Sugar and Spice

When I was a child, our neighbors had a little girl who would stand outside and scream her lungs out. One day I went over to see if she needed help. She stopped screaming long enough to grin at me, then went right back to it. She was doing it just for the fun of it.

That was a frightening peek into feminine psychology. “Some little girls just like to scream,” my mother told me. “It makes them feel important when people come running.”

Many little girls do love a good scream. Whenever there’s a birthday party, or any other gathering of female children, you can hear them for blocks. Their philosophy must be “I scream, therefore I am.”

That seems to be what the professional “progressive” feminists are doing. They’re screaming because they love to. Apparently, it makes them feel alive. They like to make people come running.

I grew up thinking I was a feminist. I don’t think I ever left feminism, but feminism has certainly left me. I don’t even pretend to understand it anymore.

When did making people feel sorry for us replace earning respect? And how can other people’s pity help us to respect ourselves?

Those on the feminist Left thinks that men have been mean to them. They want to make them sorry. But when your sense of well-being depends on eliciting any particular response from someone else, that does nothing to make you more respectable. All it makes you is codependent — which is something feminists commonly claim that they don’t want to be.

As the cancellation of a recent Women’s March shows, progressive feminists are now competing with one another to hear who can scream the loudest. The screaming never stops.

The Women’s March rally was canceled, it appears, simply because too many of its prospective participants were white. No one is arguing that some are more female than others (though that issue is indeed raised in the transgender-inclusion debate). The “whiteness” issue centers on race: the skin color of those who would be marching.

Much has been made of sisterly loyalty, especially in connection with the #MeToo Movement. But what’s most notable in this kerfuffle over “whiteness” in feminism is not loyalty — the fruit of which is cooperation — but competition. In their attempt to determine who should or should not speak for women, left-feminists are at one another’s throats.

It was famously said, by no less a light than Jesus himself, that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” By blundering into the tall weeds of whiteness, left-feminists are doing their cause no favors. As happens continually in the progressive aggrievement Olympics, the social justice troops are too busy shooting at each other to take aim against any common enemy. Or, to return to my original analogy, the scream’s the thing. And the objective appears to be simply attracting attention.

They’re not even doing a very good job of that, especially not concerning particular problems. Scream too often, and most people will simply tune you out. Our neighbors didn’t waste too much time rushing to the aid of our own little screamer. She could have been torn apart by wild dogs and no one would have noticed.

I hold out no hope for “believe every woman, no matter who the accuser may be.” In the #MeToo Movement, sooner or later the troops are going to turn their guns against other women. The Fair Sex suffers from a deficit in mutual loyalty. Women are just as prone to aiming at one another as they are to pointing the guns of their indignation at men.

It may well be asked if men don’t have the same tendencies. I think in general, they display more of a solid front. Much of their success in keeping the upper hand over women for so many centuries can be attributed, it seems to me, to their confidence that women will compete with one another.

Men are a long way from being the source of all our problems. Many women need to figure out what real self-respect means, and how it may be won. And when we hear some women screaming their lungs out, we need to demand an intelligent answer to the question of what the hell they’re screaming about.