Are Women Really Victims? Four Women -- Including Me -- Weigh In
Claire Lehmann publishes a very smart online magazine, Quillette -- with a mission I'm all for:

Quillette is a platform for free thought. We respect ideas, even dangerous ones. We also believe that free expression and the free exchange of ideas help human societies flourish and progress. Quillette aims to provide a platform for this exchange.

Claire asked me to be one of four contributors answering this question -- "Are Women Really Victims?"

An excerpt from my piece on Quillette (and please read the whole thing there):

It was New York, back in the 1990s. I was crossing Seventh Avenue when a guy going the other way called out, "Never seen a body like that on a white woman!"

Naturally, I screamed for a cop and had the man arrested and swiftly executed.

Of course, I'm completely kidding. I loved it then, and I look back fondly on it now--as a 53-year-old redhead, worried that I'll eventually start looking like the clown from IT.

Note my failure to lap up the requisite bowl of feminist claptrap on the horrors of "objectification" and my companion failure to identify as a victim of patriarchal something-or-other.

Because I don't identify as a victim, I can laugh, take a joke, and tell somebody who's bothering me to cut the crap--instead of tattling to an authority figure.

Of course, it helps that I am not a feminist. I instead call myself a humanist, and yes, I know that term has some meanings hitched to it already. However, I use it to explain that I'm for individual rights--meaning the rights of all people, not just people with vaginas.

This runs contrary to what feminism has become. Though feminism claims to advocate for "equal rights," it now busies itself demanding special rights for women--under the guise of equal rights. (By the way, there's little that screams that women aren't equal like calls for special treatment.)

Feminism now regularly calls for women to be treated as eggshells instead of equals. And through this, it does something pernicious to the women it claims to advocate for: Feminism has become a movement for female disempowerment, or what I call "encouraged helplessness" (from psychologist Martin Seligman's "learned helplessness"--the feeling that there's nothing you can do to escape your fate).

In fact, feminism, bizarrely, has morphed into paternalism--instructing women that they are fragile, passive, powerless victims who need authority figures to advocate for them. [cont'd at the link...]