As of last Friday, feminists across the country are melting down over the shock of having to see and hear a twelve-year-old tape of Donald Trump talking about behaving badly toward women.  One can only assume that these mighty warriors for women have been living in a bubble for the last forty years.  They apparently thought their plan to transform men into full-fledged wimps had been fully implemented.

Trump obviously missed two generations of enforced indoctrination and sublimation that has indeed turned many men into pajama boys.  He, on the other hand, has behaved like a thug rapper who thinks the words he spews are a how-to manual.  Everyone is offended by his past exploits, his apparent belief that because he was rich, he could get away with brutish conduct.

Trump clearly has a history of inappropriate behavior, not unlike several past presidents and politicians, but not quite as vile.  He hasn't killed anyone, as Ted Kennedy did.

Now the NYT is hawking a video of more women who say he groped them, one of them thirty years ago!  If true, why did they not haul off and slug him?  Where was all that girl power?  Wasn't that the height of the feminist movement, when they were all taking self-defense classes?

These women who are so, so offended by tales of Trump from long ago are pathetic.  Have none of them ever been to Italy?  All over the world, men have been known to be, and often are, boors.  It has been known to be the nature of the beast.

Do those of us with daughters teach them to plug their ears and run as fast as they can from ugly words?  No.  They have to learn that not everyone is civilized or well-mannered, kind or respectful.  We teach them to have self-respect and, if bothered by another person, male or female, to fight back, with words, distance, or physical force if necessary.  We teach them not to take aggressive intrusion on their person from anyone.  To be human, one must be aware.

Much of such commonsense parenting is being undermined by the foolishness of trigger warnings and safe spaces on college campuses.  Young people are being taught that speech must be severely regulated lest someone's feelings be hurt.  All in all, feminism has been turned upside-down and inside out.  These women want to be considered equal to men – powerful, competent, advocates for other women.  At the same time, they act like fragile children, as afraid of gutter language as they are of an inappropriate touch.  But these same women do not speak out for the millions of women in the Muslim world who are oppressed and abused; that would be politically incorrect.  They do not speak out for the Yazidi women who have for several years now been sold into sex slavery in service of barbaric jihadists.  That too would be an affront to Obama's rule that we must speak no evil about radical Islamic terrorists.

In short, no modern woman should have her feathers ruffled by unseemly words uttered years ago.  Better we worry about the words Hillary Clinton utters today.  She promises to raise our taxes by trillions of dollars, which means more massive debt.  She promises to increase refugee immigration by 500%, which will guarantee an increase in domestic terrorism.  She wants more gun control, more divisive racial rhetoric, more restrictions on law enforcement, more federal control of our schools, and Supreme Court justices who will further abrogate the Constitution.  In short, the end of America as founded.

Everyone knows that Hillary Clinton has a forty-year history of pathological lying.  Everyone knows she, in the words of Colin Powell, has "unbridled ambition."  People know she abused the women who threatened her husband's political career.  She was the one who hired the detectives to dig up dirt on them.  Those detectives stalked and harassed some of them.  Hillary name-called, lied, and dismissed her husband's predatory behavior as Bill being Bill.  Those women were victims of her as much as they were victims of Bill Clinton.

Hillary has as gritty and perhaps an even grittier history than Trump of bad behavior toward women.  She has taken millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, etc. – Muslim countries where women cannot drive, must be covered head to toe in burkas, and can be stoned for a variety of small reasons.  Using Trump's past as a weapon to take attention away from her own crimes that are being exposed on a daily basis by Wikileaks is so calculated, so transparent.  But it's what the Clintons do.

The feminist movement has done terrible damage to several generations of women who embraced it.  The first wave, that began just after the advent of the birth control pill, taught girls that they "could have it all" – education, career, and family.  Millions of them put off the family for too long, until it was too late, and regretted their choice.  Others had children in their forties when their own parents were too old to be hands-on grandparents.  The second wave taught that women could be as sexually promiscuous as men without consequences.  But there were consequences: STDs, drug abuse, loss of self-respect.  And now we have the third wave, a complete turnabout, in which young women must be shielded from offensive words and "trigger warned " in case there may come by something offensive in a work of literature (so many books they cannot read!) or in a campus speaker who may have views antithetical to their own.

Feminist culture has created women who would be unrecognizable to the women of the American past – women of the Colonial, Revolutionary, Civil War and industrial, WWI, and WWII eras.  Those women were tough, strong, and competent, whether they had educations or not.  And their lives were truly difficult in countless ways women of today cannot imagine.

Women of the twenty-first century have so much for which to be eternally grateful, but it seems all the feminists among us do is complain about the silliest, most irrelevant things.  They have won on every front but cannot stop whining.  If Hillary wins the election, their lives are not going to be better; they will be decidedly worse – less free, less secure economically, and less safe, for them and their families.  There will be more chaos in the Middle East and around the world.

Trump's past behavior is odious, but he is the only option at this late date.  He just might turn things around.  Hillary will double down on all of Obama's failed policies.