Boise State Prof/Claremont Fellow: cOlLeGe FoR bOyS OnLY, nO GIrLs aLlOWeD!

For America, you see.

A political science prof at Boise State University is creating all sorts of terrific publicity for the school, as per usual. Dr. Scott Yenor gave a real whiz-bang of a culture wars speech about the "personal and political evils that flow from feminism" at a "National Conservatism Conference" at the end of October. Somehow, Yenor's important contributions to American intellectual life didn't make news until excerpts of the speech began making the rounds on social media just before Thanksgiving.

Yenor did a fine job of sounding like the two-dimensional foil of a feminist consciousness-raising skit in 1973, right down to how proud he is of speaking up against those monstrous women who are destroying American families. When a TikTok video critiquing the speech went viral, Yenor didn't try to make excuses for being a sexist boor. Heck no! He tweeted a fresh link to his speech so more people could catch his key point, which is that

Our independent women are more medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome than women need to be. Without connections to eternity delivered through their family, such women gain their meaning through their seeming participation in the global project.

Yenor, you will be astonished to learn, is a fellow with the Claremont Institute's "Center for the American Way of Life," a think tank where all the thinkers consider Archie Bunker too damn mushy. And if "National Conservatism" sounds vaguely familiar, it should — Sen. Josh Hawley infamously delivered his own culture-wars rant against "cosmopolitan elites" at the group's 2019 event.

Yenor has some serious problems with feminism, because it's destroying the traditional family, and therefore destroying America. You don't have to watch the video if you don't wanna; we'll hit the low points for you.

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Yenor insists that American culture is "steeped with feminism," a claim that we're sure comes as a surprise to lots of women who deal with petty sexism all the time. And all that feminism is really bad, he says, because

It teaches young boys and girls that they are motivated by much the same things and want much the same things. Thus girls are told to become as independent as boys are said to be. Feminism's teaching of androgyny and individualism is a fundamental threat to strong, fruitful families.

Pretty weird to hear a Claremont Institute guy mad about "individualism," which we thought was pretty key to being a good capitalist. It's probably only a bad trait when it crops up in your lady types, who are then too headstrong to make good childbearing vessels. Indeed, he explains, women who are too independent-minded are probably the biggest roadblock to "national conservatism," so once again, we guess women will have to save America from these creeps.

Yenor goes on (and on) to decry women's "ethic of individual vanity in the service of fleeting beauty and middling feminine careerism," which stands in the way of an "ethic of self-sacrifice in the service of higher things" — which again, comes down to making babies for a bright conservative future, or perhaps the Fatherland. How else can women hope to have any meaningful "connections to eternity delivered through their family" besides passing on their virtuous American genes?

This is all very old, very tiresome shit. Too much sex, not enough family, and woe unto the nation that has all these awful independent women. Why yes, now it's time for the ritual attack on Hollywood and other culture-makers, for extolling women's independence as if it were good somehow, when in what Yenor considers "reality," those independent women merely end up in "midlevel bureaucratic jobs like human resource management, environmental protection, and marketing," instead of careers that really matter, like being a political science prof and giving speeches on behalf of a third-rate rightwing think tank.

This is where he delivers the lines he used in that tweet, about such women being "more medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome than women need to be" because the poor things have been sold a careerist lie by Big Feminism. After all, there certainly aren't any men slogging away in unfulfilling jobs as cogs in the corporate machine; they do their slogging all manly-like.

I wonder if Yenor is even aware that his real beef seems to be with corporate capitalism? Nahh, he's fine with that, as long as women are thinking about eternity, some kind of ecstasy got a hold on them — as they fulfill their baby-making destiny.

All this is bad for men too, because if women put off childbearing, or heaven forbid, choose not to make babies at all, then men miss out on their prime directive, which is to be a provider and guardian of their women and children, and how dare these harlots deny men their "duty" like that!

I mean, sure, you can have some men who can fulfill their destiny by being married to the tall ships they sail, but not everyone can be the sailor in that song "Brandy" or we'd run out of conservative manly men. And how will boys and men even grow up to be great manly leaders if they don't have a sound upbringing by a stern remote father and a devoted, loving — but not smothering! — mommy?

Yenor also excoriates professional conservatives — the bad ones! — for enabling all this talk of independence and careerism in a quest for women's votes, or perhaps out of fear of "running afoul of the feminist overlords" who seem to have taken over our once-manly nation. Even "family values" is an empty, androgynous term that hasn't emphasized proper gender roles, leading to such horrible androgynous words as "parenthood," as if it barely matters which gender the parent is (somehow, he avoided the seemingly inevitable "73 genders" joke).

The solution, Yenor explains, is that we need to stop all this careerism, by encouraging most people to knock off all the college, since universities are just "indoctrination camps" and the "citadels of our gynecocracy."

Ideally, women will return to getting married early and having lots of babies, as is only proper. Yenor notes, a bit nostalgically, that in the good old days, "women used to have many children when the odds of dying in childbirth were actually very high," but now that's gotten very rare, but "our birth rates are at historic lows. This has to stop, if we are to be a great nation." We'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he wants more fruitfulness, not necessarily more women dying in childbirth. But maybe they should be willing to, for that precious link to eternity.

Ultimately, Yenor explains, "Young men must be respectable and responsible to inspire young women to be secure with feminine goals of homemaking and having children." And if we must have universities, they should at least respect the manliness of important jobs, which may be all of them:

Every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering, but rather to recruit and demand more of men who become engineers. Ditto for med school, and the law, and every trade.

Presumably in his beautiful future, there'll be no need for HR management, either. All those people do is tell men to stop harassing women, and if no women are in the workplace, then problem solved.

[ Idaho Statesman / Daily Beast ]

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