Much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the comments section at the Spectator which this week has gone full Yiannopoulos on the subject of the unspeakable awfulness of Third Wave Feminism.
Except, on this occasion, it’s not a gay, attention-seeking bitch (or “modern feminism’s Voldemort”, as he’d probably prefer to style himself) who is trashing the sisterhood but one of their own – a journalist called Emily Hill, who argues that what was once a “genuine crusade against genuine prejudice has become a form of pointless attention-seeking.”
Needless to say, the girls with the scowl, the nose-rings and the unshaven armpit hair are unimpressed.
Says Lucia Lolita:
I’m taking this as satire. It gave me a good laugh.
Sniffs MirandaDobson:
Utterly generalizing and narrow minded. It’s articles like this that show why we still need feminism.
And a saucer of milk for AliceS:
It’s good of the Spectator to publish undergraduate essays.
What most annoys them, I imagine, is that the article is grounded in pesky facts:
Today, girls outperform boys at school — and have done since the mid-1970s. They are more likely to get five good GCSEs. A third of them go to university, compared with just a quarter of men. Once in university, they do better and are significantly more likely to graduate with a first or 2:1 degree. And equality? In many courses, it has gone a bit beyond that. Last year, women constituted 55 per cent of those enrolling in courses in medicine and dentistry and 62 per cent of those enrolling in law.
And:
Most self-styled feminists argue that we still struggle in the workplace. On close inspection this isn’t borne out either. Women in their twenties have out-earned men in for the last few years; now the under-40s are doing so as well.
Having personally bred a female of my own – and a particularly fine specimen, if I say so myself – it saddens me greatly whenever I hear my matchlessly beautiful creation regurgitating the half-baked, ill-informed feminist propaganda to which girls are exposed these days thanks to skanky role models like Lena Dunham and even not-so-skanky ones like that nice Hermione girl from Harry Potter.
It’s all very well for Emma Watson – as Emily Hill mentions in her article – to be applauded for making a speech to the UN lamenting the fact that her girlfriends have given up competitive sport lest it make their arms look too “muscly”.
But Emma Watson’s girlfriends are right, aren’t they? Only three women in history – Boadicea, Madonna and Michelle Obama – have ever successfully triumphed over having a pair of arms like Conan the Barbarian’s. All the other billions have done much better out of having elegant, slender, feminine arms because they’re generally what men prefer. Certainly, in my own daughter’s case, once she’s got the nonsense of her Oxford MA and her Harvard MBA out of the way, I shall be urging her to bend her mind to her principal purpose – viz, bagging herself a hedge fund manager or a Duke or anyone from One Direction so long it’s not Zayn.
And this is the key point surely. Until such time as the brilliant scientific minds of womankind devise a way of surviving which doesn’t involve mating with and generally making themselves attractive to men, then it will always remain very much in girls’ interests to ignore the urgings of those Third Wave Feminists who believe that salvation lies in making themselves more repellant, obstreperous, whiney and difficult.
Happily I think the majority of women – hey, they are, after all, the more sensible sex – are perfectly well aware of this ground truth. And I believe it’s why the Third Wave Feminist movement is going to snuff itself out, by a process of natural selection.
Think about it: the most ardent Third Wave Feminists are also, almost by definition, going to be the least attractive, the least likely to find males prepared to breed with them, and consequently the least likely to pass on their genes to future generations.
If they even live that long – for let us not forget another important thing radical feminists forgo when they peevishly reject patriarchal norms: the protection that men have traditionally afforded the weaker sex.
All right, so the Charlotte Proudman feminazi types probably aren’t going to expose themselves to too much extra risk if they insist on opening doors for themselves rather than allowing men to do it for them. But what about in a shipwreck situation, what then?
“Women and children first”, as you’re all no doubt aware, is known as the Birkenhead Drill – named after the incident in 1852 when the paddle steamer Birkenhead was sunk off the coast of Cape Town. Because there weren’t enough lifeboats for the passengers, the men (soldiers mostly) stood fast while the women and children got out safely.
What was particularly hideous about the Birkenhead sinking is that it took place in seas swarming with great white sharks.
In the end it took just twenty minutes for the Birkenhead to sink, leaving just the mast to mark her passing. The sea around the ship was littered with debris, and the bodies of those that had jumped into the water as the ship sank, were now calling out to the three lifeboats that had managed to stay afloat. Since these were crammed full of women and children there was nothing they could do but pull slowly for the shore surrounded by pieces of flesh and parts of limbs, all that remained of the sharks terrifying work.
Out of the six hundred and ninety three people on board, four hundred and thirty eight lost their lives.
Talk about disgusting sexism! The ratio of men to women eaten by sharks that day – something in the order of 100:0 – was a blot in the annals of sexual equality and an eternal badge of shame to all those who believe that girls are exactly the same as boys and should be treated just the same otherwise it’s unfair.
This is why, though it might be most men’s idea of hell being trapped on a cruise liner with, say, Caitlin Moran, Amanda Marcotte, Anita Sarkeesian, Jessica Valenti, I personally would consider it the perfect insurance plan.
You just know that as the ship went down and the fins started circling, those stalwarts would stick firmly to their principles. “No, really, after you!” they’d say as I barged past them in the lifeboat queue, with a few garbled excuses about my pathological fear of being eaten by a shark, and possibly – depending how cheerful they looked about dying for their noble cause – a cheeky farewell quip about the demerits of free-bleeding…
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