Full disclosure: I’ve loved Prairie Home Companion since the first time I heard it. While Garrison Keillor’s politics were…not ones I share – I (like a lot of conservatives) can put politics aside for good art and entertainment. Which, if you grew up small-town and Scandinavian, Keillor was.

But I also remember his reputation as a boss in the eighties – let’s just say in an industry (radio in general) where people are dysfunctional, socially “unorthodox” and frequently lack conventional social skills (present company excepted, but I know you know what I mean, Bob), and where success breeds rock-star-like entitlement, Keillor was a standout. Not in a good way.

Keillor has to be a non-fictional character – because if you wrote a fictional smug, entitled, presumptuous, arrogant, hypocritical limo liberal like Keillor, you’d be accused, fairly, of going past satire straight to caricature.

Anyway – immediately after Keillor wrote an op-ed in the WaPo condemning the commoners besetting Al Franken, Keillor is out at MPR  (and their APM production arm) for none other than sexual harassment.

Minnesota Public Radio and its parent organization American Public Media said Wednesday they’ve cut all business ties with Garrison Keillor as they investigate a report of “inappropriate behavior” by Keillor involving someone who worked with him…The allegations relate to Keillor’s conduct while he was responsible for the production of “A Prairie Home Companion.” They came to the company’s attention last month and were referred to a special committee of its board for investigation, APM chief executive Jon McTaggart said.

We don’t know all the details – but remembering Keillor in his heyday, nothing would really surprise me, in my humble but not-utterly-uninformed opinion. .

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is walking out of the Riverview Theater in south Minneapolis.  Surrounded by hipsters and hippies as far as the eye can see, he tacitly wonders what the hell all these pretenders have done with his old neighborhood.  

As BERG approaches the door, Avery LIBRELLE walks in, early for the next showing of “Antifa: The Musical”.  

LIBRELLE:  Merg!

BERG:  Er, hey, Avery.   What’s…

LIBRELLE:  Linnae Tweeden danced like a slut.

BERG:  Er, yeah.  And…?

LIBRELLE:  She was a cheesecale pinup girl.

BERG:  So…?

LIBRELLE:  She kissed other men and patted their backsides.

BERG:   And so…?

LIBRELLE:  So Al Franken didn’t do anything wrong in that photo.

BERG:  Even though he admitted to it himself.

LIBRELLE:  Senator Franken, peace be upon him, has no more control over his utterances than he has over what his hands do in the presence of a scantily-dressed wanton slut.

BERG:  Wait, wait, wait – so if a random guy at the office were to say “that woman is dressed provocatively, so I’m going to go grope her…”

LIBRELLE:  It’s sexual assault.  The moral equivalent of rape.

BERG:  But if Al Franken does it…

LIBRELLE:  She’s a slut who provoked the lusts of his innocent victim, Al Franken.

BERG:  So… (searches for words)

LIBRELLE:  Also, she’s a Republican.

BERG:  So that makes it OK.

LIBRELLE:  I’m not saying it’s OK…

BERG:  Oh, OK.  Thank goodness…

LIBRELLE:  But it’s OK.

BERG:  OK.  We’re getting somewhere.  So – men in general look with any lust in their heart upon a woman, no matter how she’s dressed…?

LIBRELLE:  Rapists who should be chemically neutered.

BERG:  Al Franken, who touched a woman in a leering provocative manner with out consent?

LIBRELLE:  Helpless before the wiles of a fallen Republican siren.

BERG:  Er…

LIBRELLE:  Hey, Merg – is the popcorn vegan?

BERG:  Only the buttered kind.

LIBRELLE:  Really?

BERG:  Absolutely.

(BERG continues out down the street to his car, shaking his head)

And SCENE

Matt Lauer out at NBC.

We don’t know the details of course.

But it’s almost as if unlimited power breeds unlimited entitlement.

It appears the Sexual Revolution has led to the Sexual Cultural Revolution.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Well, sure, sexual harassment is bad, but let’s not forget the big picture.

A lot of staff people are losing their jobs, not just the stars.  Is that really fair?

And without these talented people working in the industry, the nation suffers.

The old joke about Liberals is true: if they didn’t have double standards, they’d have no standards at all.

