People are giving too much credit to those who tear down posters and outwardly justify Hamas’s massacre. I keep hearing that these people “just can’t handle the horrors of October 7.” Yes they can. They either think the attack was a false flag committed by israel or they think Israelis/Jews deserved it. Everyone needs to stop underestimating antisemitism and hatred of Jews. And maybe these people are on the fringes but they are also in positions of power. We’ve seen signed letters and protests by congressional staffers and state department employees. I appreciate Sarah’s fear. I don’t have much faith in the reasoned thinking of younger generations.
I think they lack imagination. Or possibly (well, almost certainly) empathy. All it takes is a brief, unpleasant mental exercise of imagining one's self sitting at the breakfast table one moment, and five minutes later having strangers in one's living room, watching one's loved ones die, or even be tortured for the specific reason of causing you mental anguish, and you just aren't going to have the energy to screw around with posters. Even if you (somehow) intellectually agree with the broader Palestinian geopolitical cause, it's just not an energizing exercise (certainly not of the variety that elicits team-sports levels of zeal).
For me, this manifests when watching footage of Russians taking casualties in Ukraine. I'm very much on Ukraine's side in this, and when I see armored vehicles being blown apart or artillery striking in the middle of groups of soldiers (who often proceed to writhe in obvious agony), I think those are shots I, too, would have taken. But I don't feel *excited* by the results. I think of how horrible it must be to be one of those guys suffering in the muck, likely feeling the worst pain humanly possible - with no salvation in sight save slow death - and for no reason at all but to service Vladmir Putin's bizarre, quasi-mystical Russian Nationalist vision. I try to imagine what it'd be like to be working a radio in a tank interior one second and then, a split second later, to just not be. What would that 20-year-old life have looked like if it had continued to unfold over the next 50 years?
I can view it all as necessary, but not as "boo-yah." And if you're sitting in your comfortable American house or apartment and do feel that energized about brutal deaths, whether they're sadistically targeted Israeli Kibbutz-dwellers or collateral Gazan civilians, there's something a bit - or maybe a lot - off about you. (Though I understand soldiers who do this. And probably would myself if I were in their shoes. For all the possible excuses there are for raw, ugly cope, being involved in combat is probably the best one out there.)
I don’t see much cheering on of Palestinian civilian deaths, which is where the antisemitism comes in. Antisemitism creates a nefarious Jew, all powerful, almost magical. So our deaths become necessary -- and as we’re seeing, something to celebrate. The posters to them are evil propaganda. This is antisemitism in action.
I don’t think we have the cognitive equipment to handle far-off atrocities. One of Sam Harris’ points is that he has all these auto-donations to charities that he thinks are objectively helping other people set up, because he thinks that in the absence of structuring this, he would be more tempted to give money to someone he sees on a street corner or a gofundme that someone personally comes to him with. A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic, as the quote goes (attributed to Stalin). We just can’t wrap our minds around these tragedies at scale.
Paraphrasing a tweet I saw: if kids think Bin Laden is cool, wait til they learn about a vegetarian struggling artist with an ironic-looking mustache who, after writing a bestseller while in prison, led his people in a fight against Jewish influence on their ancestral land.
I can understand Sarah's point there right at the end as Jesus stated "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's" (Luke 20:25) and St Paul stated “Let every soul be in subjection to the superior authorities, for there is no authority except by God; the existing authorities stand placed in their relative positions by God.” (Rom 13:1). The concept of separation of church and state is certainly biblical inasmuch it's not considered ideal but accepted as a reality by Christians. However those two statements would really be an anathema to the teachings of Islam, and is reflected in the governments of the vast majority of Muslim majority states in the world.
Ooh, get me regressing to the minister I used to be!
I don't expect this is a disagreement with Sarah (who is my smarter cognitive little parasocial sister), but it's making the point about bin Laden from a different angle. He didn't actually *believe* anything in his "letter to America" (I actually wouldn't be surprised if he didn't even write any of it). It's a cynical construct of western-subversive propaganda, based in those articles (i.e. "posts" for you modern types) that came out of the American radical left in the wake of 9/11. It was intended to accentuate what was perceived as rifts in the American public by parroting ideas originating in neo-Marxist thought, with only accidental intersections with Wahhabi Islamist belief.
