According to Madeleine Albright, I’m going to hell. As is every woman who isn’t voting for Hillary Clinton. All I can say is that heaven won’t be much of a paradise if it’s populated with the fools who are.
But if a lot of other self-proclaimed leftist smarties are right, I can’t go to hell, because I don’t even exist. After all, I’m a female libertarian. Further complicating matters is that now the progressive Left has decreed that gender does not exist. So not only am I going to hell (though I don’t exist because I’m a libertarian woman, and hell doesn’t exist because these people don’t believe in it), but I can’t be a woman because gender is nonexistent. Color me confused.
I don’t think I can even call myself a left-libertarian anymore. I want nothing whatsoever more to do with the Left. I’m glad that in 2016, a woman can run for president and be taken seriously, but the possibility that Hillary Clinton is not only running, but just might win, makes my blood run cold. I guess progressives still want me to be a woman so I can be a good little victim and vote for her. These people are so crazy, they make me want to run for my life.
If one out of every two people on the planet was helpless against the other, our species would have died out hundreds of thousands of years ago.
As a woman, I am expected, by the so-called progressives who have taken out a copyright on feminism, to sit around crying, “Poor little me!” I refuse to do that, not because I hate every woman in the world, or fail to care about our rights, but because I’m not an idiot. If I am not very much mistaken, we have been half of the human race since the Garden of Eden. Which means that over the millennia, we’ve had every bit as much to do with how things have turned out as men have. If we haven’t, then we’ve all been idiots.
According to the sort of history I’ve been taught since I was a girl, men have always been awful brutes — while women have been just sitting there and taking it. That doesn’t correspond to the history of my life, or the lives of most of the women I’ve ever known. I don’t even think that most of us could possibly believe it. If we were such ineffectual feathers in the wind, we’d never muster the will to get up in the morning.
My philosophy of politics and history is one in which every individual will has an influence on the whole. Events unfold as they do because of the interaction of multitudes. This was one of the aspects of libertarianism that attracted me from the start: everybody counts. The human drama is far too unruly to be centrally planned or collectively organized. If one out of every two people on the planet was helpless against the other, our species would have died out hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Certainly the rules by which we’ve played haven’t always been fair. It’s appalling to me that my grandmothers — each of whom had as much sense as any man I’ve ever met — couldn’t vote until 1920. But that arrangement was OK with most of the women in this country until it wasn’t anymore, after which it was changed. Women do as much to keep each other down (if not more) than men have ever done to oppress them.
What we dearly need is not an amendment to the Constitution, but an adjustment of attitude.
A crucial reason why women have lacked the power wielded by men is that men tend to be loyal to one another, and women do not. We compete with one another so fiercely and viciously that men shudder to think of it. They may kill each other in wars, but the rest of the time they manage to cooperate pretty nicely. We undermine and sabotage each other nearly every day of our lives from nursery school to nursing home.
Although I’m gay, I never liked playing with little girls when I was a kid. They made me nervous. One day they’d be friendly, the next they’d get mad — for no apparent reason — and the day after that, they’d be sugar and spice once again. I rarely trusted them. Most of my friends were boys, because they were temperamentally pretty much the same, day in and day out. I usually knew what to expect.
In my adult life, most of the really treacherous things ever done to me have been done by women. A lot of women have been kind and supportive, too, and it would be unfair for me to overlook them. But all along the way, I’ve benefitted from the support, encouragement, and mentorship of a variety of men. As has every other woman who has ever succeeded at much of anything in life — whether she’ll admit it or not.
I regard it as highly offensive when I’m informed that I should vote for Hillary Clinton because she’s a woman. It’s utter nonsense to suggest that this is any less sexist than the notion that a guy ought to vote for Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, or Bernie Sanders because they’re men. It will be “our turn” to be president when the majority of men and women determine that a female candidate is worthy of the office.
Women finally got the vote because enough women thought that every other woman deserved the franchise. When we get over the inferiority complex that tells us that men’s opinions of us carry more weight than our own of ourselves and one another, that’s when we’ll finally “achieve equality.” As long as we allow the political left to convince us that we’re helpless and victimized little nitwits, that’s exactly how we’ll behave. What we dearly need is not an amendment to the Constitution, but an adjustment of attitude. We’ve got vastly more power than we think.
