Eve Ensler: Reality Check

CNN fell over itself to link to this drivel.  Real news network?  What the hell does Eve Ensler have to do with anything?  Is she even relevant anymore?

Relevent enough for me to link this crap to you and comment on it, I suppose.

It’s not hard to understand why Eve Ensler gives a rise to her female audience.  To her credit, she’s a powerful speaker and there were bits of her monologue that resonated even with me, the coldest, most heartless of men who she never references directly but is always looming in the background as the implied antagonist when she uses phrases like “violence against women.”

We don’t get to choose which pair of genitals or which brain in our skulls we’re born with, any more than we get to choose where on the earth we’re born, which language we speak, whether we’re rich or poor, and so on.  Because of all of this, it’s easy to understand how the world has people who make a career out of making us feel good about the hand we were dealt.

In a sense, the “girl power” line that Ensler delivers is really just another incarnation of the emotion behind nationalism.  Let’s feel good how lucky we were to be randomly born a certain way, because the inverse is to be miserable about it, and since it’s totally out of our hands and immutable once done, we might as well be proud of who we are instead of hate who we are.

Now I know where this idiot got her big ideas about “Feminism 4.0″ or whatever it is she calls it.  Eve Ensler won’t shut up about empathy.  If you believed Ensler, men are all heartless, senseless dolts who are incapable of detecting social and emotional cues and that women are soulfull heartful magical little fairies with extraordinary powers of perception that extend to literally “feeling” how global warming is hurting Mother Gaia.  I’m not exaggerating.

This isn’t a play that hasn’t been run about a million times before or that won’t be played about a million times in the future: take what has been historically perceived as a giant, gaping weakness and instead attempt to spin it as if it’s a strength.  Bravo, Eve.

I also disagree wholeheartedly with the assertion that men are not as or more empathetic than women.  We usually translate the broad concept of “empathy” into the more practical and easily understood “social awareness.”  You would think that Eve after all her many, many years afoot on planet Earth that she would have met both men and women who are socially inept and men and women who seem to have a sixth sense.  Is it possible that she has, but by and large Ensler has observed that women tend to show better social understanding than men?  Wouldn’t that be stereotyping, then, for her to assert that social capabilities – i.e., empathy – is a female trait?  Oh, but I digress.

Eve, being born a woman and having no clue what it is like to walk through life with a pair of balls, would probably be surprised to find that did she have balls she would likely be just as observant and in touch with the emotions of others as she is without them.  I certainly have no trouble understanding the emotions of the people around me and detecting how people really feel as well or better than most women that I know.

But you might not guess that if you were to interact with me, or other men like me.  The difference between a man and a woman is not the absence or presence of the traits that Eve Ensler harps upon as chief femine virtues exclusive to the fairer sex.  No.  The difference is the actions we take – or don’t take – as a result of those perceptions.

Let me illustrate this with some examples.

Suppose John and Jane observe that Spot is unhappy.  Which is more likely to attempt to comfort Spot?

Suppose John and Jane get into a fight and are sore at each other.  Which is more likely to attempt to reconcile the situation?

Suppose Spot dies.  Who is more likely to cry?

In the narrow-minded world of Eve Ensler, when John ignores the fact that Spot is unhappy because Spot is a dog and John doesn’t give a damn, Eve interprets this as one of two things: John is so “emotionally disconnected” that he is oblivous to Spot’s condition or that he “lacks compassion” to comfort Spot.

So the entire premise that Eve has been selling lately is that we all need to find our “inner girl” – e.g., the part of us that reacts like, well, a girl, to every situation emotioanlly rather than rationally.  She’d probably tell me that if I advocated otherwise that I’m exactly part of the problem she’s trying to address.  She’d probably also try to convince me that this is part of my conditioning and that had I only been raised differently I would think differently.

Lady, if you want to claim that girls are magic empathetic creatures in spite of the cultural upbringing they experienced, you’ll need to accept the fact that I’m a rational pragmatic creature in spite of the cultural upbringing I experienced.  The fact that our culture tends to reward rationalism at the expense of emotional responses – an observation of Eve’s that I concur is right on the money – is immaterial to the reality that it is in my nature to not behave like a girl, because I am a man, and testosterone is a helluva drug.

What do we mean by cultural upbringing anyway?  Well, probably school.  Of course school is going to put an emphasis ratoinality and practicality, because an education is preparing us to function as adults in a rational, pratical environment – namely, the natural world, and the civilization we’ve built adherent to its rules.  Math is a cold, heartless bitch, and so are engineers.  I can’t integrate a partial differential equation with the power of my girlish emotions.  I can’t feel my way through bridge construction.  I’m not going to convince a water molecule to split into two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen with a weep story about rape.

Look, men have a monopoly on basically every useful trait.  We’re bigger, stronger, smarter, faster.  If women want to pretend that they have some magic emotional third eye to add one more plus in their column (the only other being raising small children, which men generally could not care less about), then so be it.  But don’t expect we men to actually take that seriously because we know better.

If a feminist could spend one day as a man, she would stop being a feminist.  If a man could spend one day as a woman, he’d probably spend all day in front of a mirror fondling himself.  I was going to make a comment about how if he had to spend a second day as a woman he’d probably put a bullet in his head, but then I realized that no; he’d probably spend it in front of a mirror fondling himself.

There’s just no way I can take feminism seriously.  They’re just so misguided.

I think most of the men who would possibly defend and/or buy into this crap are young men who haven’t experienced living with women for protracted periods of time.  The more you see of them, the less you can possibly believe about the crap that Eve Ensler and her ilk spout ad infinitum.  That is, of course, if you actually view what they say with an air of skepticism.  If you bindly believe everything you hear without testing it against your own unbiased observations then of course you’ll keep drinking the Koolaid… but my own eyes and my own experiences don’t lie.  When reality does not mesh with the words of feminism, well, I can only conclude that the words of feminism are giant lies crafted to make girls feel better about themselves.

I’m all for girls feeling better about themselves – whatever makes them happy.  I only have a problem with it when I’m expected to actually take it seriously.  Give me a break.

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