Article content continued

Well, if there is a cause I want to join, endorse and publicize it is surely the impoverishment of a world where little girls don’t have, by right, cutlasses and rapiers, samurai steel and Toledo blades, with which to terrorize the domestic hearth and practice parry and thrust, hack and pierce, on the Christmas turkey — or more likely their weaponless male siblings. (“Now, Ashleigh, put away the battle-axe and eat your peas.”)

I’m sure there are many young women out there who grew up “swordless” — need I say that in these enlightened times I am not implying anything Freudian here — and will, consequently, live impaired and unfulfilled lives.

Is this the feminism of 2014, flocks of feminists going undercover into the Toys R Us stores, foisting micro-propaganda into tiny toddlers tea sets and light sabres? The story is an outlier, some might say — but the some would be very wrong. In an era when college students under the mighty sway of heteronormative patriarchy have conjured up the concept of “micro-aggression” and stamped their books with “trigger warnings,” there is surely nothing too silly, too intellectually vacuous, for educated feminists to embrace.

Witness that most risible spectacle of Beyoncé — the Chanticleer of Bootylicious — giving a performance at the TV Music Awards that would have the most talented stripper envious of its lavish lasciviousness, assuming poses that would embarrass the most veteran proctologist, while on a backdrop, in bright lights and huge lettering the word “FEMINIST” flashed to the world how “empowering” the louche lewd and lecherous exhibition really was.