by Anika Smith
Jonah Goldberg has a thought-provoking article up at NRO where he reminds us that "Feminists Get It Right" when it comes to the plight of women subject to abuse simply because of their sex. After giving a few examples of grisly practices where women are punished for men's inability to restrain themselves (particularly the opening scene, where he explains how young girls in Cameroon are disfigured by their mothers in order to discourage the randy local boys), Goldberg explains that this a familiar story on a global scale. "Around the world, women -- girls -- have to pay the price for the barbarity of boys."
It's a fact too often ignored in what Harvey Mansfield calls the gender neutral society, that purposefully obfuscates the differences between men and women, but it's still true: where men are most brutal, women, being the weaker and more vulnerable sex, suffer most.
Ironically, we in the gender neutral society can afford to ignore this fact because our men are (on a macro level) already civilized. And they are already civilized because women have been empowered to civilize them.
Feminism is a loaded term for us, as Goldberg rightly notes, because of what some take it to mean: rejection of tradition, often to the point of willfully going against common sense in what Mansfield labeled "womanly nihilism." As Canadian indie rocker Emily Haines once said, "feminism equals fighting nature." And who wants such a quixotic quest?
Still, it was the first feminists, the Mary Wollstonecrafts and Susan B. Anthonys, who wanted to elevate and educate women not to stand against nature and common sense, but to provide society with the sort of moral strength that guards against injustice. They empowered women, that women might civilize men.
Goldberg explains:
Female equality seems to be a reliable treatment for many of the world's worst pathologies. Population growth in the Third World tends to go down as female literacy goes up. Indeed, female empowerment might be the single best weapon in the "root causes" arsenal in the war on terror.The reason strikes me as fairly simple. Women civilize men. As a general rule, men will only be as civilized as female expectations and demands force them to be. "Liberate" men from those expectations, and Lord of the Flies logic kicks in. Liberate women from this barbarism, and male decency will soon follow.
Of course, this is why standing for human rights and fighting against barbarism usually involves standing up for women and children, as seen in the modern abolition movement and exemplified by former U.S. Ambassador for Human Trafficking and Discovery Institute Senior Fellow John R. Miller.
