When one thing is better than another thing
Chris Moos on Twitter:
So @nonajasmine, why did you delete ur tweet attacking Muslim women challenging gender segregation as “unfeminist”?
It is unfeminist to lecture other women on what they should do and think & I include Muslim women in that
No. Feminism is not endorsing everything any woman says or does or thinks. It never has been. Feminism is all about saying X is better than Y, and that of course includes saying it to women.
Feminism apparently means never telling Phyllis Schlafly she doesn’t speak for us, or asking female protesters to let patients into Planned Parenthood, or criticizing a female executive who never promotes women because “most of them don’t really care about their careers.”
What does she mean? That you shouldn’t lecture Muslim women as it’s unfeminist; or that Muslim women shouldn’t lecture other women as that’s unfeminist?
Also, isn’t she doing some lecturing on her own account with that statement, so is presumably unfeminist herself? However I doubt she would recognise logical consistency.
It’s an incredibly silly thing to say. A mass of feminists from Mary Wollstonecraft on have “lectured” other women ie written polemic, presented arguments, taken issue with, pointed out discrepancies and done other things other than agreeing with every statement made by another woman.
When I was in my teens and early 20s, I was rabidly anti-feminist, and that is exactly what I thought feminism was. “Feminists” made me furious because they saw women as dumber and even less capable than flat-out misogynists did, at least people who hated women saw them as autonomous.
Fortunately, I eventually learned that that was really a caricature of feminism, and feminists didn’t really believe that women could literally do no wrong. That was just a strawman of silly nonexistent extremists meant to slander real feminists!
Well…shit.
Can’t recall which, could hunt around a bit if people are sufficiently curious, but one of the findings of one of those recent ‘broken pipeline’ studies was it was pretty definite that the bias against women applicants also showed up when it was a woman making the decision.
I don’t think anyone should be surprised. These are _old_, established, pervasive biases, deeply entrenched in culture, in or psychology, often harder to catch even in ourselves than people appreciate. The reductio ad absurdum, here: should we say, oh, hey, those officials are _women_, so in their case, this is no problem?
I’d say, um, no.
Islam, like religions in general, is quick to advertise what it teaches as somehow actually a good thing, or justified anyway because the claimed edicts of a fictional tyrant always trump all else, or in the final retreat protected as ‘culture’, but much of what it promotes is actually much in the same category. Taught, entrenched prejudice, insinuated into culture, difficult to dislodge pernicious, and no, not somehow suddenly beyond criticism because those propagating it are themselves harmed by it. Hell, making this the principle would probably exempt anything stupid anyone ever said, ever. Much idiocy people endorse hurts them first. Let the angry idiot whites elect Trump, how very condescending of us to warn them this is unlikely to address their real problems. It’s what they want, after all. That here, too, there’s been a long term, pervasive effort to distract and confuse and drive people toward an easy, almost addictive, corrosive hatred of various ‘others’, and away from constructive solutions notwithstanding.
It is unfeminist to lecture other women on what they should do and think & I include Muslim women in that
That statement is the product of nothing else than fear.
Criticizing Islamist gender segregation will always bring about charges of racism, islamophobia and neo-colonialism from ‘The Sisters’, the willing handmaidens of misogyny
‘It is unfeminist to lecture other women on what they should do and think’
Except for HER telling women not to offend the poor widdle Muslims.
She’s also ignoring the difference between “Telling people what to do/think” and “presenting your arguments and information and letting them make up their own mind”. I don’t claim to know what Muslim women should do about the demonstrable fact that their religion is repressive and cruel, because I know that even speaking out can be risky for them, with costs I can only begin to really grasp. But that doesn’t mean I can’t say, “Segregating the sexes in public events is wrong and unfeminist.”