So Where Are the Feminists?

I’m not the first to ask this, but the more times it gets asked, the better.

During this debate on just how we’re going to get millions of Muslim migrants settled in Europe—since Europe’s politicians apparently have never seriously considered the option of actually securing their borders—where the hell are the feminists?

Because rape is bad, right?

Have they read the rape statistics regarding the millions of devout Muslims who are already ensconced in the Land of the Unbeliever?

Look, I understand the cognitive dissonance. On one hand, feminism is all about equality. And if we are true believers in equality, then in no way can we allow ourselves to entertain the thought that anyone—even a homogenous group of people who have been brought up on a steady diet of religious bigotry, swaddled in the ideological arms of a self-righteous monoculture—might be incapable of learning to tolerate being surrounded by people who don’t believe in their version of the Sky Man.

I mean, who remembers Charlie Hebdo? That masterpiece of religious intolerance had to be at least 200 news cycles ago. We forgot where the phrase Je Suis Charlie came from the moment it was time to change our Facebook avatar to the next right-thinking slogan.

Nope, with Charb safely in the ground we’re free to genuflect and go back to thinking pious thoughts about the egalitarian brotherhood of man. (Man, not woman; she should be covered up to avoid offending anyone’s religious bigotry, since offending religious bigotry is bigoted, word salad word salad word salad.)

Rape statistics, various types of fraud, and revenge shootings for cartoons aside, we remain faithful that anybody—no matter how bat-shit insane with injunctions to destroy the infidel their upbringing might be—can be taught to live side by side with everyone else in the multicultural wonderland. (Maybe it’s not so strange that these “secular” folks aren’t particularly frightened by religious nuts. All of this pigheaded self-sureness might in fact make everyone feel equally at home.)

But it’s not just the doctrine of equality that is confusing so-called feminists’ instincts when it comes to protecting women from a population that is factually highly likely to commit rape. (As well as, er, some fairly constant micro-aggressions against femalekind as a whole.)

Feminism suffers from a deep bifurcation in its conception of the nature of women. We argue that women aren’t all the same, and yet in arguments feminists very often call on one of two idealized archetypes of the female.

The first is female as Enlightenment Person. We are not to be reduced to our sexuality or our biology; we are rational homo sapiens, worthy of the same rights and responsibilities as our masculine counterparts. This is the archetype feminists call upon when they protest rape—which is, in itself, along with being a protest in favor of the sanctity of our own bodily envelopes, a protest against the unenlightened, baser dimension of the masculine. This is the archetype we call upon when we want to stand up and be counted as pro-free-speech, pro-laicity, secular, intelligent, rational citizens. This is the side of our mouths that we’re talking out of when we ask our secular male counterparts to please, please respect us and not shove their dicks into our orifi when we’re not in the mood.

But there’s an equal and opposite essential woman in the feminist’s rhetorical arsenal: The Mommy Goddess. We don’t want to be reduced to nothing but a breeding animal, don’t get us wrong—but after all, men just don’t understand how important children are to us!

And in our Mommy Goddess sisterhood, we can’t stand to see a teary-eyed fertility figure huddled at the Turkish border with those big-eyed cherubs whining pathetically at the hem of her gigantic whore-hiding tent dress.

So what if those cherubs grow up to consider non-Muslim girls fair targets for wearing skirts above the knee? We’ll jab a pencil if need be into different sections of our brains till something gives. It’s worth curtailing one’s own daughters’ freedom to make sure that other mommies can breed to their hearts’ content. That is sisterhood.

Call me a sadist, but I would love to read the transcript of what happens in one of these erstwhile feminists’ brains when their daughters do get raped for being infidels.

Do I sound ridiculously alarmist to you? Have I got my tinfoil hat on?

Look at the statistics. Think about how scary Jesus freaks can be. Imagine a Jesus freak who specifically hates you for your ethnic and/or religious background. Remember how shocked you were seeing films about white U.S. Southerners lynching black guys for Jesus? Remember how proud you were of yourself for opposing such an obvious wrong? Well, imagine yourself not as the magnanimous savior in this situation, but as the hated victim.

Not as fun or heroic, is it? You would much rather think about yourself helping out those Mommy Goddesses crying on the border. Thinking about yourself as an Enlightenment Person who might be attacked as a whore by Allah freaks is far less edifying.

So I understand where the feminists are. They’re worshipping at the Mommy Goddess altar. Meanwhile, their status as creatures of the Enlightenment is under attack. But I shouldn’t be surprised that this is the half of the great feminist divide that they’ll abandon when the chips are down. You can fill their conscious heads with all the theory you like, but in the end, most homo sapiens are animals first, people second. The Unconscious has spoken.