Charlotte Allen notices the obvious in the Washington Post:
“Women ‘Falling for Obama,’ ” the story’s headline read. Elsewhere around the country, women were falling for the presidential candidate literally. Connecticut radio talk show host Jim Vicevich has counted five separate instances in which women fainted at Obama rallies since last September. And I thought such fainting was supposed to be a relic of the sexist past, when patriarchs forced their wives and daughters to lace themselves into corsets that cut off their oxygen.
I can’t help it, but reading about such episodes of screaming, gushing and swooning makes me wonder whether women — I should say, “we women,” of course — aren’t the weaker sex after all. Or even the stupid sex, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial. Women “are only children of a larger growth,” wrote the 18th-century Earl of Chesterfield. Could he have been right?
Short answer: yes. But the women’s foolishness she mentions is far from harmless, unfortunately, it will likely require the collapse of Western civilization – or at least its partial conquest by non-feminized cultures – before it will be universally acknowledged that permitting female influence in government does not yield significantly better long-term results than permitting children a similar influence. If this statement upsets you, then I’d be very interested in hearing what, precisely, you believe the difference would likely be. As it stands, most government policy revolves around giving anyone who screams loud enough whatever they want.
It’s been said that if women had run the world from the start, we’d still be living in caves. That’s an exaggeration, of course; matriarchal societies actually tend to produce grass-hut dwellers. To me, the interesting question is if a post-patriarchal culture will survive long enough to return to hut-dwelling or if it will simply die out altogether.