“Slut Shaming” and the Washington Women’s March

I think it was about 1990 when I first heard the chauvinist quip: “For me a woman is basically a life-support system for a pussy.” I was in my early 20s and remember the man’s face and his remark because everything else he’d been saying at the edge of that summer barbecue was similarly vulgar and stupid.

Well, we’ve come full circle. Millions of American women, self-described “feminists”, have obviously come to agree with that man’s vulgar assessment.

“Political correctness is killing us.”

Sorry if you disagree, but in my mind this sentence is among the two or three most important uttered during last year’s long presidential campaign. And the Women’s March this past Saturday, the character and priorities of that march, only served to drive the truth home. Political correctness, and the reductive identity politics it thrives on, are a curse.

PC, the SJW slant now run amok, reduces the person to either his or her sexual identity and desires (thus third-wave feminism, thus the LGBT movement) or to his or her race or ethnicity. Since the Washington march is my focus here, I’ll concentrate on sexuality.

Most of the women marching would agree that “patriarchy” objectifies them; they see themselves as protesting this objectification. But to look at their own iconography in hats and on placards, a woman is essentially a vagina. Their message is clear: “This vagina is mine, I do with it what I want, it does with me what it wants. It is nasty and unruly in its raw physicality, and so am I. I am a being of autonomous desire, an individual will connected to a vagina. My will and identity are defined by this connection.”

Note that these women have not chosen the uterus, the matrix of human life, as their symbol. They’ve chosen the vagina, the nexus of personal sexual pleasure. The choice is no accident: it reveals how they conceive of their essence as women.

Fine, I’d say. If you want to locate your political essence in your genitals, that is your right. But what a pathetic objectification of womanhood it is: a reduction of woman to the pussy. When men do this, as that fellow did at the barbecue decades ago, you rightly condemn it as stupid and vulgar. When marching women do it, however, it is hailed from coast to coast (or rather on coast and coast) as “progressive”. What you fail to notice is that it effects the same impoverishment of woman’s identity.

For a cultural conservative like myself, the meaning of a person is much more than his or her sex or sexual desire. A person is also a parent, a worker, a child, a searching soul, a protector, an educator, a servant, a creator. When political correctness locates the root of identity in sexual desire, these multiple social and spiritual grounds of identity are pushed to second or third place. Thus they were largely absent from the Women’s March.

Rather than celebrate the work of parenthood or service or creative intelligence, all of which require sacrifice and labor, the marchers' top priorities were clear: fucking and their “right” to extinguish any unwanted human life that might result from that fucking. It is grotesque.

You will maybe accuse me of “slut shaming” for my remarks here. Go right ahead. The women who marched in Washington, and the celebrities invited to rally them, were in the main proud to show themselves as sluts. As dumb sluts. Me, I am ashamed to see my country give them so much positive attention for it. 



Don't misunderstand me. I know very well that America has millions of brilliant and admirable women. But they weren’t at the Women’s March on Washington. Microphone in hand, to the cheers of the crowd, Ashley Judd basically defined herself and the women present as a horde of vulgar, filthy, nasty . . . vaginas. Those words are mostly her own. The problem, as I see it, is simple: She’s right.

Check out my book Idiocy, Ltd. and begin the long, hard reckoning.