It didn't work well then, but that was pre-Obama America. The generation since has been broadly immersed in anti-western (or if you'd prefer anti-enlightenment) propaganda. The entire "woke" movement is anti-western propaganda, and little of it is any more coherent than the bin Laden screed. So I think what's being seen (to the extent that it's being seen at all - Sarah is correct to not view TikTok as a reliable cultural barometer) is *familiarity*. Old Soviet propaganda, DEI rhetoric, and the Al Qaeda letter sound similar because they are *the same thing.* They have the same objective, the same cynicism, and the same disinterest in intellectual rigor (a word I perpetually fight the impulse to spell "rigour"). In 2002 much of the public had watched 9/11 unfold in real time, and they'd been nominally trained in public schools to smell bullshit. I don't know if the malaise is actually as wide-spread as I fear, but I suspect this olfactory skill isn't only not taught, but actively discouraged, in most post-9/11 schools.
Sorry for the super late reply, but this is extremely interesting to me. Sam Harris posted a letter written a few years ago by an ISIS leader I think...called “why we hate you and why we fight you.” I would love to hear your thoughts on that.
I have been thinking/noticing just how incredibly…I dunno, incompetent Americans have become?! The propaganda and BS they believe and repeat, the sources they cite…it has been deeply disturbing to me since October 7th, especially because many of them are supposedly educated. They have not been taught to question what they read but it’s even worse than that
A side note: It's amazing how much documentation of 9/11 has, for one reason or another, disappeared since. The footage of the tower strikes and collapses are still around, but the more graphic images aren't to be found. I remember seeing photos of identifiable body parts strewn across rooftops (in one it was a pair of still zip-tied-together hands). A human torso in a street. A row of burned bodies still strapped into airline seats inside the Pentagon. And there is indeed extensive video footage of the bodies of jumpers impacting the ground at the WTC. It just wasn't "fun" at the time in the way, say, stories of WW2 battles are "fun" - verbal abstractions, text in books, distant memories. Enough time has passed that 9/11 is now just another one of those things, and without documentation of the horrors to see, it's become okay (maybe even natural) to have vicarious "fun" with it. (No one's feeling much existential angst over the nightmare realities of the Spanish Inquisition lately, myself included).
Exceptions I can think of that linger would be the Rape of Nanking and of course the Holocaust. You can find plenty of disturbing imagery documenting what went on there, and those can still suck the "fun" out of it - seeing emphasizes they aren't just things that happened in the distant past, but real things. (This is true of the Holodomor, too, and some of those images might even be the most horrific. But most Americans aren't even aware that happened.)
Anyway, I feel I'm rambling. I did say it's a side note.
You said this: "So when I look at the transition to a more modern egalitarian society, I'm happy that it happened, but I never believed that a "patriarchy" was "overthrown". Nor did I ever agree that women were just as good as men at everything, merely that they should have the freedom to try. So I support legal gender equality, but I disagree with the entire basis for feminism as I see it."
You clearly don't believe me, but you just described second wave liberal feminism exactly - what I believe the majority of feminists of that era believed. You said nothing I don't believe. So can we stop now?
Sarah dismisses the huge number of feminists like me by giving the bad ones the term. I reject that fully.
The good thing is: feminists, on the whole, won legal equality. Most of the feminist world noticed, and we went on with our lives without putting our time anymore into the activism that was needed in the 70s (and, obviously, before) - when things truly were unfair for women in a systematic way.
The bad thing is: many women didn't notice or care that we had, by and large, succeeded. They , instead, continued on in their victim, anti-science and anti-nuance world. So, yeah, most feminists that are crusading now are pretty damn bad as Sarah points out.
But, damn it, I am a feminist and I am want to continue to fight that branch of feminism as a feminist, like feminists have been doing since the first wave of feminism (Wendy Kaminer's "A Fearful Freedom" covers this ground)
I will tell you a particular space that is full of thoughtful women who are clearly overwhelming feminist and do not have crap ideas - the Unspeakeasy. Sarah, you should join.
