Dreaming of Right-Wing Women

I don't believe (whatever Schopenhauer said) that women in general are stupid, but I don't believe that the rumor's existence is entirely the fault of our men. The women seem to have brought it on themselves. If all our men were to start calling our women ugly, nobody would believe it, mostly because there is nothing more true than that women are one of the only things we stare at so desperately that some of us end up in jail. But even if men tried spreading the lie, the truth of an assertion lies not in its totality, but in its probability. Too many women are beautiful for us to call them ugly. We might even say the concept of beauty revolves around women. But are too many women intelligent for us to say they aren't stupid? In woman's defense, the problem lies more in the fact that some women are speaking for women than that all women are speaking for women. The same has gone for every other group since the beginning of history. A part must represent the whole, or there will be chaos. The problem with womankind's representation is that femininity is not a representative organization (or even an organization) at all, and the women who speak for women are never elected by womankind to do it. We might even go as far as to say they have a problem of suffrage. The feminist of the modern age is much less an envoy than a usurper. She speaks for the totality of her sex when she represents easily far less than half.

But let us dispense with the abstract and move on to the concrete. When Donald Trump became the president nearly two months ago, it was said that "women" went mad over it, and when they went mad, they "all" took to the streets. Every paper went wild for our women's resistance. Coverage was extensive. Women in tasteless pink hats plagued our streets on both coasts; nobody was sure exactly what they wanted except that Donald Trump had to go and paid leave ought to be mandatory. They had won the right to vote, and now that they had won the right to vote they were uncomfortable with the conclusion of their voting. Nearly half of American women had voted for Trump. The worse half simply did not believe in the existence of the better. Atop this absurdity came others. In the spirit of charity, we'll perhaps skip over The New York Times running a headline in praise of them that said "We are dissidents; we are legion." We'll ignore the fact that Legion was the name of a horde of demons in the Bible, and that Jesus sent them into a herd of pigs, and the herd of pigs stampeded in a fury, and the fury led them off a cliff. We'll ignore that this was applied to a rabble of angry, directionless, pig-colored feminists, and that they loved it because they were religiously illiterate. Had we been any less charitable, we might not allow them to slide. This is the most read book in the world, and these chapters at the end are the most read of them all. But we happen to be saintly, so we forgive and forget without anyone asking. We'll ignore that a Wall Street firm decided to build them a statue, and the statue was of a little girl, and the little girl was placed in front of the Wall Street bull, and they intended for her to be taking a stand against the patriarchy of finance. We'll ignore that The Bull doesn't represent Wall Street itself and that it actually represents "a bull market," and that a bull market represents prosperity, and that a little girl standing up to a bull market is a girl whose childish obstinacy stands in the way of our advancement. We'll ignore that they loved it anyway. We'll ignore that falling below the reading of the New Testament, she falls below the symbolism of the tribesman, and that she fails as hard in the written world of the Romans as she does in the pictures of the ancient Egyptians. Yes, we'll ignore all of this and get right to how she fails at her own senses. We'll ignore that liberal women do not know that if pregnancy is a massive disruption to a marriage, it is also a massive disruption to our businesses and worse to our military, and that they believe that women are just as good in combat and sporting and drinking as men. We'll ignore the claims of activist leaders in the New York Times, that what women want is not that more women become CEOs, but that nobody in the world be a CEO – that nobody should be driven to the top by greater incentives, and all progress should exist in a world without leaders. We'll ignore women whom nobody would have sex with demanding we keep our hands off their vaginas, and that we would keep our politics out of vaginas while they are putting vaginas into our politics. We'll ignore the consoling embraces given to people who are not raped and the cold shoulder given to children who are actually dissected. Out of a spirit of charity, we'll ignore all of this, and in pretending the women we encounter know writing and symbols and senses and logic, war and democracy and biology and the meaning of leadership, we'll find ourselves pretending something very strange. We'll find ourselves pretending they are educated right-wingers. And when all is said and done, the feminists will stomp their feet and shout irrational things in the streets and refuse to help husbands and bosses and friends. But International Women's Day will not be remembered by many as a day about women. It won't even be remembered by most as "A Day Without a Woman." It will be remembered as the day millions of American men woke up and realized how happy they were to have married Republicans. Jeremy Egerer is the author of the troublesome essays on Letters to Hannah, and he welcomes followers on Twitter and Facebook.