CHAPTER 7

Degrading Yourself and Calling It Equality

The second man to ever screw me over was William Jefferson Clinton. Of course, I didn’t know it at the time. I was a frizzy-headed eighth grader who, the summer before the fall election, applauded enthusiastically as he played the saxophone on Arsenio Hall’s show. He was everywhere I was: He was on MTV and VH1; he hung with the celebrities I followed; he visited late-night talk shows; he was pop culture. Democrats knew how to talk to the youth and that’s why I liked them. They were the brand of youth, races, and women. At least, that’s what I thought.

Flash forward to my freshman year of high school. Ever the Clinton supporter, I donned a Clinton/Gore pin on my backpack. I had Clinton/Gore stickers on my Trapper Keeper. I thought about how awesome their administration was while I slathered my face at night with Noxzema and blared Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” on my purple ghetto blaster. And then she happened. Paula Jones. My girlfriends and I had already learned the art of cruelty in seventh grade, so we were certified mean girls by the time we were freshmen. We mocked her hair, her face, her determination to take down our president simply because she was forlorn. I had no idea about the rape accusations, the harassment accusations; all the media told me was that this fat white guy named Ken Starr was taking all of our money and spending it on graying President Clinton’s hair. We discounted Juanita Broaddrick’s story, dismissing it as the sordid tale of a jealous woman.

“All of these women are coming out of the woodwork because Clinton became president,” we gossiped over the lunch table, repeating what we’d heard on TV. The Democrats had their lock on us because of what we thought they were, not for what they were in reality.

When Bill Clinton shook his nonaccusatory sausage knuckle at the cameras and intoned that he “Did. Not. Have. Seckshul. Relations. With. That. Woman,” that woman being Monica Lewinsky, we all believed him.

“Of course there is a reason!” we enthusiastically conned ourselves.

“She’s horrible,” I told my mother while setting the table and listening to Tom Brokaw recite headlines in the background.

“Well, of course,” my mother agreed. They had her too.

Feminists boisterously supported Clinton. Gloria Steinem, from behind her dinner plate–sized rose-colored hippie sunglasses, condemned the ravenous women who clawed at the president. Feminists supported him more than they supported his wife. That was the first thing that stood out to me. How must Hillary have felt?

Hillary held his hand during the interviews and stood beside him when he spoke, nodding her bob like a Dixiecrat hype man for Clinton’s one-man act. I felt bad for her. Her story resonated with a thread from my childhood, a woman rendered defeminate by what began sounding like her husband’s personal indiscretions.

Clinton’s story unraveled, and all of us girls who had so wholeheartedly believed that he was the target of that “vast right-wing conspiracy” were politically stood up. The Clinton we knew wasn’t there. The red-faced man who liked his Cokes with a lot of ice and waved at me in the parking lot of my school, the man who valued his wife and daughter and played sax on Arsenio was gone. In his place was a cautionary tale of putting faith in men, in politics, in anything but God.

When it was universally realized that Clinton was a philanderer, I accepted it and continued to support him—but something had changed. I recognized within myself that I had compromised an integral part of my beliefs in order to count myself as a supporter. It was a slow process, but politically it made me angry. I grew up knowing what marital infidelity was and the agony it causes families. That I had compromised my opposition to that for this president angered me. I was angry that Democrats had put us in this position. They knew the entire time; it was just a Victorian freak show centered around prolonging the inevitable. The women they trotted out at events and in interviews were tools, nothing more.

“What do you care?” barked a friend when I expressed doubt about our president over his infidelities. Feminists stopped accusing the women who came forward of lying; they stopped painting them as harlots and instead turned their fury on Ken Starr. They made the prosecutor the bad guy for Clinton lying under oath and then turned on the American public—who supported Democrats when they painted the women as harlots—when they didn’t continue their enthusiastic support.

“He’s married to his wife; he’s not married to the country. Let them sort it out.”

“Yes,” I replied. But if you can’t honor an oath you made before God to your wife, how can you be expected to honor your oath to uphold the Constitution? I thought. I didn’t dare say it, lest I be treated the same as his accusers. That’s when my path first parted from the Democrats and I began a long journey of recovery from the condition known as Liberalus Feministus.

