You Must Not Question Gloria Steinem. But I Do Have Questions.

Gloria Steinem died this week at 92, and this weekend I’ll bet you won’t find a single legacy corporate media outlet willing to print anything but hagiography about her.

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And that’s a shame, but of course it’s typical. The Left’s icons are forced down our throats no matter their inconsistencies, lies, blunders, and sins; the Right’s icons get called “divisive” and “controversial.”

But I didn’t come here to lionize Gloria Steinem, and I didn’t come to go along with the picture the propaganda press is going to paint of somebody who spent the better part of a century driving a wedge between the sexes. Rather, I’m going to give a fair accounting of a legacy which is mixed, at best, and a challenge. (RELATED: The Demonic Possession of Liberal Women)

Because if we’re going to celebrate this “icon” of second-wave feminism, then I want the celebrants to handle a few questions I have.

For example, why aren’t any of these glowing portrayals of Steinem by the Left trashing her as a CIA asset?

She was one, you know.

From 1958 to 1962, Gloria Steinem ran something called the Independent Research Service. It helped to send American students to international youth festivals, which sounds innocent enough, except that’s little more than a cover story. In point of fact, what the Independent Research Service was actually doing was recruiting photogenic young liberals to disrupt Communist confabs for kids in Vienna and Helsinki. This all came out in 1967 when the New York Times and Washington Post ran stories exposing the organization and its CIA funding, and Steinem was quite open about what she’d done. Steinem told the Washington Post the outfit was “liberal, nonviolent and honorable,” and later said she would do it again.

Don’t get me wrong. The Independent Research Service might have been the best thing Gloria Steinem actually did. Assuming the good-looking liberals she sent to Europe didn’t then get turned by the KGB and become Soviet assets, which, given the CIA’s standard performance, is exceptionally possible.

And assuming Gloria Steinem herself wasn’t turned.

Because the movement she attached herself to and soon fronted was precisely the kind of thing the Comintern would have loved.

When Steinem was later running around the country trashing every American institution as a conspiracy against women, after coming to public view as a CIA minion, the irony probably should have been discrediting. It wasn’t.

Why?

Probably because Gloria Steinem was the one second-wave feminist who didn’t prove Rush Limbaugh’s later-arriving maxim that feminism was invented as a means of giving unattractive women access to mainstream American society. (RELATED: The Biology Feminism Can’t Explain)

Gloria Steinem was a looker. That’s why people paid attention to the subversive and divisive things she said. She was the most bankable face of that movement, which spent lots of time and energy attacking concentrated and unaccountable power, and she was a CIA asset.

Anybody on the Left want to explain how that happens?

Limbaugh was right, of course, and Steinem was the exception that proved the rule. Betty Friedan was the rule itself. Friedan was old and plain and not especially charismatic or engaging, but Friedan actually did real work for the feminist movement; not that much of it has aged all that well from a societal standpoint, but she wrote The Feminine Mystique and co-founded the National Organization for Women. She did that while Steinem was gracing magazine covers and going to galas. (RELATED: When Women’s Liberation Disappoints)

And it would be nice if somebody would justify this, particularly in an age when some astonishingly large percentage of American females are recording themselves engaging in utterly shallow, banal, and mindless behavior while attempting to monetize themselves as “influencers” as part of female empowerment. Is this what second-wave feminists were going for? If not, then why was Gloria Steinem the face of the movement? Was it not eminently foreseeable that feminism would devolve into AOC and “Same, Lindsay” when it chose cute and shallow as its avatar?

They called Betty Friedan jealous and difficult and played out. I’m not going to say they were wrong. But when Friedan noted that Gloria Steinem was, essentially, Maneater Barbie, she wasn’t wrong, either.

Will modern feminism admit this? Will it admit that the feminism of Gloria Steinem rewarded celebrity and fame rather than honest arguments about relations between the sexes?

Because if not, then why were we subjected to a feminist icon who was a sex symbol?

Gloria Steinem was a human jungle of inconsistencies.

Take her positions on Bill Clinton, after all. In March 1998, after the devastating Kathleen Willey 60 Minutes interview, which came while the president was in court with Paula Jones, the woman it seems quite clear he sexually assaulted, Gloria Steinem explained in a Times op-ed that even if the allegations against Clinton were true, he was “not guilty of sexual harassment.” (RELATED: Believe All Women — Unless They’re Inconvenient)

Why? Because he had “taken no for an answer.”

Which was not, and is not, in evidence.

