The Abolition of Woman

What is it about generalizations women can’t understand?

The other day, the Daily Wire released a video in which I discussed the fact that women are not as funny as men. These videos, for those who haven’t had the enormous pleasure of watching one of them, are largely ad lib. My producer Tom will run the subject by me, and if I approve, he’ll select some short clips. When the cameras roll, I’ll watch these clips for the first time, then react unscripted. The idea is to be amusing and incisive and, sure, maybe a bit provocative, but in a silly way rather than the inflammatory bugger-off-and-die-if-you-disagree way that distinguishes most American political discourse.

Anyway, ever since this vid came out, I’ve been receiving emails that say something like: “Listen, smarty pants, my sister-mother-daughter is hilarious. Therefore you are wrong.” Well, who knows, maybe I am wrong. That happened once. But if I am, that’s not why. A generalization is not disproven by an exception. A generally true statement with many exceptions is, more or less, what a generalization is.

But women can’t seem to grok this. If I say a man will destroy a woman in a fistfight, I’ll receive a mug shot of some female listener’s 300-pound Aunt Brutus, who is currently doing 25 to life for beating her milquetoast husband to death. If I say women are less rational than men, I’ll receive some contrary example — which unintentionally proves the point.

Feminists, who, again speaking generally, have ruined the lives of every human being everywhere, must have realized at some point that the female mind works this way. They have been using this technique to spread their absurd and destructive doctrines for decades. In 1973, female tennis ace Billie Jean King beat male player Bobby Riggs in what was called the “Battle of the Sexes.” It was deemed a major victory for women’s equality. Leave aside the fact that Riggs probably threw the match. The players weren’t “the sexes,” they were individuals. King was 29 and at the top of her form, while Riggs was 55 and hadn’t been number one since the 1940’s. No matter the outcome, women can’t beat men at tennis. For my female readers, that’s a generalization.

Here’s another. Women don’t care whether they can beat men at tennis or not. Women are not really all that interested in sports. Yet every other day, the sports pages of the struggling Washington Post demonstrate why the Washington Post is struggling by leading with a story on some women’s sport. If you had to guess, how many of the Post’s dwindling readers would you say open the sports pages thinking, “I wonder how the Passaic Ballerinas did at hoops last night?” Five? One? None? The Post isn’t reporting the news, it is instructing us on what we should be interested in. I have no idea what makes the Post’s editors think they know what we should be interested in. What I think is that the editors are buffoons.

My wife and I just returned from a vacation in Italy. It was lovely, thank you. We wandered the hill towns of Tuscany and stopped off in churches and museums to admire the medieval art. We also took side trips to Florence and Rome, where we stopped off in churches and museums to admire the Renaissance art. I was struck once again by how often the paintings and frescoes depicted the Virgin Mary. If I had to guess, I would say pictures of Mary were second only to those of Christ crucified.

I don’t think this was the church telling people what they should care about, ala the idiots over at WaPo. Just the opposite. I think it was the church’s more or less unavoidable response to a cult of Mary that grew up among believers and priests hungry for the nurturing gentleness of the feminine in a society and religion largely run by men. It was a repeat at scale of the woman who cried out to Christ, “Blessed is the womb that bore thee and the breasts which thou hast sucked.” The Savior demurred, but the sentiment ultimately carried the day.

As I looked at these paintings, I couldn’t help thinking that it was somehow healthy to live in a society where people looked with adoration on images of an obscure peasant girl whose central achievement was to mother a child. In terms of measurable class and status, she was nothing in this world. But she’s in heaven now, and there — news flash — she has been crowned queen.

Why? Because in Mary, we see motherhood as it truly is. Holy. Sacred. The best thing any woman — or anyone — ever does. Eliminate every female basketball player, doctor and astronaut and the highest standards in those fields will remain wholly intact. Remove our respect and support and love for the sacred duties and sacrifices of motherhood, and every good thing human life has to offer will vanish without a trace.

Here’s one more generalization. We live in a materialist society that is hostile to the towering spiritual necessity of the feminine, that quality, possessed by women alone, which gives human existence almost all of its solace and beauty. I support the right of women to make their own choices. I truly don’t want to stop any boss-girl or baller-girl from wasting her homemaking years on whatever inessential ephemera her nature calls her to. This is a free country. You go, girl.

But I would dearly love to see a mighty rebellion of the human heart against an information war that seeks to celebrate masculine values exclusively and in both genders. Its immiserating effect has been only this: to mutilate the social imaginary; to extinguish in our common life our reverence for the central human contribution to creation.

Wise men once followed the light to take a knee before an instance of that sacred act.

Wise men still do.

Have a happy Father’s Day.