Joe Doakes

In J-school, that’s called “Dog Licks Dog”.

I mean, why?

The Nobel LIterature prize is now enmeshed in a sexual harassment scandal.   It’s actually pretty nasty looking, especially given Sweden’s strenuous efforts to paint itself as gender-neutral to the point of androgyny.

And the Swedish Academy that issues the awards is worried (emphasis added):

“When an institution which selects Nobel laureates finds itself in this type of situation then it of course risks affecting the Nobel prize negatively,” Lars Heikensten, executive director of the Nobel Foundation, told the daily Dagens Nyheter newspaper.

Don’t worry, Nobel peeps.  After Obama, Paul Krugman,Aung San Suu Kyi, the IPCC, Algore, Paul Krugman, Kofi Annan and Yassir Arafat, that boat has left the dock and cleared the lighthouse.

#NotMe

#NeverDidNeverWill

And #RealMenNeitherHarassNorAcceptGuiltByAssociation

And, for those who insist, #QQQQ.

I mean, as long as we’re communicating via the medium of the hashtag.

The #MeToo campaign is doing for sexual harassment what #BringBackOurGirls did for Boko Haram’s hostages; took a seirous issue and made it into a trite, temporal trifle; an “event” rather than either a social malady or a wartime atrocity, respectively.  In 21st century terms, the campaign “raised awareness”, which is a moderne way of saying “generated a lot of shrill chanting, shrieking and marching about, literally and metaphorically, in the interest of waving a bloody shirt”.

Genderquislings:  One of the most noxious byproducts of this bloody shirt campaign are the clumps of “feminist men” whose response to this past two months’ Robespierrian orgy of revelation is to throw themselves prostrate before the court of public opinion and demand mercy – for themselves (whatever) and every other man.

I come not to praise them, but to bury them and those who parrot them, especially via yet two more social media chanting orgies, “#YesAllMen” and “#ShutTheF**kUp”.

Among many other vague and morpheus sins of which they’d accuse their fellow guys is the notion of “toxic masculinity”, which in the hands of “feminists” [1] and their male hangers-on quickly turns into a synonym for “masculinity” of any kind.

My reply:  They – or the things they represent – are the real problem.  Not masciulinity – real masculinity.

Disc-lame-ers:  In an intelligent society that debated the merits of an argument, I could omit this section.

But I live in the “progressive” Twin Cities, so I have to treat much of the audience like ambulance-chasing lawyers.

The “First Wave” of feminism was right:  Women should be the equal of men in the eyes of the law.  They should face no discrimination due to their gender in the work place; they should be paid according to their qualifications, experience, credentials and other factors relevant to the job.  They should not have to accept non-consensual harassment and abuse due to their gender.

The “Second Wave” of feminism – AKA “Identity Feminism” – is wrong.  Women should also have no advantage over men in family court.  Their status as individuals should not be reverted to the Victorian era, where was assumed that a woman’s natural state frail victims (the term “potential victim” is used with a straight face by more than a few modern feminists) that must be protected from the male species, slavering brutes looking to pounce on the defenseless benighted damsels among us.

The Collective:  How this has manifested during the current sexual harassment crisis has been the notion that “#YesAllMen” are complicit in sexual harassment; that sexual harassment is a side effect of “toxic masculinity”; that harassment, abuse and rape are inextricable from being male.   That the world would be a better place if it were more like an anthill – where the women did the thinking and leading and designing, and the men just shut up and did what they were told, and contribute to the gene pool (until genetic engineering obsoletes that, too).

The males who’ve become the leading voices of this orgy of gender-abasement remind me of the people “convicted” of various thoughtdrimes curing the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward who, after weeks, months or years jammed into prison cells and gulags, beaten and sleep-deprived by the Red Guards, abased themselves with almost ritual fervor on film and before crowds, not “begging for mercy” so much as abjuring being worthy of it, before being shot in the back of the head or sent off to be worked to death in the Chinese gulag.

Call them “victims of toxic social work”.

If nobody else will do it [2], then let me be the first to draw my line in the sand and yell “Stop”.

