Jump to content

Feminist hysteria is causing the infantilization of women


Pong Messiah
 Share

Recommended Posts

It's written by a woman, so it must be true:

 

Add this all up and you have todays thought leaders telling women they need to be spoken to gently, need the government to guard them from harsh words and uncomfortable topics, that their setbacks are always someone elses fault and that they aren't in control of their own lives.

 

This shift toward telling women they need help at every stage of their lives (remember the Obama campaign's Life of Julia?) might raise funds for feminist causes or gain votes for politicians, but its not empowering. Its infantilizing.

 

OMG people, this sound serious!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I admit conspiracy was a bad word choice. I can't help my language skillz today because I be cleaning house like a boss and just posted while waiting for my floor to dry after mopping the kitchen. I did skim the article. I have more to say but really don't have the desire to do it on a tiny phone.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I admit conspiracy was a bad word choice. I can't help my language skillz today because I be cleaning house like a boss and just posted while waiting for my floor to dry after mopping the kitchen. I did skim the article. I have more to say but really don't have the desire to do it on a tiny phone.

"Cleaning house like a boss?" Ms. Spam, how can you find empowerment in a domestic role like that? Surely this is yet another example of Stockholm syndrome via the patriarchy.

 

I won't keep anyone waiting, as I'm sure "What are Kurgan's thoughts on this?" is on the forefront of everyone's minds here.

 

As I've suggested elsewhere, the only thing I find stupider than a lot of feminist stuff in social media is a lot of anti-feminist stuff in social media. So I went into this figuring the article was mere click-bait for some rubbish that will end up blaming Obama for breast cancer, or the like.

 

I think this article's bang on the money, actually. "Add this all up and you have today’s “thought leaders” telling women they need to be spoken to gently, need the government to guard them from harsh words and uncomfortable topics, that their setbacks are always someone else’s fault and that they aren't in control of their own lives." Years ago I read a book asserting that much of modern feminism was a strange and ironic sort of revival of the 'purity cults' of the Victorian era - the same that feminism started off in opposition to. This has been confirmed and reconfirmed in my ample experience with feminist criticism.

 

I agree it's not a conspiracy, though. I think it's an example of a deep psychological reality in social philosophy, and something I'm increasingly coming to believe is a major driving force in people's belief systems: the tendency of movements and the people who comprise them to mirror or reflect that which they strenuously oppose and criticize. A kind of shadow politics, in the Jungian sense of the term. As a kind of parallel example, look at Tea Party protesters opposing Obama Care, all the while demanding their own grandma's medicaid be left alone. Tea party types, whose belief system is all about self reliance and getting government off people's backs, never the less seem to have no qualms with the use of the welfare state themselves when needed. This cognitive dissonance is, I suspect, is the real source of their anger. Their own failure to live up to their own professed values, projected onto or blamed on others. It is not inspite of their grandma being on medicaid that the Tea Party is so angry at the social democratic welfare state. It is because of it.

 

I'd guess a lot of feminists are like this, in their own way. Their dependency on the male - either personally in their own domestic situations or socially via the welfare state, countermands their own ideals of independence. So it's blame the evil, woman hating republicans and so on - kinda like how their hostile brothers in the Tea Party blame the socialist democrats. Notice the despite the two groups tend to have for one another. Familiarity breeds contempt.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

That makes a lot of sense, Kurgan. Cause even on a minute scale, the stuff that pisses people off about other people are often their own negative traits they dislike glaring them back in the face. I've seen it many many times. Including in myself.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest El Chalupacabra

 

But now, politicians, pundits, even celebrities are feeding an outrage machine by telling women they should be offended by anything and everything.

 

What Dunham doesn’t appear to realize is that by claiming common phrases are sexist, women are actually being told that they need to be protected from free speech and that they should be offended more often because they are somehow being oppressed by that speech

 

Suddenly women were told they were being marginalized if they were called bossy, even though some men are called far worse (far too colorful to mention here).

 

Even more detrimental to women than telling them words can hurt is the recent feminist trend of giving them mixed signals about sexuality.

 

Women are even being told flat-out that they aren’t making their own decisions but are following a path set for them by a patriarchy.

