Daily Caller columnist Mark Judge “didn’t want to write a standard review” of The Book of Jezebel: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Lady Things, the new book out from the editors of Jezebel. In this, he succeeded. Judge wrote that the book is angry and funny, but demands “a deeper analysis of feminist apoplexy” instead, “because the rage of the Jezebels is indicative of a serious cultural problem that is potentially fatal for the United States.” (Yes, a half-dozen exasperated bloggers, not our suicidally vengeful legislature, will destroy America.) His deep analysis? These women have serious daddy issues.
Here’s Judge:
Deep down, America is a very angry country because of missing, absent, and lousy fathers. The social science is clear and unambiguous about the devastation the loss of fathers causes in terms of drug abuse, promiscuity and loss of self-esteem among young people. […] More than twenty years ago the poet Robert Bly argued in his bestseller Iron John than the loss of fathers has caused a tremendously debilitating and long-lasting psychic wound in America, and that a lot of what passed for political activism was often an attack on absent fathers. […] Thus the malevolence towards “dead white males” and the liberal obsession with feelings and personal grievance. The bogus ‘war on women’ is really nothing but liberal women acting out against bad fathers.
I appreciate Judge’s attempt to blame feminism on the failures of men — even in the most retrograde, sexist manner possible. Personally, when I make a broad diagnosis of a group of people, I try to make it less easily disproven, and I try not to quote poets. But then, Judge is the same fellow who once wrote that he is allowed to be racist because one time his bike got stolen. Talk about obsession with personal grievance …
