The battle of the sexes gets unpleasant

The sexes very much at odds with each other today.

It's not just Twitter.

I've been to classic plays recently---The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth—in which they hate each other. The productions were really excellent in many ways, but the distortions, which I thought misogynist as well as misandrist, added a lot of hatefulness.

The first was especially bad, because an amusing feature of the play is the bantering war-of-the-sexes byplay you find in Shakespeare. In this version it was all resentment and distrust.

The MacBeth was supposedly a feminist retelling of the story from Lady MacBeth's point of view. It just made everything nihilistic and cruddy, and certainly didn't make Lady MacBeth a more interesting or impressive character.

Among other things, it eliminated the political character of the play. If that's feminism, it was a mistake to give women the vote.

But why? Liberal feminism is an obvious problem, because it cuts the natural tie between men and women and makes them competitors. What one wins, the other loses.

Another is the effective legal requirement that all distinctions and differences in result be eradicated. They go too deep to be eradicated, but that doesn't stop heavy-handed attempts to do so, so both sexes end up resentful.

A third problem is the sexual revolution. Everyone was given total sexual freedom, so every woman was put in play and became an object of pursuit.

And a final problem is porn. How could that do anything good at all for the relations of the sexes?