Don’t Let Feminism Warp 9/11 - The American Spectator

Last night, 60 Minutes broadcast a moving story of firefighters in the World Trade Center 22 years ago. Scott Pelley carefully used that word, “firefighter,” throughout the elongated feature.

60 Minutes, choosing diversity when it clashes with truth, highlighted several female firefighters (both among the more eloquent talking heads, so one cannot really gainsay their inclusion) on the program. But 343 of 343 who perished were firemen. So, cannot we safely, in this one instance, drop the 21st-century gender-neutral term?

So warped by feminism are some that they see sexism not harming the men on 9/11 but shortchanging the women.

“In news coverage, where [firefighter Brenda] Berkman said she expected to see an ‘inspiring story of how all of New York had pulled together on 9/11 and afterward to try and save and help people,’ she found instead that women in that narrative were often ‘relegated to more traditional and stereotypical roles—as widows and nurses and volunteers,’” reads an article appearing seven years ago at NYU’S website. “There was little or no acknowledgement of the women like her, who as emergency responders were ‘doing exactly the same thing that the men were doing,’ Berkman says. She remembers receiving calls from perplexed female firefighters from all over the country who tuned in to the news from New York, where 2,000 NYPD and Port Authority police officers joined more than 214 FDNY units in the rescue, and immediately wondered: Where are the women? Through the gendered lens of history being written in real time, Berkman recalls, women didn’t get to be ‘the heroes of 9/11, who rushed there, who stayed there, who did their jobs even at risk to their own lives.’”

The flipside of this finds expression, among other places, in the Google search engine that autocompletes “men can” with “get pregnant.” Like the firemen, mothers provide a gift that one can never repay: life. They deserve honors, too, and men should not feel cheated at their exclusion from Mother’s Day or “Mom” tattoos or anything like that. The reasons to impose sameness upon difference that motivates such crimes against language stems less directly from feminism than a sort of political obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Some people simply must straighten every book on a shelf; others insist on blurring the differences between men and women.

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