The young woman behind the counter at Grand Central Bakery in Portland’s Multnomah Village wore a black T-shirt with white letters telling the world: “The future is female.”
I wanted to ask her what exactly that meant. What does a female future look like? She was so young, and considering that this is Portland, a one-party town in a one-party state, she might have been offended at receiving a question instead of an immediate atta-girl.
On my way out, though, I noticed another employee – a young man – sweeping the floor. For some reason, I didn’t mind interrupting him and asking:
“What would happen if you came to work in a T-shirt that said, ‘The future is male.’”
He smiled as if the question had already occurred to him.
“Probably nothing,” he said.
It was a safe, politic answer. More likely the truth is he would have been told to change his shirt – after receiving a lecture on why men have always run things so it’s time for a different kind of future.
If the future is female, chances are the future will be the same-old, same-old.
Read the news. Read history. Women don’t handle power any better than men.
Even a Nobel Peace laureate like Aung San Suu Kyi, when put in charge of Myanmar (aka Burma), has stood by and watched as the Buddhist majority has committed genocide against the Rohingya Muslim minority.
Her supporters say that as a civilian leader, Mother Suu (as some call her) has no control over the military. But she can still use her office or her moral authority to try and intervene. Instead she acts like she doesn’t see what is happening.
In “Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields,” history professor Wendy Lower details what wives, mothers, sisters and daughters were capable of.
“(W)omen displayed a capacity to kill while also acting out a combination of roles: plantation mistress; prairie Madonna in apron-covered dress lording over slave laborers; infant-carrying, gun-wielding Hausfrau.”
As Lower discovered, many women described what they did during the war as “organizing things in the office or attending to social aspects of daily life. … They failed to see – perhaps preferred not to see … how their seemingly small contribution to everyday operations in the government, military, and Nazi Party organizations added up to a genocidal system.”
Many of these German women escaped punishment at the end of the war.
“Emerging feminist views stressed the victimization of women, not their criminal agency,” Lower said.
We are more inclined to make excuses for the evil females can do. Their lack of upper body strength makes them weaker. Females of all races and nations have long been at the mercy of men in a way men will never experience: Females can be impregnated and their bodies enslaved. We justifiably feel sorry for them.
All of this has given women a privilege. They are not perceived to be as bad as men.
When it comes to political conniving and backstabbing, women can hold their own with men. They seem especially adept at tribalism (in the name of inclusiveness, of course).
Look at the intolerance and divisiveness displayed during the recent Women’s March, particularly in New York when a black activist named Tamika Mallory and a Hispanic criminal justice reformer named Carmen Perez pushed out one of the original white organizers, Vanessa Wruble, after she refused to make amends for being Jewish. (Black Americans blame Jews for making money off of the black community and for being culpable in the American slave trade. In truth, most people want to make money, and African warrior tribes eagerly kidnapped and sold their black brethren.)
At one point in the dispute, Mallory praised Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, who has a long history of denouncing Jews.
In an account of the racist insults directed at Wruble, The New York Times quoted an account by Evvie Harmon, a white woman who helped organize the march and described the degree to which Wruble was berated by the black Mallory and the brown Perez for being a white Jew:
“They were talking about ‘You people this,’ and ‘You people that’ and the kicker was ‘You people hold all the wealth.’ I was like, ‘Oh my God, they are talking about her being Jewish,’” said Ms. Harmon, whose account was first published by Tablet (an online Jewish magazine). “The greatest regret of my life was not standing up and saying ‘This is wrong.’”
This is what happens when you invite people into an organization, a workplace, a venue, a political party, a city, a state, a nation simply because they belong to a particular racial or ethnic group. They may seize on that identity, first and foremost. Maybe they will assimilate, or maybe they will split into their own group or tribe.
The white women who initiated the idea of the Women’s March after Donald Trump’s victory wanted to be inclusive when they reached out to black and Hispanic women. Perhaps the initial organizers should have reached out to Americans.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
From the Archives:
I read your ignorant comment on Dowd’s column in the Times. You’re on the wrong side of history. Fortunately you’re part of a generation that’s dying out. America won’t progress until the baby boomers and their greed is gone for good.
You have no idea what side of history either of us will be on. The future will decide, and it probably won’t be that decisive. The future will be another generation’s present tense. There will likely be just as much disagreement then as now (if public disagreement is still allowed).
Here’s the closest thing to certainty I know: Wherever you live, take a look outside the window. See the world out there? Someday it will still be there, but you won’t. You’ll be dead.
I’m not a Maureen Dowd fan so I missed your comment. I find it interesting that you wrote something that somebody disagreed with and instead of disagreeing with you, this person wished you and your entire generation dead. I would guess that the commenter is female and owns a “Wild Feminist” T-shirt.
It has been my experience that The New York Times readership is overwhelmingly liberal. I don’t comment there very often, but I always at least glance at the comments. Invariably the reader favorites represent the standard liberal viewpoint.
The Times’ readers also lean towards intolerance. I once had a Times reader send me an email telling me I was unfit to comment on The Times’ website. This was in response to a comment I posted in favor of the death penalty.
