The Re-Patriarchy of Post-Feminism

The Re-Patriarchy of Post-Feminism

©2017  Ross Williams

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m enjoying this immensely.  The smug, condescending, self-righteous champions of women’s political nobility, dignity and worth are being paraded in public as the very same manipulative, lecherous, womanizing bounders that their pre-Savior savior, Cuckold Bill, was.  And likely still is.

The fact that it is now backfiring on them is delicious.  Hoisted on their own petard.  One can always count on “progressive” nitwits not looking more than two moves ahead on the chess board.  Sometimes not even that.

Imagine the giddiness of their perceived impunity when, at the very same time they were rewriting the narrative around Cuckold Bill from abuse of power to mere and irrelevant sexual dalliance − and getting large parts of the public to buy into it − they were ousting Bob Packwood for sexual misconduct that didn’t coincide with cheating a bimbo of her day in court.  It’s good to be the king.  By which I mean: it always helps to have a latter-day Lady Macbeth running interference on the bevy of crumpled tartlets left in the king’s wake.

Modern “progressives” had the temerity to offer up mocking contempt of Mike Pence for never doing any business with women, alone.  After all, marriage vows are pre-dinosaur; they went out with the trilobites.  Yet who’s laughing now?  It’s not Harvey Weinstein, Al Franken, John Conyers, Charlie Rose, Louis C K, Dustin Hoffman, Matt Lauer or Garrison Keillor.  By the time I finish this essay there’s likely to be another dozen names, big and small, added to the list.  And if the current political alignment continues, eleven of those names will be “progressive” liberals in politics, media or Hollywood.

…which is the next hilarious aspect of all this.  “Progressive” liberals are uniquely supportive of women, women’s rights, and whatever version of feminism the feminists claim it currently to be.  No other political alignment shares that inane sensitivity.  Conservatives and republicans are all neanderthals, and libertarians are − in this equation − republicans-once-removed.  We simply advocate too much separation of personal interaction from the controlling ministrations of government to sufficiently combat the sexual predation of women beyond outright rape.

Yet who are women’s predominant predators in this new agitprop?  “Progressive” liberals, hands down.

Puns aside, the truly tasty irony of this, though, is − if the conspiracy theories are even partially true − it’s backfiring on them.  Remember, this was designed to eliminate Foxnews as the only significant non-liberal media propagandist, and Donnie Combover, the political interloper who declared war on the entrenched bureaucracy of “progressive” liberalism and its liberal and conservative keepers. 

Get rid of Roger Ailes and Foxnews crumbles.

Well, that didn’t happen, so get rid of Bill O’Reilly and Foxnews loses all impact.

That didn’t happen either.  Instead, the media outlets depleted so far are NBC, CBS, CNN and PBS.

Wait! was that Candidate Combover, the liberal New York democrat who told his fellow democrats to get bent, explaining how to “grab ‘em by the pussy”?  Turns out the people who are weary of the entrenched, self-serving, self-pitying establishment didn’t give a damn.  And it turns out the ones who do give a damn are all liberal hypocrites or hypocrite-enablers.  And the political hucksters being pilloried are Conyers and Franken who, turns out, people don’t like as much as he thought.

The Left seems to have declared a prudish culture war and the only ones showing up for the fight has been the Left.  The only real casualties here are from friendly fire.  It’s been a two extra-grand tub o’ popcorn spectacle, twenty-five years in the making.  1992, and the election of “Cuckold” Bill Clinton.

Paula Jones, look what a mess you made!  How on earth can you be so dim as to accept an interview for an Arkansas state clerical position − at 10 PM − in a motel room − from the Governor of Arkansas himself?  Now, I love to mock Lady Macbeth as much as the next libertarian, and will often do so gratuitously, but when the crone is right, she’s right.  You’re what happens when you drag a dollar bill through a trailer park.

There was a time that feminism would have hounded Paula Jones out of the club.  The thought of having special protections granted by society − let alone government − for the fact of one’s gender was appalling.  It was termed patriarchy and it was universally sneered at, because each and every special protection seen by feminists was granted exclusively to men.  [Feminists ignored those granted to women; they didn’t count for some reason.]  Feminism demanded the end to male specialness; and no, women didn’t deserve them either.  Women are not little girls; they’re fully-formed adults able to take care of themselves.

If a woman was so stupid as to be in Paula Jones’ position in the first place, or not leave once she figured out what the evening was turning out to be, she deserved what she got − short of forcible rape.  If she could be talked into doing things she was not originally intending to do, then she’s simply a slut.  Making it safe − and socially-acceptable − to be a slut was among the first non-economic objectives of feminism.  Why should guys have all the fun?

The thought of criminally or civilly penalizing “sexual harassment” − hounding and badgering a woman with sexual innuendo, demeaning commentary and crude, boorish proposition − would have annoyed an original feminist.  She’d have embarked on a tirade against the patriarchal trivialization of women and not taken a breath for a fortnight.  The sexual harassment itself would simply have inspired the feminist to retort with the uninspired rejoinder: male chauvinist pig.

By contrast, most of what passes for “sexual assault” today would have made the feminist seethe with rage.  Original feminists were wholly unsympathetic to anyone, male and especially female, of the attitude that women needed or deserved special protections just because they were women.  After all, among the special protections granted to men by society and its government, those against being touched were not among them.  A man would have been laughed out of the human race for complaining about having his package fondled − by anyone.   If a woman couldn’t emasculate a male grabbing her butt or other private parts in less than five words, she had simply not been paying attention.  ...and she had no one to blame but herself.  Feminist philosophy was born a libertarian adjunct.

