Essays in Idleness

Readers of Canadian literature and history in college will all be aware that Stephen Leacock was an imperialist, racist, and deeply misogynist; for that’s the kind of “education” that is taught in universities these days.

I like to recommend, for starters, Leacock on “The Woman Question,” written while he was campaigning against the female franchise, and temperance, shortly after the Great War — while walking barefoot under a big straw hat with an open bottle of scotch, through downtown Orillia, daring the local constabulary to arrest him. He knew that he would lose this contest, and that the emancipated women would then vote to bring in the so-called “temperance movement,” to prevent the (overwhelmingly male) heroes coming home from battle, from having a drink. He wrote very effectively on the phenomenon of “the awful women,” then gaining influence, but you will have trouble finding it, for the awful women of today have had it banned.

The essay, incidentally, argues that women already have the “right” to practice almost every profession. The problem is that they can’t do it. Put them on one of the great skyscrapers then being built, and they will fall off, &c. It was an instructive and deeply amusing essay.

Helen Andrews (née Rittelmeyer) has recently improved the argument, making it more explanatory than my own observation that the women’s vote swung nearly every Canadian election in the last century. For instance, that is why we got the Trudeaux. Subtract the women’s vote, and we would hardly ever have been bothered by a Liberal government.

Mrs. Andrews’ thesis is not quite this, but that the feminization of our society is what has given rise, more recently, to “Wokism.” It is what happens when the “movers and shakers” in our society start thinking like women, or are actually replaced by women, whether by fashionable trend, or sex-change.

“Suicidal empathy” is what Gad Saad calls it. It also explains why Islam is taking over in the West.

But American polling shows that married men, and married women, and unmarried men, voted the same way, by fairly wide margins, for the Republicans in the last three elections. The problem is unmarried women, who voted more than two-thirds for whoever was running against Trump. Think it through, gentle reader. Mature, grown-up women are innocent of the charge that has been brought against them. It is only the unmarried women who are demonic, and whose vote needs to be taken away.