Quote of the Day:

I don’t need people to tell me that because I am a woman the standards of evidence are lower for my claims.

— Joy Pullman at The Federalist

 

The feminist movement started off emphasizing that we women are strong, competent, and smart.

But that was then.

Foes of Judge Kavanaugh's confirmation have spent a lot of time portraying women in ways that should insult us: as depicted by the Democrats, we're so weak and helpless that, if one of us lodges a serious accusation against another human being, we must be automatically believed.  

Evidence cannot be evaluated; our feelings might be hurt. We are fragile.

Joy Pullman, executive editor of The Federalist and an expert on education, makes a set of declarations–all excellent–that uphold women as sentient beings, capable of sifting through evidence and not the wounded birds on the verge of crumpling.

Among Pullman's declarations:

I am a woman, and I am able to consider evidence and ideas without using my sex as a shield for weak thinking, or an excuse for reprehensible behavior.

I can think, I ought to think, and I will think, and nobody can stop me no matter how hard or long they chant brainless, anti-fact, woman-demeaning slogans like “Believe all women” and “I believe her” and “Yes all women.”

I don’t need slogans. I don’t need marches. I don’t need a vulgar pink hat. I don’t need abortion, and I don’t need to wallow in self-pitying victimhood so the great white government can swoop in and rescue poor little helpless me.

I want the truth. I want justice. Getting those requires due process. It means the presumption of innocence, the ability to face one’s accusers in a court of law, the ability to present evidence and speak on one’s own behalf. It means weighing evidence, not “credibility” or “believability” or, heaven save me, “passion.” It means setting aside my biases to weigh claims based on the facts at hand.

The cliche about women before feminisism was that we are irrational, prey to our emotions, and can't be trusted to sift through information.

This plays out insidiously in one line of thought encouraged by Kavanaugh foes.

It goes something like this: Maybe I've never met Judge Kavanaugh and he has never assaulted me personally, but some other man did and so Kavanaugh must pay.

The subhead to Pullman's story counters this:

Women are not so morally craven that we need to punish some politically convenient scapegoat for the sins of completely different men. That's not justice.

Feminism, which purported to encourage women to know their strength, is now characterizing women as helpless creatures, intellectually so weak and emotionally so fraught that we must not be asked to look at or weigh evidence.

How dumb do they think we are?