I am woman, hear me giggle and scree

The rise of the real modern day patriarchy comes not dressed as a Viking. It comes dressed as Elle Woods

“The Beauty of … Girlhood.” An Ulta Beauty podcast.

— Featuring two dudes in drag confidently explaining to us what authentic girlhood is. David Lopez and Dylan Mulvaney — the latter fresh off a sponsorship by Tampax, a keynote address at Forbes’ Power Women conference, and an audience with Joe Biden — together solve the mysteries of femaleness that not even Stephen Hawking could disentangle.

And all while sitting on their own squashed balls. Four of them.

Congrats! You’ve come a long way, baby!

To some of you, this whole theater of grotesqueries is a kind of “you do you” thing — to each his own, let your freak flag fly!, etc. And that’s because there’s a certain fillip of virtue one derives from not appearing overtly judgmental on contested cultural issues.

But we can and do discriminate all the time. Which is a good thing: just as not all opinions are equal, not all things are equal, and our epistemology is created and maintained by what we choose to distinguish and prioritize. We are all individuals, yes; but liberty is supposed to be ordered for a reason. So when non-judgmentalism first cedes ground to acceptance, then active affirmation, and finally the institutionalization of such affirmations at the point of the government gun, we’ve lost the plot of the social compact entirely. Just look to Canada to see how quickly and completely such surrender of language leads to a “benevolent authoritarianism.”

The fact is, the left is erasing women; and to those “feminists” who embraced the power dynamics of intersectionality — only to find their life’s work appropriated by men doing cutesy burlesque — that must seem like a brutal kick to their “Barbie pouches.”

These are modern day minstrel shows, but to protest them is to oppress the protected class of minstrels.

Here’s where we stand today: “race” — an actual social construct (in that it crudely approximates the more accurate and scientifically valid field of population genetics) — has been recast, once again, as an essentialist identity, in a way very familiar to, say, Woodrow Wilson and his KKK horseback swashbucklers; while “sex” — an actual category of biological essentialism — is treated as a spectrum, with individualist accounts of “gender” feelings ruled dispositive when it comes to defining men, women, anything in between, and even — increasingly — something outside the species.

Up is down.

Left is right.

Ken is Barbie.

This won’t end well for anyone. But for women, it may already be over.

Turns out a man needs a woman like a fish needs a bicycle — especially now that we know all it takes to make a woman is an affirming proclamation and a halter top.

Ironic, isn’t it?