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Sauce for the goose is sauce for the other goose

In a classic revolution-devours-children moment, he has even been accused of mansplaining the hapless MacEwan questioner over peoplekind. And sauce for the goose is sauce for the other goose. But I do not assert that he is more hypocritical than the typical human being. Rather, I claim his hypocrisy is being magnified by his conceit, or if you credit him with sufficient depth, his arrogance.

Trudeau did not simply insist that she use a different common word out of courtesy. He sought to impose a bizarre new term on her. And Newspeak, in PC or other form, is always a sign not of good manners but of the ambitious reshaping of society by intruding on conscience, inventing words for thoughts normal people don’t have, like the host of unpronounceable pronouns Jordan Peterson famously refuses to use.

To be sure, we live in an era when the thoughts normal people have are in some disrepute. The belated 1960s discovery of the evil of racism, long casually accepted, led to a widespread assumption that any long-standing belief or social habit was probably vicious, especially if premised on significant differences between people, including over gender.

Photo by Ryan Remiorz/CP

Thus where first-wave feminism in the 19th century mostly took women’s differences from men for granted, and claimed that greater respect for femininity would create a kinder, gentler world, the mid-20th century second wave generally espoused Simone de Beauvoir’s “mind has no sex” view, denying all but superficial physical differences. Contemporary third-wave feminism, radical, ambitious and post-modern, appears to believe both at once, stressing or denying differences depending what most advantages women. So maternal love is real and beats the paternal kind, rhetorically and in court. But manliness is artificial and bad.