I agree that the power of naming is extremely important... that's for example also why there's pro-choice and pro-life instead of pro-choice and anti-choice or pro-life and anti-life.
I think feminists did women a disservice though by making housework and childrearing less valued than they used to be, by making women 'easy', not requiring any commitment etc. Also, I don't believe that women entered the workforce because it's harder now to provide for one family on one salary... I think it's the other way around: it's harder to provide for a family on one salary now because women are in the workforce (although it's probably not as black and white as that and the two arguments probably both have some truth to them).
I'm not claiming that feminists made women go and get jobs, but if you read Betty Friedan's "Feminine Mystique" for example you'll see how she makes the claim that no intelligent woman can be happy and satisfied being a housewife/sahm, basically implying that housework and rearing children are inferior things to do. I take offense to that. She also claims that women were getting burnt out because they way overdid the housecleaning and such, and she says that that's because of the other women, with the women on the same street competing to have the cleanest house etc. For this, she claims the solution is to get women to get outside jobs. I'm sorry, but I can think of other solutions, can't you? (I know that this is just one feminist, but it's a rather important one).
And yet women could vote since 1920. How primitive even in the age of female suffrage.
. . .
Ancient cultures, we are assured by feminist...theorists?...were matriarchal.
Is it any wonder, then, that when we finally got some power, we didn't let you vote for a while?
Startlingly hilarious!!
Excellent points. I'm working on writing something making the analogy between neurotype and gender, as an offshoot of a comment I made to a family member that curing autism because autistics have a harder life and are discriminated against would be like if the early suffragettes had gotten sex-change operations so they could vote instead of lobbying for women's sufferage. Which got me thinking, many of the pro-cure arguments about autism could also apply to femaleness, to a certain extent now but especially in the past. Women have less earning power than men, just as autistics have less earning power than non-autistics, so is it acceptable for parents of daughters to give their little girls testosterone shots to increase their earning power? So why would it be acceptable for parents to try to drug or change their children's neurotype to increase their earning power? Autism is a part of who we are, just as gender is part of who we are.
WOW!!!!
I just had a marvelous tingle in my brain reading that sentence about suffragettes getting sex change operations!!! Please, please write this, and distribute it widely!
So it sounds like we've both had some verifiably negative experiences in the gender wars. I have no solution, other than the personal one.
Max, I only look like Rush Limbaugh. But I'm working on that, been ordered to do the gym every day and done six so far consecutively.
I don't think white Anglo-Saxon Protestant straight men should own this country, even if I am one. America is better than the Islamic Republic of Iran because of freedom of religion, separation of church and state, democracy, constitutional law, and a short list of other things. But W scares me because he seems a little too close to the Iranian president for comfort. A president with nukes who does the will of his God, writes faith into policy, and supports the torture of POWs and erosion of civil liberties in the name of security. I will be happy when his term is up and I hope it is a Democrat in there after him. Or at least a sane Republican like John McCain. I'd almost switch to Republican, temporarily, just to make sure Cheney doesn't become the Republican candidate.
I was a college graduate before I was a Christian. That should tell you why I am politically liberal, yet religiously conservative. I sleep better at night knowing that freedom of religion is protected. Ask any Jehovah's Witness, almost all my extended family in Michigan. The Nazis packed the "Bible researchers" [insert German word here, Biblenresforcers or something] off to the camps. Ask any Seventh Day Adventist, they helped me read my Bible closer nine years ago. 500 years ago being a Protestant could get you killed. 1,000 years ago having a Bible could get you killed. Their version of the End Times suggests that the United States will abolish freedom of religion and persecute everyone who has Sabbath on Sunday.
I inherited my parents' politics, not their religion. They did not prefer any world faith in child rearing. If anything, Mom was a skeptic and Dad urged a healthy knowledge of history for what "Christians" did, or failed to do (very tepid effort to save Jews in WW II). I did support dad drawing a ball-point ink Hitler-moustache on a U.S. News cover of Ralph Reed.
A little story: In 1998 an African-American GS-13, a Branch Chief in the Census Bureau, got upset when I made a query about the educational requirement of the position (college degree) versus my own current level of education (Master's). She was still working on hers. Maybe thought educational elitism was the 21st century version of racism. But I actually felt sorry for her when some older guy ridiculed her ideas, "the old way wasn't so bad" he said. She did offer me my first job that actually approached my current standard of living. And I had five years of sociology, in other words, race sympathy, or gay sympathy.
Never mind that Master's or no, a GS-13 earns an obscene amount of money. My dad (deceased) retired as a GS-13. As a self-confessing Christian she should have known that God blessed her financially. And oh by the way, I remember she was married. I am still single nearly ten years later.
I did not write the Bible. I merely take it as it is, and presume that whatever is in there, is what He wanted. I am free to disagree because I do not understand why _____ and _____ should be punished for doing what my friends Ron and Annette, or Grant and Dena, or Ted and Pam, take for granted as straight Christians. But I do know I did not create anything, let alone the universe. Let's acknowledge the real problem: your disagreement is with God, not with me.
I presume if God was gay friendly but depicted as unfriendly, He would not let it stand. I have to presume He wanted it that way, whether I understand or not. I wouldn't want to be slandered if I was God. If I was God, I'd do something about the world's problems and overpopulation in one stroke, genocide of certain hatemongers. Shia fights Sunni in Iraq? Goodbye.
God is hoping someone will repent tomorrow and get saved. That is why genocide is a poor idea for the Christian God, today. But everything comes to an end, even mercy.