#NotMe

#NoNotAllMen

#QQQQSnowflakes

It’s The Devaluation, Stupid:  Matt Walsh had a great piece in the Daily Caller earlier this week, in which he pointed out the real problem:  not the presence of men, but the lack of Men:

The problem is not that there is too much masculinity in our culture. On the contrary, there isn’t nearly enough. A man becomes an abuser and harasser of women when he rejects that which makes him a man. He is not expressing his masculinity when he strips naked and struts around in front of his unwilling coworkers and subordinates — a move that seems oddly common among these types — rather, he is expressing his almost complete lack of masculinity.

Not sure if he’s referring to Charlie Rose or Louis CK – and I”m not sure it matters at the moment.

These men are weird, desperate, self-debasing, and effeminate. If you say we should have fewer of those kinds in positions of power, I agree. Let’s have none at all. But we would do well to replace them with men who are actually men. What we need in our society are chivalrous, strong, respectable, productive, and self-sacrificial men. Real men, in other words. Men who protect, provide, and do all of the things that society has always depended upon men to do. If you are that sort of man, you certainly should not shut up, step to the side, or consider yourself “trash.” Our culture needs your input and leadership more than ever.

Of course, the dominant narrative from a good chunk of our society – Hollywood, academia, the educational/industrial complex, is that traditional masculinity needs to be filed down to sized, tamed.   Primary schools medicate it; popular entertainment castigates it.  Entertainment has combined a relentless, big-budget focus on “girl power” with a near-complete suppression of any notion of giving boys any impetus to be what was traditionally called a “man” – chivalrous, comfortable with but not abusive of his power, driven to defend his family, his significant other and his community, self-sacrificing but optimistic and prone to using his power for good.  Those parts of society mock and taunt those notions (until they need a cop)…

…and propagate them with an education system that systematically feminizes boys, a family court system that ensures boys’ only role models as children will be mothers (who most assuredly do serve a role in raising emotioally boys – but not the only role) and that love, for a male, is an exercise in self-destruction, and an “entertainment” industry that seems to have taught half a generation boys that pornography is sex.

In other words – if you want to create the stunted, anti-masculine caricatures that are Harvey Weinstein, Charley Rose, Al Franken and Louis CK [3], the modern education, entertainment, academic and social justice systems are the most efficient possible factory to create more of them.

The only “Toxic Masculinity” is the stunted variety of caricatured, one-sided, immature, hollow “Masculinity” hat Identity Feminism demanded, and that the feminized Education system and Academy, and Hollywood delivered.

#NotMe:  Well, I’m done.

If you want to signal your virtue by gender self-abasement, expect me to mock and taunt you with the derision you deserve.

If you think the way to achieve equality for women is to beat down men, expect me to punch back twice as hard, and do whatever my feeble best is to lead more men – not males, mind you; men – to do the same.

If your response to discrimination against women is to promote discrimination against men, expect me to point out the obvious; you’re just passing around more discrimination.

You have rotted the society enough.  Hell, it may be too late; you may have killed it already.

I don’t care.

(more…)

Then…don’t make him.

Franken might be able to shake this off if he could depend on conflicting memories. But he can’t. Because of that photo. The sex-abuse scandal is becoming, to cultural history, what Watergate was to political history. It is gigantic. It is era-defining. And among the dozens of famous people implicated in it, the Franken photo is the most damning and irrefutable evidence yet to emerge. It’s a tableau of our time. It is the photo of our moment. It’s the kind of smoking gun you couldn’t use in a Law & Order episode because it would be too blatant. It will never disappear from the national consciousness. Powered by Consider the breathtaking way each detail reinforces the horror of the others: A Hollywood celebrity who will soon be a Democratic senator is molesting a woman. While she’s asleep. And in military gear, because she’s traveling to support our troops. In a war zone. And Franken is smiling. While shamelessly posing for the photographer. How can we ever cease to be amazed and appalled by this photo? It is to the sex war what the picture of the summary execution of that Viet Cong prisoner was to the Vietnam War.

And for the future?

Democrats who just this week were saying they would no longer tolerate Bill Clinton–type behavior can prove it.

 

We are getting plenty of Clinton-era behavior.  But that’s not the same thing.

