Done With Feminism

I am done with officially-sanctioned, automatically-expected-full-throated solidarity with other women no matter what the issue or complaint. I am done with the whole reproductive-health-motte-and-bailey-abortion-sacrament. I am more than done with women who think that the crusade for political, legal, and educational equality is merely an excuse to be viciously-manipulative bitches to those men unfortunate enough to be involved with them personally. I am also so done with women who are of an inter-connected social class sufficiently well-to-do to have had damn-near everything handed to them on a silver platter, complaining at an ear-splitting level about being downtrodden and oppressed; this when women in the Middle East must wear burkas out in public, have to be escorted when out in public by a male relative … and oh, yes – sold as sex slaves in Daesh/ISIL markets, or routinely have their clitorises excised. I am also done, by the way, with female protesters done up in cheap red-cloak and white bonnet costumes drawn from a bad dystrophic novel by a Canadian who knows f**k-all about the American Protestant tradition. (I’d respect Margaret Atwood ever so much more if she had done her Handmaids’ Tale schtick in an Islamic setting, but I guess she isn’t all that brave about having a fatwah declared on her. Pity.)

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Women Are All Precious Flowers Now

I always like to get my wife’s take on things, as she is smart, good looking and, frankly, I way outkicked my coverage, so to say, in my choice of spouses.

In watching some of the Kavanaugh hearings yesterday I asked her opinion on the whole deal. She says that pretty much every female she knows (herself included) got groped at some time in their lives but all have moved on from things that happened oh so long ago. She also says that this circus will severely damage any claims by, well, pretty much any female that may have been actually sexually abused in the past. “What happened to strong women? Are we all precious flowers now that must be so delicately handled?”

My wife also doesn’t think that Kavanaugh actually did said groping – but that even if he did, it was in high school some 3.5 decades ago so, well, bfd.

Her social media feeds have exploded with vitriol. I am glad I deleted my facebook account some time ago. I am sure it is awful.

That is one strong woman’s viewpoint – I would love to hear from some of our other what I would consider strong women contributors here on their take of the situation.

A Reductio ad Absurdum of the “Progressive” Categorization Obsession

Here’s a “lifeboat” exercise for students at an Ohio middle school.  The scenario is that Earth is doomed–a spaceship is escaping, but there is only room for 8 passengers out of the original 12 who were selected.  Students were required to choose who should go and who should stay, based on such descriptive criteria as:

–“an accountant with a substance abuse problem”
–“a militant Afro-American medical student”
–“a female movie star who was recently the victim of a sexual assault”
–“an Asian, orphaned 12-year-old boy”

etc etc

Note that these descriptions are mainly about demographics categories and sexual preferences/behavior/experiences, and about attitudes toward these things.  There’s a little about occupations, not much about skills, and very little indeed about personality and behavior.  We are a long way here from Martin Luther King’s dictum about judging people by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin.

The above may be a particularly egregious example, but this kind of thinking has become quite common in American universities.  Administrators, along with substantial parts of the faculties and now also the student populations, tend to view people through exactly this kind of lenses.  I’m reminded of the University of Delaware indoctrinator who became rather disturbed when one of his indoctrinees responsed to the question “When were you first made aware of your race?” with  “That is irrelevant to everything. My race is human being” and  “When did you discover your sexual identity?” with “That is none of your damn business”…and, most significantly, responded to  “When was a time you felt oppressed? Who was oppressing you? How did you feel? with this:

“I am oppressed everyday on basis of my undying and devout feelings for the opera”

…which elegantly makes the point that people are more than the sum of their demographic categories, and that the things that result in their “oppression” or “privileging” are often things other than those categories.  I greatly admire this young woman’s courage.

This sort of thing may have started in odd corners of American universities, but has now become one of the defining characteristics of those universities, and has substantially spilled out with toxic effects for the entire society.