We raise our glasses in toast and draw our first swigs. While I flex my mental muscles for the debate ahead, I breathe in the lemony scent rising from my glass, a welcome contrast to the thick aromas of the pub. One of the black-and-white posters on the wall catches my eye. It’s a photograph of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.
What were the odds of seeing this in a random London pub?
Jonas follows my gaze. “Isn’t that Simone de Beauvoir, the founder of modern feminism? You must worship her.”
“I despise her.”
His eyebrows squish together. “Really? The cultural icon? One of the smartest women of her time? What did she do to earn your contempt?”
“She was the ultimate loser,” I say. “Her so very progressive open relationship with Sartre wasn’t progressive at all. It was nothing more than a new twist on the good old patriarchy.”
Peter nods. “I see what you mean.”
“Will anyone explain for the ignorant among us?” Jonas shifts his gaze from Peter to me.
“Sartre was a notorious womanizer,” Peter says.
“That’s just a small part of it.” I cross my arms. “De Beauvoir slept with her young female students, some underage, and then served them up to Sartre.”
Jonas’s eyebrows go up at that. “Are you sure?”
“Wait, it gets worse!” I lean forward. “In her liaisons with men, she was respectful and loving. But when it came to the young women she seduced, she was as exploitative and manipulative as the next bloke.”
“If that were true, how can she still be a feminist hero?”
“It’s all very well documented,” I say. “But for decades, the academic and media establishment—everybody, really—covered up for the legendary couple.”
Jonas squints at me. “Are you saying she was a glorified pimp who talked the talk but failed to walk the walk?”
“Pretty much, yes.”
“She was a hypocrite,” Peter adds.
“She wrote a feminist manifesto that generations of women took as the red pill,” I say to Jonas. “But the things she put up with during her fifty-year-long relationship with Sartre, and the things she did, make a mockery of every line in that book.”
Jonas raises his glass, tittering. “Cheers! I love it when feminists trash their own. Makes my job of exposing the fraud so much easier!”
I glare at him.Don’t you get too smug yet, Mister Count d’Alenq!Margot Nolan is going to demolish you tonight.
Very apropos, the ice cubes in my gin and tonic clink against the glass.
I swirl them. “Feminism is gold surrounded by a lot of rubbish and grift.”
“Like what?” Jonas asks.
“Intersectionality, virtue signaling, useless programs and training courses, sterile battles that distract from the actual problems, fabricated issues that steal resources from the real ones… The list goes on.”
He smiles with a touch of mockery. “That’sa lotof rubbish and grift!”
“Haters like you use it to discredit the cause.”
His eyes tighten at the corners. “Which is…?”
“Equal rights and emancipation.”
“But you already enjoy that, don’t you?”
Frustrated, I pinch the bridge of my nose. “We live in a world where women are attacked from all sides. Mullahs sell us into child marriage and bar us from studying and working. The woke reduce womanhood to a feeling and opened the door to all kinds of abuse.”