 

Add this all up and you have today’s “thought leaders” telling women they need to be spoken to gently, need the government to guard them from harsh words and uncomfortable topics, that their setbacks are always someone else’s fault and that they aren’t in control of their own lives.

 

This shift toward telling women they need help at every stage of their lives

This article seems pretty straw mannish to me and is making a lot of assumptions that women are "being told" this or that, which I don't even know to be the case, as if women collectively or individually can't make up their own minds, in the first place. Do women really feel like they are being coddled? Is that even the message that is being collectively conspired and presented in the first place? Seems more to me that Ashe Schow is just interpreting for herself what she sees as "being told," and "telling us" what she sees as an absolute truth, which is just her arbitrary interpretation. It seems to me that if a woman is truly in control of herself, even if what this article alleges is true, they aren't going to be insecure enough to even worry about what politicians, pundits, and celebrities are "telling them" what they ought to be outraged or upset about, in the first place. If a woman can truly think for herself, she is going to decide what she ought to be concerned about on her own (or not), and the author is guilty of the very thing she is alleging.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

As a kind of parallel example, look at Tea Party protesters opposing Obama Care, all the while demanding their own grandma's medicaid be left alone. Tea party types, whose belief system is all about self reliance and getting government off people's backs, never the less seem to have no qualms with the use of the welfare state themselves when needed. This cognitive dissonance is, I suspect, is the real source of their anger.

Eh. That could be part of it. But I think a bigger part is simply they don't like that there's a black guy in the White House.

 

 

Similarly, your psychological explanation for the more annoying strand of hyper-PC internet/armchair "feminists" is, while interesting, perhaps missing the forest for the trees when there's a simpler explanation. These people simply don't like a certain type of a person, and want to decrease that person's power by enacting their own agenda and seeking more power for themselves, and policing thought-crimes and stifling speech is a particularly effective way of doing so, especially when a good portion of Western society, especially the younger generations, are completely emasculated (and when the current version of the Leftist is, at the very least, somewhat sympathetic to bullying tactics and does not value free speech very highly to begin with).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

 

Even more detrimental to women than telling them words can hurt is the recent feminist trend of giving them mixed signals about sexuality.

 

 

HAHAAHHAHAHAHHAHAHA!!!! Yeah, that's VERY RECENT!

 

 

 

If a woman can truly think for herself, she is going to decide what she ought to be concerned about on her own (or not), and the author is guilty of the very thing she is alleging.

 

 

Very right! Maybe women are generally responding to people who write articles like this. I understand if you say women are annoying, but where are you even coming from if you're complaining about the workplace being overly sensitized for women? If the world is supposed to be dog-eat-dog, then be tough enough to deal with an empowered woman!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Eh. That could be part of it. But I think a bigger part is simply they don't like that there's a black guy in the White House.

When Obama first came on the scene as a serious candidate, I was one of the hand-wringers who thought America (in particular, the South) was still a ways off from electing a black dude. I was wrong. And now, I honestly think Obamahate has less to do with skin color than the culture and beliefs (real or imagined) that he represents to people. If it was simply about skin color, Herman Cain - who knows how to say all the right things and push all the right buttons -- wouldn't have a radio show, have GOP senate hopefuls invoking his name, or be able to launch his new $9.99 (haha... get it?) monthly subscription service.

 

If Obama pushed gun rights, abortion restrictions, "down home common-sense" (whatever that is), and encouraged his audience to chant "USA! USA!" a lot of the people who "hate having a black guy in the white house" would be eating out of his hand.

 

Similarly, your psychological explanation for the more annoying strand of hyper-PC internet/armchair "feminists" is, while interesting, perhaps missing the forest for the trees when there's a simpler explanation. These people simply don't like a certain type of a person, and want to decrease that person's power by enacting their own agenda and seeking more power for themselves, and policing thought-crimes and stifling speech is a particularly effective way of doing so, especially when a good portion of Western society, especially the younger generations, are completely emasculated (and when the current version of the Leftist is, at the very least, somewhat sympathetic to bullying tactics and does not value free speech very highly to begin with).

Agreed.

 

Ultimately, it is about power; it is about shaping and controlling culture.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Eh. That could be part of it. But I think a bigger part is simply they don't like that there's a black guy in the White House.