I disagree with the premise. I am of the vein of progressivism that views social change as downstream of technological innovation. I agree that the roles of women in Western societies have changed dramatically, but I don't attribute most of those changes to feminism, I attribute them to the Industrial Revolution. If I consider two broad theories of the world, in one of which the march of technological progress made various forms of gendered labor obsolete and women were gifted a change in status, and the other in which all of human history was a giant conspiracy to oppress women and some feminists discovered this and complained loudly and everything magically changed despite the fact that everything is still a giant conspiracy to oppress women, I don't find it hard to favor the first over the second.
The other thing I would say is that there probably are millions of women who self-describe as feminists and have some beliefs along what you're saying. That doesn't make them feminists. Self-ID is no more valid here than it is in the gender world. There are lots of people who think they are Christian who have never read the Bible and whose behavior is not in concert with any significant faction of organized Christianity. They are welcome to self-ID that way, free speech being what it is, but they are not necessarily correct in their identification. I think people who self-identify as feminists are misguided.
And part of the argument that Time Magazine made for retiring the term feminism is that whatever was in the dictionary, there was no definition that people in the real world could agree on.
A definition that worked for 40 yers still works for me. I was at a party tonight with lots of women - mostly haoles from 50-80 (I am in Hawaii) and asked if they considered themselves a feminists - all did. And they are aligned with what we all understood it to be. We all read the texts! Ok, the world moves on and a different generation defines it differently. Whatever. They can rename themselves. I am keeping what it meant to the majority of second-wave feminists.
I always say I wasn't born a lesbian (though I am one) but I was born a feminist given the world I was raised in. It's true if I was born now, it's a whole different world and who knows what I would think about it. It's fine if you think the work - particularly - the legal work to advance the rights of women was irrelevant. I don't concur, but I don't care either.
Yeah, I could only figure you were much younger than me and weren't there when the stark reality was women didn't not have legal equality. Just know that if you meet a feminist who is 50 +, she will have the quaint thoughts - like I and Meghan do - of what feminism is and feel very attached to the term.
We can all agree that what goes for feminism now completely sucks. Meghan's book "The Problem with Everything" had much to do with that.
Catherine Mackinnon is 77, has been one of the country’s leading feminist academics for several decades, and is responsible for brain-meltingly bad takes in both the second-wave vein (“I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated.”) and the new woke era, in which she cites Simone de Beauvoir in saying that “anybody who identifies as a woman, wants to be a woman, is going around being a woman, as far as I'm concerned, is a woman.”
As far as I can tell, she is like most professional feminists (TERFs are hardly the norm) in being so committed to helping women that she abandoned the entire concept of a woman the instant it became cool. These people are shallow. I’m not saying that’s you or the average person walking down the street who just casually identifies with a label, but it’s not like Tumblr came along and ruined feminism. It was always shallow, hypocritical, cynical, and fundamentally based in a denial of reality.
On the other hand Christina Hoff Summers (also old enough to remember before legal equality) was basically excommunicated from academia for suggesting that maybe women in America aren’t really oppressed in the modern age, and that maybe male and female roles carry a mix of advantages and disadvantages rather than being a system of one sex oppressing the other. She of course supports legal equality. Does she still call herself a feminist? She did the last time I checked, but when you’ve basically been canceled by feminists, I think that ship has sailed.
Believe me, if I asked the women yesterday at the party who all said they were feminists if they had ever heard of Catherine MacKinnon- they would all say no, I am pretty sure. The books the everyday feminist (not centered in some "women's studies" department) were reading - the texts - were things like, initially, the Feminine Mystique. Later, Sisterhood is Powerful, edited by Robin Morgan and Our Bodies, Ourselves. Ms. Magazine. Gloria Steinman. And, then lesser read were people like Germaine Greer. Now women certainly heard of Simone de Beauvoir - but nobody outside of a slice of academia ever read her nor, certainly, McKinnon nor Dworkin nor Hoff Sommers for that matter. Feminism did exist on campus, of course, where the texts you mentioned were read in some classes. But none of them were influential to the average feminists who were at that party yesterday. Academic wars between women happened, for sure. But it wasn't in academia that we were winning our rights. Obviously, the Women's Rights Project led by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was widely successful. But then the rights were also won one workplace or church or community group or country club at a time by average women. That was feminism. Yes, there have always been strains of feminism I oppose. But I am not renouncing the term. I'm proud of what second-wave feminists did - even if you think we had no agency in the change.
