At a recent event, Barack Obama spoke about a fantasy he used to have while president of women running the world.
Obama assures us that the world would be, though not perfect, better — kinder and gentler, with so much more liberty and justice for all.
His imagination may have been prompted by the recent passing of the feminist icon Gloria Steinem. Or maybe it was a burst of petulant disquiet prompted by the way the Clancy verdict and the Cornell 7 lawsuit and the attendant hysteria saturating the zeitgeist mocked his fantasies and delivered an eerily unfriendly reminder of feminism's destructive legacy of gender gaps and toxic women.
Modern feminism would take root in a healthy, rapidly changing post-war economy. The economy required fewer physical and more cerebral skills, diminishing a primary male advantage in the workplace. Technology's labor-saving devices reduced household workloads. Prosperity's tendency to substitute leisure for labor expanded highbrow cultural availability along with boredom, temptation, and lowbrow experimentation. Government's size expanded (with intermittent exceptions) along with its role from a protector of rights to a (more feminized) provider of needs.
In 1959, before Gloria Steinem's Ms. Magazine or Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique, the movie The Best of Everything was released, providing a revealing snapshot of the cultural norms and struggles of young women at an important cultural pivot point right on the cusp of the women's movement. The dilemma both societally and individually was not whether women could excel professionally, which was fully acknowledged, but whether women could achieve success without sacrificing not just their essential role in and desire for domestic life, but their femininity. As the movie illustrated, the tough and capable executive Joan Crawford had long since lost her sweetness and softness, along with her fertility. In its examination of sexual mores, the movie also delivers a sympathetic yet stern warning regarding the perils of irresistible playboys and the lure of wealthy, powerful professionals.
Eliminating abuses based on false stereotypes and unjustified disdain toward women, honoring the professional potential of women in the merit-based free market while maintaining traditional values that protect and honor femininity and family, and protecting women from the exploitation of sexual objectification all fit comfortably into a conservative worldview. Instead, what happened was a feminist movement that forged ahead so aggressively that the concerns and tradeoffs revealed during modern feminism's infancy were mocked or ignored — in part to engage in some ill fated partnerships.
First, the movement partnered with a continuously leftward-lurching Democrat party, which offered to supercharge this movement from empowerment, equality, and rights into entitlement, equity, and rights deprivation. Many women who remained in the movement may have come for the equality, but they stayed for the dominance and double-standards. Second, the movement arranged a partnership between misandrists and misanthropists to "liberate" women from the shackles of traditionally female roles. Masculinity was explicitly attacked as toxic, while femininity was implicitly attacked by bullying women to be more masculine. The misanthropists agreed to push women to be more like men in the sexual realm, while the misandrists would do the same in the other arenas.
A recent survey found that around 50 percent of voters and 83 percent of GOP males under 50 believe that Western society is too feminine. Understanding that this toxic imbalance was a significant factor in Trump's victory, Democrats conjured up their own Democrat-styled version of the alpha male: Graham Platner. Their solution to attract the disaffected male voters, who were not self-loathing enough to join a party that blamed them for all the nation's problems, was to stuff all the woke socialism into a big burly package of manliness. Unfortunately, Platner's purported non-toxic masculinity was skin deep, and even the skin had a Nazi tattoo.
That Platner's masculinity was of the toxic variety, the type that the left mischaracterizes MAGA as, was not surprising. A party that elevates victimhood and dependency over self-reliance and achievement while largely based on envy, sloth, hate, lust, and arrogance packaged as empathy attracts similar traits in its supporters and leaders. The non-toxic masculine Democrat becomes more of an oxymoron as the party becomes more predator than protector, more conformist than courageous, more authoritarian than qualified authority.
In finance, there is a concept known as the alpha factor, which is what is unique about a company, separate from what spills over from being part of a network, industry, or the overall economy (beta factor), that determines excellence. This can be applied in the political context, in which there are qualities unique to the individual and separate from any group (including sex) or party or identity category the individual belongs to that lead to excellence in performance and leadership.
Contrast Platner's elite-financed candidacy to that of Spencer Pratt, who arose organically from the ashes of a personal tragedy due to elite corruption and incompetence. Platner fabricated his past to perform as a puppet of the elites. Pratt harnessed his past reality performer skills to become a voice of the people. He had principles, pragmatism, out-of-the box thinking, candor, charm, and courage (having acquired the ability to be hated from his reality TV villain experience). These are all alpha traits, with courage being the most essential. Principles are easy prey, doomed to be slaughtered without courage in these times, in which principles have so many predators: cancel culture, fake news, media mobs, lawfare, AWFULs.
I was watching a television show in which three twenty-something men are discussing their romantic life. They all agree about their similarly ranked overall desirability. Two of the men are baffled and struggling to figure out why one of them has so much more success. The bachelor in question tells them he simply "tells women what they want to hear." The other two recognize that this indeed is his superpower, but not without reminding Don Juan how he leaves such a long trail of embittered women. The women may start out hearing everything they want to hear, but they end up getting nothing they really want.
Feminism lures women by telling them everything they want to hear, then abandons them, failing to deliver. Women can be independent powerhouses while demanding the special treatment of the frailest dependents. They can demand responsibility-free rights, painless gain, gutless glory, and riskless reward. They can bully their way into anything they want and victim their way out of any mistake they make.
After decades of modern feminism, women are not sending their best. They are sending the DIE-unqualified, indoctrinated Karens; fake victims; emasculators; communists; and witch-hunters. Feminism offers women the fantasy that they are picture-perfect princesses but turns them into crybully monsters, the princess's photo negative. There is no princess in the crybully. There is no warmth, no sweetness, no modesty; empathy is tribal at best and suicidal or even homicidal at worst; gossip is gospel, rumor is fact; reason is too obfuscated by hate to do good.
Feminism has left too many women feeling lonely, cheated, misled. The feminists' fantasy has become our nightmare, leaving too many of us, sex notwithstanding, desperately seeking alpha.
Image via Pexels.
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