https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/only-7-per-cent-of-britons-consider-themselves-feminists/A UK survey found that only 9% of women self-identify as feminists. Another UK article (was either in the guardian or independent) mentioned some UK panel TV show consisting entirely of women, and discounted it as a "not a feminist show". So have we already jettisoned the opinions of the 90% of UK women as irrelevant, because they didn't tick the right box? And we haven't even stated on the "intersectionality" bit. Very few black people identify with the "intersectional" politics: while black people vote democrat in overwhelming numbers compared to republican, black people also tend to skew strongly conservative in their views. Most women and most black people are in fact more or less excluded from the "intersectional" discussions through rhetoric and sidelining. Intersectionality really is the "intersection" (in venn diagram terms) of a range of views, it's not the union of those views. it claims to speak for the union of all those groups while actually discounting the actual opinions of most of those group members as irrelevant, since most people aren't 'intersectional' enough.
As for the UK survey i mentioned, an interesting finding was that 74% of women said they support gender equality. That means that about 9/10 of British women who support gender equality say they
aren't feminists. They then included a comment from a feminist group leader who said "if you believe in equality then you're really secretly a feminist". This is the feminist subset basically claiming ownership of the
concept of equality and saying no rival philosophy can include that concept as a tenet. It's a
lot like the Christian parable of the blind men and the elephant (the elephant being God, and the blind men being all other religions). The claim is that only Christians are the non-blind ones, and all the other religions are really grasping for the Bible God. If most people
aren't feminists and most people say they support gender equality, then we can probably say it's a stretch to say that capital-F Feminists have some monopoly on the concept of equality. It's one of the ways that it really is like a religion: the claim that any other people who have *elements* of belief similar to feminists are really just grasping towards the "one true faith", which just happens to be card-carrying Feminism.
notably, 86% of
men in the same UK survey say they support gender equality, a far higher proportion than the women. Does this mean that British men are more likely to be "secretly feminists" than British women? According to the above logic, it would. But there's a more rational explanation: UK men aren't directly impacted by the equality movement so they're more likely to just go along with the "equality is always 100% good" mantra.
Whereas women are directly impacted, so they
know that any gains actually come with trade-offs. rights and additional responsibilities go hand in hand, and women are more aware of that than men. Take a look at actual data on women's happiness. It's been plummeting in the West along with the rise of "equality". Us men are free to basically ignore that data. Perhaps the larger number of women than men who reject the
idea of equality are actually aware of the trade-offs involved? They know that any concept comes loaded with all kinds of baggage depending on who is selling it to you. A policy that benefits women "overall" is probably going to benefit some women more than others, and possibly even leave some women worse off.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/may/18/womens-rights-happiness-wellbeing-gender-gap 
Author
Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 4469466 times)