By now, we are all familiar with the basic allegation that Christine Blasey Ford was sexually assaulted by Judge Brett Kavanaugh at a party during their high school years in the early 1980s.
There is no need to reiterate the charges, nor to go on at length about the complete lack of corroborating evidence put forth so far. One is only inclined to note, as The Weekly Standard has, that even the American Civil Liberties Union has joined the critics of Kavanaugh in tossing aside a presumption of innocence which it has in recent times extended even to Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, terrorists, known criminals, and pedophiles.
But on Sept. 29, an associate professor at Georgetown University named Christine Fair brought the rage of the Left to a new ad hominem level, at least for someone in so prominent a position. She went on a Twitter rant about “entitled white men” who continue to defend Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.
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“Look at this chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated entitlement,” she wrote. “All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.”
I feel no need to comment on whether Georgetown University should keep a person with such social media habits on its payroll. Nor is this in any way an attempt to indirectly discredit or disparage Ford, who deserves our empathy as a professed victim of sexual assault and who is not to blame for Fair’s lack of self control.
What I am compelled to say, however, is that Fair’s tweet exemplifies why so many people hate the term “feminist” and would rather be called almost anything else.
In theory, I should have no objections to calling myself a feminist. I believe in equal rights, equal treatment, equal pay, and equal opportunity for women. I am an advocate of paid family leave for mothers and fathers. I have criticized job advertisements that discriminate against women. I have admonished men who treat female colleagues as “eye candy” rather than professionals. Moreover, I have worked for female bosses for half of my professional life and I have never felt threatened, resentful, or awkward.
Two women professors served as my advisers when I was writing my master’s thesis in economics, and I am forever grateful to them for their advice and guidance. I plan to raise my daughter to resist the imputation of inappropriate stereotypes.
But then I see Fair’s hate-themed tweet, and it reminds me of everything feminism stands for in practice today. To Fair, a self-described feminist academic, feminism seems to imply that normal standards of logic and decency do not apply to her. When she encounters resistance to her reflexive presumption of guilt about Kavanaugh, she not only bursts out into a rage, but also argues that she has a right to “not moderate my rage.” Meanwhile, it is not OK for Kavanaugh to become angry when defending his record against what he claims are just vicious smears that are hurting his family. If he weren’t angry about it, that would surely be taken as evidence that he’s lying.
It is unfortunate, to put it mildly, that an associate professor at Georgetown University should join such a mob and cast aside reason and facts in favor of an obscene ideological tirade. People like Fair — and there are so many like her — have turned feminism into a rallying cry for unhinged emotion at the expense of intellect. Feminism is now about forcing others to conform to sanctimonious expressions of public opinion, or else die a miserable death while feminists castrate your corpse and feed it to swine.
As ideas go, it doesn’t get much worse than that. No wonder most younger women reject the feminist label.
Jonathan Church is an economist who specializes in consumer price inflation. He is also a contributor to The Good Men Project. He lives in Alexandria, Va.
