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What Women Really Want

What Women Really Want

By Heather Wilhelm - November 6, 2014

If you follow the antics of modern “feminism”—or even if you desperately try to ignore them—you’ve probably witnessed the following sad and wacky spectacle: Every week or so, certain clusters of cloistered, college-educated, first-world women will dredge the darker realms of the Internet for some new form of oppression to call their own.

It was refreshing, then, to see many of America’s much-touted, reproduction-obsessed, faux “War on Women” candidates—most notably Colorado’s Mark Udall and Texas’s Wendy Davis—lose handily in Tuesday’s elections. Equally refreshing was recent news out of Australia, in which the country’s foreign minister, Julie Bishop, told an audience that “feminist” is “not a term that I find particularly useful these days.” Bishop sees herself, apparently, as a person, not a walking “lady part” (Planned Parenthood’s term, not mine) grievance machine.

“I’m a female politician, I’m a female foreign minister,” Bishop said. “Get over it.”

Who else wants to give the empowered Ms. Bishop a big old trans-Pacific high-five? Get over it, indeed. Alas, at least in the near term, the bulk of modern feminists probably won’t. Monsters, apparently, are everywhere. “Sexism is not just something that occasionally rears its ugly head,” as feminist writer Jessica Valenti recently warned in the Guardian. “It exists every day in every space.”

Yikes! As a woman who occupies various and sundry spaces on this madcap, whirling sphere, I was certainly surprised to learn this. Someone who might also be surprised would be Hillary Rodham Clinton, an individual who is, when we’re being honest, not very competent, kind of a snooze, and not at all “likeable enough”—and yet who is now, rather amazingly, the leading 2016 Democratic presidential candidate solely because she does not have man-type junk in her trunk.

“What part of feminism,” asked Clementine Ford, a Melbourne-based feminist and writer, did foreign minister Bishop “find so unappealing?” You know, it’s hard to pin down just one, but it could be the nagging suspicion that most hard-core feminists would happily karate-kick you from behind in a dark alley if you disagree with them. It also could be the repeated public “rage spirals” (Lena Dunham’s term, not mine), the life-ruining “act like a conscience-free frat boy” sex advice given to countless young women, or that consistent, humor-free Darth Vader gloom.

There’s a more serious problem, however: For modern feminists, facts don’t seem to matter, and manufactured crises are all part of a day’s work. As some very real oppression of women unfolds around the globe, today’s Western feminists are busy constructing entire narratives out of false “epidemics”—widespread, sinister “street harassment” is the latest of many—that crumble upon closer examination.

I guess this makes sense, when you think about it: If the “oppression” of American women were to entirely disappear, a whole host of laptop scribblers would face the daunting task of selling “think pieces” about something else, and the only other thing they tend to know about is fusty, boring old Marxist economics. Who, aside from the people who pretended to get beyond Page 2 of Thomas Piketty’s book attacking capitalism, wants to read about that? There’s a delicate economy in the balance here, people—and, no doubt, large piles of unpaid student loans.

So the show must go on. Dilemmas must be concocted, and hackles must be raised. However, judging by the peculiar, stringent waft of its latest narratives, modern feminism might face an interesting test in the coming years—and it could fail that test by seriously misunderstanding what women really want.

Many women, in short, want husbands. Many leading “feminists,” on the other hand, seem to view husbands as terribly passé. In 2012, the Obama administration made this vision impressively clear with its infamous “Life of Julia” slide show, which featured a young mother thriving, thanks to the government, with no husband in sight. Since then, as the New Republic’s Rebecca Traister reminded us this week, the “single, progressive woman” has been increasingly viewed as an essential constituency of the Democratic Party—and the way to woo them, it is implied, is to protect them economically in ways that a stable marriage traditionally would.

Feminists will blow various gaskets over that last line, probably because it’s true. A stable marriage is usually the best economic arrangement for all parties involved. The Democrats aren’t alone in getting this joke. Desperate to appeal to left-leaning single ladies, the College Republican National Committee recently ran a cringe-worthy ad that compared choosing a candidate to buying a wedding dress.

While this week’s election results suggest that the left’s “War on Women” narrative is sputtering, the progressive dedication to curating the single, female demographic will continue to grow. With that comes a subtle vested interest in keeping more single ladies, well, single. Who needs a husband, after all, when you’ve got Uncle Sam?

Here’s the good news: An unwieldy, in-your-face government makes for a pretty lousy husband, and a feminism that pitches otherwise will ultimately lose credibility. Let’s hope more women realize this sooner rather than later. 

Heather Wilhelm is a writer based in Austin,Texas. Her work can be found at  http://www.heatherwilhelm.com/ and her Twitter handle is @heatherwilhelm.

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Heather Wilhelm

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