Ep. 101 - Why Serena Williams' Tantrum Has Nothing To Do With "Women's Rights"
Serena Williams had a hysterical temper tantrum and then claimed that she was "fighting for women's rights." The idea of "rights" -- especially women's rights -- has been so degraded in our society that now a wealthy athlete can pretend she's fighting for rights as she smashes her tennis racket and screams at an umpire. Let's talk about what "rights" really are, and why we need to stop cheapening them.
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You know, the one very strange thing that I've been thinking about on the 17th anniversary of 9-11, as a parent of young children, the thing that comes to mind is that my kids will grow up seeing 9-11 as this kind of Event from the ancient past, right? Something from which they are detached.
Kind of like how I saw when I was a kid growing up.
I remember when I learned about the Vietnam War or the Cold War, the JFK assassination.
When I was a kid, all of those events were relatively recent to me.
They happened not long before my birth.
And my parents remembered them and told me about them.
But still, it just felt like something ancient.
And that's how things that happened before you were born, I guess, always feel.
At least in modern society, that's how they feel.
I think maybe back in the old days, people felt more connected to the past, even the past, the things that happened before they were born.
Yeah. But in this modern day and age when news moves so quickly and, I don't know, we're just so immersed in things that are happening around us.
We're so immersed kind of in the present and we have all this information coming at us all the time.
We're so aware of everything that's happening in the world.
So it makes it harder for us to feel connected to the past.
And so that's how, it's kind of strange that that's the perspective that my kids will have of 9-11.
Because it was an event that was probably the defining event for my generation.
I remember I was a freshman in high school when 9-11 happened, and everything changed after that.
In fact, it's very sad. I was also thinking about this the other day.
For me and my generation, I was thinking, like, what are the three defining events for my generation?
People who are in their late 20s, early 30s right now.
I'm talking about national events, not personal events.
And so for me, those three events very easily, very clearly would be...
First, there was Columbine, which happened when I was in middle school.
And we're sadly so used to school shootings now, but when that happened, it was...
Or at least it felt unprecedented.
And it just changed school.
It changed from then on out.
School just felt different.
And there was this feeling of unease and danger that you had in school that never really went away after that.
And then 9-11, which, like I said, happened.
I think I was in 9th or 10th grade when that happened.
And then for me, the last thing, being as I grew up in Maryland, the last defining event was the D.C. Sniper.
Which I guess if you were in other parts of the country, that was more just like a news item.
But around where I lived, it was a very terrifying time for a couple of weeks, where you legitimately thought that you might get shot when you're walking to the bus stop or when you come out of your house, because that's what was happening.
And so I was thinking about how much fear, anxiety, suspicion, All of those things, those defining events infused, not just into me personally, but into everyone who was growing up around that time.
So it's kind of sad that I think every generation has tragic events that are defining for them.
But I also think that some generations have also great, you know, tremendous, spectacular events that are also defining.
Think about the moon landing, you know, for my grandparents' generation.
But so far, I don't know if we really have anything like that.
At least for me growing up, all the big news events, the defining ones, throw the Iraq war in there as well.
I mean, they were all terrible things, right?
So, in that sense, I'm glad that it happened long before my kids were born, because I don't really want something like that to be a defining event for them.
But in another sense, considering 9-11 was a defining national event, I don't want my kids to feel completely disconnected from it either, though inevitably they will.
All right. Now, switching gears to a much, much less important story.
There's been a lot of discussion about Serena Williams at the US Open.
I'm sure you've heard by now, Williams was docked by the umpire for having a bit of a temper tantrum, smashing her racket, verbally abusing the umpire, and so on.
She lost the match, but her hysterics successfully distracted from the fact that she lost and overshadowed the woman who beat her, which is very selfish on her part.
And later on, she claimed that she was I'm here fighting for women's rights and for women's equality and for all kinds of stuff.
That's what I want to focus on.
I'm going to go back to that. But I'll give you the whole quote.
She says, for me to say thief, because she called him a thief, I guess, and for him to take a game, it made me feel like it was a sexist remark.
He's never taken a game from a man because they said thief.
She also said, I just feel like the fact that I have to go through this is just an example for the next person that has emotions and that want to express themselves and want to be a strong woman.
They're going to be allowed to do that because of today.
Maybe it didn't work out for me, but it's going to work out for the next person.
Now, so very courageous.
She's a pioneer setting the stage for other women by having this meltdown.
Now, there are a few things here.
First of all, notice how she conflates her temper tantrum with strength.
And I think this happens way too often in our society.
She says that this makes her a strong woman.
She's being a strong woman by losing her cool and flipping out.
You know, a man would actually never get away with that.
If a male athlete threw a fit at a ref, which that happens all the time, right?
I mean, I don't watch tennis.
I do watch football. And you see football players all the time, you know, getting angry at the ref, shouting, coaches do it.
Okay, so that does happen. Serena Williams is not alone in that.
But... Here's what you would never see, and a male athlete would never get away with this.
After the game, during the press conference, he couldn't say, you know what, I was just being a strong man, okay?