By the time Slick Willy was boorishly seducing Paula Jones in that Little Rock motel room, feminism was morphing into a socialist construct.  This was ably womansplained to me in the feminism seminar I took while in grad school for sociology − an awkward place for a libertarian to find himself.  Feminism had recently dropped the W C Fields outlook on self-worth: “It ain’t what they call you, it’s what you answer to”, and backslid into grade-school infantilism: “He’s calling me names!!!”

I’d made the mistake − apparently − one night in class of referring to what some lady I knew…

“The term is WOMAN!” I was brutally reminded by a tandem of tender little dumplings on the other side of the room.  They were both over a decade older than me and would now easily be in their seventies.  I begged their rude pardon.  They snottily informed me that terms used to refer to females alter any female the term is directed at.  The term “woman”, though, can never be demeaning because it is what women chose as their designation … or some such pretzelled logic as that.

Ah.  Right.  The old Chesterfield Sofa Syndrome.  If I call you a Chesterfield sofa, you become a Chesterfield sofa, or at least its matching ottoman.  Words are now magic spells and have powers imparted by the speaker of those words.  Mystical incantation makes a triumphant return in the waning days of the 20^th Century, and − thank Goddess − it took the social equality of women to discover this new-is-old witchcraft.

No, no, they insisted; I was missing the point.

Yet I wasn’t.  Words, I told them, only have magic powers if the hearer of those words chooses to allow that power.  Further, it depends on a sane and intelligent navigation of context to determine whether the assertion of power is rationally inferred or a paranoid presumption.  They quibbled over this.

I would, I promised, demonstrate all this to them before the night was out.  They scoffed and snorted.

For the next hour of class, every time one of these two women-girls would open her mouth about anything, I would interrupt as rudely as I could, and start a critique of their position by stating, “Woman…!” and proceed to rip apart their comments.  By the first break, the rest of the class had settled into mostly watching the show while eating their popcorn; the two women-girls were foaming in outrage.  They approached me at the coffee machine to bawl me out once again − in private this time − about my patriarchal attitude. 

But women, I told them; I couldn’t be patriarchal, because I’d used the proper term.  It was, after all, their notion of propriety to which I was strictly adhering.

It turned out that it was the way I said it and the context surrounding the term that made the difference to them.  …as I had told them it would be.

Ahhhh.  So, you’re going to drop your infantile notion that words mean anything other than what the hearer chooses to hear in them …?

Well, they weren’t going to go that far, but they’d ease up on the whole “some terms are sexist in and of themselves” thing.

Curiously, or not, one minor semantic victory in an out-of-the-way feminism seminar in a state college sociology graduate program did not stem the rising tide of feminist puerility.  And we fast-forward to today where we find the unholy combination of micro-aggression awareness among a generation of people who admittedly need a safe space for when they have trouble adulting …   It is no wonder that any little inconvenience results in entire populations of erstwhile grown-ups rushing off to find their crayons for comfort.

We’ve spent two generations sturming und dranging over the role of female equality in our society, only to end up back where we started … if that enlightened.  Female equality now demands the same − and further − special protections from society that are not granted to men.  And simply because they’re women.

Two generations of agitation by women about their equality in all matters has concluded that women are uniquely unsusceptible to the frailty of memory in sexual matters that uniformly plagues the rest of humanity in every other subject, and which makes the contradiction of eye-witness testimony and physical evidence so troubling under every legal circumstance.

Demand physical evidence that the defendant killed the victim, absolutely; to do less is a breach of justice.  But demand the same physical evidence for an alleged rape forty years after the fact that the woman − gosh − never got around to reporting…?  That’s flagrant sexism.  “Why would a woman lie?!”

Women are also apparently immune to the mind’s habit of constructing elaborate excuses, fabricating miles of new facts out of whole cloth if necessary, to protect themselves from psychological trauma of being told they have nice hooters and the guilt those traumas inspire.  Suggest that a woman is inaccurate about who goosed her in a crowded elevator? or that it was not a pervert at all, but that she backed into the corner of a briefcase?  Not permissible, and you’re a sexist if you try. 

Modern gender preferentialism would, instead, have us kill Due Process − the Liberty plank requiring accusation, whether criminal or civil, be proven and not merely alleged before The System is permitted, even backhandedly, to penalize the accused.  Women’s words are and must be above − and beyond − reproach; unimpeachable.  Even decades after the fact.  Who cares that this obliterates Equal Protection?

What worth are sentimentalist abstractions of theoretical liberty when stacked up against a real woman’s feels relating to her personhood in its most private and intimate manifestations?  Words do have magic powers, as my two boorish denouncers claimed.  Western sexist society casts spells of every sort imaginable to reduce each woman to a jellied serfdom that islam could only dream of imposing with its primitive tools.  Accusation is sufficient in this spectacle; Cotton Mather’s ideological descendants will conjure up the appropriate rationale to justify the QED.  And they’ve been doing just that.  Goody Gillibrand, Goody Pelosi and Goodyhontas Warren are leading the way against their own.

So yes, it’s fascinating to watch the [mostly] idiot Left implode in self-pitying sanctimony.  But social spasm such as this rarely stops until it infects everyone around it.  I don’t think even a pink pussy hat is enough of an inoculant.