Performer Bette Midler, quoting one of John Lennon’s worst songs, tweeted Thursday night, “‘Women are the n-word of the world.’ Raped, beaten, enslaved, married off, worked like dumb animals; denied education and inheritance; enduring the pain and danger of childbirth and life IN SILENCE for THOUSANDS of years They are the most disrespected creatures on earth.” Midler, whose net worth is estimated at nearly a quarter of a billion dollars, is right that at least one woman has been denied an education.
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According to the Department of Justice, more men than women are raped each year, owing largely to the prevalence of sexual assault in prisons. Men are more likely to become victims of other violent crimes as well. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in the United States, before which women in fact were not enslaved at higher rates than men. In our free country, women may marry the spouse of their choosing, just like men, who coincidentally are “worked like dumb animals” enough to die thirteen times as often as women from fatal injuries in the workplace and three and a half times as often by suicide. As for education, women constitute the majority of students on campuses nationwide, according to the Department of Education, and they are as legally entitled as any man to inherit property. Until recently, Midler would have been correct in claiming that women exclusively endure the pain and danger of childbirth. These days, however, Progressives say otherwise, as Planned Parenthood insists, “Some men have a uterus.” Finally, one need look no further than Midler herself to refute the myth that women must endure suffering in silence.
So Midler deleted her tweet, but not for the inanity of her claims. Rather, Midler deleted her rant after fellow leftists complained about her use of the “n-word”—not the “n-word,” mind you, but the word “n-word”—for failing to acknowledge the alleged particular oppression of black women fifty years after the Civil Rights Movement. As recently as just a few years ago, divisive leftist politics contented itself with simple dichotomies: rich versus poor, race versus race, men versus women, straight versus gay. Today, the Left has adopted the craftier ideology of intersectionality, uniting all perceived grievance groups in a “matrix of oppression,” at the top of which sits the dreadest creature of all: the straight, white man who knows he is a man.
Yet modern America gives less reason than any other society in history to feel aggrieved. As the Heritage Foundation explained in 2011, the typical American living in poverty occupies an air-conditioned house or apartment, watches cable TV, and owns a car as well as multiple television sets and video players. On average, poor Americans enjoy more living spaces in their homes than non-poor Swedes, Germans, and Frenchmen. Americans enjoy equal protection under the law regardless of race, sex, and sexual preference, with the sole exception of “affirmative action” laws that discriminate especially against white males and, as recent lawsuits against Yale and Harvard demonstrate, Asians.
In fairness, how can we expect the Left to observe how the world works in practice when it spends so much time speculating as to how it works in theory? Bette Midler can’t be expected to check the statistics relevant to her bogus claims. She’s likely too busy counting her millions.