THE FUTURE Is Female. And She’s Furious.
In October, a few days after Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in as a Supreme Court justice, The Washington Post published one woman’s account of channeling her rage into half an hour of screaming at her husband. “I announced that I hate all men and wish all men were dead,” wrote retired history professor Victoria Bissell Brown, entirely unapologetic despite conceding that her hapless spouse was “one of the good men.” While Brown’s piece was more clickbait than commentary, it was an extreme expression of a larger cultural moment. ‘Tis the season to be angry if you’re a woman in America—or so we’re told. The storm of sexual assault allegations that nearly derailed Kavanaugh’s confirmation was just the latest reported conflagration of female fury. But this decade’s wave of feminist anger had been building for several years before that. While the “female rage” narrative does not represent all or even most women, there is little doubt that it taps into real problems and real frustrations. The central theme of the call to feminist rage is sexual victimhood…In 1994, dissident feminist Christina Hoff Sommers published a controversial book, Who Stole Feminism?, that charged feminist activists and authors with using bogus facts and other “myth-information” to portray modern Western women as brutally oppressed. Much of this critique has held up.
In many ways, 20th century American feminism was one of liberal democracy’s great success stories. Overtly discriminatory laws and policies crumbled; cultural attitudes on a wide range of subjects underwent a dramatic shift.
Modern feminism, with its framework of male privilege and female oppression, takes a simplistic and one-sided view of gender dynamics in modern Western societies. It refuses to recognize that there is no perfect solution to the problem of dispensing justice when someone alleges a crime with no witnesses and both parties tell a credible story. Rage-driven activism can be particularly destructive when it targets and politicizes interpersonal relationships, an area in which the sexes are probably equal but different in bad behavior. Rage feminism is a path of fear and hate. It traps women in victimhood and bitterness. It demonizes men, even turning empathy for a male into a fault, and dismisses dissenting women as man-pleasing collaborators.
reason.com By Cathy Young