We both agree that feminism has gotten very bad - I particularly abhor the victim feminism that is rampant (Kate Roiphe and Laura Kipnis among others have written clearly about that). I also despise whoever pushes the line that women and men are the same. They are nuts. But emphatically, no, these were not principal strains of feminism in the 70s and 80s.
We aren't disagreeing on the present disaster of what feminism has become in a country that doesn't need it. Or what it became in women's studies (now gender studies) departments.
Hey, if Martin Luther King was alive today, he would be appalled by what passes for "anti-racism" - but he wouldn't then say - ok, I am not an anti-racist as the term has morphed to something I hate. Same with me. Not giving up the term - nor are us older women - like Christina Hoff Sommers and all my women friends (and many of my men friends). I will continue to battle those crazy modern-day (3rd and 4th wave) feminists with you!
Meghan's definition of feminism is so quaint. "Equal treatment under the law". What gender studies department would hire someone who said that? What women's studies department would have even twenty or thirty years ago? Now, you'd struggle to get hired to be a math professor if you said something like that on your mandatory DEI statement. At least as I understand it, most of the surveys in the U.S. suggest that the majority of people are in favor of something like gender equal treatment under the law, and only a minority of people call themselves feminists. The sassy bloggers of fifteen years ago said it was because those people didn't understand the definition, but I don't think that view holds up.
I still remember when Time Magazine said it was time to retire the word feminism. If only.
It may be quaint - but I make the point elsewhere in the comments that millions of women who think of themselves as feminist, as I do, think about it in just that way. If you want to respond - please respond that comment so you know my argument.
Haven’t listened yet but I did read Meghan’s New Yorker piece. It’s really good, like a time capsule from when going online was full of possibility instead of a giant shitpost farm. I’m positive I must have read it back in the day since I was a subscriber then, but it feels like a different world.
One thing about Meghan's piece that made me nostalgic was the long emails she and her paramour would write to each other. I used to exchange those kinds of emails. Now I can't imagine writing anything longer than a text message. Email has become a business-only medium.
During the discussion of whether Islam is a "Chad" religion, I kept thinking of Nietzsche's argument that Christianity is a slave morality. His view was that Christianity is the opposite of anything Chad-like, and I think that view is pretty persistent in some circles. As Sarah said, it's really about the underlying philosophy, rather than the (literally) patriarchal structures that have been built up around it.
I am all for separating the Judeo from the Christian but in the context you discuss you are not giving enough credit to the part of Judaism that in the form of human rights Christianity has begun to pay attention to. Christianity is a supersessionist religion that took the concept of “b’tselem elohim” from Judaism. This concept translates from the Hebrew to in gods image. According to Judaism, all humans, Jews and nonJews alike are made in gods image. This is a powerful way of seeing the world from which the idea of basic human rights follows. Because everyone has a little of god in them, everyone is entitled to basic dignity. This concept originated in Judaism and spread to the world through Christianity. On a side note this concept is one of the reasons why Jews tend to lean liberal.
I'm no doubt simplistic on this, as I have little interest in theology broadly and consequently little nuance in my knowledge. But I did take a mandatory Old Testament Studies course as a freshman in college, and have always assumed ths "Judeo-Christian Tradition" was an acknowledgement of the fact that both religions incorporate the same foundational texts (with Christianity adding an additional set - in which the protaganist, if you will, is Jewish).
I believe that was the Hindus. They're known as "Arabic numerals" to Europeans because the knowledge migrated westward from India via Arab cultures.
I don't know much at all about the history of numbers. The ancient Greeks were obviously doing some significant mathematic work well before the Roman Empire (Euclid and Pythagoras, et al). What numerical system were they using?
People are giving too much credit to those who tear down posters and outwardly justify Hamas’s massacre. I keep hearing that these people “just can’t handle the horrors of October 7.” Yes they can. They either think the attack was a false flag committed by israel or they think Israelis/Jews deserved it. Everyone needs to stop underestimating antisemitism and hatred of Jews. And maybe these people are on the fringes but they are also in positions of power. We’ve seen signed letters and protests by congressional staffers and state department employees. I appreciate Sarah’s fear. I don’t have much faith in the reasoned thinking of younger generations.