I was being strong. You know, that's what that, I was in the rest face cussing him out.
I'm just being a strong man.
And you know what? I'm setting the stage.
I'm a pioneer for other strong men so that they know that they can express their emotions too.
No, a man would never, he'd be laughed out of the room if he said that.
As well, he should be. And as well, Serena Williams should be too, because it is a laughable, ridiculous thing to say.
Second thing to take from this, there's this whole meme about how Women aren't allowed to get emotional.
They aren't allowed to lose their cool.
But men are. You know, that's what we're hearing.
We're told that men are never criticized for having tantrums themselves.
And in the tennis world, I've heard a lot of people argue that, well, John McEnroe used to be verbally abusive all the time.
And he would flip out and he would scream and shout and everything.
And he never got in trouble for it.
He was never criticized for it.
I've actually heard it's such an exceedingly stupid argument that it's almost unbelievable.
McEnroe was criticized all the time.
He got in trouble all the time for his temper.
I don't even follow tennis at all.
But McEnroe is one of the only tennis players I know precisely because of his bad attitude.
He's one of the only ones I know.
And the fact that he had a bad attitude is the only thing I know about him.
It was the thing that defined his career for people like myself who don't follow tennis.
So, in fact, no, it's Serena Williams who gets the kid glove treatment.
She's the one who's defended.
I don't think anyone ever defended...
Were people coming out defending John McEnroe when he acted inappropriately?
Did anyone ever come out claiming that he was a hero fighting for rights and so forth?
No, no one does that for men when they act like jerks.
That's the point, okay?
I'm going to try to put this as nicely as I can, but it's when a man acts like a jerk, nobody is hesitant to call him a jerk.
And that's it. We just say, well, that guy's acting like a jerk.
But if a woman acts like a jerk, well, there are some people who will call her a jerk, but then there's this whole other group of people who will come out and celebrate her for it.
So I don't think the jerky behavior of men is really celebrated very often.
I think it's almost always condemned, but no one has a problem condemning it.
But with women, the number of people who will condemn jerky behavior is, I think, that number is smaller.
Because there are those who will not only tolerate it, but will actually outright defend it and justify it.
But third, and this is the biggest point I wanted to focus on here, and just using this as an example, okay?
Because you have Serena Williams and her claim that she's fighting for women's rights.
What was the exact quote?
She's fighting for women's rights, women's equality, and all that stuff, or something like that, and other stuff, too, you know?
So we see here again...
And I don't want to keep picking on Serena Williams, so just using that as a setup here to get to one of my favorite things to complain about, which is how we have taken this concept of rights and we have so cheapened it and turned it into such a shallow and ridiculous thing in American culture.
And that is particularly the case with women's rights.
So we see here again how women's rights has become a meaningless phrase in modern American society.
Used by feminists to reinforce this idea of this fantasy of patriarchal oppression.
And that's how it goes pretty much any time the left puts a qualifier in front of the word rights.
That's how it goes.
You know that it's going to be something shallow and petty and superficial the moment they put a qualifier in front of rights.
But I think of all the fake rights crusades that are going on in America right now, none have become more absurd or more frivolous than this idea of women's rights.
Whenever someone in America says that they're fighting for women's rights, It seems like it's always something dumb, like with Serena Williams, she's fighting for women's rights by shouting at the umpire in a tennis match.
It's just a perfect example of what women's rights have become in America, that Serena Williams is fighting for them by shouting at an umpire in a tennis match.
It just seems like they're always, when this idea of women's rights comes up, the person who's talking about it, they're always referring to something silly like that because there isn't any serious women's rights battle left to be fought in America.
Women have all of the same rights as men.
That fight is over.
And thankfully, women won.
Women were fighting legitimately for rights and For a long time, they won.
They succeeded.
It's over now.
Great. That's good.
And so we should just move on.
History should just move on to other and more real battles, but feminists have not allowed that to happen.
And now, in fact, we must say that women not only have all the same rights as men, but they even have some rights that men don't have.
So if there's any legal inequality going on in America, it is definitely going on in the other direction.
For instance, women are the only ones who have the legal right to kill children, okay?
Now, through abortion, of course.
That's not a right that I want, or that I think men should have, or that I think anyone should have.
But it is nonetheless a legal right, a very powerful legal right, That only women wield.
Women are empowered to be judge, jury and executioner over human lives.
Men do not have that legal right.
I mean, you could point all you want to, there are a lot of violent men out there who do terrible things, and that's true.
And feminists like to point that out in an effort to prove that women are, you know, second-class citizens in America or treated that way anyway.
But in those cases, you know, when a man does something violent, when he kills somebody, it's illegal.
He's going to go to prison for that.
And there are quite a lot of men in prison for doing violent things.
And you could say, well, we need to do a better job of prosecuting violent men.
Fine, I'll agree with you there.
But the fact is, men do not have the right, they don't have the legal right to violently victimize anyone.
And if they do violently victimize someone and they don't go to jail for it, it's because they were able to successfully argue that they never did that thing.
But if it's found out that they did do it, they're going to go to jail.