What was it, yesterday?  When I said the whole “Always believe the accuser” thing was going to go by the boards how that Al Franken (aka “The John Oliver of 2005) is in whatever “crosshairs” the media spares for liberal icons?

I’d like to say it was a parody – something too clumsy yet fiendish for The Onion.  It’s not, of course.

And I’d like to say it’s just another Metrocrat crank – but as MSNBC showed us yesterday, it’s not.

So the takeaway is “Slut-Shaming is bad” – unless you’re defending a Democrat.

Anyway – Franken apologized yesterday, in a very well-crafted statement.  But when I read this bit here…:

“But I want to say something else, too. Over the last few months, all of us—including and especially men who respect women—have been forced to take a good, hard look at our own actions and think (perhaps, shamefully, for the first time) about how those actions have affected women.

Did he just name all men as co-defendants?

That’d be quite the trick.

Any…day…now:

That’ be Al Franken  – then an Air America host – and Leanne Tweeden, a radio newswoman from Los Angeles.

Expect to see breaking news that Arne Carlson called a page “toots”, combined with demands that he resign, any moment here…

QUESTION:  Any bets on whether all the DFLers who were saying “Always trust accusers!” last month will be humming a different tune this week?

UPDATE:  Oh.

We must address sexual harassment. Reforming arbitration laws will ensure survivors can seek justice in court. https://t.co/Rmuz4gnie7

— Sen. Al Franken (@SenFranken) October 11, 2017

Indeed.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Movie weddings have a scene where the minister says “If anyone knows a reason why these people should not be married, speak now or forever hold your peace.”  Everybody gasps as a pregnant blonde stands up saying “Wait . . . you’re marrying him?  I’m carrying his baby!”  The bride bursts into tears and the father of the bride demands: “Where’s my shotgun?”

I always thought it was a dumb scene.  What if the blonde is mistaken?  Or lying?  Or a paid actress hired by a groomsman as a practical joke?  Too bad – the wedding is off, the groom is dead and Dad is going to prison.  If there was a good reason to cancel the wedding, it should have been brought up long before we were watching them stand at the altar.

The real point?:

That’s the main reason I dislike what’s happening to Roy Moore.  He might be a perv but the timing is so obviously a political dirty trick that I don’t even care if he is.  Democrats and Establishment RINOs should have brought it up long ago.  By lying in wait to ambush him, they’ve forfeit the right to demand my moral indignation.

Joe Doakes

Same with the DFL’s charges against Tony Cornish.  They may or may not have been real – quite a number of women at the Capitol

“The sexual revolution morphed into the French revolution so slowly, I hardly even noticed.”

— Ed Driscoll (on Hollywood in the Weinstein era)

When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

Now. [2]

(more…)

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Suppose you’re a politician who accepts campaign donations.  Turns out, one of your donors is a bad egg.  What do you do with that money?

If you keep it, you are guilty by association.  If you give it back, the bad egg will donate it to your opponent to use against you.

“After the Las Vegas shooting on October 1, State Rep. Erin Murphy, a fellow DFL candidate for governor, called on [Rep. Tim] Walz to return the $18,000 in campaign contributions he has received from the NRA over the course of his political career. Walz agreed, and plans to donate the funds to a veterans’ organization.”  Nothing against veterans, but why them?  Why not victims of the Las Vegas shooting?

The Democrat National Committee received $300,000 from accused sex abuser Harvey Weinstein.  It will forward $30,000 of that money to Emily’s List (supports candidates who favor abortion rights), Emerge America (trains Democrat women for office) and HigherHeights (supports Black women running for office).  Basically, Democrats are forwarding the money to their own constituencies. Why them?  Why not a group working with survivors of sexual assault?  And why only tithe 10%, how is that enough to purge their guilt-by-association when others must return all the money?

If the money is so tainted that you are stained the moment you touch it, then forwarding the money to a favored group doesn’t cleanse you of the stain, it makes you a middleman helping spread the stain to others.  Either keep it or give it back, but don’t try to convince me that money-laundering makes you righteous.  That’s just insulting.

Joe Doakes

They’re OK with that.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Harvey Weinstein story is troubling.  It’s as if he thinks a powerful man can walk up to women, grab them by the p—y, do anything to them.  And we know that’s false because everybody jumped all over Donald Trump when he said it – didn’t DO it – merely said it.  This guy actually did it, repeatedly, and everybody around him not only knew about it, they helped him get away with it.

