There are double standards everywhere, in politics, literature, news and in much else. But Brendan O’Neill has written a brilliant piece about feminist double standards which I hope does set off a much needed debate.
In his piece Mr O’Neill takes for his inspiration the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp case. He highlights how Ms Heard is being treated, as either a pure and unsullied victim who did not, as was alleged, drop her own turds into the marital bed, or a scheming monster manipulated and abused by her drug addled husband. Mr O’Neill points out that a large degree of the unthinking support for Ms Heard is coming from left wing or woke feminists.
Mr O’Neill said that the women who get public support from the woke feminist set are those like themselves. Support from woke feminists especially for those women who make allegations of abuse mostly appears to be directed at those complainants who support the left wing versions of feminism. If a woman makes a claim against a man and that woman is from the middle and upper class progressive milieu themselves then there will be cries of ‘believe women’. Other women n the other hand, women who don’t come near to the top of the ‘progressive victim stack’, they are ignored no matter how loudly or painfully they cry out about the abuse they’ve suffered. Mr O’Neill draws a very cogent and valid comparison between how the woke branch of feminism treats wealthy and powerful women who make allegations against men as paragons of virtue and how these woke feminists treat those women who ‘blaspheme’ wokism. Those women who don’t buy into the gender identity cult, lesbian women who feel bullied into being intimate with transwomen ie men, women who are at the bottom of the social and wealth scale and those women who have been assaulted by Muslim majority rape gangs, are at best ignored by the woke feminist establishment or at worst smeared and riduculed by it.
Mr O’Neill said:
The cry of our post-#MeToo era is ‘Believe women’. But over the past couple of years it has become painfully clear that this does not mean all women. ‘Belief’ is a luxury enjoyed by rich women and right-on women, but it is often denied to poor women and women who are ‘problematic’ in some way. Consider the extraordinary disparity between the media sympathy accorded to middle-class, Oxbridge-educated female journalists in the UK who say they were once clumsily hit on by aging Tory blokes and the media’s reluctance to focus for too long on the dire instances of rape and abuse suffered by working-class girls at the hands of grooming gangs made up of men from mostly Muslim-heritage backgrounds. The middle-class women, the ‘good’ ones, were believed instantly, and given prime-time space to tell their stories. The other women, the ‘questionable’ ones, were treated as a pesky menace to multiculturalism and essentially told to pipe down.
Spot on there. If a woman is rich and spouts the mantras of the establishment’s chosen narratives whether it be the ‘believe all women’ mantra of the Me Too movement or ‘trans women are women’, then the feminist establishment will back them to the hilt. The woke feminist establishment will back such people even if it is quite apparent that the chosen lauded victim in question is all too human and is not a saint. If a woman who is victimised is poor or victimised by one of the Progressive Left’s chosen groups or are pro-life or holds views that are tantamount to saying women don’t have penises, then these women are vilified by the wealthy well connected women’s activists who purport to stand for the rights of woman in general.
