We Need To Get Women Out Of Men’s Spaces

There’s a lot to say about the disturbing footage of a violent mob beating a man and woman in downtown Cincinnati, but one thing that shouldn’t go unsaid is that the outrageous and offensive response from Cincinnati Police Chief Teresa Theetge is yet another reminder that we should get women out of men’s spaces — and out of men’s professions.

Policing is a man’s profession. So is soldiering, and commercial fishing, and underwater welding, and so on. That’s not to say women shouldn’t be able to serve in clerical roles in a police force or in the military, but they have no business leading police departments or being deployed into combat areas.

This is, or should be, a commonplace observation. But ever since the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the rise of feminism, we’re all supposed to pretend that women can do any job that men can do. What nonsense.

Take for example the spectacle of Theetge, an older, overweight woman who is somehow the chief law enforcement officer of a major American city. In a press conference this week about the violence in downtown Cincinnati, Theetge scolded the news media and the public for sharing and commenting on video footage of the incident posted on social media. The footage, she said, didn’t “depict the entire incident,” and showed only “one version of what occurred.”

In an imperious, irritated tone, Theetge then complained that social media commentary and news coverage of the video are making her job harder. The video, Theetge claimed, “distorts the content of what actually happened, and it makes our job more difficult.” Of course she didn’t say how it distorted what happened, or why online commentary would make the incident harder to investigate. Pressed by a reporter on what exactly the video footage distorted, Theetge gave a non-answer, saying, “it just shows one side of the equation … without factual context.”

What was this missing context? She didn’t day. But her meaning was clear enough. Theetge doesn’t want people viewing or commenting on the video because of the racial element to the attack: a mob of black people attacking two white people and knocking the woman out cold. For anyone who has seen the video, no special context is needed to understand what’s being depicted. A black mob is attacking a white man, the person filming it is reveling in the attack, and when a white woman steps in to help the man, she gets punched in the face and goes down unconscious.

It’s disturbing footage that shows mob violence in a downtown that appears to be totally lawless, with zero police presence in the area — despite the fact that there was a major music festival underway nearby that night. Yet instead of taking responsibility for her department’s failure and condemning the attack against the woman in particular, Theetge is concerned about the perception of the incident on social media, that it might create an impression that runs contrary to social justice and left-wing nostrums about race in America. So she emotionalizes the entire thing, refusing to answer direct questions about what context is missing from the video. Here is the longhouse at work, lecturing us about our potential emotional responses to violence rather than dealing with the violence itself.

Theetge, like most women who have risen through the law enforcement ranks in large cities, is totally committed to DEI and social justice. Indeed, she’s currently being sued by four former members of the Cincinnati police department for discrimination against white men on the force. “The city and Chief Theetge have actively and systemically undertaken efforts to promote, advance, and make promotion and assignment decisions that are preferable to women and minorities, and to the exclusion of White men,” the lawsuit argues.

The officers who brought the suit claim they were passed over for preferred assignments, and that ever since Theetge became chief in 2022, a race-based quota system has been used to promote women and racial minorities.

This should come as no surprise. Major cities run by Democrats have a habit of making woke women police chiefs. As one commentator at Red State noted, New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Washington, Oakland, Portland, Louisville, and Seattle, in addition to Cincinnati, all have female police chiefs. Nearly 90 percent of police officers are men, yet all these cities have female police chiefs. Why? We all know why. Theetge’s own social media bio makes it clear: she calls herself an “advocate for inclusion,” and you know what that means.  

For as much as the right has denounced men invading women’s spaces in the name of transgenderism, not enough has been said about women invading men’s spaces in the name of feminism and “equity.”

There should be zero female police chiefs in this country, just as there should be zero female generals in the U.S. military and zero female fire chiefs. The recent Los Angeles fires, and the abject failure of the lesbian-led L.A. Fire Department, were a case study in the left’s rejection of reality for woke ideology. If you can’t carry an adult man out of a burning building, you have no business being a firefighter, let alone running a major fire department.

Put simply, these are jobs for men — not just because men are better at them and more inclined to pursue them as careers, but because the purpose of those jobs is to protect and defend, which are tasks proper to men, not women.

And here we get to the heart of the problem, which is that having female police officers at all, let alone police chiefs, is an affront to reality. The only reason we do it is because feminist ideology has infected public life in this country. Fixing this problem will mean rejecting the sexual revolution wholesale and returning to the undeniable and very simple reality that some jobs are for men and some are for women because men and women are different.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.