March 13, 2017
In case none of your intersectional feminist friends alerted you, last Wednesday the world was supposed to shut down through the brute force of collective female impudence. Across this rainbow-colored globe, women were supposed to clasp their uteri together in a general strike called A Day Without a Woman. In order to kick the patriarchy in the nuts and bring the global economy to its knees, organizers suggested the following three revolutionary activities:
1. Women take the day off, from paid and unpaid labor
2. Avoid shopping for one day (with exceptions for small, women- and minority-owned businesses).
3. Wear RED in solidarity with A Day Without A Woman
The event was sponsored by one organization with the word “Black” in its title, one with “Jews,” and a baker’s dozen of associations and convocations with either “Woman” or “Women” in the title. Conspicuously absent was any organization with the word “White” in its name.
There was also some initial confusion over whether the pink “pussy” hats, made so famous in the Women’s March on Washington on January 21, would also be worn, or whether the pink would clash with red, which organizers claim was chosen partially for its affiliation with the “labor movement.” (Back in January, there was also some controversy over whether the pink pussy hats were indeed racist, since some women of color have genitals that lurch more toward purple and dark violet: “they excluded women of color by insinuating that pussies must be pink.”)
Claiming that this male chauvinist society forces women to unfairly bear much of the burden of smiling, some women planned to honor the day by refraining from all smiles. To shame men for the relative dearth of female fiction authors, an Ohio bookstore turned all male-authored books backwards on its shelves. (As far as I know, the bookstore owners did not bother to explain what’s preventing women from getting off their asses and writing more fiction.)
Much of the rhetoric advertising the event was the same nonsensical KultMarx jibber-jabber that currently infects hundreds of millions of tiny brains across the West. There was much solemn blather about the “spirit of love and liberation,” about “the economic injustices women and gender nonconforming people continue to face,” about the “violence” of the free market and alleged “economic attacks” on Muslims, about “gender justice,” and generally about a cruel, psychotic, relentless, and soul-crushingly violent world that doesn”t exist but that these wound-collecting psychopaths can”t seem to live without constantly imagining.
Predictably, there were the sort of intersectional pissing matches that attend all of these Olympics for the Oppressed and provide endless amusement for onlookers such as myself. Many people griped that the bulk of people who were taking the day off were teachers who belonged to public unions and have all summer off anyway, forcing working-class single moms working three part-time jobs across the country to either risk unemployment by taking the day off to watch their kids or to surrender their entire day’s salary by paying for a babysitter. So in addition to it being a gender issue, it suddenly also became a class issue. And of course it was also made into a racial issue, because everything is these days, as one observer carped that the whole event “screamed white privilege.”
