Do mainstream feminists have flawed priorities?

We’ve yet to hear the feminist establishment condemn Planned Parenthood, which recent reports suggest may have been commoditizing and profiting from fetal body parts, which is a felony. And another episode earlier this year, the University of Virginia phony rape scandal, illustrates just how self-described feminists create online firestorms based on fiction, rather than tackling far more important issues.

Instead of furor over “manspreading,” we could make inroads against human trafficking. Instead of fussing over a mythical “pink tax” on products, we could fight domestic and foreign poverty. Instead of uproar over Instagram’s banning of female pubic hair, we could stop genital mutilation in sub-Saharan Africa.

Today’s feminist establishment is a natural outgrowth of the 1960s sexual revolution. Yet in many ways this was not a “revolution” about whether women could work. They already entered the workforce en masse during World War II, and lower-income women often already had jobs. The sexual “revolution” was more about loosening cultural mores, doing away with boring old responsible sexuality, and in the end replacing it with coarse indifference.

The American sexual “revolution” was like the Iraq invasion: in many ways justifiable, but also haphazard, explosive and chaotic. Feminists conquered the Baghdad of American culture, toppled Saddam Hussein’s statue of patriarchy, leaving chaos in its wake. Betty Friedan was Paul Bremer, struggling to cobble together a coherent aftermath. Millennial women are left picking up the pieces, leading many to wonder whether the toil and treasure warranted the widespread conflict.

Clearly it’s tough to put the genie back in the bottle. Is it possible to revive the notion that sexual expression is something special rather than casual? Heather MacDonald documents a neo-Victorianism on college campuses, where feminists are walking back their “revolution,” asking for government intervention to prevent rape even though pre-1960s, we needed no such heavy-handedness. They are echoing what conservative activists have been repeating since the start of “free love.”

Besides eliminating rape, data tell us a healthy society would move toward reducing unmarried births instead of increasing them, as we’re seeing. In cases of physical abuse or widowhood, we empathize and help. But any feminist serious about widening income inequality — the left’s current drumbeat a la Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton —cannot ignore unmarried births.

Some feminists argue that women needed better control over their bodies, yet after the sexual revolution they ceded greater vulnerability to men, even strangers.

The family is the fundamental unit of society. It is largely preserved among wealthier Americans, even as working-class families have disintegrated. Harvard sociologist Kathryn Edin documents how many low-income women want to marry, but the sexual revolution told men it was acceptable to have multiple sexual partners and abandon offspring without consequence.

Some feminists argue that women needed better control over their bodies, yet after the sexual revolution they ceded greater vulnerability to men, even strangers. Feminists cry to keep government out of the bedroom, yet through the sexual “revolution” they beckoned Uncle Sam. Mainstream acceptance of reckless sexuality enabled fathers unwilling to care for those kids, leading to burgeoning entitlement costs for taxpayers. Today, 41 percent of children are born to unmarried mothers; this stunts the War on Poverty.

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“One reason for this stalemate (in the War on Poverty) is that whatever we did to raise education levels, fund job training, and provide various forms of cash assistance was offset by the growth of single-parent families,” Brookings scholar Isabel Sawhill, a former Bill Clinton appointee, wrote in a recent book. “If the breakdown of the family continues, it will require an ever-growing and more expensive benefit package to achieve victory in this long-standing war.”

Modernists claim to have trail-blazed sexual norms, to have been “revolutionaries,” when in truth they were regressive.

Modernists claim to have trail-blazed sexual norms, to have been “revolutionaries,” when in truth they were regressive. Look at ancient history: Sexual recklessness and public indecency were normal before marriage and monogamy stabilized society. Many educated, upper- and middle-class women don’t realize the impact of their “revolution.” They float in a bubble of privilege, unmarred from perhaps the saddest repercussion of the feminist movement: its impact on low-income families.

Single motherhood is the most dominant factor perpetuating poverty. Yet bafflingly, when I posed the question of whether feminism unraveled the low-income family to Mary Dore, director of the documentary “She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry,” she passed the buck. Somehow Dore tried to differentiate between the “feminist movement” and the “sexual revolution.” But they are inextricably intertwined.

The documentary itself is a well-made and honest look at the feminist movement, with leaders admitting they excluded lesbians and African-Americans and sometimes marginalized men. Yesteryear’s feminists, though they unleashed sexual anarchy, did tackle meatier obstacles: jaw-dropping cultural sexism that enabled discrimination and sexual harassment in schools and workplaces (with few protections against domestic violence).

Yet the older generation of feminists wanted, and still want, more than true equality. They want special, unconstitutional treatment for females, and they want it courtesy of American taxpayers. They want European-style benefits to supplement their lifestyles, even as our nation careens under $18 trillion national debt, cavernous budget deficits and ballooning entitlement programs.

If our older sisters won’t change, the question is whether millennial feminists will wake up and call for a shift in priorities, one that places children ahead of adults, one that places the vulnerable ahead of the privileged.