Karl Marx's Bearded Ladies

Used to be you needed to go to the traveling carnival for a good old-fashioned freak show. What with Lobster Boy, the Bearded Lady, and the occasional fire-eater or sword-swallower, you were guaranteed an evening of ewws and agghhs. Nowadays you don’t have to wait for the carnies to come to town. You just need to read the latest dispatches from today’s Left, particularly the world of modern feminism.

Case in point: Pennsylvania state Rep. Babette Josephs, who likened pro-life women to “men with breasts” because of their support for a pro-life bill. Objecting to the proposed law to require women seeking abortions to first get an ultrasound, Josephs said,

I do not understand how a woman in this Legislature can say to herself: “I’m not capable of making my own health decisions … but I can get elected and make them for somebody else.” What is wrong with these women? … Are they women? Or are they men with breasts?

The multiple unquestioned assumptions behind this statement make it difficult to know where to begin, but let’s start with the biggest one: all women as women have the same goals and aspirations. All women as women think alike. There can be no deviation. If a woman expresses an opinion that differs from what women “should” think, she cannot be a woman. She must be a man, albeit with breasts. Or a bearded lady, such is the freakiness of her position.

This is nothing more than warmed-over Marxism. Everyone is a member of a class, whether she realizes it or not, and each class has its own interests. While Marx was satisfied with only two classes, the bourgeoisie or the proletariat, today’s Leftism sees multiple “communities”—no one wants to use the word class anymore—where people are pigeonholed according to their economic strata, race, gender, sexual preference, you name it. The categories are as mutable as a ball of Silly Putty. (I’m a proud member of the Caucaso-American of Uncertain Northern European Heritage But There’s Probably Some Danish In There Somewhere Community. My wife is a member of the Caucaso-Britannic With A Dash of Irish Thrown In Community.)

Rep. Josephs probably has no idea that she’s thinking in Marxist categories. Indeed, most people don’t realize that all this talk of diversity and “communities” is nothing but a weak brew of Marx by way of 1960s student radicals. As if by osmosis, the culture has absorbed the ideas without realizing their origin, which is no surprise considering that two major shapers of today’s society, the academy and the media, were themselves shaped by those very same ‘60s students.

This form of Marxism has not (yet?) reached the stage where they need gulags in Siberia or a summary bullet to the back of the head to enforce orthodoxy, but there is nonetheless swift and sure sanction for those having incorrect thoughts. According to Marx, anyone who did not know his correct place suffered from “false consciousness.” This incorrect thinking probably arose from ideological manipulation from their bourgeois betters, causing the proletariat to do things against their own class interests.

Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas? is a perfect illustration of this supposed false consciousness at work. Those poor proles in Frank’s home state were led to vote against their own economic interests because of the discombobulating influence of shifty Republicans, who scared them with all their talk of God, guns, and gays. These Marxist assumptions explain the savagery directed at Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann and bumper stickers like this with nary a peep from the feminists, who sprang into frenzied high dudgeon at the slandering of feminist hero Sandra Fluke.

As condescending as Frank’s thinking might be, Rep. Josephs of Pennsylvania has just surpassed him in sheer presumptuous — and cluelessness. She is seemingly mystified that any woman could be against abortion on demand. Don’t they know that abortion is a woman’s issue on which all women should think the same? Don’t they know that only women can talk about women’s “health care”? This crazy talk of preferring babies and motherhood cannot be something a real woman would think. Only a man can think this way.

That is the only logical conclusion one can draw from Rep. Joseph’s little outburst. Such is the idiocy of so much of today’s feminism. It has become so stewed in unquestioned assumptions and bad thinking, it would not be out of place in an intellectual freak show, although it would do well in the clown show, too.