Feminists Not Working
One of the self-contradicting ironies of feminism is that, by its own definition, it cannot work. This truth came home to me with great force in the recent presidential campaign. I saw advertisements for Ms. Harris in which men boasted that they were “man enough” to vote for a woman for president. Well, sexual indifference has made its way far into the body politic, so I was not surprised by the ads. What I did notice was that nowhere did Harris make any attempt to say that she would represent men’s interests as peculiarly theirs. But then, I do not know of any woman, even among conservatives, who says so. It is not so much that Harris could not stand up for men. She had no intention of doing so; perhaps it never occurred to her that it is a thing to do.
It is something like the baldly obvious failure of liberal women in my church, the Roman Catholic, even to consider that if they pretend to be leaders of men, they must be leaders of—men. Such women fail at teaching boys, but they are not embarrassed by the failure, blaming it instead on the hapless boys themselves. They can’t teach boys, but they would lead men in the church? No, they would not; they do not even intend to.
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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