Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg's celebrity-studded "ban bossy" campaign is thoroughly absurd, fundamentally un-American, and ends up coddling American girls rather than fostering the self-reliance it aims to promote, Mollie Hemingway argued in both a March 11 Federalist article and subsequent radio interview with Breitbart writer and WMAL host Larry O'Connor.
"It's time to stand up to this," Hemingway told the Drive at Five host on his Tuesday afternoon program. "Reshaping the language is a great way to reshape the way people think and to constrain liberty. There is a whiff of fascism about it," she argued, before adding that it furthers the Left's "victim" narrative about girls and women [click here to listen to the interview; special thanks to WMAL producer Jessica Stanton for furnishing the audio]:
Girls are strong and they do not need to be treated like they're delicate little flowers, that we'll change their entire personalities if someone casts a gently negative adjective in their direction.
And if we treat girls like victims, that actually does far more to harm them than if we encourage them to just have their natural strengths and it's silly to overprotect, and it actually reinforces stereotypes rather than helps.
"Clearly [Hemingway] is a counterinsurgent in the war on women," O'Connor quipped earlier in the interview, mocking the liberal media's meme which seeks to reduce American women to helpless damsels in distress in need of the white knights of big-government liberalism.
To access O'Connor's Drive at Five podcast, click here. To read Hemingway's work at The Federalist, click here.
