NOW, Emma Sulkowicz, And Modern Feminism

I have said elsewhere that combating the smaller voices in the culture war amounts to a losing proposition. So what are we to make of the National Organization of Women handing the vile narcissist Emma Sulkowicz its "Woman of Courage" award? This, apparently, was the same organization that wailed on Dean Nicole Eramo earlier this year for having the temerity to question the anonymous "Jackie's" hyperbolic story of gang rape that later unraveled under, you know, actual investigation. The politics of modern feminism, or at least in the dungheap that it has become, are about symbolism, perpetual victimhood, and a studied refusal to grapple with inconvenient yet glaringly obvious facts. In Sulkowicz' case, those facts would include damning (and seductive) texts after the alleged "rape" that make it clear she wanted a relationship with him (which he later rejected). What possible "courage" could attach to this award? Sticking to her idiotic and risibly false story despite having been found a fraud?

NOW's problems with the real world may stem from its age. Having lately turned 50, NOW opened shop in the age of sit-ins and complaint:

Betty Friedan, the Feminine Mystique author famous for leading the group, called for every woman to focus her work on what made her angry, recalls Muriel Fox, now 88, one of the group’s founders and its publicist.

“Everyone there knew that she wanted to work on what made her mad,” says Fox, now 88. “That’s the reason the movement was so successful. We had wonderful leaders, but we had thousands of people who all were leaders working on what made them angry about the situation at that time.”

Apparently, irrational rage is the only thing that matters anymore. NOW's irrelevance is, it seems likely, one genesis of the declining number of people willing to adopt the label "feminist". Whatever that label stands for, surely justice isn't part of it.