By Kyle Smith
Monday, February 05, 2018
Women aren’t automatically credible when making
accusations of sexual misconduct. Getting very drunk with a man could lead him
to make a pass at you, or vice versa. Power is and as always has been a turn-on
for women. Not every woman gets sexually harassed. Not every male sexual
transgression is serious enough to merit his losing his job.
It’s all common sense. And yet Katie Roiphe must be
counted as courageous for saying such things in her thoughtful Harper’s essay
“The Other Whisper Network: How Twitter Feminism Is Bad for Women.” On social
media, Roiphe finds herself being scored all over again, having been
vitriolically denounced last month when rumors about the contents of the essay
hit the Internet while it was still being written.
Roiphe detects a gleeful overreaction in the wake of the
revelations of sexual misconduct by powerful men in the media and entertainment
industries.
After the 2014 mass shooting in California carried out by
a man who said he was sexually frustrated and hated women who rejected him,
feminist writer Rebecca Solnit made what might be the mother of all
slippery-slope arguments when she said, “I think it’s important that we look at
all this stuff together,” meaning all kinds of male misbehavior. “It begins
with these micro-aggressions; it ends with rape and murder.” Never mind that
the killer in question had been prescribed antipsychotic medication to treat
schizophrenia. Mansplaining, massacre, it’s all very much part of the same
continuum. Feminists like these are pushing for a sort of Singapore of
sexuality, where the equivalent of spitting out your gum on the sidewalk earns
you a flogging because otherwise how will you learn your lesson? Since
depriving a man of his livelihood is not as bad as sending him to prison, they
claim, we need not be unduly concerned about due process. “I get the queasiness
of no due process. But . . . losing your job isn’t death or prison,” wrote
Dayna Tortorici, an editor at n+1, in
one particularly chilling instance of the problem Roiphe cites. The idea of
group guilt is becoming so widespread that apparently liberal men have
begun scourging themselves: One
feminist’s husband asked her, “How can you even want to have sex with me at
this point?” This kind of blanket condemnation is properly labeled ludicrous
when applied to any group other than the chief target of feminist ire, which is
straight white men. Are all peace-loving Muslims supposed to interrogate
themselves on the assumption that they might be terrorists deep down inside?
It’s hard to escape a sense that feminists see the moment
as one of sisterly revenge against men in general. Big-eyed Timmy didn’t call
or even text you after that drunken hookup junior year? Well, you can’t do
anything about that but you can
delight in the fall of Lorin Stein, the Paris
Review editor who apparently lost his job for no reason other than having
had affairs with willing staffers and whose career now looks like the
equivalent of a hapless business that got burned down because it happened to be
located in a riot zone. Stein is, or was, a highly regarded figure in the
literary world and his high status was surely attractive to many women. Dating
consenting women, even professional subordinates, isn’t ordinarily misconduct,
so feminists are falling back on calling it “an abuse of power,” as though
workplace affairs weren’t as old as the workplace and as though women don’t use
attractiveness to climb the status ladder. “Champagne anyone” was the Twitter
reaction to Stein’s ouster posted by Moira Donegan, the creator of the “s****y
media men” spreadsheet that crowd-sourced anonymous allegations of sexual
misbehavior, seemingly for the purpose of destroying the careers of those on
it. Stein, New Yorker writer Ryan
Lizza, and several other men who subsequently lost their jobs were on the list.
Women feeling uneasy about all of this are feeling
immense pressure to remain silent from peers, Roiphe points out, noting that
she spoke to more than 20 professional women for her piece but none wanted her
name to appear in it. Does it give feminists pause that women feel petrified to
speak up? Is a movement that effectively silences even mild dissent by mostly
like-minded people something to be proud of?
Feminists are fixated on an endless victimization
narrative that skeptics such as Roiphe find tiresome, disempowering, and
unpersuasive. Sexism exists, Roiphe allows, but “is it the totalizing force,
the central organizing narrative, of our lives?” At some point it begins to
sound more like an excuse than a cry for punishment of male oppressors.
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