Canadian Cincinnatus

Slut walks: demonizing sensible advice

In January, a Toronto police officer inadvertently stepped on a feminist landmine while conducting a crime prevention seminar at York University. What prompted it was a spate of late night attacks against women walking around on campus (which are continuing). Among the preventative measures discussed, Constable Michael Sanguinetti recommended that women not walk around alone at night ‘provocatively dressed’.

Sounds like common sense advice to avoid rape?

Not if you’re a feminist. The usual suspects promptly seized upon that comment as an attack by the police on women’s freedom. To drive the point home, a ‘slut walk’ was promptly organized in Toronto, which was then copied across various American cities, as this MSNBC article recounts.

Confusing practical advice with moral pronouncements is commonplace in the left’s knee-jerk grievance mongering ‘dialogue’.

To see why Constable Sanguinetti was not ‘blaming the victim’, lets reframe his advice in terms of a nonsexual crime. Let’s say I want to drive my Cadillac Escalade into downtown Toronto and park it late at night in Regent Park (a bad neighbourhood). I leave the doors unlocked, the windows rolled down and the keys in the ignition. I can do that. I have a right to do that. As far as I can tell, it’s even guaranteed by the constitution. And furthermore, I vigorously defend my right to do that.

But at the same time, when I report it stolen, the reporting officer has a perfect right to tell me I am an idiot. And if I ask Constable Sanguinetti about the advisability of this course of action at a community safety meeting, I expect him to tell me that it is not a very good idea. This is what the good constable did at York University in January, except the crime was rape not auto theft. But regardless of the crime under discussion, he is no more taking the side of the rapist than he is taking the side of the auto thief. (Psst..this example is adapted from one given by Camille Paglia from an article of her’s on the same subject.)

The police force would be blaming the victim only if they charged victims of sexual assault with lewd conduct - as they do in Saudi Arabia, or as the police in Canada do when they charge gun owners with unsafe storage who report their guns stolen.

All of this would be common sense if it weren’t for the fact that the left aggressively pushes a grievance agenda that is completely divorced from reality. And because their advice (‘go ahead and dress like a slut and walk around at night alone because you have a God given right to do so’) is so dangerous, it is precisely the targets of their compassion who suffer the most.

For if a young woman finds herself alone at night in an underground parking garage with a rapist, her sacred human rights will do her precious little good against the deranged pervert now confronting her. In this case, Constable Sanguinetti could help her a lot more than a community organizer would be able to. Of course, a close second best would be a snub-nosed 38 in her purse, but I suspect that the activists who are so strenuously championing her right to dress provocatively wherever she wants to would be just as adamant that she do so only while in a state of complete helplessness.

Dr. Helen Smith: “Men Don’t Exist to Serve Women’s Desires”

By Dr. Helen Smith:

“I read Kay Hymowitz’s new book, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys, recently. ... I do believe Hymowitz tried to be sensitive to the plight of today’s men, but the book presents as being more concerned about how men fit into the world of women rather than how men actually feel themselves.”

“According to Hymowitz, these child-men are all used to a freewheeling life of going from girl to girl and video game to video game. Hymowitz mistakenly believes that men are suffering from the limits of American individualism.

Though she reluctantly admits that the “materials available to young men are meager, and what is available contradicts itself,” she comes up with this ridiculous conclusion: “At bottom, they are too free, a fact epitomized by their undefined, open-ended, and profoundly autonomous pre-adulthood.” She ends the book suggesting that young women will have to get a better understanding of the limitations imposed by their bodies (Huh?) and young men need to man up.

My question to her: Why should they?

What do you have to offer these men you call child-men if they do man up? Are you going to ensure that they have fair access to their children should they divorce? Will you make sure that they aren’t hauled off to jail if the wife makes false accusations of domestic violence? Will you let them keep the earnings and property that they worked for over years rather than have them turned over to their wife, even if she cheated and was abusive? Will you shield the millions of men who live in fear of their significant other but have nowhere to turn for help? Will you make marriage, in other words, as valuable to men as you think it is for women?”

All too true. After reading Dr. Smith’s article, I am reminded of the fact that feminism is wrong not so much in what they say about the ‘patriarchy’ but in what they don’t say. What feminists neglect to mention is that in a traditional society, women have a huge normative role in male behaviour with the choices that they make: if you aren’t a stable, responsible, hard-working man (i.e. if you aren’t good-provider material), you don’t get to be married and therefore you don’t get sex.

But after trashing traditional marriage and/or making its cost exceed its benefit to men, is it any surprise that men aren’t interested in marriage any more? So men become slackers.

Feminists make things worse by telling women its OK to be a slut. They think they are doing women a favour by empowering them, but they are not. They are actually disempowering women by taking the power they used to have in controlling negative male behaviour away from them. Freeing men to be pump-and-dump, alpha male cads.

Who is all this good for?

Not men.

Not women.

Not society.

But this is what you get when you replace customs and traditions that have evolved over a long period of time with a theory concocted by ivory tower intellectuals.

More proof that feminism is just the ladies auxiliary of the left

Meg Whitman is a highly accomplished woman. She was the CEO of eBay. When she joined eBay in 1998 it had 30 employees and revenues of $4 million. When she departed in 2008 it had 15,000 employees and annual revenues of $8 billion. This year she is running for California governor against an old man who is a card-carrying member of the California patriarchy (he is a former governor and his father was governor of California before him). In short, she seems to have just the kind of ‘non-traditional’ career arch that feminists should love.

Last Thursday an aide of the white male patriarch Meg is running against was caught on tape calling Meg Whitman a “whore”. One would expect feminist groups to up in arms over the insult.

And if one did indeed expect that, one would be disappointed. In fact, the President of the California chapter of the National Organization of Women, Parry Bellasama, sides with the patriarchy. Parry said, “Meg Whitman could be described as ‘a political whore.’ Yes that’s an accurate statement.”

You see there is one little itsy bitsy, teensy weensy problem with Meg Whitman. She isn’t a doctrinaire leftist. This is the same reason why organized feminists also hurl vitriol and spit venom at other accomplished powerful women leading ‘non-traditional’ lives, such as Margaret Thatcher, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, Michelle Bachman and Michelle Malkin (who is also a visible minority).

If feminism was merely a movement dedicated to ‘empowering’ women in non-traditional roles - and nothing else – then they would be supporting all of these people. But they are not. Their consistent opposition - often hysterical – of conservative women betrays their true calling. At their core, feminism has as little to do with empowering women, as environmentalism has to do with conserving nature. They are just front groups for socialism that are used to deceive people who otherwise would not find socialistic policies appealing.