When pieties collide: Feminism versus multiculturalism in western Europe

The most dazzling eruption of moral blindness came from a British feminist currently on a fellowship at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The political and press silence after the New Year’s attacks was a product of Western sexism and indifference to rape, alleged Laurie Penny in The New Statesman. This was, of course, preposterous. Had thousands of white males committed the attacks, a worldwide furor would have immediately broken out. The effort to look the other way was patently the result of cringing political correctness. But Penny was equally critical of the “right-wing press” for condemning the mass violence, since it only did so out of “unbridled racism.” “It’d be great if we could take rape, sexual assault and structural misogyny as seriously every day as we do when migrants and Muslims are involved as perpetrators,” she wrote. Penny did not provide any examples of daily mass sexual assaults committed by Westerners. Then, in a paroxysm of hysteria induced by the conflicting pressures of feminism and multicultural relativism, Penny accused those “right-wing” critics of not just racism but sexual perversion: “I’ll be blunt. I think some people out there are very excited by their conception of ΩIslamic≈ violence against women. It allows them to enjoy the spectacle of women being brutalized and savaged whilst convincing themselves that it’s only foreign, savage men who do these things.” This is lunatic fantasy. Moreover, the “conception of ΩIslamic≈ violence against women” is not just some “right-wing” construct—it is a fact.

The feminist apologists did issue grudging, boilerplate repudiations of the violence but only en route to conflating it with Western patriarchy. In an understatement of colossal proportions, Penny acknowledged that the “experience of women in the West is [not] exactly the same as the experience of women in Middle Eastern dictatorships and war zones.” Let’s rephrase that, shall we? To live in a society where women’s magazines, pop culture, and advertising incessantly celebrate female sexuality and promiscuity, where every elite profession desperately seeks to hire and promote as many women as it can, and where women enjoy every freedom and right that men do, is not just “not exactly the same” as living in a culture where female rape victims are murdered to preserve their family’s honor and where women who don’t wear the veil or burka face public shaming or worse; there is no similarity whatsoever between those two experiences.