Chicks Who Hate Freedom

Young American women supporting Hamas may be the strangest social phenomenon in history. There was some logic, however sad, in the story of John Walker Lindh (the “American Taliban”) whose conversion to Islam may have been a reaction to the disruption to his family life by his father’s homosexuality. Black men who joined the Confederate Army could justify that odd choice because of an offer of personal freedom. But what would persuade a free, privileged young woman to support a political, ideological and religious movement that would extinguish “choice” and the availability of living an alternative gender while advocating horrific violence?

One would think that the extraordinary degree of misogyny inherent in Islam (and the Hamas edition in particular) would be off-putting. Wife-beatings, denial of education, genital mutilation, child brides, honor killings and sartorial oppression are features, not bugs. Genghis Khan was probably more pro-woman than the average shariah-enforcing imam (he banned kidnapping and several other offenses against Mongol women, probably because his mom had been taken against her will by his father).

What mental gymnastics are required to believe that there is a natural alliance between LGBTQ+ and Hamas? Or that there was ever an Islamic Arab nation called Palestine? Or that men with an identity disorder are really women? Or that humanity is doomed because the climate may be two degrees warmer on average in another 50-100 years? Or that history started at the moment capitalism began to oppress everyone?

I sometimes imagine that Hugh Hefner or someone like him was secretly a kind of mad genius, the secret architect of feminism, convincing women that they really wanted to live the same hedonistic, predatory, impersonal, pointless sex life as a male lounge lizard. The pill and abortion were created to aid that lifestyle choice. Two generations of young men have since been raised to respect “choice”, i.e., her body, her problem. Sexual "liberation" was always asymmetrical and barbarous.

Are the confused co-eds in keffiyehs (almost of of which are made in China) simply running from an utterly barbarous sexual climate, from the belief that marriage is not worth the risk, and from the realization that financial security cannot really be guaranteed by being a good girl with good grades? Is there some satisfaction in feeling “empowered” by a mindless, semi-violent movement with the intellectual depth of a bumper sticker? Daddy issues? What explains this?

Before we make undergraduates read the Federalist Papers, maybe we should require Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom. Precisely because Americans don’t have to oppose kings or clergy trying to limit our freedom, we are instead more likely to be beset with isolation, anxiety and powerlessness, at liberty to succumb easily to conformity, new forms of authoritarianism and even destructiveness to escape. Instead, we need to cultivate the use of our expansive freedom to achieve, love, spontaneity and a life of reason. That so much of popular culture and universities are constructed to oppose that healthy and happy mode of living may be why we have a problem. We do not educate our young on how to make use of freedom.

Anyway, how do we pull so many young women back from the edge of an abyss?