Women's March (Tantrum?) on Washington
Tomorrow, millions of women will gather in Washington DC and in other major cities across America to protest the fact that Americans freely and fairly elected a potty-mouth successful businessman instead of an infamously corrupt and criminally incompetent person with a vagina.
But the 2017 Women’s March on Washington isn't going to be the great show of sisterhood that Democrats expect and that the media will attempt to portray. There’s already plenty of strife within the movement itself. On the Facebook event page, white women were told to keep their mouths shut and let women of color lead the event and set the discourse. Apparently, white women are simply too high on the arbitrary totem pole of privilege for their ideas or opinions to matter.
“Now is the time for you to be listening more, talking less,” wrote Shishi Rose, a writer and activist from Brooklyn who operates the Women's March social media accounts, to white feminists on the Facebook who said they felt unwelcome. “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.”
Who needs men to belittle women and quash their voices when there are so many women who are more than happy to do it themselves?
Also, the agenda for the march explicitly includes supporting the expansion of abortion rights, so if you’re among the 44% or more of American women who identify as pro-life, don’t expect a warm welcome from your sisters-in-arms. The march is sponsored by NARAL and Planned Parenthood, and the organizers terminated the march's partnership with the pro-life group New Wave Feminists in response to hysterical outcries against the group's participation on Twitter. New Wave Feminist activists still plan to attend, so it will be interesting to see how many women spend more time protesting each other instead of President-elect Donald Trump.
Not surprisingly, the Women's March organizers and participants ignore the fact that guaranteeing paid maternity leave and offering incentives to companies that provide child care at the workplace are among Trump’s key campaign promises, and the media certainly won't remind them.
For the first time, we have a Republican politician who wants encourage women’s participation in the workplace, and cares just as much for the lives of women and children as he does for fetuses. But working with Trump to ensure that he adheres to these campaign promises isn't nearly as important to these particular feminists as screaming at Trump for bragging about how easy it is for a wealthy celebrity to get laid.
To Hillary Clinton's credit, expansion of parental leave was one of her campaign promises, too. Maybe if she spent one of her 30 years of public service actually putting such a policy into effect instead serving the financial interests of hostile foreign powers, besmirching the character of her husband’s mistresses and victims, and sleeping through important phone calls, she could’ve won over more of the 46% of women who voted for Trump.
One doesn't have to read between the lines too much to see that the Women's March has very little to do with empowering women and improving their lives. The actual goals of the march are to:
- Support the expansion of abortion rights
- Serve as yet another vehicle for racially and culturally divisive Black Lives Matter movement
- Provide yet another opportunity for the media to advance the false narrative that Trump is a danger to women and reinsert debunked sexual assault allegations against Trump back into the public consciousness
Most importantly, like everything else in the modern leftist movement, this isn't a fight for equal rights and opportunities... it's a fight for equal outcomes, regardless of individual merit.
Consequently, instead of uniting women, the march will alienate them from each other. Instead of advancing the idea of women as equal and valuable participants in the democratic process, it will revive the archaic notion that women are too emotionally unstable to be taken seriously, let alone be trusted with the reins of political power. Instead of serving as a strong force in opposition to Trump, it may serve to win more women-- and Americans as a whole-- over to his side.