SARAH VINE: How absurd of women who dislike Trump to go on a sex strike
All over social media, American women are shaving their heads and swearing off sex with their partners in protest at Donald Trump’s re-election.
Quoting the 4B movement, which originated in South Korea, they are urging other women to adopt the principles of no dating, no intercourse, no marriage and no children to ‘punish’ their menfolk for choosing Trump over Kamala Harris.
Don’t get me wrong: I have serious reservations about Trump, as I’m sure anyone with half a brain does. But the idea that his return to the White House will usher in an era of female repression equivalent to the kind of dystopian nightmare depicted in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is absurd.
Yes, Trump has had many ‘women’ problems (see Stormy Daniels et al); yes, a Republican rump supports hardline policies on abortion; yes, his deputy called Harris ‘a childless cat lady’, but that was just banter (dare I say maybe even a joke, a concept that American liberals increasingly seem to have trouble processing).
And besides, it was a lot less offensive than dismissing opposition supporters as ‘garbage’, which Joe Biden did.
But the idea that Trump will preside over a misogynist administration that will strip women of their rights, relegate them to the status of second-class citizens and chain them, barefoot and bleeding, to the kitchen sink is simply deluded.
Also, it’s very narcissistic. America’s debt is $35.85 trillion. There’s a hideous war in the Middle East. Don’t these drama queens realise the President-elect has bigger fish to fry?
Whatever else Trump may be, he’s an old-fashioned Boomer libertarian (his political muse being Ronald Reagan). He believes in free markets and freedom of expression. The last thing he’s going to do is neutralise half the country’s taxpayers, many of whom voted for him – 44 per cent, in fact, which is quite something given how supposedly reviled he is among the fairer sex.
The truth is, surely, that America’s women care about things such as the economy, international politics and the loss of women’s rights in other areas, such as schools and prisons and the sporting field. After all, one of Trump’s campaign promises was to ‘keep men out of women’s sport’ and withdraw funding from hospitals that offer gender reassignment surgery to minors.
The ‘punish men’ attitude of these blue-haired hysteriacs is so one-dimensional, superficial and deeply reductive. What’s more, it’s rather pathetic considering all the bigger issues affecting women across the wider world.
If you want to shave your head in solidarity with your downtrodden sisters, do it in support of women who really know the meaning of male oppression.
Women such as the Tehran university student who stripped to her underwear last week after a confrontation with the regime’s so-called ‘morality police’. She was last seen being bundled into a car by the authorities. God only knows her current fate, assuming she’s still alive.
Or what about all the girls in Iraq who’ll soon find themselves unable to escape the slavering clutches of their much older husbands when the ruling Shia majority lowers the age of consent to nine?
Why aren’t heads being shaved to draw attention to their plight? Or to the thousands of Yazidi women and children captured, sold and abused by Isis in Syria, or the schoolgirls abducted and forced into sex slavery by Boko Haram in Nigeria?
Or what about the women of Afghanistan, forbidden to speak to each other in public, let alone do anything as radical as obtain an education, or leave home with even an inch of flesh on show?
I could go on, but the list is endless and there’s not enough space on this page.
Suffice to say that these moist-eyed liberals with their smug, self-regarding expressions of woe won’t shave their heads for these women, but will do it for their own self-regard – while happily living in the world’s largest liberal democracy. If they hate it so much, why don’t they swap places with some of their sisters elsewhere?
In any case, don’t they know about history? In Hitler’s concentration camps, the first thing Nazi guards did to new inmates was shave their heads. Will life under Trump be comparable to that of six million Jews under Hitler?
Such performative feminism disgraces us all, and makes women look weak and ridiculous. Get a grip, for heaven’s sake. Find something real to worry about.
Trump’s re-election is already boosting the ailing US economy. Shrinks in New York report a 15 per cent uptick in distraught Democrats seeking appointments to ‘work through’ their post-election ‘trauma’. Given how much those guys charge, that’s got to be a positive, surely?
DailyMail
