No Apologies by Anthony Esolen

Author:Anthony Esolen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regnery Gateway
Published: 2022-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

A Change in Essence?

I think that most sensible people will admit that if you bring girls into a troop of Boy Scouts, the troop changes. It is not just that the girls will want to do things that the boys do not want to do, but that the boys lose some of what made the Scouts appealing, and they refrain from doing what otherwise they might do, because it doesn’t work with girls in their midst. The feminist lawyer who sued The Citadel so that the school would admit women confessed as much in a burst of breathless honesty, saying that the Citadel experience would be changed utterly. If that is so, then surely it is admissible for us to ask whether the change is for the better or whether the change, even if it should result in something good, has come at the cost of something very different that was also good, and perhaps necessary or in danger of dying away.

I have spoken much about the team, and not so much about what I like to call dynamic enmity, something that characterizes masculine politics. Women have sometimes expressed amazement, even dismay, that a male defense attorney and the male prosecutor in a homicide case can pummel each other about the ears for two weeks and then go to the tavern for a steak dinner and drinks. Here again we witness the masculine capacity to set things in proper emotional compartments, to bracket, to feel and express great passion at one moment and then to set it aside as if it were irrelevant. And in fact most passion is irrelevant in some respect or other. Your legitimate scorn for Mr. Jones will get in the way today when he proposes a measure that will genuinely redound for the common good. Your duty is to set that scorn aside.

There is more. You cannot fight with your pinky extended. Fights are bloody. To play football, as I have said, you have somehow to enjoy being tackled, being bruised. You cannot be solicitous for your flesh. Politics is a blood sport. It must be. Too many questions of great moment are involved, even questions of the life and death of persons, the thriving or the dying of a culture or a nation. What we need is dispassionate passion, a willingness to wrestle, to beat the opponent bloody or to be beaten bloody ourselves, and then to move on, rather than retire to a closet, weeping. So we may legitimately ask whether that is what women who enter politics want. Etiquette here is deadening and dangerous, because it may prevent necessary conversations and arguments from occurring at all.

The entry of women into politics, as I observe it at least, has not had the ennobling and elevating influence that the early feminists promised: that women would help to civilize men and thus avert the bitter conflicts of civil and international war, and that discussions in legislatures would be less likely to degenerate into angry outbursts; niceness would be all in all.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.