feminism's lethal victory

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Jan 11, 2006

Mark Steyn has a mordant essay explaining how feminism, by succeeding too well, has made itself prey to the very dangers it promised to eliminate.

Every December 6, our own unmanned Dominion lowers its flags to half-mast and tries to saddle Canadian manhood in general with the blame for the Montreal massacre -- the 14 women murdered by Marc Lepine, born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater, though you wouldn't know that from the press coverage. Yet the defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M Lepine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, meekly did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate -- an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The "men" stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.

Your average Western feminist lobby group doesn't see it that way, naturally. "The feminism I think of is the one that embodies inclusivity, multiculturalism and the ability to change the world through the humanity that women do bring," says Stephanie Davis, executive director of Atlanta's Women's Foundation. "If there were women in power in representative numbers -- 52 per cent -- I think that the World Trade Center would still be standing."

You wrong yourself, Miss Davis. Even female terrorists could have hit the Towers after adequate pilot training.

An old joke tells about the beaver that chewed off three of its legs and was still caught in the trap -- a perfect emblem of 1970s feminism. Traditionally, women at a disadvantage (whether social, physical, or economic) protected themselves from the predations of unscrupulous males by marriage, sexual modesty, godliness, and (when cornered) bare-fanged truculence. From the start 70s feminism was in the service of Leftism rather than women, whence it gleefully amputated the first three limbs and resulted, thirty years later, in Maureen Dowd. Says Steyn:

So far, in this first large-scale experiment on the dispensability of men, it appears that, in the broader societal sense, fish do indeed need bicycles. That's a Gloria Steinem line, of course. These days Gloria is -- what? 83? 112? -- and still looks fabulously hot, but, like The Feminism of Doria Gray, it's her ideology that's gotten all wrinkled and saggy.