Now contrast that with something like abortion, where women have the legal right to kill a human being, a defenseless innocent human being.
Men do not have that right. I cannot think of any example of something that men are allowed to do legally that women are not allowed to do legally.
I can't think of any example.
I mean, the only thing you had left was, you know, like in the military, fighting on the front lines, but all that's changing now too.
So if there are any legal inequalities, it seems to go the other direction.
And we could also look at the fact that women get lighter sentences for the same crimes in federal court.
There are fewer women in prison.
There are fewer women homeless.
There are fewer women who are murder victims.
There are fewer female dropouts in high school and on and on and on.
So the idea that women's rights must still be established in America and that we need people like Serena Williams to fight for them is plainly absurd.
Now, here's the thing.
I'm not saying that men's rights need to be established either.
My point is, we need to stop qualifying rights.
So stop talking about women's rights.
Don't talk about men's rights, because that's just as bad.
Now you've got the men's rights activists on the other side who are trying to respond to the feminists.
And so they're becoming the antithesis of feminists.
They're becoming the feminists for the other side, which is no good either.
Because that entire way of looking at things is wrong and flawed.
We need to stop trying to divide people up into groups and give them their own special rights.
Because the whole idea is that all people are supposed to have the same rights.
Human rights, that's the concept here.
We shouldn't be dividing it down and all that, you know, and divvying it up and separating and distinguishing.
No, everyone has the same rights.
That's the idea that our founding fathers had.
Now, there was a glaring oversight for the Founding Fathers because they said that all people have the same rights and people are created equal, except they excluded racial minorities and women from that group.
So, it was very necessary for us to go back and correct that and make sure that we include racial minorities and women in that group.
And so that's been done, thankfully.
And so that's it.
That's all we should do as far as that goes.
As far as rights go, that's it.
What we needed to do was correct the mistakes of the past and make sure that everyone in America really does have equal legal rights.
And once that was done, as far as rights go, that should be the end of the discussion.
And now you just let people go and live with that freedom.
And, you know, how they choose to use those freedoms and the outcome of them using those freedoms, that's an entirely different discussion.
And that's not going to be the same.
It's not going to be equal. But as long as everyone is allowed to do legally the same sorts of things, and legally they have the same opportunities open to them, then we can say that the fight for rights is over.
Now, there are other human rights fights in America that still need to be had.
The one that I referenced earlier, for instance, there is still a group of human beings who are categorically excluded from the idea of human rights, and those would be unborn children.
So that's a fight that still needs to be had.
We still, after all this time, still have not reached a point where everyone in America is included in Under the concept of human rights.
Which is a very, you know, it's very sad when you think about it.
We had the founding of America, and supposedly everyone had equal rights, but of course racial minorities and women were excluded.
And then there was this battle for over a century, a century and a half, to make sure everyone really was included.
And so we had just kind of established that, and then almost immediately you have Roe v.
Wade, and now we're excluding a whole other group of people.
We almost got to the point where we had it right, and everyone really had equal rights, and then we ruined it.
So that's still a fight that needs to be had.
Now, I think, so you have the concept of rights, which again, that's just, as long as we all have the same legal opportunities, and nobody is legally excluded, From, you know, doing certain things or being treated a certain way, then you have rights.
So there's no reason to talk about women's rights unless we're talking about unborn females who, you know, across the world anyway, are disproportionately affected by abortion.
You have sex-selective abortion, everything else.
But aside from that, we could put the rights discussion to the side, but we still could have a discussion and should have a discussion About ways that our culture particularly degrades women.
Now, that isn't that our culture removes rights from them.
These are not women's rights issues, but they are human issues.
And they are issues that seem to especially impact females.
You know, for example, you have the porn industry, pornography, which primarily trades in the debasement and objectification of women and children.
For another example, you have the fact that femininity in our culture is constantly cheapened by this concept of transgenderism, who insist that they can become women by mutilating themselves or putting on a dress or something like that.
So again, the idea of womanhood has been cheapened and objectified and appropriated by men.
So that's an issue of women being degraded and debased in our culture.
And then for another example, to go back to it another time, women are victimized by the abortion industry.
And not just because girls are often targeted for sex-selective abortion, but because women are lied to and taken advantage of and told to, convinced, coerced into denying the gift of motherhood, rejecting the life in their womb, and embracing this life of regret and emptiness and guilt.
So pornography, transgenderism, abortion, these are very real enemies of women in our culture.
Because they defile women, they objectify, they cheapen, they degrade, they kill.
But you'll notice that feminists, with very rare exceptions, when they talk about women's rights, they're not referring to any of those things.
They usually support all of those things.
Those are the real battlefields.
The real battles that need to be fought, they're on the wrong side of those.
Where women are actually being victimized, they're usually in favor of all that.
But then they're going to go and rally behind Serena Williams because she got in trouble with an umpire in tennis.
So, pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the state of feminism in modern America.
All right. I'm gonna leave it there.
Thanks for watching, everybody. Thanks for listening.
And remember to say a prayer for our country on this anniversary of 9-11.
