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| Reprinted by license. |
Back in February, I
wrote a post arguing that the “war on women” angle had more potential to
damage Barack Obama’s re-election bid than it did to hurt the eventual
Republican candidate. What I didn’t
explicitly say — what I should have said in just so many words — is that
pushing the “war on women” meme would put radical feminists on the road to
self-marginalization.
Why? Because,
inevitably, anyone who tries to argue the “war on women” seriously can’t help
but present him/herself as a tinfoil-hat-wearing loon, a wild-eyed nutjob
completely out of contact with reality.
Moreover, the people who would come to that conclusion would be not just
men but women in the center.
For instance, at the DNC, Sandra Fluke, a liar almost as
accomplished and egregious as Bill Clinton, found it well within her fertile —
er, creative imagination to conjure
up a dystopian female future worthy of a Richard Donner film should women be
denied free contraception. But where are
the battalions of men waiting to shove shoeless women back into the
kitchen? Too many of them need their
wives’ income too much to do that. (Or
perhaps I should say “their roommates’” or “their girlfriends’”; so far as
there is a dystopian future for women — particularly black and Latino women —
it’s coming as one
result of the destruction of the traditional nuclear family.) The idea that “the great issue of the day,
and the appropriate focus of our concern, is making other people pay for her
birth-control pills” is what led Peggy Noonan to
characterize Fluke in the WSJ as “a
ninny, a narcissist and a fool.”
The Code Pink vulvas dancing outside in protest didn’t help, either.
