The Glowing and All-Knowing Little Girls of the American, Feminist Imagination
By
David Gottfried
About twenty minutes ago, I endured the specter and haute solemnity that is Greta Thunberg, the female, teen environmental activist who descended on America like a Viking Queen. Her self-assurance and confidence were so pronounced as to be almost violent, and her female bitchery made me think of Leni Reifenstahl, Hitler’s favorite film maker and the director of the seminal Nazi propaganda film, “The Triumph of the Will.”
Thunberg scolded America, telling us that we had robbed her of her childhood. The press genuflected before her as though she were a Delphic oracle blazing with pure and incandescent genius.
As I looked at Greta Thunberg’s eyes, and really got to know them, I knew that I was witnessing the second coming of a girl I knew when I was eight, Judy Walkenstein.
My Mother met her father, Jack Walkenstein, through PWP, Parents Without Partners, a club for single parents who were on the make to mate. Jack Walkentein was a cab driver who went to a Freudian psychoanalyst 5 days a week, a Marxist who deplored the Vietnam War long before most Americans could find Vietnam on a map, and the sort of guy who could turn the subject matter of silly, frilly Woody Allen movies into serious, captivating drama.
Greta Thunberg’s eyes seem to smolder like Judy Walkenstein’s eyes. Judy Walkenstein was unremittingly furious. As Greta Thunberg lacerates us for raping Mother Nature, Judy Walkenstein hated men and boys. I remember her screaming and seething that men and women should live in other parts of the country. She somehow decided that the South should be inhabited by men and that the North should be a land inhabited by women as crisp and kind as the good queen of the North in the Wizard of Oz. Sometimes, I think she gave the gay liberation front of New York, in those presumably heady days after Stonewell, the impetus to publish a map which renamed the Upper West Side of Manhattan the Gay Men’s District of Manhattan, a zone from which all women and heteros were to be evicted.
The map was not sexist as it gave gay women their own special place in the sun. The Upper East side of Manhattan was to become The Lesbian District of Manhattan, a zone from which all men and straights would be resettled.
(Actually, the gay liberation front might have been a tad partial to women as the housing stock of The East Side, what with its enormous tracts of land on and around Park, Madison and Fifth Avenues, was decidedly more glitzy than the housing stock on Manhattan’s west side. These sort of policy proposals were in sync with the era. In his 1969 campaign for mayor of New York City, Norman Mailer, careening on an adrenaline high after the publication of his anti Vietnam war book, “The Armies of the Night,” proposed that the entire city go without electricity for one weekend per month, presumably to help us get back to nature. Man, just thinking of those times makes me want to find camping gear, pitch tents in Central Park, and join a back to nature band of rebels akin to the gang Woody Allen hung out with in “Sleeper.”)
But back to grating, berating Greta Thunberg. As I gazed upon her conquistador’s countenance (If my reference to conquistadors doesn’t seem to fit, you’ll have to forgive me because I am listening to Procal Harum’s rock song “Conquistador.”) I realized that the feminist analysis of sex and behavior is so wanting and false.
Feminists always claim that men stalk the land like prideful princes while women cower in shadows. In fact, this country seems to be turning into a place where women can never be too brassy and men can never be too bashful.
For example, the idea that the youngest females inevitably have brilliant lessons to impart to dowdy, old white men like myself seems to be a new provision in the Democratic Party Platform, a document which, most assuredly, is written in the most banal and bestial form of diversity- driven drivel that the fags and fag hags of academia can cough-up. (And don’t censor me for being homophobic; I am gay)
Actually, the notion that young, privileged princesses all have brilliant things to say was very much apparent during the 1980 Republican Presidential primaries. At that time, a twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl was admitted to press conferences where she peppered presidential contenders with supposedly stinging, zinging questions. New York’s Public Television stations aired feature stories which lavished praise on this Joan of Arc of young, intelligent Republicans. I think she did a great job of making the Republican party utterly disgusted with young, progressive pains in the butt, put the final nail into the coffin of Liberal “Ripon Society” Republicanism and was the final act before the ascendance of Queen Nancy Reagan and her royal consort, Ronnie Mc Donald Reagen.
