The Lonely, Delusional World of Feminist Literature

"Why are women, who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny?" Christopher Hitchens once famously asked.  Hitchens was not around to the see a day when morbidly obese women would hold signs that read, "No, you make me a sandwich."  Hitchens could never have imagined how unintentionally hilarious an entire women's movement could become. 

Elise Ehrhard  A few years ago, as the country entered into all-out post-election warfare, I decided to distract myself with non-political interests.  I loved literature and longed to encounter wonderful writers exploring the complex terrain of love, life, and art.  Instead, as I perused literary magazines online, I fell down another rabbit hole: the gender politics–obsessed world of mostly female MFA graduates who edit and publish on these sites. 

"Their essays are so bad that they are good.  The writings emanate from young women inspired by a movement sporting vagina-shaped hats and vulva costumes.  The authors themselves often sound lonely, miserable, and endlessly fixated on unhealed childhood wounds.  But no worries: They have a scapegoat.  Trump and the patriarchy are all to blame.  

"Here is a sampling of a classic tour-de-force by a creative writing professor from a liberal university.  A year after Trump's inauguration, she moaned about how even left-wing men could not take her or her friends anymore: 

" 'To a certain extent," she writes, "we expected it from the men who wear lobster-printed pants, the men from Connecticut, the Young Republicans of America with their gelled and parted hair, their summers in Nantucket, their LL Bean slippers worn on the porches of fraternities, 2pm on a Monday.  But when my friend pulls me aside in a hotel bar and tells me it's happening to her husband — a man who donates annually to NPR and voted twice for Barack Obama, who has a degree in Art History and works for a non-profit — neither one of us knows what to say." 

"When she and her friends all went nuts post-Trump, her boyfriend dumped her.  "All of you women with your labia hats, he said.  All of you with your clitoris signs."  This feminist writer concludes that the problem is the men.  She never wonders if her sisterhood has become insufferable.  She never asks how she would feel if her boyfriend walked around in public wearing a giant penis costume and then berated his beloved for being an insufficient ally. But modern feminists lack the self-awareness to see the comedy of their actions." . . .