An excerpt from this article: http://thefederalist.com/2014/11/17/its-time-to-push-back-against-feminist-bullies/
How many times have you heard the line that feminism is simply “the radical notion that women are people”? And when was the last time you thought that sentiment even remotely expressed whatever the h-e-double-hockey-sticks is going on in feminism these days?
In the last week alone, we saw the social media outrage machine (with assists from friendly journalists, of course) force Time to apologize for including “feminist” in a cheeky poll of which words should be “banned” from overuse or misuse. (It had won the poll by a wide margin before the thought police cracked down and forced its removal.) Bloggers and writers at The Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the New York Review of Books all called on Time to renounce the inclusion of “feminist” in the poll.
We witnessed a mob of online feminists harass a male scientist to the point of tears because of his sartorial choices. Dr. Matt Taylor helped land a spaceship on a comet hurtling through space at the clip of 135,000 kilometers an hour, the first time humans had come even close to accomplishing such a tremendous feat. He is a great man who has accomplished great things for all of humanity. But when he discussed his team’s accomplishments on television, you see, he was wearing a shirt made by a female friend out of fabric depicting cartoons of scantily clad women. Quelle horreur!
That’s it. Enough already. Enough. Enough. Enough.
And when Nancy Pelosi was asked by Nancy Cordes of CBS News if she’d given any thought to stepping down on account of how she’d just overseen yet another drubbing of Democrats in the House, she accused the assembled press corps of misogyny, claiming they’d never asked male leaders such questions. Even the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank — I repeat, even Dana Milbank — couldn’t take the idiocy, since of course male leaders are asked such questions all the time.
That’s it. Enough already. Enough. Enough. Enough. Whether we want to or not, we have to deal with our feminist bullying problem.
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Last week we saw Kim Kardashian slather her body with oil and put everything on display. Much joviality ensued. I mean, if anyone suggested that she wore something inappropriate to work, I missed it.
But we live in a culture where third-wave feminists engage in “slut walks” to send the message that nobody should be judged by what they wear. And yet if you make cartoons of the very same things these women wear on slut walks and put them on a shirt, that’s “ruining the comet landing”? That doesn’t even make sense.
I suppose there are people who can say “Matt Taylor was asking for harassment because of what he wore,” but those people sure as heck aren’t feminists, who claim that such views are sexist. And feminist extremists are the same ones pushing all sorts of gender identity and trans activism, arguing that men wearing women’s clothes to work is no big deal. If that’s no big deal, how much less of a big deal is a shirt with representations of women on it?
It honestly may have always been this way, but there’s no disputing that right now American feminism is a tangled mess of double standards, Puritanical policing of men’s behavior, fascist speech codes, and petty grievances. It’s in a state of constant outrage.
In a Q&A with the Wall Street Journal last week — before #ShirtStorm broke — Taylor was asked if his sleeves of tattoos had hurt his success. He said, “The people I work with don’t judge me by my looks but the work that I have done and can do. Simple.” Taylor is lucky he works with scientists who judge him by his work and not his appearance. Let’s all aspire to such behavior and finally help feminist bullies learn to do the same.
There are many reasons why the vast majority of Americans do not identify as feminist. Feminism has its own problems. But the one thing most of us should be able to agree on is that feminist bullies are damaging civil society. We must stand up to them if we don’t want them to harm it any further. We shouldn’t be bossed around by people who constantly whine, manufacture outrage and offense, and cull the internet for things to be upset about.
