The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘Incredibly Sexist Assertion’

Posted on | February 23, 2011 | 10 Comments

The Lara Logan story proves to be the gift that keeps on giving, thanks to a predictable pattern: Someone attempts a reaction more complex than “rape is bad,” and immediately gets shouted down by angry feminists.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Thank God for Nirs Rosen’s ne plus ultra moonbat response, or otherwise I might have been denounced even more thoroughly than I was. (Getting myself denounced by feminists is sort of a hobby.) But today I got coincidentally linked by a feminist whose chief target was Toronto Sun columnist Peter Worthington:

There’s an understandable feeling of horror that 60 Minutes correspondent Lara Logan would be attacked and “brutally sexually assaulted” for some 30 minutes while covering crowds rejoicing the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in Cairo. . . .
Should women journalists with small children at home, be covering violent stories or putting themselves at risk? It’s a form of self-indulgence and abdication of a higher responsibility to family. . . .
Apparently, against the advice of her bosses, Logan insisted on staying with the crew when they returned to Egypt.
It was the right thing for her to do journalistically — unless, of course, she had small children, which was the case. Her son (from a second marriage) was born in 2009 and should have taken precedent over her wishes to cover the world’s biggest story for the moment.
This holds true for any woman covering wars or revolutions. . . .

You can read the rest of that, but you’ll probably find more amusement reading the hissy-fit reaction of Renee Martin at Ms. Magazine:

As I read this incredibly sexist assertion, I kept waiting for him to suggest that men had the same responsibility to put their children ahead of their careers, but of course that was just wishful thinking. The truth of the matter is that it takes a man and a woman to create a child, but it is only mothers who are set up with the narrative that they must be continually self-sacrificing. We appease women by claiming to celebrate Mother’s Day once a year, but this demands that women continually put aside their personal desires or ambitions. It depoliticizes motherhood and keeps women compliant.

You can read the rest of that over-the-top screed. And it is the over-the-top quality of Martin’s reaction that elicits attention.

However offended anyone might be by Worthington’s “incredibly sexist” column, isn’t he expressing rather a common-sense sentiment by saying that the mother of a two-year-old ought not be deployed to a de facto war zone? Isn’t it also common sense to say that a mother’s relationship to her young children, her daily involvement in their lives, is more important than that of the father?

It certainly doesn’t strike me as a “sexist” attempt to justify male supremacy, much less an expression of “misogyny” (a word that Martin slings about casually, as feminists always do) to say that motherhood is a special role, deserving of special protections.

Isn’t it actually more misogynistic to derogate motherhood, and to say that a women’s role in child-rearing should be treated as an afterthought? Yet a fanatical commitment to equality is one of those ideas that have consequences, and if motherhood is an obtacle to equality, then feminists are compelled to insist that motherhood be trampled into the dust.

For the sake of grim irony, I should point out that in her blog bio at Womanist Musings, Renee Martin writes: “I am the mother of two darling little boys that fill my life with hope.”

Martin’s attack on motherhood as a “self-sacrificing” endeavor overlooks the fact that marriage and responsible fatherhood also require sacrifice of men. A single fellow can pursue the footloose-and-fancy-free life to his heart’s content, but once he’s got a wife and children, he has a duty to devote himself to their support, and society will judge him according to how well he meets that duty.

Speaking of which, you ought to hit my tip-jar, sparing me condemnation for failure as a breadwinner.

Dr. Helen Smith has some related thoughts on women’s expectations of men. Of course, she’s got the husband of every blogwife’s dreams.


Category: Feminism

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