Redneck Nation (21 page)

The Warden grew up Catholic in South Carolina, a state where the term “papist plot” is still used at appropriate public gatherings.
I met her at a Christian coffeehouse when we were both in high school, and we dated for a short time before she dumped me
(of course). Nearly ten years later, we had a happenstance reunion. She was working as a newspaper reporter and driving a
black Corvette with T-tops and a vanity plate that read “Blondi.”

I never had a chance.

I do not claim to be an expert on southern women. As a man, I can’t honestly claim to understand any woman, including my wife,
my mother, or even my seven-year-old daughter. But I can report from my personal experience as a tireless observer of the
local wildlife that there are just two kinds of southern women: the kind who will kick your ass and the kind who will get
their Daddy to do it for them.

Either way, you lose.

My grandmother Graham is the strongest, most fearless woman I’ve ever known. Once, while picking butter beans, she killed
a rattlesnake using just an empty grape Nehi bottle (something about the shape, I’m told; apparently it won’t work with a
Dr Pepper). She was in her sixties at the time.

Her daughter, my aunt Lib, rid herself and her two daughters of a loser husband and father through the effective brandishing
of a firearm. No shots were fired, no charges filed, and no appeals sought. He took the truck in the driveway and the clothes
on his back and, at last report, considered himself well treated.

Lib’s sister, Celie, lived for many years in a cabin back in the dense woods of a thousand-acre hunting club. The waters were
filled with snakes, the woods alive with carnivores of all shapes and sizes, and yet it was nothing for her husband to go
and leave her and the three young boys for days at a time as he took care of business.

These are not weak women jumping up on the dining table at the first sign of danger and waiting for a man to come to the rescue.
Maybe it’s a reflection on their low opinion of southern manhood, but southern women don’t seem to expect much from us in
the first place.

As for the intellectual capacity of the typical southern woman, I cannot praise it as inordinately large because (a) she’s
a Southerner and (b) worse, she’s an American. And I’m not going to pretend that there isn’t a political and social conservatism
at her core that would discomfit the average feminist, liberal, progressive, or Victorian. But I cannot allow the denigration
of the strength and independence of southern women to go unchallenged.

If you really want to find insecure women dependent upon men, you can skip Blanche DuBois and Melanie Wilkes. You won’t find
her down South anymore. At least, not since she left Arkansas.

Aye, there’s the rub: Hillary Clinton (née Rodham)—the acme of American feminism, idolized by the establishment media as the
fullness of self-realized womanhood
itself—is seen by Southerners for what she truly is: pure redneck.

Hillary Rodham is the least empowered political woman since Marie Antoinette.

From her law firm partnership in Arkansas to her U.S. Senate seat in New York to the “Property of the White House” ashtrays
on the unintentionally donated coffee table in her Georgetown apartment, Senator Rodham owes everything—
everything
—she has to her husband, to her man. Whenever she displayed her barely concealed contempt for women who “have stayed home
and baked cookies and had teas,” southern women stood at a hot sink of dishes and rolled their eyes.

First of all, if Senator Rodham had been a true southern lady, she would have sat politely next to her husband on television
that Super Bowl Sunday night and then filled the fireplace with the remains of his personal belongings on her way out the
door Monday morning. I have personal knowledge of what it is like to wrong a southern woman, and it doesn’t involve loving
pats on your arm while you humiliate her on national television. The only thing a real southern woman would be patting lovingly
is the butt end of her Smith & Wesson.

I’m not suggesting that Senator Rodham should have done anything to violate the Homeland Security Act, but if she truly is,
as advertised, the incarnation of modern feminism, feminists are a particularly uninspiring lot. It’s undeniable that there
are southern women who stand by their man though he’s hurt and humiliated them time and time again. And there is certainly
a strain of insecure southern female that won’t walk away from a bad man or a worse beating.

