires and to which she is entitled. And this normative claim that men ought to treat women as their equals in all respects Feminist Woman grounds in the descriptive claim that women are the equals in all respects to men.
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However, at one and the same moment, contemporary Feminist Woman reveals herself to be among the weakest and neediest of human beings. Such is the hyper-sensitivity of Feminist Woman that, as was noted in the preceding paragraph, gentlemanly or chivalric gestures, appreciated by both the women from previous generations as well as non-feminist women today, are sufficient to injure her.
And masculine pronouns are even worse, the nuclear bomb, as it were, of the Patriarchy.
In other words, men must watch their language around Feminist Woman, and they must always be on their best behavior, as Feminist Woman understands it.
Feminist Woman demands preferential treatment, i.e. “affirmative action,” for women in business, college admissions, and even politics. Women, you see, need for the government to come to their rescue, for despite being the equal to men in every conceivable regard, somehow men just continue to victimize them.
This, at any rate, is how Feminist Woman depicts the state of women.
Thus, the contradiction should by now be apparent:
Women, who are just as strong, tenacious, and intelligent as men, are perpetual victims of men and, as such, require perpetual protection from (mostly) men in offices of authority and power.
The proverbial Damsel in Distress is a stereotype that Feminist Woman views as a relic from the Bad Old Days of the overt and rampant patriarchal oppression against which Feminist Woman has been waging war and prevailing for decades. And yet it is Feminist Woman who incessantly screams in distress for help. It is Feminist Woman who spares no occasion to wax hysterical as she declares her victimhood.
Feminist logic boils down to the reductio ad absurdum: She is strong, fearless, and independent—even as she is frightened, victimized, and in desperate need of protection against men from (mostly) men in government, business, and virtually everywhere else.
Second, Feminist Woman swears that America’s is a “rape culture.” Make no mistakes about it, the Brett Kavanaugh freak show was great political theater for Feminist Woman, for the idea of an affluent and powerful white man, particularly one who attended one of the world’s most elite academic institutions, raping women is nothing more or less than an ideological fetish for Feminist Woman.
And while this promises to shock the sensibilities of your average person, it is nonetheless true that the younger the white man in question, the more politically titillating it is for Feminist Woman to think that he is guilty of rape. Anyone who has any doubts about this should recall to mind the Duke Lacrosse Lie from some years back, the Big Lie that a black stripper was gang raped by several affluent young white men, Duke University students who played on their school’s Lacrosse team.
Feminist Woman, it is crucial to grasp, lives in a Lifetime movie. Although Hispanic and, especially, black men are significantly more likely than their white counterparts to subject their partners to domestic and sexual abuse, from the perspective of Feminist Woman it is white men, specifically, wealthy, successful white men, and them alone, who are uniquely prone to prey upon and rape women. This is the case for white male physicians, lawyers, CEOs, and politicians, as well as “entitled” young white boys with rich parents who send them to elite schools.
Herein, however, lies another contradiction: If America had always been the bastion of sexual repression and gender oppression, the rape culture, that Feminist Woman says it is, then why is it that rape was a capital crime up until the 1970s?
To repeat, those very same white men who Feminist Woman accuses of having promoted a rape culture enshrined in their laws the penalty of death for those convicted of the crime of rape.
Moreover, it was Feminist Woman, or at least her left-wing allies, who succeeded in rendering the death penalty “cruel and unusual punishment” for rape.
Third, Feminist Woman repudiates Christianity as the religion of the Patriarchy. In fact, she tends to be quite irreligious, at least as far as traditional religion is concerned. On the other hand, Feminist Woman sounds profoundly religious in treating her body as a sacred temple of sorts. This, after all, is how she sounds when she screams from the rooftops that no one has any right to tell her how and to what ends she will use her body.
Such is the sacredness with which Feminist Woman sees her own body that an unwanted touch by a man is enough to leave her at once outraged and traumatized.
The verdict: The feminism of Feminist Woman is nonsense. It is logically and ontologically incoherent.
Anyone who is either remotely reasonable or remotely decent will flee from it.
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