Everywhere you turn folks are "piling on,'' having their fun with Hillary's whining about the politics of "pile on" and "six men against one woman."  This reminded me of several encounters, real life and in the blogosphere, with women of the feminist persuasion.  At my alma mater, a bastion of all-female education (you never hear that do you?  a bastion of female education?), all knickers are in a twist as the powers-that-be try to think of ways to define the mission of educating women in an all female environment when, for all intents and purposes, there isn't any appreciable or substantive discrimination against women before the law or in society generally.  That's the problem with defining a mission as one of redress.  If the problem goes away, what are you left with?  Well, as we have seen with so many of the righteous causes that have been successfully addressed, there is always a group who has found its niche in the victimhood and so it behooves them to identify victimization when there ain't none.  At Mount Holyoke, this has been taken to absurd lengths as at least two students have undergone sex reassignment surgery and have graduated as males.  The justification for this was that they had been socialized as females and therefore understood what it was like to be female...that is, what it's like to be oppressed as a female, and so have to deal with the resultant psycho-social damage and should be educated at great expense in supportive, non-threatening environment.  And so the debate rages between dueling PC camps as to how much privilege should be extended to those who have forfeited their duel victim-citizenship (being a female in the US of A, and being transgendered in the US of A) by putting  a foot, and maybe another appendage, in the oppressor's camp.

 I was at a dinner a few weeks ago and got to sit next to the guest of honor, a famous female academic, a professor of Philosophy and Law.  She had given a talk about religious pluralism and its legal basis in American history.  Most of the talk was unexceptional, until a graduate student asked about the tension between religious observance and secular law.  The student gave the example of female circumcision.  Immediately, the good Doc of Phil defined this problem as raising a "sex equality issue."

Aside: Actually, the first couple of times she uttered this phrase, I thought that she was saying that this problem had a "sexy quality."  I could tell from the quizzical looks being exchanged that I wasn't the only one confused by this. 

This threw me for a loop, but I have to admire someone who is quick enough on her feet to define a problem on her terms.  She isn't a feminist at the forefront of feminism, per se, but she plays the gender card with alacrity, playing to her personal advantage in an indirect fashion.  Anyway, she went on at length in answer to this question, first saying that modifying one's body as in the case of a middle-aged woman getting liposuction was a right [I think it falls into some constitutional penumbra, but I'm not sure], and by the way, ISLAM DOESN'T CONDONE GENITAL MUTILATION [it's merely coincidental that the only societies that practice it are Muslim], but then you have the strange case of Catholic universities that are founded by certain orders that are exclusively male getting a BIG exception from federal anti-discrimination statutes with respect to the sexy quality issue because the presidents of said universities have to be members of those religious orders and so cannot be female [she didn't mention that they also couldn't be other religions, or even other ORDERS within the same religion, but who's counting?].  This came about because Roman Catholicism is a "majority'' religion [read, "the religion of the oppressor gender/race/culture."]  Female circumcision would probably not be treated with the same deferrence because it is a ritual of a non-Western, non-majority, religion.

It took her about 20 minutes to "answer" the question, and by the time she was done she had effectively equated Roman Catholics only allowing male Jesuits to be the president of Notre Dame with little girls being ritually mutilated with shards of glass.

Okeeeee-dokey.  Of course, it isn't a sex equality issue.  And if she is right, that it isn't even a religious issue, because the "religion" in question doesn't condone it [Muslims can depopulate their countries of Christians and Jews in two generations, but can't eradicate female circumcision even though it's forbidden by their religion...huh...] then it isn't even a matter of only men can be presidents of Notre Dame.  Just think, she could have answered the question in thirty seconds, thereby avoiding the catcalls of "Taze her, bro!"

Later, at dinner, she mentioned the fact that women were held to a different standard than men with respect to their behavior.  Her beef was that while male "geniuses" were coddled and indulged even when they were louts, women who were "weird" and abrasive were ostracized despite their genius.  She then cited an example of a scholar in Rhode Island who was weird and impolite and poorly socialized but a genius, but couldn't get any respect or a job because she was a woman.  If she were a man, her ickiness would be forgiven and she'd get a job, no problem.  For example, Honored Guest, says, look at Hillel's son-in-law.  He was a genius scholar but a jerk to one and all, yet his mother and wife catered to his every whim.

I kid you not.  This woman makes a sweeping generalization about the double standard for jerk geniuses, male and female, and takes as her example for the male side a Jewish scholar who lived in the Middle East almost 2,000 years ago.  And who was coddled by women.  No record of how men fawned over him.

What I took from this was that [a] Honored Guest wants to be the president of a Catholic university despite the fact that she is Jewish and female, [b] she's had liposuction, and [c] she wishes she could be an asshole like all of the male geniuses, but she knows she'd be out of a job.  And her mother always liked her brother best.

What got me was, like Hillary, this woman is at the peak of her chosen career.  She is widely respected, mostly by people I don't agree with but whatever, she is fielding offers for full professorships from Harvard and Brown, she gets paid thousands of dollars plus expenses to talk about any ol' thing that flies into her head and still she WHINES that female assholes don't have the same rosie employment prospects that male assholes do.  Or is it that female geniuses are punished for behaving badly and male geniuses aren't?  She WHINES that male Catholics of certain orders GET TO BE university presidents and she doesn't BECAUSE...SHE'S... A... WOMAN.  Who is a nice genius.  Who has had liposuction.

Ugh.