 • • • 

When I was a college freshman I showed up to Grandma and Grandpa’s once for Thanksgiving with my hair near shaved and my nose pierced. Grandma stared at me in horror. She didn’t recognize me for the longest time and asked an aunt if Gale had picked up a lesbian hitchhiker while en route from St. Louis to the Ozarks. When she realized it was me, that I had cut off all my hair, that I had put a stud in my nose, her lips pursed and she wouldn’t hug me or say hello. That was the first time I made Grandma mad. The second time was when I showed up for my first Christmas as a married woman and I pulled into Grandma and Grandpa’s gravel drive with a Republican bumper sticker on my car. My uncle was in the inner circle of a well-known Democrat in Missouri who was running for senate. His opponent was a Republican named Jim Talent, whose sticker was on my bumper. As I exited the car and retrieved the side dish I had brought, my uncles, who held court in the drive, where they talked cars and hunting, drank beer, and smoked, raised an eyebrow at me. One uncle, a cigarette perched on his lip, drawled, “Girl, what’s that sticker you got there on your car?”

“She got Talent’s sticker on her car!” stage-whispered another.

“A Talent sticker?” stage-whispered a few to one another.

“Oh, man, wait until Uncle J sees this!” crowed a cousin.

By the time I had walked up the steps and into Grandma and Grandpa’s tiny little house, word had gotten out that the granddaughter who had shaved her hair “lesbian short” and pierced her face was now a Republican. It would have been more acceptable had I told the family that I was selling meth out of my garden shed in St. Louis County and stripping on the side in East St. Louis.

“Well!” said Grandma, passing through the crowd of kin gathered in her home. “I see you moved up to the city and done got brainwarshed!”

“I’m still the same, Grandma,” I said, giving her a kiss.

I didn’t get a spot at the adults’ table for dinner, nor was I invited to play dominoes after dessert. My family secretly blamed my husband, but in reality he had nothing to do with it. It was because of my firstborn.

Before I was a conservative, I was a progressive feminist. I had my midlife crisis of sorts when I was twenty-one years old. When I discovered I was pregnant, I was in college, engaged, and not in any way financially stable. I was terrified. I knew almost nothing about babies. I assumed that I would have a daughter and could raise her to be the mirror image of me, a progressive feminist who would fight against systemic, patriarchal oppression. Then the ultrasound technician told me I was going to have a son. A boy. I’d decided that I was going to have my son naturally, and I told my Grandma that I was going to skip the epidural. She crossed her eyes in exasperation and guilt-tripped me by telling me that she had delivered nine babies and she would have loved an epidural. Grandpa chimed in with exaggerated stories about how his mother had to gnaw on a strip of leather, hike up her skirt, and squat in the cornfield out back to bring him into the world.

“It’s like you went to get educated and came back hating modern medicine,” she said.

I was still pretty progressive at that point, diverging only on matters of abortion and the Second Amendment. I was still a third-wave feminist, and I was coming to terms with how to raise a boy. None of it made any sense until the moment the nurse placed my son in my arms moments after his birth. It was then that it clicked. In his face I found my future. I felt as if I were on a boat, pushing away from the dock of everything familiar, watching everything I was disappear into the fog as I set sail toward the unknown. This tiny boy now depended on me for everything, for life. I’d had a difficult birth and had been moments away from a cesarean when my OB determined that I would be able to pass his ginormous head. During one scary moment I wouldn’t stop bleeding, orders were barked, my son’s stomach was pumped, and my husband stood in the room, an expression of horror on his face. To his right his wife was bleeding out, possibly requiring surgery, and to his left his son had passed meconium in utero and was having his tiny stomach pumped.

“Go to Liam!” I said to him. It wasn’t a decision. I would have died then and there for my son and would do so twenty times over for him. One night, while I was recovering in the hospital, hovering between consciousness and sleep, the nurses’ station called me through my bed’s monitor.

“Mrs. Loesch, your son is hungry. May we bring him in?”

My son.

