National Review Online's Problem With Feminism: Sandra Fluke And Wendy Davis' “Career Path”

National Review Online (NRO) has a problem with feminism and how it's embodied by Democratic women running for office like Sandra Fluke and Texas State Senator Wendy Davis.

NRO roving correspondent Kevin D. Williamson penned a February 6 column decrying modern feminism, which he defined as, “Feminism is the words 'I Want!' in the mouths of three or more women, provided they're the right kind of women.”

According to Williamson, feminism is now a “career path,” where cunning politicians can succeed by “defending the position favored more heavily by women than by men [which] becomes, through the magic of feminist rhetoric, anti-woman, even part of a 'war on women.'” In other words, a policy that appears to be anti-woman may simply be an innocuous proposal with disparate support among the genders that's become tainted by feminist rhetoric.

The author's examples of such conniving feminist politicians were California state senate candidate Sandra Fluke and Texas Gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis, popular targets in the conservative media sphere as of late. “Whatever Sandra Fluke is up to, you can be sure she's looking for somebody else to pay for it,” Williamson wrote, summarizing her 2012 congressional testimony in support of contraception coverage in health plans as a petulant "'I WANT!'"

Davis, who conducted a filibuster against Texas's new abortion restrictions in June 2013, Williamson accused of “thwarting the interests of a majority of those women she is campaigning to govern,” painting her as an opportunist.

Indeed, Williamson's post is full of invective, but low on the facts regarding the very events he highlights as revealing the “Feminist Mystique.”

When Sandra Fluke testified before Democratic members of Congress in 2012, she simply argued that women's insurance policies -- which they already paid for -- should cover medication like contraception that is prescribed by a medical professional. To highlight the medical need for contraception coverage, Fluke told the story of a friend whose polycystic ovarian syndrome was treated with birth control pills:

FLUKE: After months of paying over $100 out of pocket, she just couldn't afford her medication anymore, and she had to stop taking it. I learned about all of this when I walked out of a test and got a message from her that, in the middle of the night in her final-exam period, she'd been in the emergency room. She'd been there all night in just terrible, excruciating pain. She wrote to me: “It was so painful I woke up thinking I'd been shot.” Without her taking the birth control, a massive cyst the size of a tennis ball had grown on her ovary. She had to have surgery to remove her entire ovary as a result.

Although Fluke briefly mentioned her personal use of contraceptive medicine during the testimony, she never referenced whether it was a financial burden or not.

And rather than “thwarting the interests” of Texas women, Davis filibustered a Republican bill that ultimately devastated women's access to reproductive health care in the state. Besides closing state clinics, the new restrictions Davis opposed also ban abortions after 20 weeks, putting the life of the fetus and mother in danger if certain pregnancies are forced to go to term. 

Williamson has a history of making inflammatory remarks about women's issues -- during the 2012 presidential election, he wrote that Mitt Romney was more “high-status” than President Obama because Romney has sons instead of daughters. And after former Rep. Gabby Giffords criticized Senate inaction on gun legislation, Williamson called her “childish.”