Romney’s gender pandering

Unlike National Review readers, I find no justification for Romney’s craven exploitation of delusional feminist tropes against Obama.  The Republican National Committee is parroting the absurd charge that the Obama White House is a “hostile environment” for females, for example. 

What’s next — an RNC Title IX lawsuit against Ohio State University for its football program? Sensitivity training for Army drill sergeants? (Oh, wait, we’ve already got those.) Assigned readings for Republican precinct captains from In a Different Voice? The chance that the Obama White House, staffed by eager products of the feminist university, is a hostile workplace for women is exactly zero — as low as the chance that the Bush I, II, or Reagan White Houses were hostile to women. Any Republican who actually believes [former White House staffer Anita] Dunn’s charge has merely allowed his partisan desire for political victory to silence what should be his core knowledge about the contemporary world.

The entire conceit that any elite workplace could be seriously hostile to females should be retired, not bolstered as the Romney campaign is doing.  You can’t feed the female victimology addiction just once and think that you haven’t strengthened it permanently.

  The Romney campaign’s weird claims about a female-hostile Obama economic policy are just as destructive. 

What would it mean for economic policy to pay attention to “gender,” as the Romney campaign apparently thinks it should? Women are undoubtedly overrepresented in government jobs and government-funded jobs . . . . Does that mean that Republicans shouldn’t cut big government? The Keystone Pipeline and other projects dear to the “drill, baby, drill” campaign will undoubtedly benefit male workers more than women. Should we therefore suspend domestic energy production until we figure out a way to shoehorn more women onto drilling rigs? And if the most certain way to make sure that women benefit more from the economic recovery would be to expand government hiring, should Republicans do so?

Every time that someone in the public sphere repeats the preposterous claim that females face serious discrimination today, he strengthens the falsehood and makes it harder to dislodge.   I understand that politics is ruthless and unprincipled.  But it is unbelievably short-sighted for Republicans to validate hoary feminist conceits, because those conceits will only be thrown back at them with all the greater force once they are on the receiving end of criticism.   It would be just as short-sighted to criticise the Obama cabinet, for example, for not being sufficiently “diverse” (and undoubtedly, some Republican operative has made or will make such a charge).   Doing so only lodges the expectations for racial quotas all the more intractably into the political psyche.