Pepper spray for women? That’s OK with me.

On Thursday, MP Kellie Leitch unveiled the latest policy concept in her Trump-inspired campaign for the Conservative leadership. You could even call it a “Trump-flavoured” campaign: it’s like a bag of boring snack chips with a chemical dash of Southern spice exhaled over it. And I can’t help suspecting that there is something slightly phoney about the media panic surrounding her candidacy. Shouldn’t all news stories about the Conservative race come with disclaimers, possibly in the sub-headline, about the various contenders’ ability in French?

“CONSUMER ADVISORY: This candidate is unlikely to ever be prime minister. Candidate may squirm visibly or experience sudden breakdown when confronted with one of our official languages. Candidate’s promise to study French real hard before the next election may not be honoured.”

Still, Leitch’s Thursday announcement struck me as a potentially elegant move in a hopeless chess game. Noting that a large number of women suffer physical violence over the course of their lives, she proposes that Canadians should be allowed to carry chemical mace and pepper spray for self-defence. “Women should not,” she wrote in a Facebook posting, “be forced by the law to be victims of violence when there exist non-lethal means by which they can protect themselves.”

That’s a true statement, no? Leitch does not suggest that the carrying of chemical spray weapons should be a benefit reserved only to women — she just wants to legalize those weapons generally. Perhaps I am a little more feminist than she is: I would be comfortable making the carrying of mace and pepper spray a sex-linked legal privilege. Hell, I would consider extending it to very small firearms.

Activists for feminism are continually characterizing the world of women as one of terror, abuse, and uncertainty. For Leitch to take them at their word, applying a tough-on-criminals spin, is an authentic Trump touch. I do not wholly approve of the tactic, but, as much as I think some feminists are attention-hungry zanies, I recognize the kernel of truth in their image of the universe. I’ve never had a close female friend who could not tell of bizarre, creepy, threatening things happening to them — sights and encounters that, to a male with an ordinary upbringing, seem to have wriggled from the corner of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

Leitch got exactly the response she must have wanted from the Liberal Status of Women Minister Patty Hajdu, who blurted that giving women extra selfdefence options was “putting the onus on” them, and thereby “offensive.” I find this is an odd way to raise the status of women — suggesting that if some of them might like to carry a can of mace in their purses, and could even be trusted by the authorities to use it responsibly, they are thereby dupes of the patriarchy.

The actual status of women is that they belong to the physically weaker sex. Biology has given male primates greater upperbody strength, stronger grip, and testosterone. Men commit the overwhelming majority of consequential violence everywhere in the world throughout all history. (Men’s rights advocates sometimes argue that women commit just as many violent acts as men, which misses the point by such a wide margin that it is the intellectual equivalent of throwing like a girl.)

I think the biologically vulnerable half of the species could reasonably be given a force-equalizing advantage by the law. We could talk about whether there are other classes of person — seniors, the disabled — who might merit the same advantage. Fine! Not a problem for Leitch, anyway: she wants everyone to be able to choose pepper spray, and does not think towns and cities would be beset by a permanent smog of eye-stinging capsaicin as a result.

We could talk about practical problems of enforcement, though it is not obvious to me what those would be. We could bring up transgendered women who have male DNA, skeletons, and musculature — yet I cannot see that part of the chat lasting long, because the answer is that trans women are women, ought to be counted as such for this legal purpose, and may have even more reason for considering chemical self-defence when they go jogging in a park or have to navigate a parkade at a late hour.

The “onus” business is thoroughly unconvincing: however much and in what ways you favour re-educating men to be less violent, that does not in any way imply that you cannot give women the option of buying a little can of CapStun. Some feminists, being too liberal to believe that women actually exist as an ontological category, may not want to accept the premise that there are two biological sexes with statistically distinct physical characteristics. But I do not see that favouring the Cosh Plan for arming women requires one to accept that premise.

If it suits you, you can go ahead and regard female mace privilege as an act of redress or reparation for patriarchal injustice. We could all very well say “It puts men in their place,” and agree to disagree on the details.