I don’t think the fight is over yet, but a society of greater freedom and responsibility is gradually being replaced by one of less freedom, along with a greater denial of a woman’s responsibility to properly handle herself in a world which isn’t necessarily safe.
Of course, the world and our society cannot ultimately be made safe for any single one of us, man or woman. Reasonable people understand the necessity of mitigating the risk of violence through civilizing behaviors and the promotion of common moral decency, often through the law, while also understanding such risk can never be fully mitigated.
There are bad people out there, and there are people who can and will act very badly when given the chance, and we, through our own actions, and through the the law, must sometimes step-in to deal with them.
Such unpleasant facts also instruct us to reaffirm the obvious natural differences between the sexes: Most men possess greater physical strength and a more immediate desire for sexual release than most women, as well as the greater capacity for physical violence.
In light of the above, a very vocal minority of activists tend to regard all people, men and women alike, as requiring of their ideology enshrined into law and policy.
The above statements are generally deeply unpleasant and epistemologically challenging to activist ideology and identity, for in the zeal for equality, many activists often gloss over such differences differences between the sexes, lest such admission puts them their beliefs and political platform into a compromising position.
Activists often deploy rhetoric and questionable statistics to insert themselves into all of our bedrooms, intimate lives, and personal choices through the law. They can take genuine victims within their embrace just as easily as liars and damaged people making false claims.
The rest of us are left to sort-out the truth.
They’ve started where have they have the most traction: In universities, where people who have only ideology often congregate, gaining influence and power, which are simulacra of the wider world, and among the safest places there are.
Guilty Until Proven Innocent-Cathy Young at WaPo: ‘Stop Calling Nate Parker A Rapist‘
As we’ve seen with so many activist causes: Facts, the law, and cool-headed regard for changing our institutions with good reasons easily takes a backseat to the incitement of the passions, rabble-rousing, and the creation of new classes of victims that can be leveraged to maximum political effect.
Upon inspection, deeply baked within much activism is the belief that violence can eventually be justified for larger, abstract political goals; that one’s enemies are perhaps even evil, rather than merely wrongheaded.
As previously posted: This blog continues to support civil libertarian feminists, often ex-feminists, or even continuing feminists who criticize feminist ideology in good or bad faith because they are free to do so. They are free to bring-up the often shoddy use of statistics by many feminists, the cultural Marxism and troubling tendencies of victimhood/oppressor theories, the controlling impulses on display in the video below.
Via David Thompson, from Canada via the Agenda with Steve Paikin, notice how two panelists just can’t bring themselves around to the idea of other people speaking their minds, thinking differently and critically, and pursuing ideas freely in an open debate.
They really don’t seem to see a problem with where the logic of their own ideology leads: To silence and shout-down opposing points of view, to constantly try and control the speech and thoughts of others.
Related On This Site: Cathy Young At Minding The Campus: ‘The Brown Case: Does It Still Look Like Rape?
Christina Hoff Sommers (wikipedia) is trying to replacing gender feminism with equity feminism. She also wrote The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men.
Are You Man Enough? Nussbaum v. Mansfield…From The Harvard Educational Review-A Review Of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.’
Defending Eliot Spitzer…as a man who ought to be free of prostitution laws…but didn’t he prosecute others with those same laws?: Repost: Martha Nussbaum On Eliot Spitzer At The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A very Harvard affair: The Spelke/Pinker debate-The Science Of Gender And Science
Repost-Revisting Larry Summers: What Did He Say Again?…
From The NY Times: ‘Harvard Business School Case Study: Gender Equity’