Where are the pink hat people marching in protest?

Joe Doakes

Rhetorical question, right?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

On-line arguments are so frequently worthless that I’ve developed a “first paragraph” rule:  if the first paragraph doesn’t catch my interest, Idon’t read the rest.

This one caught my interest.

Absolutely nails it.  Every problem you ever had with computers since Windows 98 . . . this is why.

Joe Doakes

It caught mine, too.

Marines test all male versus gender integrated combat units in battlefield simulations.

The results were completely unexpected – if you were a Google executive.   Otherwise, not all that unpredictable.

Vegan cafe owners – “feminists”, natch – charge men an 18% penalty, seat them after women.

Owner Alex O’Brien told Broadsheet website: “I do want people to think about it, because we’ve had this (pay discrepancy) for decades and decades and we’re bringing it to the forefront of people’s minds.

I’ve thought about it, Ms. O’Brien,   The “pay discrepancy” is almost entirely a matter of personal choices, and you’re an idiot.

But I support Ms. O’Brien’s right to operate her business and property exactly the way she wants to.  Which makes me wonder – if someone tried this in the US (it’s in Melbourne, Australia), would public accomodation laws apply?  The way they do for people who don’t want to serve gay weddings?

Back in the ’00s, when there were a lot more blogs, I used to amuse myself by calling myself “The Twin Cities’ Best Feminist”.

I did it partly – OK, mostly – to troll the local feministbotblogger community; so un-self-aware were they, and so seriously do they take themselves, that they found countless ways to spin their underwear into knots when I wrote that.  (“The Twin Cities ‘Best’ Feminist?”  Really?  What does that even mean?)

Background:  I did it partly because it was true.  Well, partly – because “Feminist” doesn’t just have one meaning.  Because as Camille Paglia noted around twenty years ago, there are really two branches to “Feminism”.

There’s “equity” Feminism – the idea that women should have the same opportunity to go as far and do as much as their merits and talents can take them.  It’s the feminism that killed off the “barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen” thing; the one that advanced the world out of the “Mad Men” era.  I think any father with a daughter qualifies on one level or another.    Am I “the best” at this?  Sure, why not?

Then there’s “Identity Feminism” – the idea that women are an identity group, like blacks or Armenians or Jews, with an agenda and history and grievances against long-time enemies and oppressors, and a collective (and to one extent or another, retributive) political interest.  I’m proud to say, I’m no good at this.  l

So we have – again, Paglia’s idea, not mine – the “feminists” who seek equality, and the “feminists” who seek demagoguery and political power.

We’ll come back to that.

Boys Without Mothers Won’t Quite Be Boys:  There’s a huge body of research about what happens when girls grow up without fathers – because our society is rife with it, thanks to our family court system and an urban culture than systematically devalues fatherhood.   Such girls grow up much more likely to fail in school, to get pregnant while a teenager or single, to have trouble with guys, and to suffer from depression and other psychological issues in adulthood.

The study of boys without mothers – or whose mothers systematically devalue their relationships with their sons – is a lot newer, since it happens a lot less often   But it’s starting to happen.  And it’s not pretty.  Boys whose mothers are absent, impaired, or who just undercut that relationship in favor of other things – other relationships, addiction, or dysfunctional addiction to career – grow up very likely to act out, to be violent, to have trouble in school and at work, and to have the same raft of psychological issues as girls whose fathers do, basically, the same thing.

We’ll come back to that.

Meet The Mother Of The Year:  Jody Allard is a feminist writer in, where else, Seattle.   And her sons are going to make some psychologists very wealthy,  Ro judging by this article, “I’m Done Pretending Men Are Safe (Even My Sons).

I have two sons. They are strong and compassionate—the kind of boys other parents are glad to meet when their daughters bring them home for dinner. They are good boys, in the ways good boys are, but they are not safe boys. I’m starting to believe there’s no such thing.

A psychologist once told me there are two lies that everyone tells:  “I never doubted my sexuality” and “I’ve never ever even once thought about suicide”.   Without arguing about the point, I’d add a third; “I’ve never thought things about my kids that concerned, worried or scared me”.