Thoughts warp-sped into my mind as I nursed him, and I asked myself, What have I done? Up to this point I had spent my time making him, the male sex, the enemy. I had helped create a culture that was growing in hostility toward the male sex, a culture that ordained that substituting the matriarchy for the patriarchy was “equality.” Through my prior activism I had helped construct a world prejudiced against him because he was born a boy. He had privilege, somehow. As a mother I was responsible for his upbringing, his emotional health, ensuring that he was a happy, well-adjusted child. Everything I had believed in was antithetical to my job now as his mother. Things that I had supported were harmful to his well-being. I recoiled from my former beliefs with visceral disdain. Gazing at my tiny boy I was born again, baptized by the fiery pain of birth, and part of this world with new purpose. Suddenly my long-held ideology and the reality of my circumstances collided: How could I continue railing against the travesties of the patriarchy, how could I continue my campaign against men, when here in my arms lay a boy, a boy whom his father and I were to raise into a man? How could I fill his head and heart with the poison I had been fed? How could I teach him as I had been taught, that men were oppressors, while I as a woman was cultivating my victimhood status as a very tool of oppression? When Liam was born, so was I—an intellectual rebirth, a spiritual rebirth, a rebirth of the heart. My instinct to protect this tiny person at all costs was overwhelming at times. Everything in my view sharpened into a clear perspective. The haze of ironic ideology was gone, and in its place was purpose. The change was remarkable and continued, a domino effect. Pillar after pillar, once erected to the false god of progressivism, toppled. Where previously I had been questionably prochoice with caveats, I became pro-life. I could not deny the life that I harbored, a separate identity from myself yet as dependent upon me as progressives are upon the state. I could not deny that teaching him to apologize for himself because he was a man was anything other than a form of abuse. I’ve always known the importance of a good father-daughter relationship, having felt the absence of one in my own life, but not until I had a son did I understand the supreme significance of the mother-son relationship. While today’s mothers rage about protecting their daughters, shouting non sequiturs such as “Tell men not to rape!” I find fewer publicly vocal mothers protesting the war on their sons. There is a war over the heart and soul of the matriarchy and men are caught in between. There exists a real war on boys, on men, perpetuated by women, and only women can stop it.

 • • • 

I began noticing the war on boys after I had a son. I saw the glib “Boys suck, throw rocks at them” shirts. I saw the bias in popular culture as the fathers on sitcoms were portrayed as bumbling idiots. I was no longer part of the matriarchy and thus could see its effect. Men are ridiculed and demonized at every stage of life with barely any grace given to those early years because of their “male privilege.” They’re defamed in college. A number of stories surfaced within the past year detailing false accusations of rape made against male university students.

Columbia University student Emma Sulkowicz carried around a mattress as a whacked-out performance project after she accused fellow student Paul Nungesser of rape. Nungesser maintained his innocence and said that their two encounters had been consensual. Sulkowicz did not report the alleged attack initially and continued to send Nungesser texts and speak with him in the months after her alleged rape. Ashe Schow covered the story extensively in the Washington Examiner:

Facebook messages obtained by the Daily Beast contributor Cathy Young show that two days after Sulkowicz was allegedly beaten and choked, she responded to Nungesser’s party invite by writing “lol yussss.” She followed up that message by telling him: “Also I feel like we need to have some real time where we can talk about life and thingz” and “because we still haven’t really had a paul-emma sesh since summmerrrrr.” 125

A week later Sulkowicz invited Nungesser, whom she now refers to as her “rapist,” to hang out. And a month after that, she responded to Nungesser’s birthday message to her by saying: “I love you Paul. Where are you?!?!?!?!”

Six months later Sulkowicz would accuse Nungesser of previously raping her.

When police finally investigated, they found nothing. Both the police and Columbia cleared Nungesser, who continued to be harassed by Sulkowicz. Sulkowicz took to carrying her mattress around campus with her as a form of “protest.” New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand referred to Nungesser as a “rapist” while speaking at a public event. Nungesser himself sued Columbia, claiming that the university condoned Sulkowicz’s “gender-based discriminatory harassment.”126

The lawsuit also notes that Columbia Spectator editor Teo Armus took photos of Nungesser at graduation—photos that were later published in other news outlets, “so that the world would recognize and remember the face of Emma’s target.” Armus has since, according to the lawsuit, “stalked” Nungesser, including seeking out his mother’s employer in Germany.

