Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll declares THE END OF FEMINISM. She writes:

I don’t rightly remember the first time I even heard the word “feminism.” As a girl growing up in the ’50s, the oldest child, I do not remember a single time that I was told I could not do something or less was expected of me because I was female. And this was with a very traditional “cis-normative” father, born in 1925. You look up “patriarchy” in the dictionary, there’s his picture. And a mighty handsome one, too!

But Daddy taught me to throw a spiral, hit a baseball, bait a hook, clean a fish, mow a lawn in a diamond pattern, count change back to the customer. Anything less than an “A” in any subject, on any paper or test, was unacceptable. We were not a Participation Trophy family.

In college some young ladies were just starting to read the emerging feminist literature. Someone recommended Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which I found tedious and polemical and just chalked it up to her being an existentialist and, well, French. It had nothing to do with me. I was 18; the world was my oyster. And then around 1969, suddenly “women’s issues” were EVERYWHERE. The more rational spokeswomen made a good case that there were legitimate grievances of a discriminatory nature that needed to be addressed.

For example, Sandra Day O’Connor finished second at Stanford Law School and the only legal job she could get was as an Assistant County Attorney in San Mateo, California when she offered to work for free and share office space with the secretary! Clearly, that was grossly unfair.

When I was a typist at Evanston IBM in 1967, I asked to take the aptitude test for what was at that time a very early stage of the computer biz. With a smirk, my boss handed me the test – mostly math and logic — to take on my lunch hour. A 75 was a passing score; I got a 97. They said I must have cheated, plus I couldn’t carry the tool case the guys carried, which they claimed weighed 100 lbs. Oh well. My entire life might have been different and I like the way it turned out. But, yeah, discrimination on the basis of sex did exist, was addressed by some gutsy women pioneers, and massive societal changes ensued in pretty short order.

Here’s the thing: on most of feminism’s early talking points and grievances, many of which were both fair and overdue, THEY WON! In a sane world, they would have declared victory, thrown a huge party, folded up their tents and banners and gone home. But, by then “women’s liberation” already claimed to speak for a large victim group and was a lucrative cottage industry. It has galled me for decades that it claims to speak for ME.

If the Betty Friedans of the world were unhappy suburban housewives with nothing much to do but be homemakers (like that’s a SMALL thing…), they could now be fulfilled wage workers. We won! We won! Women can now be anything we want – firefighters, police officers, doctors, astronauts, CEOs, terrible senators, soldiers, ministers and rabbis, sports reporters, boxers, pole vaulters, pole dancers, bipolar – really anything at all.

But, in a grim determination never to take “Yes” for an answer, a different breed of feminist waddled onto the scene. Feminism had taken a vicious, vindictive and male-hating turn. Like other “civil rights” movements, it turned out to have less to do with “justice” and more to do with raw, abusive power, payback, quotas, unqualified people having set-aside slots based on their plumbing, and getting rich. Society needed to make some changes. And it did. However, we’ve all heard the expression “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Well, don’t look now, but there goes the baby…literally.

Abortion was always a divisive subject. The first time Mr. AG and I heard a friend wax poetic about what a great thing abortion would be, I almost got into a fistfight with him, except he was also a pacifist! Where’s the fun in pummeling a pacifist? To a non-psychotic, the very idea of killing a baby is appalling, admit it. But by the early ’70s there was a growing consensus that in the first 12 weeks, the proverbial “clump of cells” should be able to be terminated. How quickly and predictably that morphed into abortion any time for any reason, including the sex of the baby, or no reason at all. I knew one certifiable, deranged feminist who used abortion as birth control. She had had 8 abortions that I heard of before I lost track of her.

Today, after ultrasound has proven that the clump of cells looks remarkably like a baby, only 7 percent of the American people agree with third trimester abortion. SEVEN PERCENT! You could get more than 7 percent to say they have had lunch with Bigfoot and Elvis. (Bigfoot selected the steak tartare; Elvis chose the Biscuits and Gravy.) Yet seven of nine black-robed arbiters set the stage for what has become legalized infanticide.

As they say on late-night informercials: But WAIT, there’s more! The old guard, who educated and litigated and lobbied for the rights and privileges women have today are driven from the movement, indeed from the public square. They have failed to get onboard with the quaint and unscientific notion that sex is a more or less imaginary construct and can change on a whim. How shocked Eve Ensler must have been to find that her tedious but lucrative play about chattering vaginas is now verboten because “some women don’t have vaginas.” Though she died in 1986, De Beauvoir herself wrote, “If you live long enough, you’ll see that every victory turns into a defeat.” Gotta love those cheery existentialists!

Newly-minted women who are actually men can now win every athletic competition against real biological women. Title IX has been rendered meaningless. Protest if you dare, even if you’re an iconic lesbian tennis pro, and you will face a Twitter storm or legal action in Canada. Even backpedaling and groveling will not save you. As the famous novelist Max Cossack queried the other day over breakfast: “If men and women are exactly the same, why don’t we see women who’ve transitioned into ‘men’ winning athletic events against other men? How come that only goes one way?” Bueller? Mueller? Is that in anybody’s purview?

So what you might call Fairness Feminism is dead. The loony ghouls feasting on its corpse will carry on, but it will never again approach being any kind of mass movement. Normal Americans – of all colors – do not believe that a horny teenage boy who touched a breast 40 years ago is retroactively guilty of “assault.” Women cannot decide decades after a drunken, consensual sexual encounter that they have been “raped.” The American people do not believe that killing a full-term newborn baby has anything to do with “healthcare.” Fairness resonates with normal people; lunacy does not. Normal Americans know the difference.

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