But one thing most parents don’t do is tell it to their kids, even directly.

Not Allard (emphases added by me):

I wrote an essay in The Washington Post last year, during the height of the Brock Turner case, about my sons and rape culture. I didn’t think it would be controversial when I wrote it; I was sure most parents grappled with raising sons in the midst of rape culture. The struggle I wrote about was universal, I thought, but I was wrong. My essay went semi-viral, and for the first time my sons encountered my words about them on their friends’ phones, their teachers’ computers, and even overheard them discussed by strangers on a crowded metro bus. It was one thing to agree to be written about in relative obscurity, and quite another thing to have my words intrude on their daily lives.

Can you imagine – one of your parents considering you guilty until  proven innocent (not to mention with no actual avenue to prove yourself innocent(?

One of my sons was hurt by my words, although he’s never told me so.

And have it wind up in the Washington Post in a few months?  I’d take a pass, too.

He doesn’t understand why I lumped him and his brother together in my essay. He sees himself as the “good” one, the one who is sensitive and thoughtful, and who listens instead of reacts. He doesn’t understand that even quiet misogyny is misogyny, and that not all sexists sound like Twitter trolls.

Let’s just take a step back and reassess:  “Mom” has called her sons, essentially, rapists in training – because of traits their mother insists are in them, never mind their lying eyes, brains or senses of self.  

It seems to astound Ms. Allard that her son has reacted:

He is angry at me now, although he won’t admit that either, and his anger led him to conservative websites and YouTube channels; places where he can surround himself with righteous indignation against feminists, and tell himself it’s ungrateful women like me who are the problem.

His problem is not an “ungrateful woman”.  It’s one, apparently narcissistic woman who he has, luckily, discovered has been trying to gaslight him – to convince him, via .

I teeter frequently between supporting my son and educating him. Is it my job as his mother to ensure he feels safe emotionally, no matter what violence he spews?…When I hear his voice become defensive, I back off but question whether I’m doing him any favors by allowing his perception of himself to go unchallenged. When I confront him with his own sexism, I question whether I’m pushing too hard and leaving him without an emotional safe space in his home.

Am I the only one who suspects that poor kid hasn’t had “emotional safe space” since he was a zygote?

I’ll leave the rest of this exercise in narcissism – in the full, clinical sense – to you to read (or not.    And I hope this woman’s poor sons find some way to fill the hole she’s no doubt left in their lives from prioritizing them below her yapping ideology; I hope they can find some sense of themselves outside of her gaslighting.

But for a parent to marginalize their children in the face of their ideology?

It might be mental illness, of a sort (my vote is for Narcissistic Personality Disorder).     Is it exacerbated by an ideology that treats men as an enemy to be vanquished – even one’s own children?

Which came first:  the mental illness or the ideology?

UPDATE:  Kurt Schlichter notes that one of Ms. Allard’s sons has given indications of being suicidal – which, naturally, “she” used as fodder for her self-adoration:

In a post as recent as May, the feminist wrote in Role Reboot about her and her suicidal son watching 13Reasons Why, a show that has been argued to glorify suicide.

Someone get this chick a Mother of the Year award.

Curiously, Allard also has at least one daughter about whom we can’t find any public shaming pieces.

I have no words to describe my revulsion for this “person”.

What do you get when you combine:

• The “progressive” MO of transferring taxpayer money to other progressives
• “Progressives'” hatred of wealthy people (other than “progressive” plutocrats, naturally)
• The “progressive” party line on women’s issues
• The “progressive” drive to at least appear to bring a better life you’re bigger government?

I had to check this twice – but the City Pages actually has the story:   Governments, acting on “information” from “progressive” “feminist” groups  around the country,  are pouring money into sex trafficking enforcement based on absurd predictions about the nuimber of prostitutes supposedly showing up for Super Bowls:

He didn’t have to look hard for supporters. Dallas Police Sergeant Louis Felini told The Dallas Morning News that between 50,000 and 100,000 prostitutes were expected to come into town. The call for even more outrage was sounded by a study from the Dallas Women’s Foundation, which said the throng would include 38,000 underage prostitutes…Before Super Bowl XLIX in Glendale, Arizona, Cindy McCain — wife of Sen. John McCain — declared the Super Bowl “the largest human-trafficking venue on the planet.” Glendale produced a lengthy public service video broadcasting the evils of the flesh trade.

