The following is an excerpt from the author’s new book, “The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Terror of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer.” (Bombardier Books, Post Hill Press.)
Feminists have long urged women to promote the politically correct viewpoint that they are oppressed victims. Champions of second-wave feminism — such as Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem — emphasized valid grievances of women, such as feeling like a sex object or being passed over for career advancement. However, the media-tech complex has gone well beyond promoting any constructive awareness of these concerns. Instead, it cultivates the resentments such women have felt for past humiliations.
Two cases in point are the confirmation hearings of Justice Clarence Thomas in 1991 and Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. In both, the Democrats’ playbook to derail the confirmation process was exactly the same. At the eleventh hour, a woman appears with stories of sexual harassment from decades past. There is virtually no corroboration.
Kavanaugh was a teenager when his accuser Christine Blasey Ford said he tried to take her clothes off at a party, though none present at said party could corroborate anything. Anita Hill accused Thomas of making some off-color comments while she worked in his office. Again, uncorroborated.
But Democrats trying to disrupt the confirmations were not concerned about the flimsiness of the charges. The stories — hyped big in the media — served a far greater purpose. The unspoken goal was to emotionally manipulate American women who may have been humiliated in the past. They stirred up old resentments and traumas and then projected responsibility for those traumas onto the nominees. And it worked. It dredged up old memories of mistreatment among many women across America. They then became emotionally certain that the nominees were guilty.
Hence, the nominees could be framed in the public eye as “Me Too” perps, members of Wifebeaters Inc., and so on. The Senate Judiciary Committee and halls of Congress during the Kavanaugh hearings became a circus of angst-filled women, just as planned. They screamed in the hearing room. They screamed at swing-vote senators in hallways and elevators. On Capitol Hill, there were parades of women posing in “handmaid” costumes. The slogan of the day was “Believe all women!” no matter who they are or what they say about you.
Which leads to another question: What is a woman anyway? When Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked to define the word “woman,” she refused to do so and even added: “I’m not a biologist.” Given the propaganda of gender ideology — which seems to deny that males and females exist in biology or reality — why did its recent propaganda continue to speak out of both sides of the mouth as though two sexes really do exist? More specifically, why do traditional feminists like Steinem and company accept that narrative while deploring their erstwhile sisters known as radical feminists who object to it?
And since any man can claim to be a woman simply by saying so, we end up having to ask the central question posed by British novelist Dorothy Sayers in her 1938 lecture: “Are Women Human?” It is the spark of individuality, along with the biological reality of humanity as a dimorphic species, that makes us human. And we’re losing both in the morass of identity politics enforced by political correctness.
This review of women in the clutches of identity politics seems to point to two broad outcomes. First, social pressures from all corners — schools, media, popular culture — appear to be taking their toll on young women in particular. Hence, trying to navigate political correctness has been so exhausting that it added to the mental health crisis of women, especially during the Covid-19 era.
This should come as no surprise assuming they have internalized the guilt foisted on them for racism, for poverty, for environmental disaster, to properly “mask up,” and more. An Evie Magazine article noted that progressivism is an ideology “that keeps score to an exhausting degree. … [I]t’s understandable that anxiety and depression thrive in these kinds of environments.”
Second, all this slicing and dicing leads to an isolation — and exhaustion — that probably causes many struggling women to hope just to be taken care of. With so many relationships broken and real conversations off-limits, what is left but the new patriarchy, the Daddy State?
In 2012, the reelection campaign of President Obama hoped to lure young women voters with just that message by presenting an infographic called “The Life of Julia.” It offered up a utopian story about an atomized woman and showed how the government would take care of her and her child from the cradle to the grave. In 2021, the Biden administration released a similar infographic called “The Life of Linda,” another isolated Stepford wife to the state.
Both infographics provide a perfect illustration of sociologist Robert Nisbet’s point that “the State grows on what it gives to the individual as it does on what it takes from competing social relationships.” The government’s showcasing of Julia and Linda represent the push for a new social order that replaces our intimate relationships with a mass relationship with the state. The biggest losers of all are children and their childhoods. But the propaganda is meant also to destroy motherhood, fatherhood, and the whole family.
That leads us to wonder about the role of men in all this. I would say it all depends on the strength of women to reject the dystopia being foisted on us by a totalitarian force. We should reject the narrative that men are the bad guys and women are always the victims. In general, men take a lot of their cues from women. I would guess that elitist men take their cues from men who are higher in the pecking order.
But the de-masculinization of men and the bullying of women and girls by men who inject themselves into female sports by claiming a female identity are of a piece. Obedience to political correctness — out of fear of being socially rejected — drives much of it.
This psychological chaos is brought on by utopian power elites of both sexes. Divisiveness between the sexes is key to family and relationship breakdown across society. That division proved critical to the breakdown of the black family in America and, increasingly, to the American family across the board.