The UCSB Solipsists
A sociopath runs amok—and kills more men than women—and feminists ride their hobbyhorse.
Over 77 percent of all U.S. murder victims in 2012 were male; targets of non-lethal shootings are even more disproportionately male. Four of the six homicide victims of Elliot Rodger, the lunatic narcissist who went on a killing spree in Santa Barbara in revenge for female rejection, were male. And yet the feminist industry immediately turned this heartbreaking bloodbath into a symbol of America’s war on women. The mainstream media and the Internet quickly generated a portrait of America where women walk in fear simply “in order to survive,” as a Washington Post blogger put it, adding that the shootings were merely an extreme example of the “abuse and anti-woman violence” that American women face every day. “If we don’t talk misogyny now, when are we going to talk about it?” a global-studies major at the University of California, Santa Barbara, asked the New York Times. The episode has provoked “a call to end misogyny, inequality, and violence against women,” reports the Huffington Post. Females allegedly have to walk a daily gauntlet of leers, gropings, catcalls, and condescension, simply in order to go about their business, according to the New York Times and posts on #YesAllWomen (as in: Yes, all women experience sexual hatred and violence).
These females are apparently living in a different world than mine. Leave aside the fact that the Santa Barbara killings were clearly the actions of a madman. Rodger’s every gesture and word bespoke monomaniacal, self-pitying delusion, amplified in the hermetic echo chamber of his own deranged narcissism. There is no pattern of gender-based rampages in this country; there is an emerging pattern of rampages by the untreated mentally ill. But the fundamental premise of the feminist analysis of Rodger’s massacre — that the U.S. is “misogynist” — is patently absurd. To the contrary, ours is a culture obsessed with promoting and celebrating female success. There is not a science faculty or lab in the country that is not under relentless pressure from university administrators and the federal government to hire female professors and researchers, regardless of the lack of competitive candidates and the cost to meritocratic standards. Wealthy foundations and individual philanthropists churn out one girls’ self-esteem and academic-success initiative after another; boys are a distant runner-up for philanthropic ministrations, even though it is boys, not girls, who are falling further and further behind academically and socially. (The Obama administration’s flawed initiative to help young minority males succeed has drawn predictable criticism for leaving out girls. No one complained, of course, about the White House Council on Women and Girls or the endless female-empowerment projects that roll forth from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.) Girls hear a constant message that “strong women can do it all,” including raise children on their own. Any female even remotely in the public realm who is not deeply conscious that she has been the “beneficiary” of the pressure to stock conference panels, media slots, and op-ed pages with females is fooling herself. Corporate boards and management seek women with hungry desperation. And even were this preferential treatment to end tomorrow, females, especially the privileged, highly educated ones who make up the feminist ranks, would still face a world of unprecedented, boundless opportunity.
Women “face harassment every day,” a double global-studies and feminist-studies major told the New York Times. (“Global studies” appears to be a previously overlooked arena of left-wing academic propaganda, joining postcolonial studies and other concocted fields.) This portrait of a public realm filled with leering, grasping men may have described 1950s Italy and perhaps some Latin American countries today, but it bears no resemblance to contemporary America. Construction workers have largely been tamed. Groping on subways is thankfully rare — and it is committed by perverts. No one condones such behavior. It is on the very margins of our social lives, not at the center.