Steinem went further. The Monica Lewinsky case, she wrote, meant that “yes means yes.”

Welcome sex, she said, “is about as relevant to sexual harassment as borrowing a car is to stealing one.”

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This was OK? Clinton was just shy of 50; Monica was 22 years old. He was the president, and she was a college kid. Would it have been OK if Clinton was a Republican?

Nobody bothered to ask her about that at the time, of course. Because shilling for male Democrat politicians acting in ways which, in the honor society feminism destroyed, might well have earned Clinton a hospital stay or worse from an angry husband, father, or brother was just accepted as the price of celebrity.

A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do, you know.

Then came Harvey Weinstein, which put that mentality and excuses for the Clinton power imbalance issues to the test, and Steinem was finally confronted with her inconsistency on the most basic tenet of feminism, and she gave us a mealy-mouthed explanation. Steinem said she “wouldn’t write the same thing now” because “there’s probably more known about other women now.” But she said she was glad she wrote it then.

How iconic.

Around that time, Steinem was asked by Bill Maher why Bill Clinton’s wife Hillary, who you’d think would have been her burden to carry, was having so much trouble securing the votes of young women. Steinem explained that they were for Bernie Sanders because “when you’re young, you’re thinking, where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.”

Maher was irritated, and he said that if he’d offered that line, she would have swatted him one. Steinem laughed. A few days later, when the resulting firestorm materialized, she claimed she was “misinterpreted.”

Apparently she’d been “misinterpreted” on other things. Like, for example, Steinem famously said that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, and that marriage in this country had been “the model for slavery law.” Millions of women took that to heart. But in 2000, when her value as a celebrity and sex symbol had declined, she married a Manhattan Beach millionaire NGO activist named David Bale, a native South African and British citizen with visa problems (David Bale’s son from his second marriage, the one before Steinem came along, is the actor Christian Bale). Asked about getting hitched after she’d trashed the institution her whole life, she said she hadn’t changed, but marriage had.

David Bale got to stick around in America; he jokingly called himself Mr. Steinem as he followed his more-famous wife around, and then he died of lymphoma three years after the wedding. Marriage had changed indeed.

There were others. I’ll be polite and not mention Gloria Steinem, feminist icon and Playboy bunny.

So besides the inconsistency, what legacy do we get from Steinem and the second-wave feminism she fronted?

Sure, there were things pre-Steinem America needed to offer in order for more harmony between men and women. But to get those fixes, was it necessary to get all of the package?

Steinem’s feminism treated ordinary men, marriage, and child-rearing with open suspicion. The legacy corporate media, the people slobbering all over her now, gave her an open platform to do it. She spent decades as the public voice insisting men were, structurally and individually, the problem to be managed rather than partners to be won over.

And how’s that working out for America 60 years on?

Marriage rates? In the toilet.

Birth rates? Well below replacement. Dangerously below, in fact.

Relations between men and women? So terrible that there are women posting on social media that gender reveals tell them whether they’re going to have a girl or an abortion.

That’s what happens when your movement is fronted by, and this is my best compliment for Gloria Steinem, an exceptionally gifted packager of other people’s grievances. Gloria Steinem was the unbought voice of American women, and she did real, lasting damage.

We can thank Steinem for abortion becoming the sacrament of female citizenship — the one economic activity immune to regulation. We can thank her for making the two-parent household a lifestyle option rather than the normal way children are raised, and giving us all the friendly outcomes that has produced. We can thank her for teaching educated women that domestic life was a trap; that certainly contributed to a fertility collapse among the people who read Ms. Magazine, which she founded and ran.

She had almost nothing to say to the waitress in Toledo — Steinem’s own hometown — except that she should be angrier at her husband than at her rent. Working-class women got lectures about representation. Upper-middle-class women got careers, nannies, SSRIs, and a magazine that sold all of it as liberation.

And what you get with cute and shallow fronting your movement is absolute silence when sexually confused men decide they want to join your sports teams, hang around in your bathrooms and locker rooms, and take advantage of the legal protections and affirmative actions you’ve wrangled out of the men. That’s how feminism morphed from insisting sex was a political category to insisting sex was assigned.

By then Gloria Steinem had nothing to say. By then she was just another faceless, gormless has-been lefty activist, too afraid to even declare what a woman is.

Yes, I have a lot of questions. But I won’t spend much time on them. I know the answers won’t come as fast as the name-calling and the invective. And that is Gloria Steinem’s real legacy.

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