Yes but compassion and care for which people?

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Ophelia Benson

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Greg Lukianoff on victim groups and morality on the left.

But once people on the left had defended other perceived victim groups, there seemed to be only one place left to go. The result was that the issue was pursued as a quasi-religious social movement rather than as a scientific or public policy question that needed to be carefully thought through and rigorously examined. Once people’s identities revolved around the idea that compassion and care were the highest moral ends, and therefore essentially sacred, hysteria was bound to follow. The Founders tried to guard against this kind of dynamic through things like the pairing of the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses, but those protections do not work as well when the ideology in question does not call itself a religion.

I don’t think that’s quite it though. It’s not just the idea that compassion and care are the highest moral ends, it’s also that women don’t count as “victim groups” aka a set of people who have been systematically treated as inferior and subordinate since forever. It’s the sudden and ruthless displacement of women’s long campaign for equality and respect by men who dress up as women. That can’t be due to the idea that compassion and care are the highest moral ends, because in that case where is the compassion and care for women? Where did it go all of a sudden? How was it decided that women are the oppressor as opposed to the oppressed?

Comments

4 responses to “Yes but compassion and care for which people?”

  1. iknklast Avatar
    iknklast

    I’ve read a bit about male perceptions of females (I imagine you have too!) I’ve seen some that show young males perceive females as ‘trapping’ them into relationships, and then sitting around doing nothing while he makes money to support her. (That wasn’t true even when men were the main breadwinners.)

    I think this is part of the reason it was so easy to sell the idea of women as oppressing man, rather than the other way ’round.

    I was also told once that women have it easier than men because we can wear any color we want (I think I’ve mentioned him here before). He was wearing a pink shirt at the time; I was dressed in basic black. He also felt it necessary to explain to me what it was really like to be a woman in the 1980s, a period during which I was a woman, and he wasn’t born yet.

  2. Mosnae Avatar
    Mosnae

    iknklast:

    It’s staggering that there are so many (often but not always young) people who think the different expectations society places on women and men are limited to little cosmetic details. I mean, I often feel that I don’t have a great awareness of sexist biases, given that so many are either completely normalized or left concealed, but I’m not so moronic as to be unaware that sexism is a thing.

    A few months ago, I read something to the following effect (I’m paraphrasing, obviously):

    “Being transgender is inherently anti-capitalist because capitalism relies on the gender binary: indeed, capitalism doubles its profits by selling different clothes to women and men.”

    It should not be possible to miss the point so thoroughly.

  3. axxyaan Avatar
    axxyaan

    The problem with looking out for victim groups, is that the victim group often get treated as holy. The victims of the victim group itself, often women, are often ignored.

  4. Bjarte Foshaug Avatar
    Bjarte Foshaug

    How was it decided that women are the oppressor as opposed to the oppressed?

    I’m probably getting too cynical and arrogant and consumed by misanthropy at this point, but the more I learn about humanity, the less I think any actual thinking goes into the average person’s view of the world (beyond “whatever goes by the name ‘[insert tribal/ideological/identity label of choice]’” or “whatever the current orthodoxy of my tribe happens to be”). The following quote from 1984 seems apt:

    In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

    Substitute “gender ideology” for “the world-view of the Party”, and I think it pretty admirably captures the situation we’re in.

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