I think they lack imagination. Or possibly (well, almost certainly) empathy. All it takes is a brief, unpleasant mental exercise of imagining one's self sitting at the breakfast table one moment, and five minutes later having strangers in one's living room, watching one's loved ones die, or even be tortured for the specific reason of causing you mental anguish, and you just aren't going to have the energy to screw around with posters. Even if you (somehow) intellectually agree with the broader Palestinian geopolitical cause, it's just not an energizing exercise (certainly not of the variety that elicits team-sports levels of zeal).
For me, this manifests when watching footage of Russians taking casualties in Ukraine. I'm very much on Ukraine's side in this, and when I see armored vehicles being blown apart or artillery striking in the middle of groups of soldiers (who often proceed to writhe in obvious agony), I think those are shots I, too, would have taken. But I don't feel *excited* by the results. I think of how horrible it must be to be one of those guys suffering in the muck, likely feeling the worst pain humanly possible - with no salvation in sight save slow death - and for no reason at all but to service Vladmir Putin's bizarre, quasi-mystical Russian Nationalist vision. I try to imagine what it'd be like to be working a radio in a tank interior one second and then, a split second later, to just not be. What would that 20-year-old life have looked like if it had continued to unfold over the next 50 years?
I can view it all as necessary, but not as "boo-yah." And if you're sitting in your comfortable American house or apartment and do feel that energized about brutal deaths, whether they're sadistically targeted Israeli Kibbutz-dwellers or collateral Gazan civilians, there's something a bit - or maybe a lot - off about you. (Though I understand soldiers who do this. And probably would myself if I were in their shoes. For all the possible excuses there are for raw, ugly cope, being involved in combat is probably the best one out there.)
I don’t see much cheering on of Palestinian civilian deaths, which is where the antisemitism comes in. Antisemitism creates a nefarious Jew, all powerful, almost magical. So our deaths become necessary -- and as we’re seeing, something to celebrate. The posters to them are evil propaganda. This is antisemitism in action.
I don’t think we have the cognitive equipment to handle far-off atrocities. One of Sam Harris’ points is that he has all these auto-donations to charities that he thinks are objectively helping other people set up, because he thinks that in the absence of structuring this, he would be more tempted to give money to someone he sees on a street corner or a gofundme that someone personally comes to him with. A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic, as the quote goes (attributed to Stalin). We just can’t wrap our minds around these tragedies at scale.
Paraphrasing a tweet I saw: if kids think Bin Laden is cool, wait til they learn about a vegetarian struggling artist with an ironic-looking mustache who, after writing a bestseller while in prison, led his people in a fight against Jewish influence on their ancestral land.
I can understand Sarah's point there right at the end as Jesus stated "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's" (Luke 20:25) and St Paul stated “Let every soul be in subjection to the superior authorities, for there is no authority except by God; the existing authorities stand placed in their relative positions by God.” (Rom 13:1). The concept of separation of church and state is certainly biblical inasmuch it's not considered ideal but accepted as a reality by Christians. However those two statements would really be an anathema to the teachings of Islam, and is reflected in the governments of the vast majority of Muslim majority states in the world.
Ooh, get me regressing to the minister I used to be!
I don't expect this is a disagreement with Sarah (who is my smarter cognitive little parasocial sister), but it's making the point about bin Laden from a different angle. He didn't actually *believe* anything in his "letter to America" (I actually wouldn't be surprised if he didn't even write any of it). It's a cynical construct of western-subversive propaganda, based in those articles (i.e. "posts" for you modern types) that came out of the American radical left in the wake of 9/11. It was intended to accentuate what was perceived as rifts in the American public by parroting ideas originating in neo-Marxist thought, with only accidental intersections with Wahhabi Islamist belief.
It didn't work well then, but that was pre-Obama America. The generation since has been broadly immersed in anti-western (or if you'd prefer anti-enlightenment) propaganda. The entire "woke" movement is anti-western propaganda, and little of it is any more coherent than the bin Laden screed. So I think what's being seen (to the extent that it's being seen at all - Sarah is correct to not view TikTok as a reliable cultural barometer) is *familiarity*. Old Soviet propaganda, DEI rhetoric, and the Al Qaeda letter sound similar because they are *the same thing.* They have the same objective, the same cynicism, and the same disinterest in intellectual rigor (a word I perpetually fight the impulse to spell "rigour"). In 2002 much of the public had watched 9/11 unfold in real time, and they'd been nominally trained in public schools to smell bullshit. I don't know if the malaise is actually as wide-spread as I fear, but I suspect this olfactory skill isn't only not taught, but actively discouraged, in most post-9/11 schools.