Nungesser’s lawsuit also includes a new section about the art show where Sulkowicz presented drawings of Nungesser over articles written about her mattress project. The lawsuit cites Columbia’s policy regarding gender-based misconduct, including these examples: “Unwelcome remarks about the private parts of a person’s body” and “Graffiti concerning the sexual activity of another person.”

Sulkowicz’s art project, which included drawings of Nungesser’s genitals and depictions of the sexual act Sulkowicz claims occurred between them, would presumably fall under those categories. Yet Columbia did not prevent the images from being posted to be seen by the public, including Nungesser’s parents, who were in town for the graduation.

In this case the boy was presumed guilty because the word of the girl was believed over his in the face of the facts. I wish I could say this was the only case, but this is becoming the rule, not the exception.

Rolling Stone published a farcical story by Sabrina Erdely that focused on gang-rape allegations made by a woman named “Jackie” against seven members of the University of Virginia’s Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. Erdely never contacted the accused in the article and instead published the accusations as gospel truth. Jackie’s story didn’t add up: the dates, the fraternity, even the party at which the rape was said to have occurred. The Charlottesville police found no evidence to support Jackie’s accusation, and friends of Jackie came forward to challenge her story. The man Jackie claimed had taken her to the party and encouraged the rape was discovered to be a fictitious, elaborate composite character that Jackie had likely made up (using a head shot of an old high school classmate, names from Dawson’s Creek, and Internet phone numbers to fake texts to her friends) to make jealous another male student who had turned down Jackie’s romantic advance. It all sounds very Fatal Attraction. By the time sleuths discovered it was an entirely made-up accusation and the Columbia School of Journalism shredded Rolling Stone’s credibility, the damage was done. The fraternity’s reputation was in shambles, the university’s dean was under fire, and the story had thrust campus rape into the national spotlight with exaggerated figures. The fraternity sued the magazine, the dean sued the magazine, Rolling Stone’s deputy managing editor gave his resignation, and the magazine that had once glorified the Boston bomber with a Jim Morrison–esque cover once again found itself the most reviled publication in America. All of this could have been avoided if Jackie hadn’t falsely accused her fellow students of rape. If Erdely had actually performed the job of a journalist and chased the story instead of a narrative, this story would not have been published. The belief of she in a “he said/she said” created the environment for an irresponsible story such as this to germinate. Lives were ruined over this, a narrative based on gender discrimination—discrimination against men. Male college students are denied due process if accused of rape. The Affirmative Consent Project was born, with universities encouraging students who have sexual relations to photograph themselves with their signed mutual consent form.127 California passed a state law requiring colleges that receive state funding to include such mutual consent agreements as part of their campus policy.

Universities began adopting policies that male students were guilty until proven innocent, but in the cases of Nungesser, UVA, and “John Doe” who is suing Brown University over a false accusation, the truth didn’t exonerate the accused. Schow notes that there are now over thirty men who are fighting back against various universities’ lack of due process for those falsely accused of rape.

Feminists began sloganeering with “Teach men not to rape!”

Now here is the solutionless solution rising up again. How about “Teach women not to lie”? Why not teach women about true empowerment, an empowerment that comes by way of self-sustainment and hard work, not pretending that they’re helpless victims in a sea of testosterone? Because that doesn’t scare people into taking the only action they can: voting for the party with the catchiest social slogan.

Lying about rape not only makes it harder for actual rape victims to obtain justice but also produces a chilling effect that discourages real rape victims from speaking out: They’re afraid that no one will believe them because some manipulative women cried wolf one too many times. Third-wave feminists believe that anyone who claims that she was raped deserves to be believed. Hillary Clinton tweeted: “Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported.”

Whether or not that includes Kathleen Willey or Juanita Broaddrick was never made clear.

 • • • 

My husband’s paternal grandmother once angrily remarked, after seeing a feminist protest on the nightly news: “These women just set back motherhood a hundred years.” He had gone to visit her one evening and they were watching the nightly news together.

“These women have set us back a hundred years,” said Grandma Loesch. “We fought hard to get out of the fields and these women put us right back in them,” she said spitefully. Grandma Loesch was politically minded and outspoken. The matriarch of her family until she passed, Grandma Loesch raised ten children, all but three of them girls. She recognized her strength and relished her role in the home. While Grandpa Loesch traveled, obtained various college degrees, and built a real estate business, Grandma Loesch ran the roost. By the time I entered the picture and met her, she was nearly lost to Alzheimer’s. I did get to meet her meet her once, though, when she had a rare moment of clarity the first time she met my firstborn son, her great-grandson. She sat beside me on the sofa and stroked his fat hand.

