A Feminist Blogger’s Essentially Unserious Take on Cologne Attacks

The attacks on scores of women New Year's Eve in Cologne, allegedly by groups of men who arrived recently in Germany from  the Middle East of North Africa, provided a bitter ending to last year.

So the flip tone and unserious remedies put forward in an article on a feminist blog would have surprised me if anything produced by frivolous contemporary feminists retained the power to surprise.

The jaunty post is by somebody named Meghan Murphy. It begins:

You’ve had your chance, bepenised ones. And you’ve blown it. What you’ve proven, time and time again, is that you cannot be trusted to behave yourselves after dark.

Murphy puts forward as a solution a curfew for men. But does she seriously think that these uncivilized men would meekly obey a curfew? She is using a terrible situation, in which women were brutalized, to attempt to be clever and get in a dig at men in general. She fondly imagines these brutes are just like the men at an American fraternity house. 

Cologne was a an event that requiring serious analysis. It is not the sort of thing that should provoke the attempted cuteness of "bepenised."

My colleague Carrie Lukas, by contrast, addressed this issue in the serious way it deserves recently in the Boston Post–and brought up some troubling and politically incorrect ideas that the Feminist Current writer seemed to miss:

Western women often have the luxury of ignoring this biology because of the triumph of classical liberalism, with the supremacy of the rule of law and elevation of reason, decorum, and nonviolence. Of course, violence against women still occurs far too often, including in the developed world. Yet, at least in Western societies, it is understood and accepted that men aren’t supposed to use physical strength to dominate women. If they do, they will be punished – not only with the force of law, but also with public shame.

It wasn’t always this way. It’s taken hundreds, even thousands, of years for our customs and laws to embrace a concept of human rights that holds that the strong should not take advantage of the weak, and that all human beings have dignity and warrant respect.

Not all societies have evolved to this point. Women remain second-class citizens in much of the world, and they are denied basic rights including freedom of movement and the freedom to decide when and whom to marry. Many are all too aware of their physical vulnerabilities and how men can make use of their superior strength. Not only do some societies lack laws against the abuse of women, even where such laws exist, the culture hasn’t accepted the idea that violence against women is out of bounds.

Western women ought to keep this in mind during the ongoing discussion of immigration policy. Many people are uncomfortable discussing the ways in which integrating immigrants from different cultures might impact Western society, and suggest that anyone who dares to raise the question is bigoted against those of different races or religions.

Yet far more is at stake than superficial identity politics.

The Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens also addresses the issue with notable bluntness:

Put bluntly, there is a pronounced tendency among Middle Eastern men to view women either as chattel or as whores. This is not a pleasant reality to acknowledge, but it’s an even more dangerous thing to ignore. So why is it ignored?

Mr. Kern writes that police have remained silent about incidents of rape “because they do not want to give legitimacy to critics of mass migration.” That fits the pattern in Sweden, as it does with the Rotherham child sex-ring case, involving some 1,400 English girls abused over 16 years by men of Pakistani descent. In that case, police and social services ignored evidence of the abuse for fear of “giving oxygen to racist perspectives,” according to the Independent Inquiry into the case.

Or, as Denis MacShane, Rotherham’s former Labour MP and self-declared “Guardian-reading liberal leftie” put it, it was a matter of “not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat.”

That’s a telling admission. Multiculturalism is a liberal fetish that is also the antithesis of liberalism, classical or modern—a simultaneous belief in individual autonomy and cultural equality, irrespective of whether different cultures believe in individual rights or not.

Note to Feminist Current.: We hope you soon will learn to address such serious issues in a manner befitting grown women.