A popular hashtag folks like to use on Twitter is #firstworldproblems, often to accompany some lament about a minor nuisance or inconvenience. It's a way of sharing your gripe but recognizing, that, yes, we have it oh so good to have problems oh so trivial. But with the American Left, there's not such self-awareness about the relatively trivial nature of many of their gripes and grouses, and this is particularly true of American feminists in this "war on women"-obsessed media ecology.
And so conservative blogger Mollie Hemingway today thought she'd look at the top five problems American women and girls face, according to liberals in the media, and contrasted that with the much more substantial woes that say women in Iran or Saudi Arabia face. You can read the whole thing here, but for a taste here's a brief excerpt contrasting the heteronormative repression of "girl" Happy Meal toys with Islamist extremists in Nigeria kidnapping and enslaving schoolgirls who dared to get an education (emphasis mine):
Who could deny that the problems identified by feminists in America are serious? Here are just five recent examples of how bad women have it in the States, each followed by a look at a minor problem faced by women in other parts of the world.
American Problem #1
Gendered toys being distributed McDonald’s.
Did you know that McDonald’s distributes toys with its so-called Happy Meals? And that these toys come in “boy” and “girl” varieties? Can you believe what a human rights violation this is? Slate is on it, thank goodness. This must be stopped.
Global Problem #1
234 girls kidnapped from Nigerian schools last week by Islamist extremists.
As the Associated Press reports:
The kidnappings are believed to have been carried out by Nigeria’s Islamic extremist rebels, known as Boko Haram. Boko Haram — the nickname means “Western education is sinful” — is violently campaigning to establish an Islamic Shariah state in Nigeria, whose 170 million people are about half Muslim and half Christian. Boko Haram has been abducting some girls and young women in attacks on schools, villages and towns but last week’s mass kidnapping is unprecedented. The extremists use the young women as porters, cooks and sex slaves, according to Nigerian officials.
