Feminists: Idiots or Shrikes?

It is no doubt some mysterious function of divine justice that feminism turns its adherents into caricatures of helpless and irrational females. I know so many homemaker moms who possess incredible dignity and self-possession — the respect and power that such womanly women acquire without even trying is kind of startling and wonderful. And of course, I also know plenty of more careerist women who show up and do their jobs well without a lot of fuss and bother about their gender. But feminists?

So help me, every dame I know who is an avowed feminist comes across as Betty Boop with PMS and a hatchet. They tremble in fear before the objectifying power of the Male Gaze. They eschew rational argument and revel in shrieking nonsense. And their attempts to imitate the boorish sexuality of the worst of men inevitably morph into faux Victorian prudery.

And what in the world is this weird, crazy obsession with campus rape? Inflating the statistics. Going into hysterics whenever someone points out the numbers are wrong. And rejecting any suggestion that women ought to take care at night or learn self-defense or stay sober around strangers as “blaming the victim.”

Perhaps the campus rape hysteria is a sign of misplaced revulsion at the college booze-and-hook-up culture which does, in fact, degrade women and which is part of the “sexual liberation” that feminists stupidly supported. That is, maybe it’s a way feminists can get girls out of a situation they helped create without taking any responsibility for having helped to create it.

I hope so. Because if it’s not that, then the whole foofaraw comes across as some sort of Freudian kookiness wherein feminists are so fearful of their secret rape fantasies they project them onto the world. Can’t they just read Fifty Shades of Grey like everyone else and let it go?

Then again, there’s also the possibility that there’s some kind of shrewish method to the girly madness.

Rape is an awful crime, second only to murder in evil. What makes it so is not the physical violation alone, but the spiritual one as well: it forces a person into the most intimate human act against his or her free will. Inherent in our disgust at this behavior is: the spiritual importance of sex, the fact that sex is therefore not to be taken lightly, and the fact that people possess free will and the natural right to exercise it without violence or coercion. In short, our rejection of rape is a rejection of the entire Democrat Party platform!

But rape is also a subset of a more far-flung evil: strong people preying on the weak. Which is a subset of the human condition or what some of us call Original Sin. Which is to say, it doesn’t go away. We don’t evolve out of it. It doesn’t lessen with history. It’s not due to some mysterious “rape culture” that can be changed and made to vanish. It’s the same yesterday, today and tomorrow and, like human wickedness itself, it will not leave us until our old pal Uncle Jesus comes again.

So we take care of ourselves and one another. We stay out of some sections of the city. We lock our doors. We walk our lady friends to their cars. We learn to fight. We carry weapons if needs must. And when rape does happen, we try to put the offender in prison. It’s a fallen world. We learn to live in it.

To say that it’s blaming the victim to suggest women take care or learn to defend themselves — to say that the answer to rape is  “telling men to stop raping women” — is so childish, so unreasonable and so unrealistic that I can only wonder if it’s not some sort of power play. After all, if you give yourself the moral right to hector and restrict perfectly innocent men on the grounds that it will stop evil men from doing the evil they will never stop doing, then you’ve basically given yourself the right to hector and restrict innocent men forever.

Is that the idea? Or is it just stupid? Feminists: idiots or shrikes? You decide.