“Oh, Dana,” she said to me after my father-in-law, her son, told her about the baby, “he really is beautiful.” She smiled at me before that spark in her eyes slipped away.

I have been most blessed in life to be surrounded by strong examples of female leadership. My own maternal grandmother, Grandma Scaggs, was the matriarch of our family. She raised eight children while her husband, my grandfather, worked his fields and cattle. When I told her that I wanted to stay home for the first few years of my children’s lives, she replied, “If you can do it, take advantage of it.”

I think it vulgar that modern-day, third-wave feminism is so quick to downplay the natural talents and strengths of women. It is a movement that has outlived its usefulness and is so disfigured it doesn’t even qualify as a hopeless caricature of what it was in the days of (pro-lifer) Susan B. Anthony. During Anthony’s day feminists marched, supported by Republicans, for the recognition of their right to vote. Today feminists march, supported by Democrats, for free birth control pills. When Sandra Fluke, fresh from backpacking across Europe and drinking wine with her boyfriend, held a press conference on Capitol Hill and pretended it was a hearing, she lamented her lot in life, that as a student at a pricey university she couldn’t control her libido and thus was paying thousands of dollars a year for birth control pills specifically for her sexual recreation. (She tried to parlay her fifteen minutes into a political career and failed spectacularly, likely because her constant panhandling wore on people.) The math didn’t add up, and many women across the country asked why Fluke’s birth control was so expensive when theirs cost just a few bucks at Target or Costco.

Progressives shouted and screamed for conservatives to get out of their bedrooms, and with this issue they added a delicious ironic caveat: Stay out of their bedrooms except to pay for what goes on in the bedroom. You can’t have it both ways. If I’m to be forced to invest in someone’s sexual recreation, I should at least get to publicly question her morality when her libido warrants a several-thousand-dollar-a-year birth control bill.

The choice for women is before conception. I’ve never opposed birth control. In fact, the GOP doesn’t either, which is why it’s pushed for some time to render birth control available over the counter. The Left is against it, particularly Cecile Richards, head of Planned Parenthood, as it would eliminate the bait to visit her abortion mill. Heaven forbid we give prochoice women choices. The shrieking from the Left, led by the Skeksis of the House, Nancy Pelosi, accused Republicans of blocking women’s access to birth control. They painted a picture of chubby, white congressmen throwing themselves in front of women as though they were blocking a goal every time a woman attempted to enter a pharmacy and purchase birth control. Since insurance covers birth control for health reasons such as endometriosis (I know, as I suffered from a mild yet painful form and it was offered as an option by my OB/GYN and covered by my insurance), perhaps, Republicans suggested, women who seek birth control for sexual recreation could pay for it themselves. Democrats were outraged, feminists were outraged, and they all took to the airwaves to collectively make that sound that the Wicked Witch of the West made when Dorothy doused her with water. It’s a quasi reverse pimping: Americans forced to toil and pay for a woman’s sex-ay par-tay fun times!

Some members of my Flyover family were appalled. No one, man or woman, should hold a press conference and ask the nation to pay for their birth control.

“Well, heck, I didn’t ask no one to pay for my condoms,” said a cousin in a very too-much-information moment. Other members of my family revered Sandra Fluke as some sort of folk hero. A begging-for-birth-control folk hero.

 • • • 

Another disconnect I had with feminism came when I realized that the third wave was encouraging women to value themselves not according to their own strengths as members of the female sex but rather by how well they measured up against men. Borrowing patriarchal systems of measurement for everything from pay to combat seems oxymoronic. Doing so inherently shows that they themselves view our female sex as the weaker of the two. The Pentagon recently declared that combat roles will open up to women. For years activists who have never eaten an MRE in the desert heat or left family for months at a time to serve their country wanted to dictate over military commanders how the branches should be ordered. We are to pretend that women have the same bone density and muscle mass as men so as not to hurt feelings with political incorrectness. The Marines were under enormous pressure to lower their standards for entry so as to accommodate women who failed physical tests, even after it was shown that women fared worse in combat-skills tests and suffered double the number of injuries.128 General Martin Dempsey once said:129

If we do decide that a particular standard is so high that a woman couldn’t make it, the burden is now on the service to come back and explain to the secretary, why is it that high? Does it really have to be that high?

