Penna Dexter

There’s a particularly nasty battle tactic being deployed in the gender wars. Women are blaming good men, as a group, for the sins of bad actors. A recent op-ed in the Washington Post provides a disturbing example of this.

Victoria Bissell Brown, a retired history professor from Grinnell College in Pennsylvania, wrote her piece in a tone that suggests she’s speaking on behalf of all women.

Its title is: “Thanks for not raping us, all you ‘good men.’ But it’s not enough.” She describes an episode the previous evening when she yelled — even screamed — at her husband for 30 minutes after he made what she called a “small, thoughtless, dismissive, annoyed, patronizing comment.” She piled blame upon him for what she describes as “the torrent of memories every woman has,” not only of sexual abuse but of being “dismissed, disdained, and mistrusted.” Of being mocked and “laughed at” as Christine Blasey Ford believes she was.

On top of that, Professor Bissell Brown announced: “I hate ‘all men’ and wish all men were dead.”

Her husband sat there and listened. He’s a “good man,” she writes.  But that he listens is not good enough. She writes of her rage that has risen because, “In the centuries of feminist movements that have washed up and away, good men have not once organized their own mass movement to changethemselves and their sons or to attack…. the male culture.”

Yes, they have, writes commentator Ben Shapiro. Western civilization, religious education, law enforcement, and marriage are institutions that restrict men and protect women.

The Left seeks to tear down these institutions. It is succeeding in destroying them. We are losing the Christian consensus that once helped us recognize and deal with one another’s sin nature. Tribal identity groups blame one another for real and perceived injustices.

Things are really bad when feminist identity politics seeps into what would otherwise be a good marriage.