But according to police, not one person was busted for prostitution-related crimes or sex trafficking in the days leading up to the game.

The results?  Nearly no arrests.

Deterrence?  Perhaps.

“Progressive” delusions about the habits, peccadillos and appetites of the wealthy (who are, let’s be honest, the only people who can ever afford to go to the Super Bowl)?  Definitely.

Oh, yeah.  Minnesota’s doing the same.  Bigly.

Not long after the inauguration, when Big Feminism threw their nationwide “Women’s March” in media centers around the country, I heard the usual suspects hyperventilating about all the “strong, fearless, powerful women” who were converging for the marches.

Of course, I saw episodes like t his…

…and observed that it’s always the “feminists” – male and female – who jabber the hardest about how strong, fearless, powerful and “fierce” they are that are the first do dive into ofay ad hominem babble (“your male privilege…”, “mansplaining”) if you dare dissent from their current gospel in any way.

(I was also tempted to find some of those precious little snowflakes and ask them if they though they could last twenty minutes in my grandmother’s shoes; she, who raised my dad by herself while running a photography studio, in a small town, during WW2?  I think not).

David French on feminism’s new shiny toy, the “Fierce Girl”:

We are living in the age of the fierce girl. That’s the new feminist ideal. Do you want to make online feminists furious? Just try writing a television or movie script that even implies that “damsels in distress” need any man to rescue them from danger. No indeed. The modern female action star can take down any number of burly men. Doubt me? Watch Charlize Theron destroy man after man in this trailer for Atomic Blonde.

It’s modern feminism, telling modern women what they must do and be with their newfound “choice”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I’m a pre-operative transgender woman.  I demand entry into this unit so I can shower with young, blonde Norwegian women.  It’s my right.

Kidding aside, it might be a smart move.  Women get to serve which shuts up the feminists.  But they’re segregated, which eliminates sexual harassment.  Plus, it’s easy to reassign an entire unit to safely guard headquarters when the shooting starts, rather than pluck individual grunts out of an integrated unit to cut down on white-knighting.

This way, the politicians can say “Yes, you are equal to men, you can do everything they can do.  Grrrrl power!”  Might be worth looking into for Army units.  You notice they’re not giving the girls any expensive equipment to operate and maintain, like their own aircraft carrier or submarine.  I suspect there’s a reason for that.

Joe Doakes

On the one hand – not so fast.  Norway’s military is already pretty gender-integrated.  Don’t be surprised if you see a female frigate commander sooner than later.

On the other?  The Norwegians’ unit – a section of the Norwegian Army’s Jegertroppen, loosely translated as “Rangers” – is a special forces unit, roughly on part with the Airborne Rangers, and hauling a lot of expensive equipment around isn’t really part of the mission.  The stated mission – having female troops to deal with female Muslim suspects – isn’t entirely daft. And for the unstated, and these days probably tertiary, part of the mission, providing a guerilla cadre if Norway is every conquered again – it makes complete sense.

Our idiot betters were chuckling – briefly, at least – at Mike Pence and his wife’s rules for his conduct in public around female associates, staff and the like.   In that particular context-mangled teapot-tempest, Mike Pence was supposedly a “Neanderthal” “Taliban” “sexist” for never meeting with women alone.

Of course, if you’re in politics of any party (but especially the GOP, especially given our media’s, er, cozy and complementary relationship with the Democrat oppo research force, and triple-especially if you’re connected with Trump, it’s just good common sense.

I was going to leave it there – but it turns out, in this grievance-mongering era, that it – or having cameras rolling at all times – is not a bad tactic if you’re a man of any kind having to deal with women on any non-marital level.

Didn’t he do this twenty years ago?

I remember back in college, thirty-odd years ago, reading some rather dogmatic radical-feminist claiming that technology would soon make it possible for women to live lives, up to and including reproduction, completely without the need for men.

It’d seem that technology may be close to evening the playing field for men.