Here we go again:
National Review, whose in-house editorial suggested Newtown was the price of the Second Amendment, published a piece on Wednesday from anti-feminist Charlotte Allen suggesting the reason the shooter was able to kill so many students was because Newtown was a “feminized setting:”
There was not a single adult male on the school premises when the shooting occurred. In this school of 450 students, a sizeable number of whom were undoubtedly 11- and 12-year-old boys (it was a K–6 school), all the personnel — the teachers, the principal, the assistant principal, the school psychologist, the “reading specialist” — were female* There didn’t even seem to be a male janitor to heave his bucket at Adam Lanza’s knees. Women and small children are sitting ducks for mass-murderers. The principal, Dawn Hochsprung, seemed to have performed bravely. According to reports, she activated the school’s public-address system and also lunged at Lanza, before he shot her to death. Some of the teachers managed to save all or some of their charges by rushing them into closets or bathrooms. But in general, a feminized setting is a setting in which helpless passivity is the norm. Male aggression can be a good thing, as in protecting the weak — but it has been forced out of the culture of elementary schools and the education schools that train their personnel. Think of what Sandy Hook might have been like if a couple of male teachers who had played high-school football, or even some of the huskier 12-year-old boys, had converged on Lanza.
Charlotte Allen hates women. That's not an overstatement. She was the author of the famous Washington Post column which tells us that we women are dim and we shriek. She wrote a column about women dressing as whores and sluts for Halloween, and she wrote a column summarizing all the most misogynistic ideas about women and sex.
So she hates women. Lots of people do, in fact, but most of them don't get column space in the National Review.
In a sense, correcting Allen's misogynistic arguments makes no sense. But it's worth noting that there was an adult male on promises and that was the shooter. It's also worth noting that not only the principal but several of the teachers acted extremely bravely and some sacrificed their lives for the children. And it's worth noting that if we took seriously her argument that feminized settings have the norm of helpless passivity (what an asshat she is!), then masculinized settings have the norm for random violence. Both stories have about the same truth value, in my view.
Allen admits the bravery of the principal and the teachers but then simply ignores it, in favor of various imaginary scenarios of what husky 12-year-old-boys might have achieved or how high school football training would have turned a couple of male teacher into a force that could have stopped a shooter with more than one weapon, including a semiautomatic one.
And don't you love this bit?
Male aggression can be a good thing, as in protecting the weak — but it has been forced out of the culture of elementary schools and the education schools that train their personnel.
My brain just exploded all over the desk, given the actual events she pretends to write about. In any case, the teaching of small children has probably always been a female-dominated occupation, not something that anyone has forced on the schools. If anything, elementary schools would love to have more men among the teachers, though not for the reason that they can be sacrificed as battering rams in the case of massacres.
Poor Ms. Allen. How does she cope with that humongous self-loathing she demonstrates? See how my feminine empathy reared its ugly snake head there?
Back to righteous anger: Note that the women teaching small children are performing one of the few legitimate roles extreme anti-feminists allow women to have in the labor markets. But even that doesn't protect them from the misogynistic knitting needles of one Charlotte Allen.
The real question is, of course, why The National Review finds Allen's thoughts worth publishing. The only possible answer is that they are continuing the war on women, on all fronts.
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*Added later. This link argues that she also makes five factual errors in the first two sentences.