"Top 10 Feminist Fiascoes of 2014"

2014 was not a very good year for feminism.

Despite its considerable power and influence in the media and in the educational system, feminism has squandered a considerable amount of its good will by leaping before thinking.

Allowing themselves to be driven by a primal ideological zeal, feminists often embraced the wrong people and the wrong causes. Someone should have told them to make better use of their minds.

The result: the feminist brand has been damaged. Let’s say that it is down but not out.

Schadenfreude, anyone.

For our edification and to enhance the joy of the season Charlotte Allen has compiled the Top 10 Feminist Fiascoes of the year.

One is slightly surprised to see the list in the mainstream Los Angeles Times, but that’s not a reason to complain.

Many of these have been covered on this blog, for which I happily give myself credit.

I will not list them all, but just a sampling to whet your appetite. Allen’s column deserves to be read and savored in full.

Leading the list is Jackie, the authoress of the UVA rape hoax.

Allen explains the story:

Rolling Stone’s 9,000-word feat of “investigative reporting” smelled worse than a bucketful of day-old chicken heads from the day it was published on Nov. 19. A three-hour serial sexual assault atop a pile of glass shards as a fraternity-initiation ritual? Really? Yet many feminist (but fortunately not all) in America bought into this over-the-top tale because … it’s a feminist axiom that no woman ever lies about rape. Over at #Istandwithjackie, they’re stillstanding with alleged victim Jackie even though her story has been chopped into glass-shard-size pieces by real reporters doing their jobs.

Then, there was the great feminist heroine, Texas state senator Wendy Davis, who famously filibustered abortion restrictions.

Davis became the Democratic candidate for governor of Texas ... and lost by 20 percentage points.

Last, for this post, was the horror that occurred at Rotherham, England.  There, a real rape culture existed. It was perpetrated by Muslim men on young British girls, with impunity. It was ignored by the authorities, but also by feminists.

Allen explains it:

Now there was a real rape culture: nearly two decades of sexual assault, exploitation, and trafficking of teenage girls, mostly by British-Pakistani men, that had been covered up by British authorities for fear of stirring up anti-Islamic sentiment. The response of U.S. feminists was mostly crickets chirping. Why? Perhaps because the perpetrators weren’t the white middle-class men who are feminists’ preferred villains.

If I recall, I called this a modern form of human sacrifice, performed in order to assert that one was free of the taint of Islamophobia.