Of course, these women exist down South: They’re called rednecks! It is highly significant that the woman who trudged through
Gennifer and Kathleen and Monica and Juanita, and dragged her daughter along, is still regarded with pride by the contemporary
feminist movement. She remained until the end of her husband’s term of office one of America’s most admired women, even as
the Secret Service was stopping her at the White House door to search her for spoons.

Standin’ by her cheatin’ husband, throwing lamps within earshot of the neighbors, taking the towels at checkout, and then
using her husband’s good-ol’-boy connections to get her a job—Senator Rodham does everything a redneck man would want except
dip snuff and cook ‘shine. So how did she get to be an American feminist icon?

If the classic southern woman is sensitive, frail, and ever vulnerable to the waywardness of men, then the American feminist
movement has migrated en masse onto the Tara plantation. Modern feminists are the most delicate flowers of our society, ever
vulnerable to the slightest change in barometric pressure. Consider these examples:

• A professor of women’s studies at Penn State demands that a print of Goya’s
The Naked Maja
be removed from her classroom because it creates a hostile work environment, making it impossible for her to empower her
female students. “Any nude picture of a female encourages males to make remarks about body parts,” she said.

• A law professor at Northwestern University urged the criminalization of catcalls and other harassing comments made toward
women on public streets, asking that such speech be legally punishable as “assaultive behavior.” The goal, apparently, is
to protect frail women from the destructive power of whistling.

• Years before Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered drapes to cover the topless statues of the Justice Department, female
workers in the Vermont state office building complained that they were being sexually harassed by a mural of Christopher Columbus
arriving in the New World. The painting, which showed topless native women greeting the white European males, had to be covered
with a bedsheet for the protection of Vermont’s womanhood.

• When animal-rights activists at UC Santa Barbara announced that all pets should be referred to as “companion animals,” a
professor wondered aloud whether that meant the centerfolds in
Penthouse
magazine would now be known as “Penthouse Companion Animals” instead of “pets.” Fifteen college-educated women filed sexual
harassment charges against him for unauthorized use of humor.

• Professor Mary P. Koss of the University of Arizona authored “The Scope of Rape,” a survey of college-aged women which,
she says, indicates that one in four has been the victim of rape or attempted rape. She includes in that number, however,
women who consented to sex but had been drinking. These women, she believes, are the victims of rape. “The law punishes the
drunk driver who kills a pedestrian,” she argues. “And likewise, the law needs to be there to protect the drunk woman from
the driver of the penis.”

Now, when it comes to sex, I’m certainly no Wilt Chamberlain, but I’ve driven around the block once or twice. And, as a product
of the rural South, I find this last item the most confusing and offensive. Professor Koss considers herself a feminist. She’s
struggling against the patriarchal attitudes of a society that considers women emotional, irrational, and unstable. And what
is her argument regarding sexual harassment and rape?

That women can’t hold their liquor.

Obviously it is possible for a drunk woman to be raped. But that is not what the sexual harassment harpies terrorizing American
society are talking about. They want men to protect women from themselves, to play daddy to their drunken dates and lovingly
tuck them, unmussed, into their beds. And, men, if you don’t, if you treat your date like a rational human being who decides
to drink, date, and do the nasty like a grown-up, your friendly, local feminists will throw you into jail.

Once again, I know women who believe men are just naturally stronger and more disciplined than the fairer sex. I know women
who expect men to take care of them when they can’t take care of themselves. But I didn’t know these women were
feminists
. I thought they were Southern Baptists.

And while we’re on the subject of sexual entanglements, ladies,
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS DATE RAPE!
Stop saying it! You sound like some loopy cast member from an uncensored performance of
The Vagina Monologues
.

There is rape—sex by force and against your will. And then there is sex—either explicitly consensual or with no demonstrated
objections. What else is there? What category is missing?

Ladies, if you’re on a date with a good friend you’ve known for years, and the guy uses physical force to overcome your objections
and violate you, it’s rape. Period. And if you meet a total stranger in a parking lot and, overcome with passion, allow him
to explore your nether regions without complaint, it wasn’t rape, it was sex. That’s it.