I saw one of the those “Wild Feminist” T-shirts last month at a store in downtown Portland where I bought something for my niece. After the clerk wrapped up my purchase, she said brightly, “Which sack would you like?”
She showed me a selection of white sacks with big black letters, “THE BEST THING SINCE ____” and then various names were written in felt tip pen in the blank spot. None of them appealed to me.
The clerk started to put my purchase in a sack that said, “THE BEST THING SINCE MAXINE WATERS.”
“No way,” I told her. “What do you really know about Maxine Waters? I used to live in California. All her years in office, and she’s mostly served herself.”
The clerk whispered, “Isn’t that how it is with most of them?”
I left with a sack that said,”THE BEST THING SINCE BABY GOATS.”
Nice column. Nicely concluded.
It is hard to develop the discussion though.
While I’ll admit it is ridiculous that Donald Trump is President, I’ll also acknowledge he seems to be . . . not half bad at it?
Maxine Waters: A proud racist thief whose life has been a triumph of ignorance? I’d vote for baby goats first.
R.I.P., well she seems somewhat the same. Either way you are engaging with the uneducated or mis-educated. People who long for the dark comfort of long rotted certainties that could not stand the light of day.
I used to work out at a YMCA in NE North Dakota (my SO took a job with NPR there). One day the blandly personable young Lutheran woman behind the counter posted a warning sheet on the notice board.
It told of hippies known to be travelling the Mid-west and befriending children, eventually slipping them LSD. It was a “rural” legend that was evidently gaining currency then.
Being ever helpful I took her aside later in the week and alerted her to the daffiness of such an assertion. I concluded my gentle “wising her up” by asking how could anyone possibly benefit from such an activity as giving acid to preschoolers? Moreover, I remarked, there are many real concerns that should claim our attention.
She nodded carefully. The next time I was in the gym I saw that the warning sheet had been re-posted in all caps with color highlights.
The cloistered mind will often believe what it wants to believe and no evidence or argument will dissuade it. Rather than our having entered into a cloister, however, one has grown up around us. A grubby parochialism has snaked its tendrils seemingly everywhere.
“Progressive thought” is oxymoronic. It is an irresponsible retreat into dead platitudes, but with brio!
In case you missed it:
https://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2019/01/old-photo-seen-umbrage-ensues.html
I’ve been listening to essays written by Marilynne Robinson lately. I disagree often but learn often, too. If nothing else one should watch Bill Forsyth’s gentle film of her novel “Housekeeping.”
Although filmed in B.C. (Nelson/Castlegar) it is set in a fictionalized Sandpoint, the town in which Robinson grew up.
Thanks for the link. I’ve been enjoying David Thompson’s observations, as well as the responses he provokes. Somehow I ended up in a 2013 archive about a woman who was taking delight in her little daughter showing off her poop. This mother bemoaned the day when her little girl would not be allowed to be proud of her poop.
A Thompson commenter’s response: “Curse the patriarchy, stopping little goddesses finding triumph and validation in the size of their stools.”
I read that and thought about the proposed Oregon legislation to make it easier for women to pump breast milk while on the job. Why are some women so eager to turn bodily functions into political issues? There is another discussion going on in Salem about providing free tampons to female prison inmates. That could quietly and easily be handled as a policy change. Provide them out, and be done with it.
Is this what female leadership looks like — fussing about lactation and menstrual cycles. And, of course, “inappropriate” touching.
I expected more from the women’s movement.
Meanwhile, one woman writes:
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2019/02/07/davis-marks-evil-is-banal/
@Larry
I read the piece in your link. Wow. Just wow. It’s easy to dismiss a privileged student at an Ivy League school as out of touch and insignificant, but she touches on her significance when she laments the “white boys” who will be in charge of things 15 years from now while ignoring her cohort that will be controlling the media narrative in the same time frame.
This is the problem with the #metoo movement. It takes a reasonable position: sex assault is bad, and then equates it with laughing at a joke about women’s bodies. If you are going to take a position that vilifies and excludes everyone who’s ever laughed at a joke about a woman’s butt… you aint gonna convince anyone to join your team to change the world.
As a person who believes Trump is a danger to American ideals (mostly because he is too American) I have to ask is it worth it to exclude reasonable people who would otherwise be allies in favor of some absurd exclusive ideal? Abolish ICE = Reelect Trump.
The debacle in Virginia is the Platonic Ideal of modern liberal chickens coming home to roost. Pre- <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_Man_(film)"Soul Man (1986) can we really say that black face can be viewed the same as it is now? I came of age just after, and can attest to that movie being an uncomfortable indicator of what is seriously inappropriate. You take a state where the top three state-wide offices were held by Democrats and work your exclusionary magic. What are you left with? A Republican Governor in charge of a Republican legislature. How’s that purity working for you now?
Despite my above fears, I am confident America can survive Trump, even a second term. I am not so sure it can survive more social media.
[…] The Privilege of Being Female […]