Because feminism is hated
The Telegraph reports on a conversation at the LGB Alliance conference yesterday:
Kathleen Stock said that academic institutions treat students like customers and the “grown-ups” no longer tell anxious young people that someone saying something that they disagree with is not actually harming them.
The philosophy professor said that she will now speak from outside the academy so [that] she is not being constantly watched for a mistake.
Or rather a “mistake,” i.e. a reasoned claim that some bile-infused teenager takes a dislike to.
She was joined by campaigner Julie Bindel who warned that the bitter debate is “about misogyny” which allows men to try [to] silence feminists.
“The reason why so many people have latched on to this, why it’s captured the liberal masses, why it’s captured our institutions is primarily because feminism is hated,” she told the audience to applause.
“This is the old intolerance by the way, not the new. Feminists like me that speak about male violence, and point the finger at male perpetrators, are hated, including by men on the left.” She said that the trans debate had “given them an opportunity” to criticise feminists in a way “they never could before” and still be seen as “being on the right side of history”.
It’s the truth. Just before reading this story I made the same point in a quote tweet.
Feminists are hated, and feminists are hated because women are hated.
It might be more accurately called a misstep than a mistake. The latter implies, as in logically implies, fault. The former allows for mere transgression.
Feminism is so disliked that apparently a large percentage of girls and young women refuse to wear the label. I suspect this’s primarily because they want to be cool, not the uptight fun police. Feminists are harpies, witches, bitches. They want to say yes, to be inclusive, to be liked. They don’t want to be “boomers”. Unfortunately, the very essence of feminism is incompatible with this impulse toward social approval.
Feminism is (duh) supposed to be about the flourishing of female people, requiring at minimum being able to distinguish between the sexes. Otherwise, it’s impossible to focus attention on females or to recognize sexism when we can’t tell who’s male and who’s female. You can only say that people are affected by some phenomenon. (Some might argue that such language would be intrinsically good due to its inclusivity.) The same problem arises from completely ignoring race: it’s impossible to recognize racism when we can’t tell who’s one race and who’s another. Feminism requires not being inclusive of males. It requires telling someone, “This is not for you.”
Being a vocal feminist means pointing out when something constrains female flourishing, but the “cool girl” who fits in with the guys would never do that. It sometimes means standing in opposition to what others in your peer group deem acceptable. It means telling people from whom you probably want approval that their actions or beliefs are wrong, even harmful. Few things are more likely to shrink popularity than that. Marking exclusion immoral assuages the cognitive dissonance that this all generates.
Thus we see the metamorphosis of feminism into its modern form, that ridiculous movement for all oppressed groups, because for females to have their own movement wouldn’t be sufficiently “inclusive”. “No, guys,” it says, “we’re not like those ugly, old, boomer bitches. We’re young and cool and always DTF.”
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