What is the scenario for “date rape”? It’s either rape or not rape. You know what date rape is? Date rape is the mournful
cry of a woman who suddenly realizes she just slept with a loser.

In an attempt to prevent this confusion, some northern colleges have begun to quantify the art of romance. One such school,
Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, has made a name for itself through its sexual contact policies. At Antioch, students
who are seeking intimacy (for the most part, men) must get explicit, stated permission from their partners (for the most part,
women) before they take any actions. Want to neck? Ask first: “May I please slide my tongue down your throat?”

Want to cop a feel? “May I please check the freshness of your fulsome loaves?”

Want to, well, you know… “May I please mount you like a stallion and cry, ‘On, Thunder King, on!’?”

How romantic it must be on a warm, moonlit night to stroll the campus of Antioch and hear the sounds of spring: the evening
breeze, the rustling leaves, and the extended contract negotiations as a young man (hereafter known as the Party of the First
Part) pitches woo to his lady love (a.k.a. the Plantiff).

Some liberal feminists even label consensual sex “rape” if the man pressures the woman verbally. Verbal pressuring is when
a guy seeks sex by, say, threatening to break
off the relationship or (my usual dating strategy) falling to his knees and begging for it. This is psychological coercion
and is no different from a knife to the throat or a gun to the head, feminists argue. Men engaged in this coercion should
be punished appropriately.

So let me get this straight: Women can do anything men can do, except say no? Are modern, postfeminist women truly so weak,
so defenseless, so utterly dependent upon the kindness of lovers? Then they have all turned into Daddy’s Girls, those petite
flowers of my southern youth whose chastity was ever guarded by their proper upbringing, their commitment to Christ, and the
certain justice of their father’s twelve-gauge. Only this feminist incarnation of the southern belle relies, not on Big Daddy,
but on Uncle Sam. They have loaded up the legal system with layer upon layer of gender-specific protections, court-supported
petticoats to cover their inbred feminine frailty.

How else to explain why simple speech and innocuous images are seen as predatory members of some sexual harassment conspiracy?
The Goya and the Columbus mural mentioned earlier are hardly exceptions. In Dayton, Ohio, it was Titian’s
Venus of Urbino
that was vandalized and eventually removed because feminists “felt they were being sexually harassed by the painting.” At
the University of Nebraska, a graduate student was forced to remove a photo of his own wife from his desk because she was
wearing a bikini and some of his coworkers felt harassed.

The same women who roll their eyes at the affectations of our grandmothers—like using euphemisms for “breast” and “leg” in
the presence of fried chicken—find the works of Michelangelo too offensive to be viewed in mixed company.

Are the new American feminists puritans, prudes, or just pathetic examples of powerlessness? These women remind me of the
Oral Roberts University students I traveled to Europe with my senior year. I was the student conductor of the concert choir
and we toured the continent, performing at Notre Dame, and St. Peter’s in Rome. In Florence, the must-see location was the
Galleria dell’ Accademia and Michelangelo’s
David
.

My previous exposure to visual arts had been largely limited to black velvet paintings featuring canine card players, but
the
David
absolutely mesmerized me. To see it, you must work your way through long halls at the gallery filled with lesser works by
Michelangelo, works that prepare you, step by step, to see his ultimate masterpiece.

Then you enter the main hall and there it is: the fulfillment of all human potential realized before your eyes in carved stone.
Michelangelo’s
David
is the reason I don’t believe in angels. It is visual proof that humans may achieve the divine.

I went to see the
David
with thirty or so other ORU students, among them three classically southern, nonfeminist females who entered the main hall
about the same time I did. As I gazed, openmouthed and moist-eyed at what I believe to be the greatest work of visual art
ever crafted by human hands, I couldn’t help noticing these girls, clumped together and giggling uncomfortably.