Month: July 2019

Intemperate Speech a Cause for Concern

Posted on | by hr | 1 Comment on Intemperate Speech a Cause for Concern

I wish our President were a little more self-controlled in his speech, but it seems to me that there is a significant difference between, on the one hand, a man — even a President — who is prone to spouting off ungraciously, and, on the other hand, virtually an entire national press and punditry united in making scurrilous and unfounded accusations against the duly elected President.

One intemperate man is an unfortunate demonstration of flawed character. The nation’s press engaging in a concerted effort to promote a false narrative is something else, and, for those who actually value the idea of democracy, something much more significant. (After all, if the Russians’ modest efforts to influence the election are a serious concern, how much more serious must be concern about the influence of a grossly biased and inaccurate — or even deceptive — mainstream press?)

It is the fashion to erupt in righteous fury with every clumsy, inarticulate, or just plain rude comment from our President. I’m still waiting for the expressions of outrage from the public, and contrition from the press, that should follow two years of false accusations of treasonous complicity with a hostile foreign power.

We strain at boorish gnats, while swallowing the mendacious machinations of a corrupt Fourth Estate. Trump will be gone in five years. The smugly corrupt press and opinion-making elite will still be with us. That is a legitimate reason for some righteous fury.

It’s Time for Feminism to End

Posted on | by hr | Leave a Comment on It’s Time for Feminism to End

Feminism began with goals that were both laudable and achievable — and it achieved them: women are today the legal equals of men. For decades now, since that legal equality was achieved, feminism has been harmful to women.

Feminism has always had its destructive aspect, its misguided insistence that women adopt male practices that, for reasons of simple biology, work against women. The sexual realities for women are different — completely, ineluctably different — from those for men, and encouraging women to disregard those realities harms women. Women aren’t men, and they can’t act with the casual disregard for responsibility and consequences that nature has gifted to men as an unfortunately viable option.

There is another, more subtly corrosive quality to feminism. In an era when people talk of “safe spaces” and worry about “micro-aggression,” feminism has unwittingly removed the cultural safeguards that made it possible for women to comfortably coexist with men in public spaces. The quotidian gestures of male chivalry — opening and holding doors, walking on the street side of the sidewalk and the down-side of the stair, refraining from vulgarity and profanity in mixed company, etc. — have long been resented and denigrated by feminists as lesser examples of toxic masculinity. That’s a mistake, and one with consequences: these gestures serve as an assurance to women that men are aware of the differences in physical power between the sexes, and choose to harness that power in token acts of protection.

Has feminism made women safe from men? No, as the “me too” refrains make clear, it has not. Human nature in the realm of sex is deeply wired and impossible to change quickly, if at all. What is possible is the accretion of social patterns of behavior that create safeguards for women, patterns that encourage safe behavior by both men and women. Feminism, having achieved its legitimate legal goals, has left as its only purpose the destruction of femininity and, along with it, the social safeguards that protected women.

It’s time for the feminist movement to accept victory and go home.