Sorry for the super late reply, but this is extremely interesting to me. Sam Harris posted a letter written a few years ago by an ISIS leader I think...called “why we hate you and why we fight you.” I would love to hear your thoughts on that.
I have been thinking/noticing just how incredibly…I dunno, incompetent Americans have become?! The propaganda and BS they believe and repeat, the sources they cite…it has been deeply disturbing to me since October 7th, especially because many of them are supposedly educated. They have not been taught to question what they read but it’s even worse than that
A side note: It's amazing how much documentation of 9/11 has, for one reason or another, disappeared since. The footage of the tower strikes and collapses are still around, but the more graphic images aren't to be found. I remember seeing photos of identifiable body parts strewn across rooftops (in one it was a pair of still zip-tied-together hands). A human torso in a street. A row of burned bodies still strapped into airline seats inside the Pentagon. And there is indeed extensive video footage of the bodies of jumpers impacting the ground at the WTC. It just wasn't "fun" at the time in the way, say, stories of WW2 battles are "fun" - verbal abstractions, text in books, distant memories. Enough time has passed that 9/11 is now just another one of those things, and without documentation of the horrors to see, it's become okay (maybe even natural) to have vicarious "fun" with it. (No one's feeling much existential angst over the nightmare realities of the Spanish Inquisition lately, myself included).
Exceptions I can think of that linger would be the Rape of Nanking and of course the Holocaust. You can find plenty of disturbing imagery documenting what went on there, and those can still suck the "fun" out of it - seeing emphasizes they aren't just things that happened in the distant past, but real things. (This is true of the Holodomor, too, and some of those images might even be the most horrific. But most Americans aren't even aware that happened.)
Anyway, I feel I'm rambling. I did say it's a side note.
FIRST!!!!
Noooooooo
YES
...it's actually nice to see you again ;)
Pfft. At this point you're like the Leah Thomas of first-posts. It doesn't really even count.
You said this: "So when I look at the transition to a more modern egalitarian society, I'm happy that it happened, but I never believed that a "patriarchy" was "overthrown". Nor did I ever agree that women were just as good as men at everything, merely that they should have the freedom to try. So I support legal gender equality, but I disagree with the entire basis for feminism as I see it."
You clearly don't believe me, but you just described second wave liberal feminism exactly - what I believe the majority of feminists of that era believed. You said nothing I don't believe. So can we stop now?
Sarah dismisses the huge number of feminists like me by giving the bad ones the term. I reject that fully.
The good thing is: feminists, on the whole, won legal equality. Most of the feminist world noticed, and we went on with our lives without putting our time anymore into the activism that was needed in the 70s (and, obviously, before) - when things truly were unfair for women in a systematic way.
The bad thing is: many women didn't notice or care that we had, by and large, succeeded. They , instead, continued on in their victim, anti-science and anti-nuance world. So, yeah, most feminists that are crusading now are pretty damn bad as Sarah points out.
But, damn it, I am a feminist and I am want to continue to fight that branch of feminism as a feminist, like feminists have been doing since the first wave of feminism (Wendy Kaminer's "A Fearful Freedom" covers this ground)
I will tell you a particular space that is full of thoughtful women who are clearly overwhelming feminist and do not have crap ideas - the Unspeakeasy. Sarah, you should join.
I disagree with the premise. I am of the vein of progressivism that views social change as downstream of technological innovation. I agree that the roles of women in Western societies have changed dramatically, but I don't attribute most of those changes to feminism, I attribute them to the Industrial Revolution. If I consider two broad theories of the world, in one of which the march of technological progress made various forms of gendered labor obsolete and women were gifted a change in status, and the other in which all of human history was a giant conspiracy to oppress women and some feminists discovered this and complained loudly and everything magically changed despite the fact that everything is still a giant conspiracy to oppress women, I don't find it hard to favor the first over the second.
