NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
SUNDAY SPECTATOR
March 14, 2010
Extremist thinking
It does not matter whether you are a man or a woman: if you oppose feminism, you must expect to be smeared. If one is a man, one will certainly be accused of "misogyny," or hatred of women -- which is another thing entirely from opposition to the feminist ideology.If one is a woman, it can be much worse, as I've learned from many woman friends who have stood in the path of "the sisterhood," and been treated as traitors to their own sex. In neither case will there be arguments, or at least, legitimate ones. The accusation of misogyny has long been considered the curtain-dropper behind the ideological barricades; like the accusation of "racism," or "homophobia," or "islamophobia," or any of the other psychologizing terms that are employed in the assembly of an ad hominem. Nor need we expect evidence for our crime. Consider if you will this smooth, parenthetical insinuation, taken from a column in this very newspaper: "Trouble is, there are roadblocks -- including noisy obstructionists who (perhaps out of fear, perhaps out of insecurity, perhaps out of some curious zeal for revenge we'll never know about) think the journey should go in the opposite direction. We ignore such people at our peril." I noticed it because I'd been named in the column, along with Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, Glenn Beck -- and St. Paul, flatteringly enough -- as exemplars of a "rabid misogyny" and "extremist thinking." Or perhaps I rated only with Scott Brown, the new U.S. senator from Massachusetts, as a "pale, albeit appallingly classless, echo of it." The column, by Janice Kennedy, was on this page last Sunday. It began by offering a game of "Spot the Jerk" -- in which all win, and all must have prizes. And rather than try to refute it, I would invite gentle reader to read or reread it, playing the alternative game of "Spot the Argument." For beyond the ad hominems, I couldn't find one. I could quibble that remarks attributed to me by paraphrase misrepresented what I'd said, but then, what I'd originally said was every bit as politically incorrect, so why bother. What I found most telling, was another parenthetical assertion, about persons of my ilk. "(Personally, I don't even know any men like that -- not among family, friends or neighbours.)" That she doesn't, strikes me as a measure of the bubble in which the "liberal intelligentsia" are living, and with which I am over-familiar from my own dealings within the "mainstream media." Indeed, it is how Fox came to trounce CNN, MSNBC, and other purveyors of television news; how a specialized business newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, came to have such a large circulation; how "talk radio" got started, along with the whole "vast rightwing conspiracy" in the blogosphere. Put it this way. Working in the media myself, I know plenty of people with views like Janice Kennedy's. But she knows no one else with views like mine. This comes of living in the intellectual equivalent of a "gated community." One is reminded of a comment attributed to the late Pauline Kael, very liberal movie critic of the New Yorker, after Richard Nixon's landslide victory over George McGovern in 1972 -- that she didn't know how Nixon had won, since she didn't know anyone who'd voted for him. The quote may be apocryphal, or perhaps it was real but cutely self-deprecating. (There's a special place in my heart for ideologues who are capable of self-deprecation; it's like cracks in the Berlin Wall.) What Kael did say, for attribution, in a speech to the Modern Language Association in December 1972, was rather more malignant: "I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theatre I can feel them." I am not a populist, and I do not think that if the vast majority of people agree with me, I must therefore be right. Nor vice versa, if they stand against me. The truth is something no one owns. It is something that exists unanswerably in itself, and this includes the truth about men and women, whatever it may be. That women are "underrepresented" in some domains (political and corporate boardrooms were mentioned), and "overrepresented" in others (one thinks of maternity wards), may be the consequence of a male conspiracy crossing all cultural frontiers, and going back to the beginning of historical time. Or, it may reflect genuine differences between the sexes, that contribute to a certain division of labour in all known sexually reproductive species -- and in the case of humans, even to complementary variations in spiritual outlook. It could also be that both are necessary to the survival of the species. The great majority, of men and women alike, passively accept the latter view. We may be wrong, but I do not think it makes us all misogynists. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top