HAPPY WARRIOR
from National Review
Afghan women display an election poster after registering to vote. Associated Press photo by Alexander Zemlianichenko
For reasons best known to its editors, The Guardian in Britain has been publishing extensive excerpts from The Terror Dream: Fear And Fantasy In Post-9/11 America, by Susan Faludi. The other Monday morning, halfway through one of no less than three excerpts (plus an interview) in that day’s edition edition, I came across this, harking back to the fall of 2001:
“Fighting the gender war seemed to be a preoccupying concern, too, of Mark Steyn's November 19 article in the National Review, in which he denounced the proponents of nanny-state big government – ‘Hillary & Co’ prominent among them - for having de-balled American men in the air just as they had on the ground. The airline cabin was ‘the perfect symbol’ of ‘the modern social-democratic state’, he wrote, with a female FAA director who stripped pilots of their handguns and an oligarchy of flight attendants on every plane whose dictates had to be obeyed…”
You know, Susan, sometimes it’s not about you. I wasn’t writing about “the gender war”, but about “the war” – you know, the one involving thousands of dead bodies in New York and bombers setting off for Kabul and Kandahar. You remember, the non-metaphorical war. But, if you’ve been peddling war as lame-o leftie metaphor your whole life (Ms Faludi’s previous book was Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women) I guess it’s hard to remember there was ever another kind. I didn’t recall my ancient NR column as being about “fighting the gender war” and, indeed, on sending my mail-order bride to retrieve it from the vault I could discern no “gender war” component to it whatsoever. There is no animus directed to the “female FAA director” on account of her femaleness, which can only be deduced by the fact that I mention her name. The piece is about big government, and, insofar as it targets any serving politician, it’s far more critical of a non-female, Dick Cheney, and his post-9/11 swoon to the virtues of the overbearing state, than of Hillary or the FAA director or anyone else.
The western feminist left are like those Japanese guys in the jungle who don’t know the war is over. Ms Faludi doesn’t know the war is over and she won. Which is why, as Kate O’Beirne pointed out in her book, American feminists are reduced to complaining that “women make up only 1.3 per cent of plumbers, pipe fitters and steamfitters…” Jiminy. Maybe laying pipe is something that particularly appeals to boys, and maybe girls would rather be the hotshot lawyers who sue the contractor for not hiring enough female plumbers: after all, 60 per cent of US college graduates are now women. If it’s hard to get a female pipe-fitter, it’s because they’re all at law school.
At the time Ms Faludi was detecting patriarchal oppression in my NR prose, the Bush/Blair patriarchal phallocracy was busy liberating Afghanistan, a country where women were forbidden by law from feeling sunlight on their faces. When I used to point that out in speeches, huffy western feminists would object that the Taliban were a particularly vile regime but a long way away and not especially relevant. Okay. But all that’s happened in the last six years is that we now know that that distant evil on the fringes of the map has embedded itself in the heart of every western city. There are forced cousin marriages in Muslim communities throughout the developed world: In 80% of New York Pakistani families, the parents determine whom and when you marry; 57% of British Pakistanis are wed to a first cousin, with daughters as young as 11 being sent abroad to marry. The Province of Ontario gives polygamous men welfare checks for each of their wives, and Canadian immigration recognizes arranged marriages performed over the telephone. There are “FGM resource coordinators” in Australian hospitals. In the Netherlands, Muslims account for the vast majority of those taken in to battered women’s shelters. There are “honor killings” in Germany and Scandinavia, and Toronto and Dallas.
When they’re sufficiently hectored by the likes of David Horowitz, Ms Faludi and her sisters can be temporarily roused to express some pro forma objection to “honor killings” and the like. But only for a moment, and then it’s back to the usual dreary myopic parochial preoccupations: Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women had to be retitled for the paperback edition The Undeclared War Against American Women lest anyone whose pieties hadn’t been gathering cobwebs since 1969 might carelessly imagine that a leading feminist might have something to say about the “war” being waged against her Muslim sisters in Dearborn and Portland and Montreal and London, Melbourne, Amsterdam, Oslo and Berlin.
I appreciate that to Ms Faludi I will always be as revoltingly patriarchal as a 1950s sitcom dad. Yet there is something not just boring but grotesque in western feminists’ inability to prioritize. They seem implicitly to have accepted a two-tier sisterhood, in which white upscale liberal women twitter about NR columnists’ appalling misogyny in criticizing a female Bush Administration official, while simultaneously the women of the fastest growing population group in the western world are forced into clitoridectomies, forced into burqas, forced into marriage, forced into psychiatric wards, forced into hiding – and, if all else fails, forced off the apartment balcony by their brothers and fathers to fall to their deaths, as has happened to at least seven Muslim girls in Sweden recently. This is the real “war against women” being waged across the western world, but, like so much of the left, a pampered and privileged sisterhood would rather fight pseudo-battles over long vanquished enemies.
from National Review, February 25th 2008
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