Todd Seavey has put together a huge ten point rant against the practice of feminism in America. Although it's longish and sometimes redundant one one or two points, it's quite coherent and echoes a number of sentiments I've expressed here. I am particularly impressed by this passage which dovetails neatly with what I've just been talking about vis a vis experimental evolution of rules.
Feminism Often Demolishes the Very Traditions That Could Solve Our Problems.
Fittingly, I once had a notion that turned out, like most good conservative ideas, to have been better stated by someone else before me, in this case Irving Kristol. He observed, back in the 70s, before we’d even gotten in the habit of calling politicized campus speech codes “political correctness,” that feminist and leftist taboos are not so much opposed to traditional etiquette rules as they are a hastily-constructed, ramshackle substitute for traditional etiquette. To take a collegiate example: tradition dictated that young men shouldn’t walk around half-naked in front of women they hardly know, and the left demolished that taboo with the result that women — even smart, “liberated” women — found themselves quite alarmed by the naked men walking around their dorm rooms but unable to articulate their objections in (hated) traditional language (”boorish,” “unseemly,” “not gentlemanly”) and so had to concoct (proper) leftist rationales — not always terribly good ones — for a de facto return to the old order and in some cases separate bathrooms (”All those men are potential rapists!” “If we’re all naked, they may objectify me!” “I can see his patriarchy hanging out, for goodness’ sake!”). Being a lefist means, above all else, never admitting you made a mistake — or rather that predecessors thinking along the same lines as you made mistakes — and so we “progress” on to a new set of rules, learning almost nothing from the experience of abandoning the older, more nuanced set that preceded them. So it is with liberalism, always.
I view feminist critique as a species of liberal thinking, and I acknowledge the degree to which the liberal impulse can indeed spur us on to positive change. But as I asserted with Wal-Mart, it's not merely ethical people-power, but institutional power expressed in areas broader than politics and intellectual discourse.
This is where feminism is failing. The ideas of feminism are clashing with female behavior as well as other institutions. I don't mean to get deeply into it, rather to express my general agreement with Seavey, the new humorist on the blogo-block. I think he's making points that in the contemporary discourse of civil rights and social power, can only be expressed through humor, and that he does a good job at that.
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