Freedom Feminism

Mark Hemingway writes at Weekly Standard,

Lately, there’s a lot of talk among feminists about the need to keep women safe. The rape culture is allegedly inescapable, and trigger warnings are appended to college syllabi to protect sensitive souls from reminders of any past cause of pain, from “neuro-atypical shaming” to mention of “how much a person weighs.” But it turns out that if you dare to debunk feminist myths, you’re the one that really needs protection.
Christina Hoff Sommers speaks at Wagner College in New York, April 7, 2010. At

For years now, Christina Hoff Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism? and The War Against Boys, has been promoting what she calls, in the title of her latest book, Freedom Feminism. This view, she writes, “stands for the moral, social, and legal equality of the sexes,” but also for women’s freedom—including the freedom to embrace traditional femininity. “Efforts to obliterate gender roles can be just as intolerant as the efforts to maintain them,” she writes, and “theories of universal patriarchal oppression or the inherent evils of capitalism are not in [freedom feminism’s] founding tablets.” Above all, Sommers’s approach is moored in reality, not utopian notions of social justice.

At Sommers’s speech in April at Georgetown University, multiple undercover policemen were placed in the audience. At Oberlin, also in April, uniformed police officers never let her out of their sight and after her speech escorted her in a police car from the campus to a dinner. In May, she was the guest of honor at a Washington, D.C., meetup of “Gamergate” supporters—video gamers concerned about radical feminism’s influence in the video game industry (more on that later). In response, Salon and Daily Beast columnist Arthur Chu started a social media campaign to pressure the bar where the gamers were meeting to drop the event and sent emails to the venue accusing them of hosting a “right-wing hate group.” Despite the pressure, the owner of the bar, Local 16, emailed Sommers to tell her they “would never keep any group out. This is America.” A bomb threat soon followed, necessitating a heavy police presence and a tour of Local 16 by bomb-sniffing dogs.

...By being poised, persuasive, good-humored, and scrupulous with facts, Sommers is exploding unhelpful feminist stereotypes. It says a lot about contemporary feminism that precious few who claim the feminist label also embrace liberty and reject victimhood—and for that, they’re the ones who are getting bomb threats.

Read more here.