Women doth protest too much

The day after the Women's March on Washington, march organizers and the mainstream media were declaring victory. But what was their actual purpose for marching? The march started out as a protest against Donald Trump on the flimsy grounds that Trump is a uniquely, frightening sexist because he once said something crude about women to a B-list celebrity. But before a single woman showed up in Washington, organizing for the event had devolved into the usual mess of leftist hobbyhorses, anti-police agitation, adolescent acting-out, and internal identity politics sniping. By the time organizers were done mau-mauing each other, the march's mission statement relegated "women" to back of the bus, behind all the superior-quality victim groups:

OUR MISSION

The rhetoric of the past election cycle has insulted, demonized, and threatened many of us--immigrants of all statuses, Muslims and those of diverse religious faiths, people who identify as LGBTQIA, Native people, Black and Brown people, people with disabilities, survivors of sexual assault--and our communities are hurting and scared. We are confronted with the question of how to move forward in the face of national and international concern and fear.

That's the first paragraph. The word "women" doesn't appear until the end of the second paragraph. But at least it shows up somewhere. If the black, brown, LGBTQIA, Muslims, etc. etc. had their way, the word "women" would have been eliminated entirely. In some cities, the march was rebranded specifically to exclude mention of women. You can be sure that, behind closed doors, woman-eliminationist arguments flew thick. Middle-class, melanin-deprived Yoplait-eaters may supply the bodies and the money for such events, but as is usual, leftist radicals took over the organizing. So it was unsurprising that the logo they created was a Black Panther fist with hands of inferior colors propping it up, or something. Maybe the black fist was pulling up the other hands. Maybe they were pulling it down. It doesn't really matter how you see it, so long as someone can spout empty-headed nonsense about intersectionality nearby. For this reason, it is actually the perfect logo for the modern feminist movement: Surprisingly, nobody has complained that the Jacobin caps worn by many marchers (they were called something else, and not bonnets rouges) were knitted with pink-colored yarn. But hat iconography and mission statement angst were the least of the optics problems for organizers. There was also the problem of Hillary Clinton. And Bill Clinton. The day of the march, Hillary Clinton voiced her support, tweeting:

Thanks for standing, speaking & marching for our values @womensmarch. Important as ever. I truly believe we're always Stronger Together.

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) January 21, 2017

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Would that be the value of returning an unrepentant rapist to the White House by electing his equally unrepentant wife, or the value of abusing a rape victim in court in order to spring her assailant early, as Hillary Clinton did? How do you say you're opposing sexual violence against women while excusing the Clintons? If you're co-chairwoman Gloria Steinem, you've had a lot of practice throwing crime victims under the bus in service to Hillary and Bill. By now it comes naturally. I'm old enough and was once feminist enough to have been in the room when leaders of prominent feminist organizations mocked Paula Jones and quipped that Bill could do anything to them so long as he kept abortion legal. These aren't urban legends: I even knew a woman who said such things about Ted Kennedy. Helpfully, nobody in the mainstream media asked marchers how they could justify condemning Trump while excusing Hillary and Bill. In one New York Times article, prosperous female Wall Street brokers talked about taking to the streets against Trump's "crass language" about women, even if it cost them business clients. Reporter Kate Kelly noted that most of these women were Hillary supporters, but she didn't ask them how they felt about Clinton's crass language about rape victims when she was defending her husband from accusations of rape or providing legal representation to a convicted rapist. This cognitive dissonance on sex crimes wasn't helped by the prominence of anti-law enforcement activists among the march's official sponsors. When you march side-by-side with the pro-criminal ACLU, with anti-cop terrorists like Angela Davis, and with a whole slew of "prison abolitionists," you cannot credibly claim also to be advocating for law enforcement to pursue rapists.

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The modern feminist movement's real stance on sex crime is that they're only opposed to some of it. Since the 1960s, leaders of the feminist movement have been quietly, systematically betraying some rape victims on the altar of leftist politics. The first generation of modern feminists at least openly debated whether it was useful to support rape victims when so many sex predators were minority men, or whether they should just demonize the police along with the rest of the Left. Today, feminists don't debate this anymore. The hard left, anti-cop race activists have won out. Anti-rape activism morphed into anti-campus rape activism, a movement that avoids working with the real justice system to put real rapists behind bars by blaming white male college students for "hetero-patriarchal" thought crimes instead. Nowadays, the only policing feminists are allowed to support is policing each other. Before the march, organizers produced a manifesto detailing the hierarchies of victimization so white marchers wouldn't forget their purported "privilege" over other women:

We must create a society in which women--including Black women, Native women, poor women, immigrant women, disabled women, Muslim women, lesbian queer and trans women--are free and able to care for and nurture their families, however they are formed, in safe and healthy environments free from structural impediments.

Cynically, this sort of thing isn't directed at power brokers like Hillary Clinton or Gloria Steinem --or even at Donald Trump. It is designed to keep ordinary women in line, lest they question the professional activists spouting extremism under the banner of women's rights. This is the way the left works: power always exempts people from rules that apply to everyone else. The Huffington Post called the manifesto "a beautifully intersectional policy platform." "I didn't want to be part of the march if it was going to be a white-woman kumbaya march," sniffed Portland, Ore. NAACP president Jo Ann Hardesty. Steinem chimed in, scolding the little women who were not exempted from mandatory re-education, as she was. "Sexism is always made worse by racism--and vice versa," she wrote. "[White women] don't just get to join the march and not check their privilege constantly," explained spokesperson ShiShi Rose. "Now is the time for you to be listening more, talking less," Rose lectured on the organizing committee's Facebook page. "You should be reading our books and understanding the roots of racism and white supremacy. Listening to our speeches. You should be drowning yourselves in our poetry." No wonder professional feminists like Eve Ensler (see page 3 of the VDay 2016 annual report) spend their time churning out buckets of incomprehensible prose: incomprehensibility may be the last defense against the accusation of being insufficiently willing to drown in a puddle of black women's poetry. And no wonder so many people are looking at the women's march and sensing something uncomfortable and dishonest. Beneath all the Seventies-tinted agitprop, pink hats, and unity speeches, what the movement is really about is hatred of any woman who fails to submit to the right types of people while espousing the correct politics using the officially sanctioned words. It is laughable to call any of this pro-woman.