We’re talking about reducing the effectiveness of our military to satisfy political correctness. Most women are not suited for combat, with very, very few exceptions, the Kurdish Women’s Protection Units being one. I have the privilege of knowing another such exception, a member of my family, a woman who set a record for sit-ups in the army. But we should settle for being surprised by the exceptions, not changing the rules.

The irony is that you never hear anyone saying all women should have to register for the draft. In the battle over “inequality,” an illogical premise lingers: So long as boys are forced to register with the Selective Service upon their eighteenth birthday, the same requirement should befall girls. If combat roles are to be open to all women, then so too should the draft. Until that time, forcing boys but not girls to register for the draft is gender discrimination. If I have to sign up my sons, you feminists better get prepared to sign up your daughters.

 • • • 

There are not a lot of business opportunities in the town where my family resides. You either work at the quarry or the bank, teach at the small school, find a factory in the region, or work at the Rest’urnt. Every one of my aunts and a few of my cousins worked at the Rest’urnt as waitresses. When we cousins were little, we would tear around the whole town and take our parents’ loose change inside and buy Cokes with lots of ice. There was no shame in being a mother who stayed home and there was no shame in getting work outside of the home, either. Parenting, mothering, fathering is about making ends meet, period. Working for your children so they have food to eat is the same job as preparing that food for them to eat. Staying at home to raise your children and working to make sure they have what they need to live are both ways to mother. There is more judgment about women’s roles outside of Flyover Nation than inside of it. Every insecurity possessed by the coasts is projected onto Flyover and the people happily and voluntarily contained therein. People in Flyover are proud to be stay-at-home moms, homemakers, and homebodies. Women are proud to act like ladies and men like gentlemen.

We live in a world where feminists define female empowerment by how well they can measure up to male expectations. They conflate femininity and feminism and view as limitations and burdens the natural strengths and weaknesses of the female sex. Third-wave feminists tossed out the yardstick by which these things are measured and instead insist that society measure women by the same yardstick as it measures men. (A brief history lesson: First-wave feminism a hundred years ago wanted the right to change the laws. Second-wave feminism a half century ago wanted to change the culture. Third-wave feminists now want to change reality.) Third-wave feminism presupposes that the previous distinction of measure is sexist. It claims to want equal pay in the workplace yet demands this while generally taking more time away from work for maternity leave and child care. Third-wave feminists want to retain qualities unique to the female sex yet demand equal treatment to men while doing so. If the practice of fairness is the focus, this is wholly unfair.

When faced with this dichotomy, the third wave blames masculinity.

For the past few years women have been lectured on the subject of “pay inequality.”

No, women do not make less money than men for the same job anymore.130 Feminists demanded choices, got choices, and subsequently whined about the result of the choices they made using their own free will. If there is a pay discrepancy, it is because of choices. The Wall Street Journal sums it up thus:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) notes that its analysis of wages by gender does “not control for many factors that can be significant in explaining earnings differences.”

What factors? Start with hours worked. Full-time employment is technically defined as more than 35 hours. This raises an obvious problem: A simple side-by-side comparison of all men and all women includes people who work 35 hours a week, and others who work 45. Men are significantly more likely than women to work longer hours, according to the BLS. And if we compare only people who work 40 hours a week, BLS data show that women then earn on average 90 cents for every dollar earned by men.

Career choice is another factor. Research in 2013 by Anthony Carnevale, a Georgetown University economist, shows that women flock to college majors that lead to lower-paying careers. Of the 10 lowest-paying majors—such as “drama and theater arts” and “counseling psychology”—only one, “theology and religious vocations,” is majority male.

Conversely, of the 10 highest-paying majors—including “mathematics and computer science” and “petroleum engineering”—only one, “pharmacy sciences and administration,” is majority female. Eight of the remaining nine are more than 70% male.

