Gee, Feminism, What Do You Want To Do Tonight?

Cat stink eye is the best kind. Via slight clutter @ Flickr.

As you know, we feminists are a very busy lot.  We’ve been disturbing a great deal of shit lately.  In case you’re keeping track, according to the fine minds at the National Review, feminism was responsible for all the Rihanna-related victim-blaming.  My countrymen at the National Post, not to be outdone, have upped the ante: now feminism is responsible for murder. See, in Toronto, some 17-year-old kid (named M.T.) “incited” her boyfriend to “stab another girl to death in exchange for sex.”  And absent feminism, posits one Mr. Lorne Gunter, this would never have occurred.

Mr. Gunter (who wittily entitled his piece “Feminism’s deadly fallout”) is downright offended by the suggestion that a better sense of self might have prevented this young lady from “inciting” her boyfriend to murder.  To wit:

Pardon me?

Ah, faux-politeness.  That always put those harpies in their place.

Girls have turned to murder because they have no power?

Yes!  How absurd!  Disenfranchised groups never lash out violently!  Except, you know, in the Middle East.  But those are like, Arabs and stuff and totes different than enlightened white people.

The truth is, they have turned to murder and “obsessive irrational hatred of one girl toward another, depict[ing] an emotional landscape devoid of respect, conscience or heart,” because they have too much power.

Ah yes.  If ever there was a powerful constituency in this society, it is that of teenage girls.  I mean, look at their hot little asses!  They have men and teenage boys in their thrall!  Those prurient little power-grubbing sluts!

I don’t mean too much power relative to boys — with whom they are now equals in every real sense

Haha, y’know, except the genital sense and the “statistically likely to be raped and murdered” sense.  Which are totally unreal and made up by feminists to justify the shockingly disproportionate power wielded by young girls in this society.

– but rather relative to teens of past generations.

Nothing like a non sequitur to keep your column moving rhetorically along.

It is just possible that all of this is the logical end product of feminism, instead of, as Ms. Timson postulates, the harbinger of some return to a regressive age.

Oh, dude – you don’t mind if I call you dude, right?  I’m just exercising my extraordinary privilege as a young woman in this society – c’mon.  “All this”?  All what?  Teenage girls forcing their hapless boyfriends to stab other women was the end goal of feminism?  Hold the phone, ladies, perhaps some self-examination is in order!  I did not get this memo!

Feminism’s attempts to release women from the strictures of the old sexual morality, and the movement’s encouragement for women to act like men, have produced violent girls like M. T. who use their sexuality as a tool, and think nothing of offering up– via cellphone text messages — “bj’s ” and “bang bangs” in order to have a perceived rival, Stefanie Rengel, killed.

It is sentences like this for which the expression *headdesk* was invented.  IMHO, of course.  Dude, (a) trading sex for “protection” from men is the very essence of “the strictures of the old sexual morality”; (b) who encouraged who to act like what now? I must have been sick that day at Feminist Indoctrination Camp; (c) SEXUALITY IS A TOOL BECAUSE THE PATRIARCHY MADE IT SO, AND WOMEN (INCLUDING YOUNG ONES) WIELD IT AS A MATTER OF SURVIVAL.

It’s not the technology that’s changed, it’s the girls.

O rly?  There have been no technological changes in the last say 20 years?  This sentence doesn’t make any goddamned sense.

Now before anyone flies off the handle and accuses my [sic] of being a patriarchal, barefoot-and-pregnant-in-the-kitchen reactionary,

Well, since patriarchs can’t get pregnant I doubt that’s a big risk, but in any event sentences that begin with “Now before you get angry” should be outlawed.  That phrase always masks a crap argument, like “no offense, but.”

let me point out that my wife is a lawyer

OH!!! Well, if your wife’s a lawyer then it’s impossible for you to have your head up your ass on gender issues!  I bet you have never even beaten your wife. Not even when she gets uppity.

Mr. Gunter then graces us with his very own version of Feminism 101:

But feminism at its core was about more than just freeing women and girls from stereotypical careers and winning them equal pay for work of equal value. It was also about tearing down the old morality and ethics (which the movement’s most radical members saw as yokes created for women by men) and about taking away women’s feminine choices and directing them only to masculine ones.

Too right.  I can think of nothing I’d rather do than sit on the couch and scratch my balls all day and watch porn.  Thank fucking God feminism took away my period and starched crinolines so I could indulge my masculine side.

So when you tell girls for four generations that they are weak and should demand the kind of power boys and men have, and when you — through the pill and abortion — signal to them that sex is nothing more than a consequence-free, pleasurable act and when, finally, you remove faith-based morality from the mix, too, you should not be surprised to wake up one morning and find that you have created an M.T.

So wait a sec, here, dude.  Is it that girls think they’re weak or that they’re powerful?  And by the by, where is the stabby (ahem) young man in all of this?  Is he just an empty vessel, steered by the incredible power of a young woman’s vagina (you can hypnotize men by getting them to stare into it!) into doing things he would otherwise totally never do?  Maybe I really should be showing more leg, readers!  I could engineer a coup!  I could finagle a green card!  I could convince AIG executives to voluntarily return their bonuses!

Of course, what really makes me mad is that this guy has a column in a national newspaper column and on my tombstone it’s gonna read “prolific commenter on feminist blogs.”  Logic is as logic does, I suppose.