The Feminist Omerta
11th March 2011
The Other McCain reacts to feminist criticism.
We are at that stage of the argument you have with your wife when whatever started the argument has ceased to be relevant, and the point of the argument has become: She is right, you are wrong, and your refusal to acknowledge her unquestioned rightness is regarded as an intolerable insult.
Just as I’ve read more Marx than most Marxists, I’ve read more about feminism than most feminists.
To every woman who has ever been passed over for a promotion that instead went to a guy, or otherwise felt herself subjected to sexist discrimination, the guy who criticizes feminism is mentally associated with That Awful Creep. This isn’t necessarily my fault, or the women’s fault, it just is what it is.
For women writers, feminism is “this thing of ours,” a subject on which they expect to exercise a monopoly. You will note here a distinction between women who write for a living, or at least as an amateur vocation, and women who have no ambition to be regarded as “writers.” Insofar as any woman aspires to be a writer, one of the subjects about which she can always write — and never have to worry about competing for readership with male writers — is feminism.
No matter how much historical evidence I cite in support of the fact that Second Wave feminism was deeply rooted in the anti-American Left — both Betty Friedan’s pro-Soviet Old Left and the radical New Left roots of the Women’s Liberation Movement — they will not concede the point, because I was born with a penis, and no one born with a penis can be permitted to write with authority as a critic of feminism.