September 10, 1997

But sic transit gloria! Thelma and Louise freed themselves from an oppressive patriarchal society by driving their automobile off a cliff. Their double suicide proved they were liberated women because they made that death decision independently from male coercion!

G.I. Jane (Demi Moore) proves she is a liberated woman by getting herself beaten to a bloody pulp, almost raped, and subjected to extreme bodily harassment. To the feminists, this is okay because her goal is to be treated just like men.

This is the kind of equality the feminist movement has always sought (and why they remain a ridiculous subset of the left wing of the Democratic Party, far outside of the mainstream). The feminists' legal oracle in the years before Ruth Bader Ginsburg emerged, Yale Law School Professor Thomas I. Emerson, described the goal of gender equality in the Yale Law Journal (April 1971): "As between brutalizing our young men and brutalizing our young women, there is little to choose."

"G.I. Jane" is a movie with a message, so it's not real entertainment. It's a psychological lesson designed to abolish the stereotype that men and women are different, and to make Americans believe the myth that women can perform in combat just like men, even in the toughest branch of the services, the Navy Seals.

The movie really doesn't help the feminist cause because the villain is a loud-mouthed Texas female Senator, whose sport is to humiliate military officers for not fully integrating women into combat jobs. In order to keep her Senate seat, she spikes G.I. Jane's career in the Seals by falsely accusing her of lesbianism. So much for sisterhood among the feminists!

G.I. Jane proves that women can take a beating as well as a man, but so what? The movie shows that she lacks the upper body strength to pull herself out of the water into a boat, a rather elementary test for anyone seeking to be a Navy Seal.

We could talk about how dishonest the movie is in pretending that G.I. Jane could do everything the Seals do. She couldn't; that's a Hollywood fiction created with tricky photography, make-up, and a stand-in for the star.

We could argue about whether a woman can do as many pull-ups as a man (she can't), or use the same gutter language as men (she can, and G.I. Jane did). We could talk about what nonsense it is that a young man talks to a young woman in the shower and doesn't notice she's nude.

We could talk about the gender-norming (i.e., scoring females higher than males for the same performance), and about how officers tolerate sassing from their subordinates if they are female (like G.I. Jane). We could talk about how the military lie about all of the above, pretending to the public and to Congress that women are performing equally with men.

But more important than all that is what the feminists are doing to America and to the relationship of men and women.

The release of "G.I. Jane" coincided with the entry of women into Virginia Military Institute (VMI) and the Citadel. On the slow news days of the last week of August, the viewing audience was treated to many pictures of these turn-in-the-road events ordered by the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Supreme Court.

On television, it was hard to tell the girls from the boys in the VMI "rat line." The girls had their heads shaved, and the VMI upperclassmen started their verbal and physical abuse of the now-genderless "rats."

When G.I. Jane is being beaten and almost raped in the movie, we can see the horror in the faces of the Seals who watch, and their contempt for the Master Chief who performs this exercise. They joined the Navy to become real men, and now they are being trained to be passive while watching a woman beaten and raped!

It's called sensitivity training to desensitize men about the abuse and mistreatment of women. Such courses are now part of U.S. military training.

Will VMI and Citadel cadets now be given sensitivity training so they will get used to abusing women in the rat line? VMI's superintendent pledged equal treatment to all "rats" because now "VMI does not care if you are female or male."

Training civilized young men to suppress their inclinations to be protective and courteous toward women is not merely wrong and stupid, it is evil and wicked. We have no respect for the men who participate in the evil of programming men to treat women as though they are men.

Civilization is on the chopping bloc. The feminists have not given us progress for women; they are turning men into the stereotype of the caveman who drags his woman by her hair.

When the Promise Keepers gather in Washington in October, we hope they will lead us on the long road back from feminist madness.