V-Day
The Feminist War Against Love
By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | February 9, 2001
URL: http://frontpagemag.com/horowitzsnotepad/2001/hn02-08-01.htm
WHEN JANE FONDA was thirteen years old, her mother went into the family
bathroom, closed the door, and slit her throat from ear to ear. Just
outside the door, she left a note for the maid that there was a mess
inside, and to please clean it up. That evening, Jane's father, Henry
Fonda, went on stage, as usual, to perform the role of Mr. Roberts in the
Broadway play in which he was starring. He never told his daughter her
mother had committed suicide. She was to learn about it three year's later
at summer camp in the pages of a movie fan magazine.
These biographical details are brought to mind by the "V-Day
Demonstrations," scheduled for 50 cities, over 200 college campuses and
Madison Square Garden, which Jane Fonda has bankrolled to the tune of $1
million. These are an effort by feminists across the country to transform
Valentine's Day, a millennia-old celebration of romance and friendship,
into a "Violence Against Women Day," an orgy of hatred against men. A
novelist could not have formed the metaphor of Jane's childhood trauma
more acutely: Valentine in Violence.
But even though Jane Fonda has provided the organizing funds, the event
itself is not merely an expression of personal distress. It is a social
movement, a gathering and statement of the forces of the political left.
The manifesto of the organizers "proclaims Valentine's Day as V-Day until
the violence stops. When all women live in safety, then it will be known
as Victory Over Violence Day."
Of course, the idea that some day all women will "live in safety" is a
utopian fantasy - the impossible dream of a kingdom of heaven on earth,
where the sick will be healed and the wounded made whole. How is this
world - the real world of flesh and blood human beings -- ever going to be
made safe for children like Jane? Or for any human being -- female or male
-- given what human beings are and what they have shown themselves to be
capable of since the beginning of time?
The messianic illusion that will energize the thousands of women who flock
to Jane's cause reflects the fact that the cause itself is not a political
movement, but a crypto-religion. A yearning for redemption without God,
but through their own political action. It is a substitute for a God who
could accomplish the miracle they yearn for, but who - for whatever reason
-- is absent in their hearts. The actress Glenn Close, who is adorning the
event, put it succinctly when she described the woman who actually came up
with the idea for V-Day this way: "She is giving us our souls back."
Like all political religions, it is also a religion of hate. In authentic
religions, God judges, God redeems and God forgives. In authentic
religions, we understand ourselves as sinners. No one mistakes himself or
herself as a redeemer. In political religions, human beings act as God,
judging and condemning, and there is no redemption. This is the bloody
history of the left - the saga of the guillotine and the gulag - which
continues now into the new millenium.
Which is why the left wants to take the one holiday a year dedicated to
the love human beings do manage to show for each other, and turn it into a
day when women can vent their rage against men. According to the
organizers of V-Day, "22% to 35% of women who visit emergency rooms are
there for injuries related to ongoing abuse." This makes the United
States, in their eyes, one of the most repressive and barbarous places on
earth for women. But as Christina Hoff Sommers notes (USA Today, 2/8/01)
the actual figure of abuse according to Bureau of Justice statistics is
one-half of one percent. Why the wild exaggeration? To foment hate against
the devil. As Sommers puts it: "The true numbers are apparently not high
enough for V-Day proponents. They are determined to implicate the average
American man in an ongoing social atrocity and to place the United States
on a moral par with countries that practice genital mutilation and bride
burnings."
Jane Fonda's life has been consumed with hatreds like this in the name of
love. She committed treason in Vietnam, indicting American soldiers over
Radio Hanoi as "war criminals," and abetting their torturers on a visit to
the infamous "Hanoi Hilton," which housed our prisoners of war. She said
at a college rally in Michigan once that "I would think that if you
understood what communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your
knees that we would someday become communist."
Jane's hatred for America and her love for Communism have been central
tenets of the leftist religion for nearly a century now. There are not
many leftists any longer who would defend the gulag itself as they once
did. Even Marxism has undergone revisions. In the old days, the
crypto-religion demonized "the ruling class." Now, a trinity of hate has
been added to the old formula of belief. It was prominent in the chants at
the Inauguration of a Republican President just this January: "George Bush
go away - racist, sexist, anti-gay." The same exaggeration, the same will
to believe in themselves as the Redeemers of us all.
The founder of V-Day is Eve Ensler, author of "The Vagina Monologues" a
cornucopia of hatred against men. Celebrities like Fonda and Close refer
to themselves as soldiers in "Eve's Army." How fitting. Eve, the mother of
us all, who was tempted by the Serpent to "become as God," and who instead
led our Fall from grace and into the vale of suffering and tears from
which the left promises to redeem us.
---- David Horowitz is editor-in-chief of FrontPageMagazine.com and president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Feb 10 2001 - 22:02:44 EST