I don’t believe in crucifying a whole group just because a few people have made mistakes

From Of Course Dolly’s Not a Feminist. She Loves Men. by Suzanne Venker. Dolly Parton, from everything I have seen and heard, is an admirable and formidable person. She is an example of the old and wonderful America where people take responsibility for themselves, struggle to overcome their circumstances, are rewarded for their success, and then keep on giving back to their community and nation.

Venker's essay feels a little shoe-horned to address an argument that Venker wants to make about feminism but is interesting in its quotes from Parton. It is nominally a review of NPR's documentary/podcast Dolly Parton's America. Venker makes a particular point of contrasting the interviewer's constrictive and poisonously negative social justice/feminist assumptions and the big-hearted, generous views of Parton herself.

I was hooked at Episode 1, entitled “Sad Ass Songs,” which highlights the beginning of Dolly’s career when she wrote depressing songs in her youth that she laughs about now.

Toward the end of that episode—the 44:39 mark, to be exact—Parton is asked whether or not she’s a feminist.
Her answer stuns the podcast’s host, Jad Abumrad. Not only did Parton say, “No, I do not,” she said it emphatically and resolutely—so much so that afterward, when Abumrad is asked by another woman he interviewed for the same episode, “So did [Dolly] say no? Or was she just evasive?”

“No, uh, like she recoiled,” said Abumrad. “Which surprised me. It was like, I don’t know, like I dropped a word bomb in the room.”

I would love to say the producers of the podcast have since questioned their allegiance to feminism after interviewing Dolly, that they’ve learned a thing or two about a whole new way to approach life and love, but I won’t hold my breath. Judging by Abumrad’s reactions to much of what Dolly had to say, he was clearly shocked to discover that this fiercely outspoken, unapologetically independent, successful businesswoman denounced feminism. After all, isn’t feminism responsible for every strong-minded and successful woman on the planet? (Um, no.)

What more, Dolly has written songs about women who’ve been on the receiving end of bad behavior by men. So why on earth isn’t she resentful of men like she’s supposed to be?

“I think of myself as a woman in business,” Parton said. “I love men—cause I have a dad, my brothers, all my uncles I love, my grandfathers I love, and I relate to them. And I write a lot of songs about women, because I am a woman; but I write a lot of songs for men…I write about men and their feelings because I know they have feelings, too. I look like a woman, but I think like a man…I don’t believe in crucifying a whole group just because a few people have made mistakes.”

That is a dead-on explanation of a feminist mindset: the choice to crucify an entire group of people as a result of a few bad apples. Feminist leaders and their followers are notorious for turning personal pain into a massive social problem.

That’s precisely what separates feminists from the Dolly Partons of the world. Women who’ve known their share of suffering but who choose not to hold a grudge or to blow the suffering out of proportion have zero in common with feminists.

I would argue that the real difference is not between Dolly Parton's American and Christian world view and feminism. It is between Dolly Parton's American and Christian world view and the victimhood view of social justice, critical theory, critical race theory, postmodernist view of which modern feminist theory is merely an adjunct specialization.

It is also a contrast between the crabbed, hateful, presumptuous, disparaging and ignorant worldview of much of the chattering class and that of most Americans. The postmodernist, statist enabled, victimhood of the establishment clerisy is just not a good fit with America (or with common morality). It is why the MSM clerisy always sound like they are anthropologists doing fieldwork among an unknown tribe.