Mona Charen On How Feminism Fails Us

With John Harwood

Conservative lightning rod Mona Charen joins us to talk Trump, feminism, sex, and civility.

Mona Charen, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Syndicated conservative columnist, and contributor to National Review. Author of "Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense." (@monacharenEPPC)

Excerpt from "Sex Matters": 

National Review: "Mona Charen vs. the Feminists" — "At the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year, Mona Charen drew boos — and eventually needed a security escort out of the building — for criticizing conservatives’ shift of late regarding sexual propriety. 'How can conservative women hope to have any credibility on the subject of sexual harassment or relations between the sexes when they excuse the behavior of President Trump?' she asked in a subsequent New York Times op-ed. 'And how can we participate in any conversation about sexual ethics when the Republican president and the Republican Party backed a man credibly accused of child molestation for the United States Senate?'

In her new book 'Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense,' Charen lays out the case the Right should be making on these topics. It’s an excellent issue-by-issue overview of conservative thinking on, well, sex matters — from the wage gap, to abortion, to the rise of unwed childbearing, to the mommy wars, to the hookup culture and alleged rape crisis on college campuses, to the new debate over transgenderism. Its one major limitation is that it focuses far more on pushing back against feminism than on offering a positive conservative vision of what relations between the sexes should look like."

Mona Charen is a successful political commentator. She’s also a wife and mother. And when she had to choose between those roles, she chose the latter. In her new book, "Sex Matters," Mona Charen argues that more women should feel free to do the same, to embrace what makes them different from men and ignore modern feminists she says have lost touch with science, love and common sense.

This hour, On Point: have we forgotten that men and women really are different?

- John Harwood