Elle reports that at Monday's Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) Awards, honoree Gloria Steinem hit virtually ever virtue-signaling leftist trope.
Accepting the Board of Directors Tribute Award - along with Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards (of course), and actress/activist Janelle Monáe, Steinem preached from the catechism of liberalism, a mix of punitive shaming of the West for our way of life, romanticizing Third World and cultures, feminist rage, and narcissistic self-regard.
According to Steinem, Manhattan is land that was stolen from Indians by “patriarchal Europeans.” Language “once had no gendered pronouns.” Racists want to “control reproduction.” “Trump-like walls cannot stop poisoned air arising oceans.” And so on.
"Now there is more activism than I have ever seen in my lifetime," Steinem said. "And maybe, just maybe, thanks to all of you in this room and billions more around the world who are woke, we are not the richest but we are the majority, and we are woke and maybe we are about to be free.”
Her full speech:
Well, I have to say that everybody who was marching there or marching in their hearts, I was one of the honorary co-chairs, but the march was organized by all of these great fan-f*cking-tastic people, a lot of you who are here tonight, all the friends I just had to wait to be born, so thank you, and this award will help me live to be 100, to live up to it, right? Thank you, Diane, for your great heart and sense of adventure and for the most important thing on earth, kindness. Thank you, Cecile, for giving us the first of all human rights, the right to our own bodies. And thank you, Janelle, for the ancient and healing art of storytelling. And thank you, Michael Kors, for these—are these not great pants?
Now about all of you in this room, I wonder what I could possibly say to you, because you are among the most creative and smart people on earth; you are definitely woke. So I decided to talk about what we probably don't know, because our schoolbooks don't usually start when people started. For instance, did you know that we are here on "Manahata" island? It was here before the Europeans showed up. And only about 600 years ago, before patriarchal Europeans were here, which was less than 5 percent of human history, languages had no gendered pronouns, people were people—what a concept. And here we are struggling with gender—they knew better; women used herbs to decide when and whether to have children, as was explained to me by the women in southern Africa, the people from who we all came, every single one of us here. It turns out that controlling women's bodies is the first step in order to control reproduction in every hierarchy, and it's made doubly necessary by racism, and caste, and class, which is why being woke is understanding that you can't be a feminist without being anti-racist, and vice versa. Now that we're trying to transcend race and gender roles, it helps to know we invented them and we can dis-invent them. And now everything from the Internet, from the flood of refugees to global warming, is telling us to stop forcing women to have unwanted children, which was the first root of global warming, and to share and to care for our spaceship earth. A crucial minority of people are scared and outraged by these not-so-old hierarchies, but the big majority knows very well that Trump-like walls cannot stop poisoned air or rising oceans or even hungry and desperate refugees. So why not learn from our communal past when we were linked not ranked, we will be helped as we learn by both new technology, which helps us connect, and the old truth that human beings can only empathize when we're together, as we are tonight with all five senses.
Okay, I don't want to make you crazy with talking about the past, but I also do want to suggest that you Google and look at the Omo people of Africa, who decorate themselves every day with flowers and colors and all kinds of—you have to promise me to Google these folks—they are your ancestors. We have always decorated our bodies; it is noble, it is imaginative, it is part of our hearts, and that is your tradition from the past. And you also need to look at Sex and World Peace, the book, which proves that in every modern country, violence against females is the predictor of all other violence. So as you and I are leaving old hierarchies behind, this is a time of hope but also of danger. There is backlash from Trump to terrorists against the kind of equality and understanding and simple humanity that we strive for. So like a woman leaving a violent household, who is then most likely to be injured or killed because she is escaping control, we too are escaping control. So we have to be careful and look out for each other. But just as we would never tell a woman to turn back to violence, we won't turn back either. Now there is more activism than I have ever seen in my lifetime. And maybe, just maybe, thanks to all of you in this room and billions more around the world who are woke, we are not the richest but we are the majority, and we are woke and maybe we are about to be free.
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