 

Similarly, your psychological explanation for the more annoying strand of hyper-PC internet/armchair "feminists" is, while interesting, perhaps missing the forest for the trees when there's a simpler explanation. These people simply don't like a certain type of a person, and want to decrease that person's power by enacting their own agenda and seeking more power for themselves ...

I don't think this explains just how virulent and pathological these dislikes can get at times. It's human nature to be dismissive, scornful and frown upon groups with whom we have nothing in common and who are culturally different. So long as we ourselves are more or less content and our own lives have meaning - if only in the form of day to day struggle for survival - it doesn't seem to go beyond that. This, I think, is why revolutionaries so rarely hail from the underclasses that would benefit most from major social change. It's really about personal frustration more than anything.

 

So yes, the Tea Partiers most certainly dislike a black guy in the white house - though the same people were not much more impressed when it was a white guy back in the 90s, and the notion of totalitarianism in general. The P.C crowd has chosen the macho white male type as their pariah. But why? Why these groups and not some other?

 

I think the groups that get under our skin and really make us crazy - there's some projection of self going on there. The hated group either possesses a trait the haters wish they had, or a trait the haters also have but wish they didn't, but are not willing to give up for more pragmatic purposes. And note that the hated group does not even really have to possess the projected trait, they need only do so in the collective imagination of the ideologues, whose own cultures and belief systems coalesce around this frustration and projected self despite.

 

What really tips me off, though, is the undercurrent of duplication that marks these movements vis-a-vis their opponents. Notice the elaborate hierarchy - though never defined as such, implicit in the PC feminist "social justice warrior" view of society. The more marks of "oppression" you have, the more leverage with which you can command the conscience of the movement. Being both black AND female trumps being either one alone, and bonus points if you can throw being gay in there as well. The architects of South African apartheid and the Nuremberg laws could not have more elaborately categorized whole populations according to what accident of birth made them than that one most sacred word in all the critical theory catechism: "intersectionality."

 

It goes on and on. They project their despite for social privilege onto "straight white males" from the plush comforts of their Ivy League department chairs and blogs. Not exactly the hallmarks of being oppressed and downtrodden. Their sense of zeal and drive to save the rest of the world from its unenlightened self smacks of 21st century white man's - or should I say woman's burden.

 

Their attacks on the prudery of the religious right's purity balls and abstinence only sex ed are, at least in part a kind of psychological dumping ground for their own glaring discomfort with human sexuality, as exemplified by the cry of "objectification" at media images of women showing more skin than would be allowable under Shari'a law. Their ONLY disagreement would be over whether it is women's responsibility not to dress in a manner that men would notice, or it is men's responsibility not to notice no matter how women dress. The more they extol "independence" for women and look askance at marriage, the louder their criticism of clerical celibacy in the church, to say nothing of their favored tactic of shaming their MRA counterparts (who themselves respond to feminism with their own cries for gender separatism) for not being able to get laid. As for the religious right - the pedophilia scandals in the Church and numerous prostitution and infidelity scandals among conservative leaders should make quite clear why they rail against liberal amorality. A joke I heard once describes "his wife's vagina" as the best place to hide something from a conservative male. That's family values for you.

 

The Hugh Hefners of this world barely take note of any of it.

 

While I don't think this is all there is to it, I do firmly believe these kinds of hang ups are a major factor in why our politics are the way they are.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This article seems pretty straw mannish to me and is making a lot of assumptions that women are "being told" this or that, which I don't even know to be the case, as if women collectively or individually can't make up their own minds, in the first place.

Do you watch TV? Read opinion pieces? Have a Facebook feed?

 

I'm not even a wimmen, yet have personally seen each and every example you quoted... multiple times! I think I even made a thread about the "bossy" thing.

 

Aside: one of my friends is what you might call a "feminazi" based on how rigid and humorless she is about "women's issues," the books she reads, the company she keeps, etc. But she recently made the choice (the personal choice) to be a stay-at-home mom until the youngest is in grade school, and is now ready to murder the next friend who lets out a subtle-but-obviously-disappointed sigh, a "But, but... you're so educated!" observation, or quasi-accusatory query about why her husband isn't the one putting his career on hold to take care of the demon spawn.

 

She is "being told" by people who share her belief system, people she has long considered friends, that she has chosen... poorly. And having heard her make identical comments regarding other "smart" women choosing to "waste their potential" as homemakers, I am getting secret immense pleasure seeing her taste her own medicine.