Other factors that account for earnings differences include marriage and children, both of which cause many women to leave the workforce for years. June O’Neill, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, concluded in a 2005 study that “there is no gender gap in wages among men and women with similar family roles.” 131

It’s men, not women, who put in longer hours at work.132 The wage gap is a myth. There is a gap, to be sure, and according to Forbes, it’s that of women in their twenties outearning men.133 Women are now more likely to have college degrees than men are.134 According to the last census, Time reports, “young women are driving the change. In the 25–34 age group, 37.5% of women have a bachelor’s degree or higher, while only 29.5% of men do.” So when men are penniless and uneducated, will feminists then finally claim equality?

 • • • 

Today’s feminists equate sleaze with empowerment. They call it “brave,” and “empowered.” Degrading oneself just to show that you’ve the freedom to do it is “empowering” or something. Modesty is ridiculed. Being a lady is ridiculed. Today’s woman is “brave” if she man-spreads on a stool with her Michelin Man rolls spilling over the top of her underpants (Amy Schumer for Annie Leibovitz). She’s brave if she disrobes in every episode as a plot device (Lena Dunham). When women aren’t conflating skankiness with empowerment, they’re pretending victimhood is empowerment’s equal.

Strength is a sin and weakness is a virtue. It’s a reason why the third wave hates masculinity.

David French in National Review wrote of a culture shift, one among honor, dignity, and victimhood:

As western civilization built an elaborate rule of law, “dignity culture” replaced honor culture. In a dignity culture, in Haidt’s words, people “foreswear violence, turn to courts or administrative bodies to respond to major transgressions, and for minor transgressions they either ignore them or attempt to resolve them by social means.” The southern culture of my childhood was a hybrid, where honor was earned. Violence was certainly possible in this culture, but all parties would appeal to authority when life or limb hung in the balance. The bottom line was that you either ignored minor transgressions or you learned to step up, personally, to deal with offense. The honor and dignity cultures, however, face new competition from an insidious development: victim culture. In victim culture, people are encouraged “to respond to even the slightest unintentional offense, as in an honor culture. But they must not obtain redress on their own; they must appeal for help to powerful others or administrative bodies, to whom they must make the case that they have been victimized.” This is the culture of the micro-aggression, where people literally seek out opportunities to be offended. Once “victimized,” a person gains power—but not through any personal risk. Indeed, it is the victim’s hypersensitivity and fragility that makes them politically and socially strong. In victim culture, a person cultivates their sense of weakness and fragility, actively retarding the process of growing up.

Not only is this mindset destabilizing—there is high incentive for conflict, with little to no personal risk to balance the desire for vengeance—it’s unmanly. In victim culture, a person cultivates their sense of weakness and fragility, actively retarding the process of growing up. There is zero incentive to mature, because maturity can actually decrease your power and influence. 135

This victim culture is killing American masculinity—which is bizarre, because as you’ll see later in my chapter on culture, pop culture craves it. Third-wave feminism is so preoccupied with obliterating American manhood that it’s ignoring the real patriarchal attack on women: the transgender movement.

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Last summer Bruce Jenner, the guy to whom my older cousins looked up and bought Wheaties because of, the guy who was the greatest athlete on the planet, announced that he was going to start living his life pretending that he’s a woman. When I was younger, men who dressed up as women were called drag queens or, as per Dr. Frank-N-Furter, “sweet transvestites.” Apparently those words are now stricken from the English language by the PC police, as people pretending to be the opposite sex are now referred to as “transgendered.”

Jenner’s “coming out” as a chosen female identity was done with Diane Sawyer in a much-hyped prime-time interview, a perfectly timed promotional vehicle for Jenner’s spin-off reality show, I Am Cait. The show followed Jenner’s “transition” from pretending to be a female privately to pretending to be one publicly, all the time. Jenner showed off his new closet to Sawyer and his new collection of large-size day heels. He grew out his hair and sported shiny blowouts. He discussed how he was learning to apply makeup and how women have it so much harder than he fathomed because we wear makeup nearly daily. He got breast implants and was named Glamour’s “Woman of the Year.” Jenner posited himself as the face of the transgender movement. Progressives in LA and NYC feted Jenner, called him “brave,” bestowed upon him the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the ESPYs. Jenner showed women that men could be better women than they, provided they had Jenner’s cash to splurge on jaw shaving, silicone, and other cosmetic surgeries. Being a woman, said Glamour with its choice, is a commodity. The female sex can be bought.

