If President Trump beats Vice-President Kamala Harris in November she will be the second woman he has beaten in a presidential election. I wonder what that means.
But the conservative media is full of pieces warning men about the perils of mixing it up with women.
For instance there is the question of how Kamala worked her way up the greasy pole of politics. Wink, wink, know what I mean.
But Stephen Green says that men — starting with Donald Trump — should stay out of this. Only women get be personal in public about other women. The one thing that unites women is for a man to talk about a woman’s chastity.
The Women’s Network is real. It is effective. It is even cruel, especially to other women. And it does not tolerate male interlopers.
Quite simply, if you are a man you have no idea how women’s minds work, so stick to the issues.
If you get that there’s more. It’s a long piece by Kay S. Hymowitz at City Journal about “The New Girl Disorder” where she notes that almost all the protesters at the campus pro-Hamas protests were young women. Any time that police or male counterprotesters mixed it up with them they got creamed, because the women protesters out-manipulated them.
The fact is “women are all but conquering the twenty-first-century academy”. And that means Girl Rules.
Their strategies, however, are frequently more cunning than men’s, and invisible not just to their more guileless victims but even to themselves. They’re masters of the covert psyop.
You know, like “safetyism” etc.
Over the past several decades, safety (both physical and emotional) has taken on a talismanic power in the feminized academy. Equity and inclusion have become major moral concerns. Trigger warnings, cancel culture, and deplatforming are imposed to protect the marginalized and oppressed from ideas deemed harmful by the in-group—and serve as ways to ostracize those who don’t share those convictions.
So these trends are not so much “woke” as feminine. You are not allowed to be “harmful” towards a woman.
On the other hand, I’d say, sitting in front of a congressional committee before all the world, as former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle did, is particularly devastating for a woman. Women typically do not confront each other in public. It’s a guy thing to stand in the line of battle and take the slings and arrows of the enemy. And it is also a guy thing to resign when you have utterly failed. Falling on your sword, and all that. But I read that the male congressmen stuck to the issues in asking questions; it was the congresswomen that stuck in the shiv. So they all know the Rules.
Yet it’s worth remembering that women have reason to exaggerate dangers and embrace safetyism. Societies have always needed to adapt to the biological reality that women are the smaller and weaker sex and bear the children necessary for group survival. Protections for the weaker sex have taken various forms, from the hunting and gathering division of labor to medieval chivalric rules to the “women and children first” moral code [on the sinking Titanic].
And so it makes sense for the village women to gang up on a man that insults or abuses a woman.
But does “safetyism” work in the public square?
My gut feeling is that the women’s culture of safety and inclusion is designed for the women of the village who are thrown together and need to get along. They cooperate, but only up to a point. And no woman has power over another woman. Every woman is queen of her household.
I don’t think that works in public, or in a goal-oriented organization. In a university, the teaching and the curriculum need to be the best they can be, and devil take the hindmost. It’s not about safety and inclusion, but getting it right.
Women cooperate and build obligation by mutual gift-giving. Men cooperate and build loyalty with teamwork.
In our society we have kicked over the traces on all this stuff. And I believe the resulting mess will take a time to disentangle.