News that I missed, courtesy of The Babylon Bee:
HELL — Feminist icon Gloria Steinem refused to allow Satan to hold the door open for her on the way into hell, in what many are calling her final act against the Patriarchy.
“No way,” Steinem said as the Devil attempted to hold the door open for her. “I don’t do that. I don’t submit to your male chauvinism. I won’t give you that power over me. Now step aside.”
Satan told friends he was a little taken aback by Steinem’s behavior.
“I typically hold the door for all our new female residents,” he said. “It’s just the way I am. It’s the way I was raised. I don’t know why she took offense. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
Steinem was later seen chastising the Prince of Darkness for his perceived sexism and told him that she’s a “powerful, independent woman who’s perfectly capable of opening the door” for herself.
“Get out of my way, pig,” she said. “Don’t you try to pull that old-fashioned garbage with me. I’m talking… are you listening?”
Go here to read the rest. Steinem aborted her only child in 1957, the year of my birth. She therefore missed out, assuming a normal lifespan for her child, in sharing that child’s life for 69 years, in addition to any children that child had and any kids any grandchildren had. She made a poor trade for the life she lived without them.
Actions have consequences.
Having been raised in a super liberal/leftist household, but with some semblance of chivalry, encountering older feminists who criticized me holding the door open for them was ultimately one of the watershed moments in my turn away from the leftist upbringing I had. This story from the Bee is uncomfortably close to reality.
I have never personally experienced it. All females I have held the door open for have smiled and thanked me. One of the advantages of rural and small town Midwestern nice.
Well, she may not have wanted Ol’ Horny to hold the door open, but she’s going to regret is smacking her butt on the way in!
Her sister (1926-2008) was married for 60 years, was a mother to six children, and built a business as well. (IIRC, she was involved in some aspect of the trade in gems). I don’t think any biographer will pursue this line of inquiry, but both Steinem and Betty Friedan had a capable and accomplished sibling who made them look like duffers.
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She produced some engaging magazine articles prior to 1970 and some bits of personal memoir at a later date. That was before her thinking lapsed into a stereotype. You would have to scrounge to find a satisfactory cause espoused by the founders of the National Organization for Women or Ms. magazine or much in the way of reflection on the human condition worth bothering about.
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Idiots on the television keep calling her a ‘trailblazer’, as if spinster magazine writers were a novelty in 1957.
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Compare her to some of her peers (among them contemporaries): Shana Alexander, Midge Decter, Joan Didion, Joan Beck, Erma Bombeck. How does she stack up?
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Other people are calling her a radical. She wasn’t a dissident in the manner of Dorothy Day (or, in an attenuated way, Julie Kelly in our own time). Her income had to have fluctuated a great deal during the period running from 1957 to 1971 (when the dough from speaking engagements began rolling in), but it sufficed so that she could afford apartments in Midtown Manhattan and travel abroad. She was never unwelcome in the world of New York magazine journalism and as a young woman was quite well connected (John Kenneth Galbraith, George McGovern, and Allard Lowenstein were all, ca. 1965, personal friends). She formulated the discontents of a particular bourgeois type; not the most appealing type.
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You’ll recall that Camille Paglia’s view was that her prominence ruined public discussion of certain issues; she likened Steinem to a cultural commissar.
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A close examination of Steinem’s actions and comments reveals and almost clinical concentration on her views of the relationship of men and women to accomplishment. Every time she tried to blend the talents and characters of each, she demonstrated the uniqueness of the genders. Probably one of the more effective voices at promoting differences without denigrating the fact that there are such differences even though that was probably not her intention.
92 years! to choose wisely.. and HE certainly gave her time too at the end..HE always does..
i hope in the end she chose well before eternity fixed her final choice.
the terror is certainly not Satan.. and not Even God – although we should fear HIM even imperfectly.. no the terror lies in our own will.. especially one given thousands of chances… but still.. malformed before that final choice. hopefully she did pass the test in the end.
Keep in mind, for every aborted baby is a father in pain. It’s not all sunshine and roses for the dads who never got a say in the destruction of their offspring. Quite the missed opportunity.
Gloria Steinem gave an interview to some TV writer named Brad Falchuk some months ago. The understanding between the two of them was that it would be broadcast after her death, carried on Netflix. Jane Goodall gave a similar interview last year. We saw it last night.
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The partisan Democrat in our house lost interest halfway through as, in her view, Steinem wasn’t saying anything interesting. (And later lamented that Steinem was one of those who made ‘feminism’ ‘alI about abortion’).
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I realize these interviews are not meant to be contentious and I wouldn’t expect the interviewer to cross-examine the subject a la Mike Wallace. Even so, Falchuk was at times an irritating lick-spittle.
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That aside, what he prompted from her was a recitation of her personal biography and public activities with bits and pieces of her personal philosophy included. (One topic he did not touch was where she stood with her sister’s children, the only proximate relations she had).
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Either because her age, her vintage, or elements of her abiding personality which do not come through in print, she had at the end an agreeable presence on the tube, more so when describing the more poignant episodes of her life. She doesn’t appear to have been bearing any grudges as she was heading out the door.