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Blame a Feminist: The Top Tragedies Feminism Has Wrought

Are you having a bad day? It’s probably a feminist’s fault.

Jessica Valenti

September 20, 2013

(Reuters/Eric Thayer)

If you’re having a bad day, there’s a national tragedy, or the weather just doesn’t seem right—it’s probably thanks to a feminist. After all, feminism has been blamed for everything from killing the family to traffic. Seriously. This week—in the wake of the tragic shootings in DC—a GOP Senate candidate blamed women in the workplace.

So here are a few of my favorite things feminism has been blamed for:

Impotence: Laura Sessions Stepp (of Unhooked fame) wrote in The Washington Post that young women’s feeling empowered to initiate sex was causing a scourge of impotence among college-aged men: “According to surveys, young women are now as likely as young men to have sex and by countless reports are also as likely to initiate sex, taking away from males the age-old, erotic power of the chase….. One can argue that a young woman speaking her mind is a sign of equality. “That’s a good thing,” says [teacher Robin] Sawyer, father of four daughters. “But for some guys, it has come at a price.” Because if there’s one thing that kills straight guys’ boners, it’s girls that want to have to sex with them.

Crime: Concerned Women for America, the anti-feminist organization, believes that feminism is behind the increase of incarcerated women. According to CWA’s then-president Wendy Wright, feminism made a grave error in promoting women’s autonomy: “Such ideology, which often encourages women to feel that ‘they don’t need to be dependent on a husband and they shouldn’t have to depend on their family,’ could be leading women into these kinds of activities ‘where they’re forced to fend for themselves,’ Wright says.” Hear that ladies? Husbands don’t just take out the trash, they keep you out of jail!

Mass Shootings: It’s not just women in the workplace that’s behind mass shootings, it’s “feminized” schools. According to Charlotte Allen in National Review Online, the murder of twenty children at Sandy Hook Elementary School can be traced back to the lack of men around : “There was not a single adult male on the school premises when the shooting occurred….. There didn’t even seem to be a male janitor to heave his bucket at Adam Lanza’s knees. [A] feminized setting is a setting in which helpless passivity is the norm.” Guns don’t kill people, feminized settings kill people.

Traffic & Environmental Decline: Women are so selfish, with their wanting to work outside the home. Don’t they know they’re single handedly ruining the environment? According to Jack Cashill—a writer who just put out a book, If I Had a Son: Race, Guns and the Railroading of George Zimmerman (ahem)—feminism is bad for the environment. Or, as he writes, “Equal pay for equal work also means equal commutes.” Cashill continues by saying that stay-at-home moms “save the state’s highway infrastructure from meltdown, especially since a ‘nanny’ often drives to the working mom’s house, putting three cars on the road where otherwise one would do. Homeschooling moms further ease the strain on the ecosystem by keeping their kids off the road.” The less you gals leave home, the better off the earth will be!

Anthony Weiner: You may have thought that the only person responsible in the Anthony Weiner sexting controversy was Weiner himself—how shortsighted of you! Thankfully, Fox News set the record straight and pointing to the real culprit: feminism. You see, feminists made it easy for slutty, slutty girls to go on the Internet and entice men into sin. Because birth control.

This is just a small sampling of the horror that feminism has brought to our doorstep. We didn’t even get into the ways feminism caused the horrors in Abu Ghraib (so says Phyllis Schlafly) or helped Michael Jackson’s criminal defense.

So when you’re tasked with seeking the root cause of a major problem, don’t waste your time looking to the easiest answer—look to feminism instead! If you work really hard, I’m sure you can find a link. And remember, any time you get a paper cut, or trip over something or a man somewhere stubs his toe—that’s not an accident, friends, it’s just a feminist getting her wings.

Jessica ValentiTwitterJessica Valenti is the author of Why Have Kids?: A New Mom Explores the Truth about Parenting and Happiness. She has also written three other books on feminism, including The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women, which was recently made into a documentary. She is editor of the award-winning anthology Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape and the founder of Feministing.com, which Columbia Journalism Review calls “head and shoulders above almost any writing on women’s issues in mainstream media.” Jessica was the recipient of the 2011 Hillman Journalism Prize and was called one of the Top 100 Inspiring Women in the world by The Guardian.


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