No sooner did I write about the War on Wives than a member of the American aristocracy walked right into the crossfire.  We do indeed have an aristocracy – people who are allowed to be fabulously wealthy without facing a single word of class-war criticism, and whose every utterance is given enormous weight by media courtiers.  Many of these aristocrats can be found in Hollywood.  However, not even a movie star can get away with dissenting from the strictly enforced groupthink against traditional marriage, as actress Kirsten Dunst discovered.

The leading lady of the earlier Spider-Man film trilogy dared to venture, during an interview with Harper’s Bazaar: “I feel like the feminine has been a little undervalued. We all have to get our own jobs and make our own money, but staying at home, nurturing, being the mother, cooking – it’s a valuable thing my mom created.  And sometimes, you need your knight in shining armor.  I’m sorry.  You need a man to be a man and a woman to be a woman.  That’s why relationships work.”

As David Limbaugh observed, it’s interesting that Dunst felt compelled to say “I’m sorry” in the middle of this entirely common-sense observation.  Did she notice her interviewer frowning in distaste, or did she correctly anticipate how the left-wing hive-mind would recoil in outrage?  Drop this sentence into a time machine and beam it back in time, perhaps as recently as 1982, the year IMDB says Dunst was born; nearly everyone reading it, of either sex or any socio-economic class, would ask in bewilderment why she felt obliged to include an apology.

As things stand in 2014, not even cushioning the blow with a phrase that has come to mean “I’m not passing judgment, I’m just telling you how things are” was enough to save Dunst from a furious backlash, which Limbaugh samples:

It’s not as though Dunst objects to women having professionally success, as her own career clearly demonstrates. But to say she likes men to be masculine or chivalrous and women to be feminine is blasphemous. For her to acknowledge what people have instinctively known since the beginning of time — that men and women are different — is threatening to feminists.

So poor Kirsten Dunst is finding out what it’s like to have the leftist thought police knocking at your door. Some of them have called her “insufferable” for voicing her opinion. Others have said she is just “dumb.” One critic tweeted that she “should never be allowed to talk near young girls.”

Yikes.  She was better off tangling with Doctor Octopus.  Of course, she received support too, some of which is quoted at Twitchy.  The War on Wives has been going badly, but there is still effective resistance.

The War on Wives is a war on sexual identity, both of necessity and by design.  The ultimate goal is to destroy traditional family relationships, which are an impediment to State power, and offend liberal theorists as antiquated relics of the earlier eras they despise.  A nation of single people, especially single women, dependent upon the State for subsistence – and recognizing no moral authority before it – is the end state of this transformation.  Married couples who stick together, raise their own children, and accumulate property over generations are a serious obstacle that must be removed.

But the traditional relationship Kirsten Dunst described is consistent with natural law.  It’s the way most men and women want to arrange their lives.  Not universally, of course, and there is no reason to heap scorn upon those who don’t feel the urge to be nurturing motherly women in partnership with white-knight men.  But in a society including millions of people, the majority of us are naturally inclined to want such relationships, with varying degrees of intensity.  It’s also socially productive, given all the advantages a stable marriage brings to husband, wife, and children.  Thirty-odd years into the War on Wives, it still feels strange to have to explain these painfully obvious advantages, the entirely natural tendency of men and women to seek each other as life partners, and (can we be brutally honest here?) the fact that men sometimes need a wee bit more convincing to stick around for that life partnership.

We’re now embarked upon a social-engineering program designed to erase those values.  Marriage between men and women has been aggressively re-defined as nothing special, just one option among many, no better or worse than any other coupling (and soon there won’t be anything special about “coupling,” either.)  As Kirsten Dunst discovered, it is a thought crime to suggest there is anything truly different about men and women, or anything unique and special about what happens when they come together for (hopefully) life-long fidelity.

To complete that level of societal reprogramming, it is necessary to devalue both “masculine” and “feminine” qualities, blending everything into a grey unisex slurry.  The hive mind is especially tough on the feminine virtues, which “feminism” has spent decades portraying as symbolic of male oppression.  Not only is the role of “wife” in the traditional sense nothing special, it’s regarded as bad, inferior, soul-crushing, ambition-thwarting.  A woman’s wedding ring is a shackle on the end of an invisible chain.  

Even traditional courtship rituals are under attack, based as they are upon young people instinctively following the same natural law that led their parents to create the marriage culture we’re currently burning to ashes.  Somehow even asking a girl out to the prom can now be construed as sexual harassment, because of all the unfair burdens the request supposedly places upon the lady.  This is the kind of eye-rolling lunacy that remains when all the old social graces have been wiped out, along with the culture that gave them meaning.  If there are no ladies, there will be no gentlemen, and vice versa.  If marriage is nothing special, then “wife” is not a title that conveys unique honor and respect.  That’s why the redefinition of marriage is, inescapably, a War on Wives.  Married women don’t vote the right way, so collectivists have little use for them, and everyone a collectivist does not embrace is his enemy.