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Hanna Rosin: This is What a Feminist Looks
Like
A couple years ago the National Organization for
Women came up with a new PR campaign. The program
duped unsuspecting college students into wearing a
T-shirt carrying the gratuitous slogan, “This
is what a feminist looks like.”
The campaign was designed to dispel the popular
notion that all women’s libbers are Helen
Thomas look-alikes with a hooked nose, deep-set
eyes, serpentine lips, and rhinoceros-hide
skin.
For a while, the program seemed to working,
mostly because the persons wearing the T-shirts
were 20-something college drop-outs – men and
women alike -- who were more than happy to don free
apparel that appeared to be advancing a worthy
social cause.
But all the social redemption garnered by the
N.O.W. campaign has now been undone in the single
stroke by a disaffected journalist by the name of
Hanna Rosin. If Ms. Rosin has not yet appeared on
your loony-left radar screen, here’s a quick
run-down.
In 2007 she unveiled her book, God’s
Harvard, written as a satirical expose of
Patrick Henry College, a Virginia-based institution
that seeks to promote conservative religious
ideals.
A couple years later she penned an expose in The
Atlantic titled, The Case Against
Breastfeeding. As we know, millions of American
women are to this day being oppressed by
breastfeeding. In response to the article, the
American Academy of Pediatrics noted simply,
“the author skims the literature and has
omitted many recent statements.”
And earlier this year, Rosin was nominated for a
National Magazine Award for her story about
transgendered children. Thank goodness someone had
the courage to take on that long-neglected
topic.
Having solved the problems of evangelism,
breastfeeding, and transgender, earlier this month
feminist Rosin decided to try her hand at social
commentary. Titled “The End of Men,”
Hanna Rosin’s article in the current issue of
The Atlantic could just as easily been called,
“Feminists Dancing on the Grave of Western
Civilization.”
For starters, Rosin sings hosannas to the
growing tide of women who are “forgoing
marriage altogether.” As a result,
out-of-wedlock births have spread out of the
barrios and trailer parks and are “creeping up
the class ladder.”
W. Bradford Wilcox, head of the National
Marriage Project, is quoted as making the astute
observation that these changes have been “bad
for kids.” The sequelae of female-headed
households is the well-documented litany of
“crime, drugs, sex, teen pregnancies,
suicides, runaways and school dropouts,” Rosin
acknowledges in a flash of lucidity.
But Hanna is not troubled by indicators of
galloping social disintegration, just so long as
they carry the patina of ever-expanding female
empowerment.
The main focus of Rosin’s soliloquy is not
the nuclear family, children, or the fate of civil
society, however. The brunt of her venom is
directed squarely and unapologetically at men. To
erect her dystopian mythology, Rosin indulges in a
noxious mixture of historical revisionism,
gynocentric narcissism, and shameless
stereotyping.
Reflecting on African-American social mobility,
Rosin asserts that “Typically, women’s
income has been the main factor in determining
whether a family moves up the class ladder or stays
stagnant.”
Of course that’s a preposterous example of
Ms.-Information.
The reason why so many African-American families
remain mired in the cycle of poverty is the
marginalization of the male breadwinner by policies
that demand the woman be single and have child
custody before she can qualify for welfare
benefits. And getting men re-involved in the family
holds the key to upward social mobility.
For years, feminists abhorred gender stereotypes
as an ideological anathema. But when stereotypes
are applied men, Rosin revels in them, like a
female mud wrestler poised to take the plunge. And
many would look askance at the seeming illogic of a
self-proclaimed New Age woman who indulges in rabid
anti-male stereotypes.
I’ve read accounts of Jim Crow, that dark
era in American history when African-Americans were
systematically deprived of their civil liberties by
Democratic carpetbaggers. And I have trouble
distinguishing the racist musings of White Citizens
Councils from the chauvinistic prescriptions of Ms.
Rosin.
Men are the “new ball and chain,” men
are “fixed in cultural aspic,” and men
“spur each other to make reckless
decisions,” she writes. In contrast, women are
“making all the decisions,” women are a
“maternal rescue team,” and women
“do it a whole lot better.”
Then Rosin approvingly recounts the video
Telephone, in which two women go on a homicidal
spree targeting men, then flee in a yellow pickup
truck, with one woman bragging, “We did it,
Honey B.”
Most women I know express genuine compassion and
concern when they learn of lagging male enrollments
in higher education, shorter lifespans, and the 6
million unemployed men caught in the eddies and
backwaters of the current economic recession.
But to Hanna Rosin, we live in a bipolar,
zero-sum world in which everything is viewed
through the prism of gender and power. For her, all
that matters is women on top.
And that’s what a feminist looks like.
* * *
Carey
Roberts probes and lampoons political correctness.
His work has been published frequently in the
Washington Times, Townhall.com, LewRockwell.com,
ifeminists.net, Intellectual Conservative, and
elsewhere. He is a staff reporter for the New Media
Network. You can contact him at E-Mail
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