Shortly thereafter, in the early years of the Reagan administration, we were treated to a bevy of young girls who also had something to say. These girls used traditional stereotypes regarding female fragility to become political celebrities. They claimed that they were traumatized, terror-ridden and grieving for humanity because Ronald Reagan’s harsh line against the Soviets was making nuclear war more likely. I remember that the New York Times Magazine had a long article brimming with gorgeous photos of their bright, beautiful and commendably anxiety-ridden faces as these charming latter-day debutantes fretted a future of scorching flames and radiation. The girls gave us all the pathos of Emily Dickensen with all the imagined geopolitical sophistication of Adlai Stevenson. And, in their most daring feat of ideational distortion, they told us that nuclear arms should be reduced not because of the risk of thermo nuclear annihilation but because they feared nuclear war. It seemed as if America believed what they had to say because they were young, female and rich.
And America does give special credence to the arguments or rantings of the young, female and rich. First, because America is such a fiercely capitalistic country, it tends to assume that rich people can always be relied upon to discern problems clearly. Second, because America, like most of the world, believes that women are more compassionate than men, Americans are convinced that a rich women will bring us intelligence leavened by kindness. Finally, because America reflexively believes that that which is new is automatically preferable to that which is old, they know that young people are in tune with the good, the true and the beautiful. Ergo, when someone is female, young and rich, that someone has won America’s triple jackpot, and everyone harks to her Highness’s every word.
Although these twinkling little girls are, according to feminist idealogues, suffering from terrible self esteem because of male oppression and patriarchy, they certainly show no shortage of self-esteem in academia where some colleges have enrollments that are as high as 60 percent female. Where are the boys? More and more of them have been doped on and deranged by psychotropic drugs which are dispensed by educators who are convinced that normal boyish energy is pathological hyperactivity. More of them are learning-disabled. More of them are drag queens, transgendered and are more apt to be cocktail waitresses than collegiate scholars.
Of course, men still have leads over women, particularly in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math). Actually, male leads should be expected in all academic areas, including languages, which had traditionally been thought of as particularly favorable to females.
Male leads should be expected because the bell-shaped curve is different for men and women. First, let me explain the bell-shaped curve (not everyone got this in school): The bell-shaped curve refers to the way a graph would look if one plotted the number of people with each particular score on a graph. For example, the number of people with IQs between 90 and 100 would be very high, as that roughly constitutes the normal range of IQ scores, and the number of people with IQs of 150 and 50 is very low. The graph looks like a bell.
However, the bell is squashed down, in the middle, in the case of males. In other words, fewer males score in the average range. More males have very high IQs and more males have very low IQs. The proportion of males who are geniuses or mentally retarded is much greater than the proportion of females who are geniuses or retarded. Some scientists have posited that the number of men with IQs over 140 is eight to ten times the number of females with IQs over 140. Of course, I am not saying that the world is bereft of very bright women. Surely, some women are as sharp as a whip. However, female excellence is rarer than male excellence.
This huge differential in intelligence can be explained because of physical differences between males and females. First and foremost, male brains weigh more, and have more brain cells, than female brains. Of course, some people will find my reasoning coarse and simplistic and will state that something is not necessarily stronger because it is bigger. However, their arguments just don’t jive with reality. We know that a bigger lung can breathe in and hold more air. We know that a larger kidney will cleanse blood of more urea than a smaller kidney. Why do feminists find it so hard to realize that the male brain, which is heavier and contains more brain cells, may have more prodigious powers of concentration, syllogistic reasoning and imagination. (Some feminists have said that brains are more powerful when they make more connections and that when one’s neurons are more inter-connected with other neurons, one will be more apt to discern the similarities between two supposedly different entities. Of course, neural connectivity is a critical prerequisite to cognition, but it is stupid to reason that since it is important, the size of one’s brain suddenly becomes wholly unimportant. Such reasoning is analogous to contending that since naval power may be important in war, air power is of no consequence.)
In Sacha Baron Cohen’s hysterically funny movie, “Borat,” we are invited to believe that the protagonist is a stupid buffoon, particularly when he says that men are smarter than women. Of course, Borat is pretty damn stupid with respect to many things. However, on some issues, particularly those pertaining to sex, we may in the future come to realize that we have been, in the beginning of the twenty first century, a tribe of insane buffoons, wedded to a dogmatism that makes Catholicism seem heterodox, which believes in treating pre-pubescent boys with testosterone blockers and consecrates as science that which is most pleasing to its ideological prejudices.