Calling the “war on women” a “leftist construct” in today’s must-read article on Breitbart, U.K. writer and blogger James Delingpole goes on to say that the Brits can learn a lot from how we in the U. S. work to fight this phony war. Specifically, Delingpole cites a panel put on by IWF and our sister organization Independent Women’s Voice at the libertarian-leaning FreedomFest last week in Las Vegas:
…I was very inspired by an all-female panel talk I attended given by two related organisations called Independent Women's Voice and Independent Women's Forum. "That was far more interesting than one had any right to expect from a bunch of chicks," I told the girls afterwards. And they took it well a) because they knew I meant it and b) because one of their organisations' raison d'etre is not to see women as victims whose role is constantly to be offended by our phallocentric society's patriarchal sexism.
The left loves to co-opt women as one of its oppressed "minorities", which ought to be risible given that, in the US for example, they constitute 53 per cent of the population.
But depressingly, on both sides of the Atlantic, the "war on women" meme is gaining broader and broader currency with its own hashtag (natch) and the development of a cultural climate in which even fairly routine male behaviour is increasingly seen as unacceptable and misogynistic, and where eunuch-like men of a leftist persuasion now fall over themselves to demonstrate how feminist they are, in order to differentiate themselves from the right, who are of course all Neanderthals.
What I see almost nowhere in Britain is anyone fighting back. The men don't because they're too scared of being targeted by the feminist harpie rent-a-mob; the women don't either because they've jumped on the bandwagon themselves or because they've been culturally brainwashed into thinking that maybe the more the extreme members of the sisterhood have a point and are correcting a long-entrenched social injustice.
And it's not helped by the way politicians pander to this female militant tendency – as we see, for example, in the way David Cameron and Nick Clegg suck up to MumsNet – because they think it shows how enlightened and post-sexist they are; and also because there are votes in it.
This is because when it comes to voting, women and men behave differently. Men tend to be much more rigid in their political views, where women are more likely to be swing-voters, less swayed by politics or ideology than by mood music. And it's swing voters, as we know, who are the ones that shift the electoral balance.
For once, it’s nice to know that what’s said in Vegas isn’t staying in Vegas.