Fearful message behind 'Fearless Girl'

SO many people have gotten it so wrong about “Fearless Girl.” The statue of a pint-size female, arms planted defiantly on her hips as she stares down the rendering of a bull charging through New York City’s Financial District, has morphed into a kind of feminist Rorschach test.

The metallic minor is widely seen as a symbol of girl power in the face of virulent alleged sexism. Or, an epic cry against gals’ supposed pay inequity as compared to dudes’ throughout America, particularly in the monetary sector.

The 4-foot-tall artwork, erected in honor of International Women’s Day last month and originally scheduled to be removed Sunday, was even branded in a Post editorial as an ingenious advertising gimmick worthy of “Mad Men’s” Don Draper, cooked up by Boston-based State Street Global Advisors investment company. Oops. State Street employs just a handful of women in top executive positions, even fewer than the abysmal numbers posted by other Wall Street firms.

And yet, some “Fearless” critics, myself included, aren’t buying into the sculpture’s defeatist message. We see the bronze babe as representing something else: A blow to the collective gut of the fairer sex.

Why, in this age of unprecedented social, political and economic gains enjoyed by those living and working as females, should we be expected to wallow in victimhood?

Yet “Fearless Girl,” which Mayor de Blasio last week guaranteed will stand its ground in lower Manhattan through February 2018, while others push for permanent residency, is more than attracting the eyeballs and cellphone cameras of tourists and city residents alike.

The unmoving girl child perpetrates myths of women’s powerlessness, while fomenting self-pity and anti-male sentiment that helps no one.

Ironically, that bull statue was never intended as an expression of male power — but of American prosperity and strength.

“I think it’s a problematic sense you get from the statue — the American economy is trying to run this girl over,’’ Carrie Lukas, managing director of the Independent Women’s Forum think tank, told me.

“American women are more likely than any women on earth to be managers in corporations. They can run for office, start a new busi- ness, work hard and earn a lot,’’ she said. They even can choose to be stay-at-home mothers.

Warren Farrell, Ph.D., was a devoted feminist who, for three years in the 1970s, was the first and only man elected to the board of directors of the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women.

Then he started writing books, including 2005’s “Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap — and What Women Can Do About It,’’ which nuked the gospel of male earnings superiority, and made him persona non grata on the liberal speaking circuit. Farrell revealed that young, never-married, childless women earned 117 percent of the sum raked in by similar dudes. Blasphemy! His source? It wasn’t some fringe men’s-rights group, but the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It’s been an article of faith by feminists and the administration of former President Barack Obama that gals earn less than guys — the pay disparity recently was pegged at 79 cents for females compared to each dollar raked in annually by males. But when one factors in things such as education level or years of experience, the pay gap starts to vanish. It dwindles completely when one considers that women lose earning power voluntarily when they jump off the fast track or scale back careers to become mothers.

That doesn’t entirely explain the lack of women on Wall Street. But Farrell says that, too, can be chalked up to choice.

“Many people [in finance] work 60, 70 hours a week,” he said. He conducted a study that determined many women who achieve high salaries, as opposed to men, tend to kick back in favor of more satisfying, and lower-paying, work-life balances.

I can think of better places that “Fearless Girl” should live as a celebration of womanly achievement, not a sign of defeat. How about Harvard Yard? Women today earn about 60 percent of postsecondary degrees. Or the grounds of NASA? Working there from the 1940s, African-American female mathematicians were instrumental in putting Americans in space and white men on the moon, as depicted in the flick “Hidden Figures.”

How about Chappaqua, home of Hillary Clinton, the first female major-party candidate for president of the United States?

Where she exists today, “Fearless Girl” is an insult to women as well as men.

No ‘vice’ in Mike’s life

Leftists are off-base here. A Washington Post profile of Vice President Mike Pence’s wife Karen — the nation’s second lady, — contains this nugget: “In 2002, Mike Pence told The Hill that he never eats alone with a woman other than his wife and that he won’t attend events featuring alcohol without her by his side, either.”

The fury expressed from the left about the food and booze rules of the evangelical Christian couple (there’s no reason to believe they’ve changed since 2002) is sad.

The veep was accused of keeping women down in the workplace. Would critics be happier if Mike Pence bragged about his sexploits? I hope not.

‘Safe’ bet Rikers plan won’t fly

New York City’s massive jail complex on Rikers Island is a violence-plagued hellhole. Yet a plan to close Rikers within a decade, championed by a blueribbon panel and announced by Mayor de Blasio Friday, rattled New Yorkers’ fears that the lockup would be replaced by potentially risky facilities in our neighborhoods.

Hizzoner gave almost no plan specifics, saying the falling city crime rate should result in cutting the jail population from 10,000 to 5,000. Unless and until our safety is assured, I won’t trust this scheme.

Prof’s sick US-hate

A professor from Drexel University in Philadelphia, whose tweets include a holiday-eve outrage in which he wrote that all he wanted for Christmas was “white genocide,” has disgraced himself again.

Associate prof George Ciccariello-Maher, Ph.D., spewed on Twitter last week that he wanted to “vomit” at the sight of an airline passenger giving up his first-class seat to a uniformed member of the American military — later explaining that he was upset by reports of Iraqi civilian casualties.

This anti-American, anti-white racist isn’t fit to teach.