DO NOT blame sexist abuse on Feminism
Oh fuck no! As feministing.com reports, National Review Online editor is now claiming that feminism is the reason why pop superstar Rihanna got beaten up by her boyfriend Chris Brown. She writes:
According to an article in the Boston Globe, an informal poll taken among 200 teenagers has revealed that almost half of them blame the pop star Rihanna for her recent beating, allegedly by her boyfriend, Chris Brown.
It's just one survey. But it's very bad news. And feminists are to blame.
...What has happened -- and what Rihanna and Chris have to do with Gloria [Steinem] and us -- is that by inventing oppression where there is none and remaking woman in man's image, as the sexual and feminist revolutions have done, we've confused everyone. The reaction those kids had was unnatural. It's natural for us to expect men to protect women, and for women to expect some level of physical protection. But in post-modern America, those natural gender roles have been beaten by academics and political rhetoric and the occasional modern woman being offended by having a door opened for her. The result is confusion.
Let us deconstruct this idiocy. First of all, abuse and rape was not lacking "in olden timey days." Nor was abuse and rape of women discovered after the feminist movement. Gender abuse was weaved into the society of the pre-feminist West, though let us not pretend that it still isn't. Chivalric codes, which held that noble men ought to protect the docile maiden, did inhibit those men from abusing and raping women. If Lopez is interested in hearkening to the "good old days" when noble men protested women then I can direct her to Froissart's Chronicle of the Hundred Years' War, which depicts those chivalrous men raping chaste nuns and using their talents with the sword to slice up peasant women's bodies.
Second, Lopez is interested in having men reclaime their masculinity; biologically destined I'm sure, in order to protect women. However, who should women be protected from? Oh yeah, anxiously masculine men. Lapse in logic much?
Third, feminism, at least in my definition, does not insist that people, such as people with vaginas and those with penises, are not intrinsically or socially different from one another. Nor does it insist that all people should be exactly alike. Feminism insists that gender differences should not be used to privilege one person at the disadvantage of another. Teaching men to be masculine and thus to arm themselves and develop their aggression while teaching women to be feminine and thus to be docile and not learn to protect themselves leaves women at a disadvantage when men decide to extend their privilege over women by kicking the shit out of them.
Now, I'd like to see Chris Brown try to touch Serena Williams and survive with his peen still attached.
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