By Kyle Smith
Monday, March 09, 2020
A favorite buzzword of the moment, along with
“intersectional” and “gaslighting,” is “badass.” It’s peculiar to observe young
women applying the label to themselves (though it would seem to be one of those
honorifics, such as “intellectual,” and “hero,” that can be bestowed only by
others) even as they publicly disintegrate at the slightest perceived
transgression. Can you really be a “badass” if you profess also to be
traumatized by a bad date, or by a man telling you he thought you attractive,
or by being interrupted by a man at a meeting? Very often the self-styled
badass woman will tell us that some quotidian male infraction rendered her
short of breath, or bereft of speech, or nauseated in the tummy, or unable to
work. Why do today’s “strong, confident” women so often make very public
displays of weakness and an inability to cope?
Because, as George Will eloquently put it, victimhood
confers privileges. To put it another way, thin skin is now weaponized. Chris
Matthews said two flirty things to a woman at a workplace; this “undermined my
ability to do my job well,” the woman reported as though she’d been assaulted
or brainwashed; and MSNBC brass were, in the current burn-the-warlocks
atmosphere, obliged to take her at her ridiculous word that this was a
shattering event. Wacky old Chris got the sack. Was firing him really the only
suitable remedy? Not apology, not suspension — only ritual electronic seppuku
would suffice? For issuing compliments in the third degree? (Oh, let’s not
forget — he also made fun of Hillary Clinton a few times and questioned
Elizabeth Warren with mild skepticism. A three-count indictment!)
As a young adult strolling the streets of Manhattan in
the early 1990s, writer Meghan Daum would attract unwelcome sexual commentary
from construction workers. Her response would be to flip a nonchalant middle
finger and continue on her way. Being able to laugh off or ignore crass
behavior is a sign of strength that younger women are recasting as
“internalized patriarchy.” Daum refuses to see men as a collective threat.
Those who misbehaved were “embarrassments to themselves,” she writes. “Their
aggressions were neither personal nor political. They were just moronic.”
Daum, a feminist born and bred who participated in
marches on behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment and Roe v. Wade and has
never in her life voted for a Republican, is now in her late 40s. In The
Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars, she
advises today’s trembling and triggered young feminists, “Grow up.” Being a
woman carries with it certain costs, she agrees, but also a great many
counterbalancing benefits. Toxic femininity exists as surely as does the
masculine variety. Negotiating awkward or unpleasant sexual situations is
something grownups must learn to do, she holds, and it’s hardly the case that
only women emerge from such situations with regrets. Why couldn’t the woman who
wrote a 3,000-word piece of revenge porn about her bad date with Aziz Ansari
instead have simply cut off the unpleasant encounter while it was happening?
Why couldn’t she “stand up on [her] two legs and walk out his door,” as Bari
Weiss of the New York Times memorably put it? It’s not very badass to be
silent and passive for a sexual encounter and then be ragingly nasty
afterwards. “You Are Not a Badass” was the original title of Daum’s book.
Daum surveys the landscape of feminist outrage in
disbelief: Can America really be one of the ten worst countries on earth for
women? So claimed a 2018 Thomson Reuters survey of “experts in women’s issues,”
i.e. professional feminists. Weren’t the pussy hats of the 2017 Women’s March a
little cringey? Were Harvard students really made “unsafe” by the presence of a
dean and lawyer they chased away for participating in Harvey Weinstein’s legal
defense? Are “manspreading” and “mansplaining” really worth getting angry
about? Daum wonders whether “feminism itself is a moral panic,” a performative
victimhood that does nobody any good. Recalling a woman friend who faced a
(disgusting) situation involving male sexual misbehavior in the workplace in
the 1990s, she repeats a useful piece of advice: “Switch chairs and move on.”
From the stability of middle age, Daum looks back on her
mid-20s self with a wise perspective on sexual dynamics. She used to have
lunches with an older man (she doesn’t supply his name) who she thought might
be able to advance her career. Lunches turned into dinners and dinners turned
into something resembling dates. Things never turned sexual, but the
possibility hung in the air and at one point he invited her to his house for a
weekend. She declined, and he apologized for asking. Daum today understands she
was leveraging her sexual power, teasing the older man, to aid her career
prospects. If there was an imbalance of power here, it’s not obvious who held
the advantage. She cites the “countless ways that women frequently have power
over men: in the use of sex as a tool for manipulation, in parenting dynamics,
in the ability nowadays to shut down a conversation by citing male privilege. .
. . Power dynamics shift among all kinds of people all the time.” The feminist
vision of male conquerors and female vassals forced to do their bidding or
endure their abuse is not even close to the truth. Funny how gaslighting is,
these days, a supposed masculine specialty. “In my lived experience,” Daum
writes, “women’s gaslighting skills generally far exceed those of most men.”
Hear, hear.
Daum cops to a certain fascination with a group of
contrarians that she calls “Free Speech YouTube” and others call “the
Intellectual Dark Web.” Mainly these are thinkers and podcasters who question
the Left from within the citadel — Bret Weinstein, John McWhorter, Joe Rogan,
and Sam Harris — though a few are conservatives such as Jordan Peterson. It’s
not that she agrees with everything they say; she just enjoys the ranginess of
the conversation. Alas, so much has been ruled out of bounds that, on the left,
it is nearly an act of rebellion to maintain one’s intellectual poise, to
acknowledge that things aren’t that bad and that we’ll mostly muddle through.
She writes sadly, “So enthralled with our outrage at the extremes, we’ve
forgotten that most of the world exists in the mostly unobjectionable middle.”
How strange it must feel to not change one’s beliefs at
all and yet be treated like an apostate. Writes Daum, “Woke me when it’s over.”
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