My aforementioned friend Dena, she would not stand for an attack by one person against anyone. It seems those of us who have lived very closely with things like a lifetime of harassment in the name of Asperger are not going to stand for any attacks anywhere.
Maybe if there is a bright side to a lifetime of harassment, it makes someone give a damn about other people.
I don't need to be a woman to care about women's rights, or at the very least have personal sympathy for a woman who has run out of easy options (think unwanted pregnancy, after which it is only a matter of making the best of it).
I don't need to be black to wonder why majority-African-American Washington D.C. does not have any senators or a Congresswoman without a vote, or to wonder if W could have made New Orleans and Katrina any worse if he had intended them to die. (It is not rocket science. Refuel helicopters in flight to save more flood victims, helicopter carrier. Fly drones over the city to know who is in trouble and where. Hospital ships, maybe an old aircraft carrier for temporary housing, stockpile food and water and medicine like we stockpile arms in Diego Garcia.)
And I don't need to be gay to wonder why the legal system is not reasonably accessible to GLBT, especially with regard to marriage and family.
I forgot one thing: my parents even thought circumcision was excessive indoctrination into Judaism. They left well enough alone at that.
My family never supported violence against women.
Moreover, I had an opportunity at Marshall University to work with the West Virginia Statistical Analysis Center (along with a little recidivism and gun control research, quite a bit of research dedicated to domestic violence specific to WV, including a little evaluation research)
And we saw some real-life domestic violence in our part of WV (I only wish our neighbors were as nonviolent as we)
1. the woman next door was beaten by her husband, whom she divorced and remarried, go figure, she'd run over to our place and he'd chase her.... my parents never had guns before (air rifle pellet guns nonwithstanding), but my dad got one then
2. another neighbor woman drove off and left her husband who walked maybe 7 miles or so. When he found her there, he let her put a cup of hot tea in my mom's hand and then, as she told police, "cold-cocked her". Premeditated violence, no spur of the moment
3. when Mom rented her countryside home to a HUD-sponsored family, as they were moving in, he tripped on a TV set and started beating on his wife. He had bought a shotgun earlier at Wal Mart: Mom and I were there. I left, went to the neighbors and called state police.
Violence, alcohol seem a part of that subdevelopment. Add sex and jail and welfare fraud and you got a soap opera.
We are not rednecks. Mom (Michigan) and Dad (Wisconsin) were midwesterners growing up. My brother and I were suburbanites growing up (Washington DC area: Maryland: Kensington, Rockville, Waldorf), although Dad retired to the vacation house so close to my high school graduation, I graduated from a WV high school, not the Waldorf one. (The graduation in Waldorf was so much cooler: honor guard flown in by two helicopters (Blackhawks they looked like), WJLA news personality Paul Berry spoke)
The problem with arguing about "feminism" is that it's not a single philosophy; it's an umbrella term for many different and contradictory philosophies and ideologies. There are many people who call themselves feminists with whom I disagree greatly; there are others with whom I mostly agree, and many others all over the map. I like having the right to vote and own property and pick my own spouse, so, yeah, I'm a feminist. But that doesn't mean I agree with the majority of the ideology that's being promoted as "feminism."
Yup
unfortunately the power of naming has been present in all the human history, i'll like to make an analogy with the third reich, in which all the ''Jewish '' and ''black'' were considerated inferior just for that.
i don't know, maybe is something of the human nature, praise someone who seems ''superior'' to guide the community and beat off those apparently different people without giving them the opportunity
Maybe this all goes without saying on a website such as this, but I generally think EVERYTHING goes without saying, which is why I don't talk a whole lot!
That happens to me too, sometimes I think something goes without saying when in fact it's not, i have learned to translate all my thoughts on words, but sometimes is still difficult to know when something goes without saying or not :s
I did hear about Melungeons on the History Channel but never heard of them in WV.
Just a few dozen jokes directed at the police.
Someone drew a detailed rural traffic stop on the bathroom wall. I guess it can happen in very remote places, your word against his.
One punch line is cop saying, "yeah, yeah, yeah ____ ____ my ***."
I'm still laughing 11 years later.
You're right about the racism. Mom was afraid to invite Ernie over to the WV retreat, afraid of what K____ and R____ and B____ might say, 90% white up there. So she invited him to our flat in PG County, 80% black.
I can imagine the Boys Don't Cry scenario in Berkeley County WV.
Do you know what the locals said about my brother in Inwood, WV?
(to their kids) Stay away from (my brother), this was perhaps some point between 1992 and 1998.
Because he's a computer programmer with a very dead love life. Like mine.
That's why he went to Arlington County in 1998.
I really enjoyed your piece, Max, on the high school girls and the guys they think they need, and the revelation they get in their mid to late 20's.
It's exactly what I needed to resolve my conundrum.
1. If you or I are such intelligent, compassionate, adults with good character and personality
2. Why do we get such a lousy welcome?
3. Because they think they need something, the way they need something, and it is not what we can offer.
Insert Asperger or morbid obesity, and I figured it out.
We're more civilised down here in NoVa.
I respect your patriotism, Yetti. You and your agemates actually have living memory of an American draft. Now, being born in April 1970 (Beatles breakup, Cambodia invasion), my generation thinks a draft is a beer
Enough with Max, please. He's been very helpful with the explanations, especially the female immaturity thesis he observed as a teacher.
That's actually more relevant for the Generation Next of Asperger, but all the same, I say it again, if you can understand the truth, you CAN learn to live with it.
jiggeryqua, are you an educator too?
I generally have positive regard for educators. I've had some of the best in Charles County MD, Shepherd University or Marshall University