The other thing I would say is that there probably are millions of women who self-describe as feminists and have some beliefs along what you're saying. That doesn't make them feminists. Self-ID is no more valid here than it is in the gender world. There are lots of people who think they are Christian who have never read the Bible and whose behavior is not in concert with any significant faction of organized Christianity. They are welcome to self-ID that way, free speech being what it is, but they are not necessarily correct in their identification. I think people who self-identify as feminists are misguided.
And part of the argument that Time Magazine made for retiring the term feminism is that whatever was in the dictionary, there was no definition that people in the real world could agree on.
A definition that worked for 40 yers still works for me. I was at a party tonight with lots of women - mostly haoles from 50-80 (I am in Hawaii) and asked if they considered themselves a feminists - all did. And they are aligned with what we all understood it to be. We all read the texts! Ok, the world moves on and a different generation defines it differently. Whatever. They can rename themselves. I am keeping what it meant to the majority of second-wave feminists.
I always say I wasn't born a lesbian (though I am one) but I was born a feminist given the world I was raised in. It's true if I was born now, it's a whole different world and who knows what I would think about it. It's fine if you think the work - particularly - the legal work to advance the rights of women was irrelevant. I don't concur, but I don't care either.
I was born a feminist and I will die a feminist.
I don't think it worked 40 years ago either. And maybe that's the difference generationally, since I wasn't around to know.
To me, the sine qua non of feminism is clearly something other than gender equality. It is (as Sarah says) the denial of reality.
Yeah, I could only figure you were much younger than me and weren't there when the stark reality was women didn't not have legal equality. Just know that if you meet a feminist who is 50 +, she will have the quaint thoughts - like I and Meghan do - of what feminism is and feel very attached to the term.
We can all agree that what goes for feminism now completely sucks. Meghan's book "The Problem with Everything" had much to do with that.
Catherine Mackinnon is 77, has been one of the country’s leading feminist academics for several decades, and is responsible for brain-meltingly bad takes in both the second-wave vein (“I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated.”) and the new woke era, in which she cites Simone de Beauvoir in saying that “anybody who identifies as a woman, wants to be a woman, is going around being a woman, as far as I'm concerned, is a woman.”
As far as I can tell, she is like most professional feminists (TERFs are hardly the norm) in being so committed to helping women that she abandoned the entire concept of a woman the instant it became cool. These people are shallow. I’m not saying that’s you or the average person walking down the street who just casually identifies with a label, but it’s not like Tumblr came along and ruined feminism. It was always shallow, hypocritical, cynical, and fundamentally based in a denial of reality.
On the other hand Christina Hoff Summers (also old enough to remember before legal equality) was basically excommunicated from academia for suggesting that maybe women in America aren’t really oppressed in the modern age, and that maybe male and female roles carry a mix of advantages and disadvantages rather than being a system of one sex oppressing the other. She of course supports legal equality. Does she still call herself a feminist? She did the last time I checked, but when you’ve basically been canceled by feminists, I think that ship has sailed.
Believe me, if I asked the women yesterday at the party who all said they were feminists if they had ever heard of Catherine MacKinnon- they would all say no, I am pretty sure. The books the everyday feminist (not centered in some "women's studies" department) were reading - the texts - were things like, initially, the Feminine Mystique. Later, Sisterhood is Powerful, edited by Robin Morgan and Our Bodies, Ourselves. Ms. Magazine. Gloria Steinman. And, then lesser read were people like Germaine Greer. Now women certainly heard of Simone de Beauvoir - but nobody outside of a slice of academia ever read her nor, certainly, McKinnon nor Dworkin nor Hoff Sommers for that matter. Feminism did exist on campus, of course, where the texts you mentioned were read in some classes. But none of them were influential to the average feminists who were at that party yesterday. Academic wars between women happened, for sure. But it wasn't in academia that we were winning our rights. Obviously, the Women's Rights Project led by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was widely successful. But then the rights were also won one workplace or church or community group or country club at a time by average women. That was feminism. Yes, there have always been strains of feminism I oppose. But I am not renouncing the term. I'm proud of what second-wave feminists did - even if you think we had no agency in the change.
