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Establishment realizing the empress has no clothes
Here’s something cheering in the parched desert of mainstream conservatism: the establicons’ worshipful romance with Condoleezza Rice is over. See what Bret Stephens in yesterday’s Opinion Journal has to say about Rice and her beyond-idiotic attempt to start up another “peace” conference between the Israelis and the Arabs—an attempt to which she has already devoted eight trips to the Mideast in 2007. Stephens is as good as calling her an idiot…. Which VFR readers have known for a long time. By the way, the title of this entry is a small but telling illustration of how men and women are not equivalent to each other. We can say, “The emperor has no clothes,” and it’s a common saying and there’s no problem with it. But here, in writing about a public figure who is a female, I applied the old saying to her in what I thought was a gender-appropriate manner, changing “emperor” to “empress.” But the actual result is inappropriate and disrespectful to her as a woman, as well as distracting. “The emperor has no clothes” is metaphorical, conveying the abtract idea that the emperor is manifestly flawed and that the people are refusing to see it. “The empress has no clothes” conveys not a metaphorical idea but a concrete image of a naked woman. The immediate point is that there is no usable female equivalent of “The emperor has no clothes.” The larger point is that men and women are not symbolically interchangeable with each other, and therefore cannot in all cases be functionally interchangeable with each other. As Laura W. said recently, certain socially significant jobs, such as that of priest, require a father figure. A woman cannot be a father figure. Period.
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