Body and Soul on the tension between women’s rights, respect for (minority) cultures and conservative commentators with time for neither:
And should I read anything into the fact that both Rushdie and Sullivan aim a good measure of their anger about the Miss World riots at feminists, who seem to be culpable because they failed to appreciate how important a part of Western liberal values beauty pageants are? (And will the gentlemen be disappointed to learn that Isioma Daniel apparently doesn’t share their anti-feminism, since her next writing will appear in the feminist publication conservatives most love to mock — writing not about Miss World, but about a topic neither one of them has considered worthy of notice: the radical women of the Niger Delta. I’ve been combing the press for months digging up stories on those women, and I wouldn’t miss that article. Somehow I don’t think Andrew Sullivan will be reading it. Isioma Daniel served her purpose for him as a means of attacking Muslims; what she has to say about women fighting the oil companies will probably be less compelling.And in Sullivan’s bizarre attempt to blame “puritanical, anti-capitalist feminists” who “hate free societies,” do I hear a message to Western women: You’d better be grateful for the oppression we have here, because obviously our form of patriarchy is better than their form of patriarchy?
Thank you, I guess.
Eschaton on hating America:
Being, roughly speaking, on “the left,” I have of course been accused many times, one way or another, of “hating America.” You know, me and my good buddy Chomsky who I apparently worship though I’ve never really read. I’ve never quite known what this meant, actually. It’s easy to dismiss it simply as rhetorical bludgeoning by one’s political opponents, I suppose – a pee-wee league version of a Hitchens polemic. It is more than that, of course. I’ve posted before about the underlying source of this belief – roughly, conservatives believe they have a unique claim on the “true America” which has been tainted economically by that liberal FDR, politically by activist judges and states’ rights violating Civil Rights and Voting Acts, and socially by homosexuality. Or something. If only one could remove the stain of the liberal legacy, we could truly return to the glory days of our untainted past.