Megyn Kelly, Feminist Wonderwoman

Feminists have found a new heroine. They found her in the most unlikely place: Fox News.

The new feminist Wonderwoman is Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly. The best part, for feminists, is that Kelly is not a feminist.

But, she is a strong woman. She kicks ass. She beats up men. She puts them in their place and shows them to be weak and ineffectual poseurs.

It may be true that Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, but the fury of a woman defending her family probably surpasses it.

Kelly did so on Friday when she lit into Lou Dobbs, Erick Erickson and Juan Williams over the 40% question. Apparently, 40% of American families have female breadwinners. The panel was discussing whether this was good or bad. No one seems to have noticed that the statistic was grossly misleading, but more on that later.

For the moment, limit ourselves to the fact that for both male and female feminists, seeing a woman beating up on men makes their day.

Daniel Politi wrote on Slate:

Fox News host Megyn Kelly doesn’t usually shy away from arguments. And Friday was no exception, as she proceeded to carefully and meticulously rip two of her Fox colleagues to shreds for their views on women and the workplace.

Under the heading: “Megyn Kelly Dominates on Fox,” AmyDavidson said:

Fox News host Megyn Kelly doesn’t usually shy away from arguments. And Friday was no exception, as she proceeded to carefully and meticulously rip two of her Fox colleagues to shreds for their views on women and the workplace.

One is forced to notice that both of these authors managed to fall on the same tired metaphor: rip to shreds.

Perhaps the men were so tactful that they did not want to point out that Kelly was being monumentally defensive. She demonstrated an extraordinary ability to take offense. Perhaps she was simply defending her own family, because for all anyone knows, she is the primary breadwinner for her husband and children. 

In the world of science this is called anecdotal.

Kelly had a great line when she told Erickson: “Who died and made you scientist-in-chief,” but her own attitude was anything but dispassionately objective and scientific.

In truth, Kelly told Erickson that he was being judgmental. Yikes. The idea does not belong to any science that I know about.

Kelly attacked Erickson thusly:

… but I will tell you, I was offended by the piece nonetheless. I didn’t like what you wrote one bit, and I do think you are judging people. To me, you sound like somebody who’s judging but wants to come out and say, “I’m not, I’m not, I’m not, now let me judge, judge, judge. And, by the way, it’s science, science, science, it’s fact, fact, fact, fact, fact.” Well, I mean, I have a whole—this is a list of studies saying your science is wrong and your facts are wrong.

As rhetoric, it’s a tour de force. Of course, Kelly didn’t really say anything: she exposed her raw emotions out and came close to embarrassing herself.

Listening to Kelly rant about being judgmental one is reminded of a remark Neo Neocon made the other day, with which we concur:

And one of my pet peeves is this reluctance to “judge” anyone. We judge people all the time. And if we don’t, have we no opinions and no standards of behavior? 

Kelly’s feminist enablers have been happy to use to occasion to spew their own contempt for men.

The Economist writes:

What's natural to men is not a "dominant" economic role within the modern, nuclear family unit, but a habit of posturing—often wastefully, often pathetically—meant to secure social status and impress women.

It feels churlish to have to point it out, but men are in very large part stronger and more aggressive than women. You might have a mountain of data that pretends to show that it’s all just a social construct, but no laws specifically protect men from violence perpetrated by women.

A pregnant Megyn Kelly can happily mouth off about men. She can posture at being strong and defiant and defensive because she is a pregnant woman. Real men do not assault women. They protect them. Real men most definitely protect pregnant women.

There are scientific reasons for this. You do not need me to explain them to you.

Let’s point out to the feminists out there, when you are physically weaker than someone else, it is generally a bad idea to taunt him, to trash his character and to make him feel worthless and useless.

Be that as it may, feminists were out there cheering for the studies that showed 40% of American households with female breadwinners. This tells us more about the feminist contempt for traditional male roles than it does about what is going on in America.

In truth… in point of fact, the 40% number is extremely misleading. Nearly half of households with female breadwinners are headed by single mothers who live close to poverty.

Mona Charen points out that:

… the number of women out-earning their husbands was actually just 22.5 percent of married couples with children under the age of 18. The 40 percent figure includes single-parent households in which the mom is not the primary but the sole earner.

Charen offers up another set of facts, about the social consequences of being brought up in a broken home:

Only a tiny minority of children from intact homes are going to get into trouble with the law, experience poverty, get pregnant as teenagers, commit suicide, acquire a drug addiction, perform poorly in school, or wind up on public assistance. All of those troubles, and more, will be statistically much more likely for kids who grow up in single-parent homes.

For quite some time now, segments of American society have been trying out this female-breadwinner single-parent model. How has that been working out?

Apparently, not very well. In America’s inner cities the men who have been brought up by breadwinner mothers in fatherless homes do not grow up to become breadwinners. They grow up to join gangs, to commit crimes and to end up in jail.

Absent an effectual male role model young boys get into trouble. Perhaps this is desirable in feminist fantasyland, but it is bad news in reality.

I hope it is not too judgmental to point this out. A society that is judgmental about diet soda and cigarettes needs to be a bit more judgmental about sub-optimal living situations.

Most Americans know this very well. Feminist ideologues do not. Margaret Talbot offers her contempt the opinion of the American people:

What did seem anomalous were some of the attitudes revealed in the broader Pew analysis. About half of the people surveyed said that children were better off with mothers at home (only eight per cent said the same for fathers). Three out of four said that the increasing number of working mothers made it harder to bring up children and half said that it also made it harder for marriages to succeed. I asked Hanna Rosin what she thought of the apparent disconnect between how people live and how, in many cases, they say they wantto live (thirty-two per cent of the mothers surveyed said that their own preference would be to work full time, up from twenty per cent in 2007) or what they think might be better. Rosin’s view was that the attitudes were largely irrelevant: they were bound to change, she said, and they “reflected more a lingering attachment to a certain ideal”—the way we in America pay lip service to traditional family values—than “a measure of how we want to live and definitely not of how we do live.”

How about it: the notion of a male breadwinner represents “a lingering attachment to a certain ideal.” Huh? A situation that has pertained in most human cultures for most of human history is now “a certain ideal.”

Feminists are the ones who are clinging to an ideal. They refuse to accept reality and refuse to respect the opinions of the American people.

Because, after all, everyone with an ounce of reason knows that the current rise in female breadwinner households is not a step toward a bright future. It is an undesirable situation most often borne of economic necessity. If they had a free choice most women would rather not.