In one way, at least, the Liberal party's new Pink Book of women-friendly policies is decidedly charming. By defiantly adopting the colour traditionally assigned to little girls in the cradle, it demonstrates that today's Liberal woman is unafraid to embrace the "feminine," and set aside the aggressive social constructionism that has characterized modern radical feminism. There's even a flower on the cover. Then again, maybe they're just being all ironic and flirtatious with us.
The ways of the Goddess are complex indeed -- never more so, surely, than when she chose a capitalist heiress like Belinda Stronach as the voice of talented but downtrodden women struggling to find independence with the help of big government.
The Pink Book, which is meant to serve as part of the Liberal platform for the next election, was supposedly pulled together after extensive cross-country consultations with women and women's groups. Surprise, surprise: It turns out those policies which are deemed best for women turn out to very largely be ... pre-existing Liberal ones -- nationalized daycare, full funding for feminist lobby groups and the Court Challenges Program, and even the gun registry. Did no women at all, one wonders, vote Conservative in the last election? Or is it merely that Conservative women are somehow insincere or deluded representatives of their gender, victimized by what Marxists once called "false consciousness"?
To ask is to grasp the true nature of this cynical game -- define your political program as "pro-woman" up front, and watch as anyone who opposes it magically becomes anti-woman. As the awkward presence of the gun registry in the Pink Book shows, you don't even really need to show a logical connection between equal rights for women and the items on your grocery list.
For all its predictability, there is at least one noteworthy tactical innovation in the Pink Book. Consider this sentence: "As a first step, the Liberal Women's Caucus endorses providing financial resources to Aboriginal women's organizations at the same level as their male-led counterparts." This is bold logic indeed: Because existing organizations claiming to represent aboriginal interests are actually led by men, those organizations must be duplicated, structurally and financially -- as a first step!
All one has to do is look around to see how fertile this idea really is. The Canadian Medical and Bar Associations? Historically male-led, and still lamentably somewhat so. Women obviously need their own parallel groups of equal budgetary size. The CBC? Why not two state broadcasters? We can call them the "She Be She" and the "He Be He."
And who would dare argue that women don't need their own fully-funded Wheat Board or War Museum? We look forward to the appearance of such hypothetical enterprises in future Pink Books, assuming that the Liberals aren't sufficiently embarrassed by what's in the first volume.
