George Will saw the vapors, too!

I’ve written several times about my impatience with so-called “strong, feminist women” who can’t manage to look at a painting of a nude without feeling raped, or who remember that Clarence Thomas once dared to make an (admittedly lame) adult “joke” to Anita Hill and come all over faint, or who hear a challenge to their feminist orthodoxy and find themeselves (like Hillary Clinton in the most famous passage in her book) “gasping for air…” and needing to “leave the room before I blacked out…”

Feminism seems to have raised up a garden of delicate little, unscented hot-house flowers who hear or see something mildly provocative and whine and wilt away rather than actually address the question or make a lucid argument. This particular professor, one Nancy Hopkins, of MIT, has made a simpering spectacle of herself over Larry Summers’ academic wonderings about the role of women in the sciences and the effect of gender on all studies. Her poor little sensibilities were thrown into flux, and her illusions shown in high-relief.

George Will is kinder to this dame than I can be. This woman embodies the exact inconsistancies and political expediencies that made me turn in my feminist card. “Treat me like a strong woman! But don’t disagree with me or force me to look at anything I don’t like to see…”

This woman’s foundation of feminism is either strong enough to take an occasional inquiry into the realities of gender differences, or it is built on sand and shaky ground, and it will soon cumble from under her. If she doesn’t tumble first. Pathetic. (Hattip: Betsy’s Page.)

The more I think about it, though, the more I wish Summers had not repeatedly apologized, like a whipped dog, for his ideas, which should have been allowed debate and airing. He crumpled up like a two-bit communist clerk who had a moment of clarity before being re-educated by the Kremlin. Sad.