The Unbearable Lightness of Feminism
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
In Nigeria and Iraq, Muslim armies are selling
women as slaves. Iran hanged a woman for fighting
off a rapist. ISIS was more direct about it and
beheaded a woman who resisted one of its fighters.
But we don’t have to travel to the Middle East to
see real horrors. The sex grooming scandal in the UK
involved the rape of thousands of girls. The rapists
were Muslim men so instead of talking about it, the
UK’s feminists bought $75 shirts reading, “This is
what a feminist looks like” which were actually
being made by Third World women living sixteen to a
room. This was what a feminist looked like and it
wasn’t a pretty picture.
The same willful unseriousness saw Ayaan Hirsi Ali,
a survivor of genital mutilation and an informed
critic of Muslim misogyny, booted from Brandeis by
self-proclaimed feminists. Meanwhile the major
feminist cause at the moment is Gamergate, a
controversy over video games which can be traced
back to a female game developer who slept with a
video game reviewer. Professional feminists have
spent more time and energy denouncing video games
than the sale and rape of girls in Nigeria and Iraq.
That is what feminism looks like and there is
something seriously wrong with that.
Women Against Feminism touched a nerve because
professional feminists know that few women want to
identify as feminists. Polls have found that the
majority of women view feminism negatively. Even
among young women, the feminist label doesn’t come
close to breaking the halfway mark.
Professional feminists respond to the negative
feedback by claiming that feminism is simply
equality. But if feminism were equality, women, and
for that matter men, wouldn’t dislike it so much.
A feminist looks like a professional activist
wearing a $75 t-shirt made by slave labor while
proclaiming that she is a feminist. It isn’t
fighting for the rights of women that makes her a
feminist. It’s the pricey fashion statement of
someone who toots their own horn while exploiting
less fortunate women.
The professional feminist is not there to help
women, but to promote the agenda of the
institutional left. She will turn campus rape into a
political cause while criticizing every rape
prevention measure, from a rape drug detecting nail
polish to self-defense for women, for not dealing
with rape culture. Stopping rape doesn’t interest
her. Exploiting the abuse of women to fight a
culture war does.
Her concerns are limited to causes affecting upper
class young women and the overall political
organizational needs of the left. That’s why she
will veer erratically from inflating college rape
statistics to arguing for illegal alien amnesty
despite the high number of rapes committed by
migrants.
But the women being raped generally won’t be found
on an Ivy League campus.
And that’s also what a feminist looks like.
The institutional left can’t call out Islam for
sexism, homophobia and racism because it has already
inducted it into its political coalition. And that’s
why feminists can’t talk about the mass rape of
young girls in the UK without stepping on a
political landmine. Those courageous women who do
talk about it, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Pamela
Geller, represent the principles that feminists only
claim to stand for.
It’s easy to take shots at gamers, but discussing
the rise of honor killings, genital mutilation and
domestic abuse among Muslims migrating to the West
is dangerous territory. That is why Ayaan Hirsi Ali
had to be silenced so that she wouldn’t show up the
professional feminists trying to pretend that their
mass distractions of video games, subsidized birth
control or celebrating “sex workers” are real
feminism.
Modern feminism is defined by talking non-stop about
the things that don’t matter to avoid talking about
the things that do. It long ago stopped being a
movement and became a series of distractions. When
feminists actually hit on a relevant issue they
quickly scramble to avoid talking about it. That’s
what happened with the viral Hollaback video of a
woman walking around New York City and being
harassed by minority men. The video quickly went
from a hit to an embarrassment as feminists realized
that they had unintentionally documented something
that they could not talk about.
Feminism is filled with things that it can’t talk
about. That’s why it long ago hit a dead end. It is
too afraid of being politically incorrect to be
relevant. It can’t advocate for women and so it
frantically stirs up micro-controversies that are
irrelevant to 99.99% of women. Its obsession with
Gamergate as the biggest threat to women since the
time that Miss USA suggested that women should take
self-defense classes is another reminder of its
inability to meaningfully address the problems
facing women today.
Professional feminists don’t want to fight rape;
they want to fight an intangible “rape culture”.
They don’t want to help women. Instead they want to
exploit the problems facing women to advance their
own agendas and careers. They are part of a movement
cut off from ordinary people and rooted in academia.
Few women want to identify as feminists, because
feminism doesn’t identify with them.
Feminism can’t talk about the problems facing women
because it is a prisoner of the left. It’s a
fundraising gimmick, an election turnout gimmick and
a way to sell pricey shirts.
The War on Women meme has jumped the shark. Senator
Mark Udall was mocked, ridiculed and written off by
his own Democrats for his cynical abuse of the meme.
An attempt by a congressional candidate to invoke it
during a debate in New York was met with uproarious
laughter.
The last election cycle had reduced feminism to
subsidized birth control. This cycle wiped it off
the map entirely. The next election cycle will bring
us Hillary Clinton as the ultimate feminist
candidate. Hillary built her career and won
elections on the strength of her husband’s name.
Polls show that she appeals to voters because they
think her husband is part of the package deal.
If Hillary wins, the first female president will be
a woman who got the job only because she refused to
divorce her husband after he cheated on her because
she hoped to exploit his political connections.
That too is what a feminist looks like.
Hillary Clinton laughing at her client’s rape of a
12-year-old girl from a working class family or
Carol Costello chuckling over the assault on Bristol
Palin reminds ordinary women what feminists really
think of them.
Feminism no longer speaks to women. It has become a
privileged sorority for actresses, politicians,
media types and academics who don’t actually like
women. Especially working class women.
The public face of feminism should be Ayaan Hirsi
Ali, but instead it’s the neurotic privileged
pettiness of Lena Dunham.
Feminism has become a lightweight movement heavy on
pop culture and phony outrage and unbelievably light
on content. It speaks all the time, but it no longer
has anything to say.