The craziest thing here is not that he is now a she but that the viral vampires—who never seemed to care about this before—suddenly decided that anyone not publicly bursting with praise for Jenner was a bigot.

Elsewhere this saga played out in gyms and schools across the United States. A Planet Fitness (a fake gym that lacks a real squat rack and apparently frowns upon actual muscle gains) revoked the membership of a woman who, after finishing her workout, walked into the women’s locker room to find a tall man changing. Concerned, Yvette Cormier reported it to the front desk staff, who condemned her for her “inappropriate” remark and stated that the gym has a “no judgment policy,” meaning that if men want to identify as women for the day and change in the ladies’ locker room, they are allowed. Apparently Planet Fitness failed to inform Cormier (or other members) of this when signing her contract and taking her money for gym membership.

My cousins’ school, Hillsboro High School in the same-named district in Hillsboro, Missouri, saw female and male students walk out because a male high school senior who calls himself “Lila” Perry demanded use of the girls’ locker rooms and restrooms—despite having been offered a faculty restroom. The senior said he was transgendered and the previous year had begun wearing makeup and girls’ clothing to school. The students staged a walkout in response. I spoke with one of the high school females on my television program. In a nervous voice she explained that it is hard enough to be a young woman going through puberty without the added weight of changing in front of a boy in the locker room. The female students protested the invasion of their privacy and modesty; the tall young man at the center of the controversy accused the girls of being bigots for not wanting to change or use the restroom along with him. Perry, a big senior male student, verbally attacked the female students for not acquiescing to his demands. The girls at the school, raised to protect their bodies and their modesty, now found themselves being shamed for doing so by this young man.

Men pretending to be women are not women. Women pretending to be men are not men. As a woman, I’m more offended by the former. It’s the height of sexism to assume that the entirety of a woman is summed up by a pair of fake boobs, a blowout, makeup, and high heels. It’s sexist for any man to think he can do any of this and tuck or cut and—voilà!—instant woman. Being a woman is so much more than that, yet this new breed of patriarchy lectures to women that all we are is cosmetic, all we are is silicone, filler, MAC, and Louboutin. That’s what it is—an attack by the patriarchy. I was once lectured on Twitter by a man pretending to be a woman that I couldn’t possibly understand what it is to struggle as a woman. No? Growing up with my single mother? Living through the embarrassing milestone of my first period? Growing up flat-chested until my sophomore year of high school, when everything changed and I was oblivious to it and the reactions that came with it? Struggling with society’s expectations of female beauty in a society that wants to sexualize girls before they are old enough to drive? Being looked down upon by some boys for not “putting out”? Getting married and realizing that I had to share a bathroom with a boy for the rest of my life? Having my first child and feeling insecure about my mothering skills, my dinner-making skills, my skills as a provider? Feeling the guilt that only mothers can know over working away from home and lying awake at night wondering if I’m doing the right thing or if he would be better off with me home? Worrying about him as he discovers girls and dealing with the first girl to break his heart? I love dads. They are partners with us moms. But just as I will never fully understand the problems with which dads struggle, so dads will not fully comprehend the problems with which mothers struggle—nor will any man, for that matter. These people need mental and emotional help, not enablers who assist them into a false reality. If your friend tries to do something to harm himself, to cut off his arm with a power tool, you stop him. You don’t encourage his fantasy of being “trans-abled.”136

What’s even worse, a new crop of parents are now treating this as a “condition.” Parents whose children are too young to drive a car (or, in some cases, even wipe their backsides) are allowed to determine if they want to stuff their tiny bodies with dangerous hormone treatments, stall puberty, and in some cases surgically remove their copulatory organs. It’s child abuse. When I was a little kid I wanted to grow up and be a flower, but my mother, rather than indulge my trans-kingdomness, instead shattered my dreams and informed me that I was a human girl and would grow up to be a human woman. Children need boundaries. They need parents, advocates, not enablers.

Brave. In our current culture true bravery is modesty, which progressives conflate with shame. Bravery is acting like a man when you’re a man, though as we’re about to see, some of us are forgetting what being a man even means.