Are Feminists as Delicate Flowers as the MSM Suggests?

How dare a brute of a man like Pete Hegseth imply that women aren't tough enough for combat? Doesn't he know how much that hurts their feelings?

One of the funnier patterns is how the mainstream media tends to portray feminists as such delicate flowers that no brute of a man, whether Pete Hegseth or Larry Summers, should ever dare shock professional women’s fragile feelings by expressing the slightest skepticism about whether women are tough enough for, say, combat or the highest levels of mathematics. For example, from the New York Times news section in 2025:

What Women Heard in Hegseth’s Remarks About Physical Standards

The defense secretary raised the issue suggesting women were getting into combat not because they met high standards, but because they were given a pass.

By John Ismay

Reporting from Washington

Oct. 2, 2025

Bobbie Scholley, a retired Navy captain and advocate for women in military special operations, decided to watch Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s address on Tuesday to hundreds of military leaders to see whether he had anything new to say.

But after about 30 minutes into a livestream of the event, she snapped her laptop closed.

“I listened to it with my gut just clenching, and it just kept getting worse and worse and worse until finally I turned it off,” Captain Scholley said in an interview.

Similarly, 20 years ago at the dawn of woke cancel culture, Harvard President Lawrence Summers was widely denounced for causing MIT feminist biology professor Nancy Hopkins to flee in horror to avoid fainting when Larry pointed out that the IQ bell curve tends to be broader for men than for women and thus there are more male professors in the Harvard math department. “When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn’t breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill,” Nancy declared.