Feminists and the Covid Lockdowns. By Janice Fiamengo.
In Vote Like a Woman, a substack article posted prior to the American midterms, Naomi Wolf urged female voters to reward Democrats for their Covid authoritarianism by voting against the party. After all, women have for many years formed a consistent, if now diminishing, pro-Democrat bloc.
It has not been my experience that women are particularly well-informed voters or scrupulous about the freedoms and self-determination that form Wolf’s ultimate rallying cry (more on this later). Research on female voters indicates that women are less likely than men to read a newspaper and less likely to follow current events closely. A 2019 study found that women were 20 percentage points more likely than men to choose a female candidate simply because she was female. …
The litany that lies by omission:
Vote Like a Woman trots out most of the usual feminist talking points about female disadvantage, cherry-picked in classic men-don’t-matter fashion, and far too numerous to rebut here. …
We hear about the earnings gap, the caring gap, the single-parent gap, and various other injustices allegedly borne by women. We are treated to the howler that women are more affected by violent crime than men. We’re told that the economic downturn has primarily affected women.
We never hear about any of men’s burdens, for Wolf seems indifferent to the homicide gap, the work-fatality gap, the suicide gap, the drug overdose gap, the homelessness gap, and the education and employment gap. She tells us that ‘women were chattel for centuries’ (certainly never in the United States) who only recently could ‘own their bodies’ while seemingly oblivious to the fact that men in the United States never owned their bodies, as was discovered by a generation who didn’t want to kill and die in Vietnam.
To her well-rehearsed list of female grievances are added claims about the particular harms of lockdowns, forced masking, and coerced mRNA injections, which we are told, again, ‘disproportionately harmed’ ‘women and their children’. (I suppose men don’t have children.) Here, Wolf’s arguments are particularly tendentious, extending even to pretending that lockdowns of small businesses primarily hurt women despite the fact that the majority of small business owners are men. Wolf cites Dr. Robert Chandler, who alleges that ‘women sustained 72 per cent of [vaccine] adverse events’. …
It need hardly be said — or perhaps it does — that men were harmed by Covid policies. Men were harmed by the forced shuttering of their business, by the assault on their self-determination, and by restrictions on their right to choose healthcare for their families. I don’t know enough to fully rebut Wolf’s claim that women have been ‘most hurt by forced mRNA injections’. But given that men became seriously ill and died from Covid at a much higher rate than women, it seems unlikely that men would be significantly less affected by the injections. … One recent study of young people diagnosed with post-injection myocarditis found that the cohort was 88 per cent male, and various studies have testified to the seriousness of these conditions. …
But who instigated and supported the covid lockdowns?
It was feminist politicians who pushed hardest for lockdowns and all the rest, doing so because women — feminist women — said it was what they wanted. And they wanted it in the holy name of safety.
From the feminist point of view, Covid mania was the definition of caring. Who screamed the loudest on Twitter about masking, hand sanitising, distancing, keeping children out of school, staying in one’s bubble, switching the world to Zoom, keeping out the potentially contaminated at Christmas, and so on? Who waited in line most patiently for Covid tests and clamoured for vaccines to be offered to children? Who was most adamant about the need to shame, isolate, exclude, and penalise the unvaccinated? Feminist women. …
Women overall, as psychiatrist Mark McDonald has argued in his recent United States of Fear, are a population conditioned by fear-mongering, with Covid providing a dramatic illustration of the ease with which terrified and self-righteous women could be mobilised through irrational safetyism and scapegoating.
Political scientist Jennifer Piscopo reports that women are more likely than men to want a significant role for government in managing ‘healthcare, housing, education, childcare, and anti-poverty programs’.
Many women seem hard-wired to seek a ‘safe’ rather than a free world, to rely on promises from on high rather than their own rational assessments, and to prefer collective rather than individual solutions to problems. All of these contributed to the Covid years.
People are different. We are not blank slates. The world would be a better place if the ruling class accepted that and worked with it, instead of dumbly pretending that everyone’s the same.