We both agree that feminism has gotten very bad - I particularly abhor the victim feminism that is rampant (Kate Roiphe and Laura Kipnis among others have written clearly about that). I also despise whoever pushes the line that women and men are the same. They are nuts. But emphatically, no, these were not principal strains of feminism in the 70s and 80s.
We aren't disagreeing on the present disaster of what feminism has become in a country that doesn't need it. Or what it became in women's studies (now gender studies) departments.
Hey, if Martin Luther King was alive today, he would be appalled by what passes for "anti-racism" - but he wouldn't then say - ok, I am not an anti-racist as the term has morphed to something I hate. Same with me. Not giving up the term - nor are us older women - like Christina Hoff Sommers and all my women friends (and many of my men friends). I will continue to battle those crazy modern-day (3rd and 4th wave) feminists with you!
“The far online right has been sympathetic to Islam for a very long time.” Makes sense. Hitler himself was very sympathetic to Islam
Meghan's definition of feminism is so quaint. "Equal treatment under the law". What gender studies department would hire someone who said that? What women's studies department would have even twenty or thirty years ago? Now, you'd struggle to get hired to be a math professor if you said something like that on your mandatory DEI statement. At least as I understand it, most of the surveys in the U.S. suggest that the majority of people are in favor of something like gender equal treatment under the law, and only a minority of people call themselves feminists. The sassy bloggers of fifteen years ago said it was because those people didn't understand the definition, but I don't think that view holds up.
I still remember when Time Magazine said it was time to retire the word feminism. If only.
It may be quaint - but I make the point elsewhere in the comments that millions of women who think of themselves as feminist, as I do, think about it in just that way. If you want to respond - please respond that comment so you know my argument.
Haven’t listened yet but I did read Meghan’s New Yorker piece. It’s really good, like a time capsule from when going online was full of possibility instead of a giant shitpost farm. I’m positive I must have read it back in the day since I was a subscriber then, but it feels like a different world.
Hey, I resent the suggestion that going on-line is nothing but a "shitpost farm." You're completely disregarding the staggering volume of porn.
(Though that was admittedly there from the start. I remember the Wild West days of usenet, and holy crap.)
I was a usenet addict too!
One thing about Meghan's piece that made me nostalgic was the long emails she and her paramour would write to each other. I used to exchange those kinds of emails. Now I can't imagine writing anything longer than a text message. Email has become a business-only medium.
If you like that kind of thing there's a new book by Curtis Sittenfeld called Romantic Comedy that's about 1/3 flirty email exchanges.
During the discussion of whether Islam is a "Chad" religion, I kept thinking of Nietzsche's argument that Christianity is a slave morality. His view was that Christianity is the opposite of anything Chad-like, and I think that view is pretty persistent in some circles. As Sarah said, it's really about the underlying philosophy, rather than the (literally) patriarchal structures that have been built up around it.
I am all for separating the Judeo from the Christian but in the context you discuss you are not giving enough credit to the part of Judaism that in the form of human rights Christianity has begun to pay attention to. Christianity is a supersessionist religion that took the concept of “b’tselem elohim” from Judaism. This concept translates from the Hebrew to in gods image. According to Judaism, all humans, Jews and nonJews alike are made in gods image. This is a powerful way of seeing the world from which the idea of basic human rights follows. Because everyone has a little of god in them, everyone is entitled to basic dignity. This concept originated in Judaism and spread to the world through Christianity. On a side note this concept is one of the reasons why Jews tend to lean liberal.
I'm no doubt simplistic on this, as I have little interest in theology broadly and consequently little nuance in my knowledge. But I did take a mandatory Old Testament Studies course as a freshman in college, and have always assumed ths "Judeo-Christian Tradition" was an acknowledgement of the fact that both religions incorporate the same foundational texts (with Christianity adding an additional set - in which the protaganist, if you will, is Jewish).
Using Roman numerals is a bit odd for someone of Arab extraction since they subsequently invented something somewhat better!
I believe that was the Hindus. They're known as "Arabic numerals" to Europeans because the knowledge migrated westward from India via Arab cultures.
I don't know much at all about the history of numbers. The ancient Greeks were obviously doing some significant mathematic work well before the Roman Empire (Euclid and Pythagoras, et al). What numerical system were they using?