Jason Bo Green really gets it when it comes to understanding why so many women (especially the so-con kind) do not identify as feminists.
Here's written two posts about the subject-- here and here
In the first one, "Five Things Feminism Has Done For Me, or, Gee Thanks, Joe", he lists some of the ways feminism has failed the world:
- Girls are now sexualized earlier. Although I'm not completely sure how this relates to not "evaluating women based on their looks". I'm wondering is he means women should look like women (not underaged girls). Or that women shouldn't be encouraged to be so sexualized they degrade themselves by making themselves look younger than they really are, i.e. slutty.
- Devalued motherhood. He writes:
Feminists regard it with scorn - rather than demanding that motherhood be recognized as a priority career to society, they have made stay-at-home moms feel empty and unfulfilled, when in fact I can't think of a better way to be fulfilled.
- The scorn of feminists makes him sympathetic to his mom:
Feminism was preached to America (ie. the West) by feminists who had no children and had no sentiment or value for or understanding of women who did, and treated those women with children with condescending pity - they were "missing out on life".
- He is also repulsed by the hypocrisy of many feminists wrt to the "medieval" attitudes that some cultures have regarding women.
4. Disappointed me with its hypocrisy: Far, far, far too few "feminists" are willing to speak out against medieval-era anti-women attitudes found in some certain immigrants from non-Western cultures.It's wrong to say "Miss" or "Missus" if you're Anglospheric, but refusal to take orders from a woman gets a pass if you're from, say, Sri Lanka (which is not to suggest all Sri Lankans are anti-women).
He concludes:
But 1960s-onward feminism has been promoted by bourgoise intellectuals out of touch with real, ordinary women's lives.
Too true. Opponents of so-con women say-- sometimes in all seriousness-- that we so-con women are about to take away basic rights like the right to vote, or the right to have a bank account in one's own name.
As if
It sounds like the only way they can make their argument is to engage in baseless fearmongering.
The other implication about the way feminists treat so-con women is that since feminists fought for women's rights, that means that feminism is in no way irrelevant, or that feminism has the monopoly on the Truth about women. As if no suffragette was against abortion. As if they all favoured radical lesbians and post-modern relativism.
Yeah, right.
Political movements sometimes become irrelevant. I might have been a feminist had I been born in 1940. But now, a feminist, de rigueur, must not be a social conservative. A feminist must be a socialist. A feminist must also be, as some level, a religious modernist.
And if you're none of these, not only are you not a feminist, you have no right to be consulted on any issue affecting women.
After all, only feminists have the Truth.
Which wouldn't bother me nearly so much, except social liberals constantly accuse us so-cons of thinking like we have a monopoly on the Truth. And what also bothers me, is that social liberals are the first to say that there are no "universal moral laws", and morals are relative.
All relative, except when it comes to social conservative causes.
In the other post, Jason has one really good line:
Status of Women isn't going to be abolished or hacked up - it never was in danger (although Nellie McClung accomplished more, without government funding, than it has).
Precisely why it should be chopped. But I do agree, it probably won't be any time soon.
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