Hopefully, the cooked controversy over Brett Kavanaugh will prove to be a watershed moment in the history of our country generally, and that of the so-called “Me Too” movement, specifically.
The national discourse—or, perhaps more accurately, the cluster of talking points and soundbites—to have arisen from this disgrace of a spectacle has reinforced the conspicuous and conspicuously painful absence from it of critical thought.
First, and most fundamentally, the world has gotten the opportunity to see the flagrant contradiction at the very core of “feminism.”
Feminists—who from this point onward we will call, simply, “Feminist Woman”—have been insisting for decades that men and women differ from each other only insofar as their genitalia are concerned. Women are every bit as strong, physically and mentally, and every bit as professionally competent and occupationally capable as their male counterparts. Whatever disparities exist between men and women are “socially constructed,” the legacy of “patriarchal oppression.”
Women don’t need for men to hold doors, help them with their bags, or otherwise engage in any chivalric actions toward them. Chivalry is itself an instrument of oppression. Feminist Woman, in other words, claims that it is only equality with men that she desires and to which she is entitled. And this normative claim that men ought to treat women as their equals in all respects Feminist Woman grounds in the descriptive claim that women are the equals in all respects to men.
Against the State: An …
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However, at one and the same moment, contemporary Feminist Woman reveals herself to be among…