 

Do women really feel like they are being coddled? Is that even the message that is being collectively conspired and presented in the first place? Seems more to me that Ashe Schow is just interpreting for herself what she sees as "being told," and "telling us" what she sees as an absolute truth, which is just her arbitrary interpretation. It seems to me that if a woman is truly in control of herself, even if what this article alleges is true, they aren't going to be insecure enough to even worry about what politicians, pundits, and celebrities are "telling them" what they ought to be outraged or upset about, in the first place. If a woman can truly think for herself, she is going to decide what she ought to be concerned about on her own (or not), and the author is guilty of the very thing she is alleging.

I don't know how people feel collectively. As stated earlier, I don't think coddling is the intent at all. I think it's a hugely ironic byproduct of trying so hard to make women strong and independent.

 

As far as being in control of yourself, people are very much affected by what they hear and what is expected of them, even if it is untrue or unrealistic, and even if they claim to be independent. The shows you watch, the books you read, the people you talk to -- it all affects you.

 

Translation: I have no response.

Yes, I'd really like to hear her articulate how restrictions on speech around women, how endless helpy "you go, girl!" programs, how campus sex codes -- how all these things, even if created with best intentions -- don't infantilize females to some extent. Do we really need to treat girls like delicate, agency-free flowers if we want them to grow up to be strong, independent, and successful in life?

 

:eek:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

Eh. That could be part of it. But I think a bigger part is simply they don't like that there's a black guy in the White House.

When Obama first came on the scene as a serious candidate, I was one of the hand-wringers who thought America (in particular, the South) was still a ways off from electing a black dude. I was wrong. And now, I honestly think Obamahate has less to do with skin color than the culture and beliefs (real or imagined) that he represents to people. If it was simply about skin color, Herman Cain - who knows how to say all the right things and push all the right buttons -- wouldn't have a radio show, have GOP senate hopefuls invoking his name, or be able to launch his new $9.99 (haha... get it?) monthly subscription service.

 

If Obama pushed gun rights, abortion restrictions, "down home common-sense" (whatever that is), and encouraged his audience to chant "USA! USA!" a lot of the people who "hate having a black guy in the white house" would be eating out of his hand.

I'll address the actual topic of the thread later, but I do want to comment on this real quick. I'm kinda reluctant to do so, because what I'm about to say can be misconstrued easily, but it has to be done. Now, before I start, I firmly believe that people can support whoever they want, and that black Americans are certainly free to support the GOP. However, that does not change the fact that Herman Cain is popular in conservative circles for the same reason Bobby Jindal is: Because he's not a threat to white privilege.

 

The Teabaggers are okay with Cain and Jindal and other minorities in the GOP because they are good little tokens who know their place, so to speak. They don't try to change the existing white-male dominated power structure

 

Obama is a black man. He identifies as such, and he connects to black culture. That's the real sin. He does not cast off his black heritage and act like it's not part of him. Obama would be okay with the Teabaggers if he did not seek to change 'white privilege', if he wasn't a threat to the status quo. But, he openly seeks parity with whites. He has openly worked against the status quo by climbing the ladder to power on his own merits, and seeks to help other blacks and minorities to do the same. This is why he gets so much hatred, and why so many Teabaggers try to claim he's racist against whites: Because they see actively seeking to elevate blacks to an equal status with whites as a threat to the 'natural order'

 

The ethnic and racial demographics in America are changing. We are heading towards a country where there will no longer be a racial majority. What you are hearing is the last dying gasps of the old America struggling to stay alive.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

 

Eh. That could be part of it. But I think a bigger part is simply they don't like that there's a black guy in the White House.

When Obama first came on the scene as a serious candidate, I was one of the hand-wringers who thought America (in particular, the South) was still a ways off from electing a black dude. I was wrong. And now, I honestly think Obamahate has less to do with skin color than the culture and beliefs (real or imagined) that he represents to people. If it was simply about skin color, Herman Cain - who knows how to say all the right things and push all the right buttons -- wouldn't have a radio show, have GOP senate hopefuls invoking his name, or be able to launch his new $9.99 (haha... get it?) monthly subscription service.

 

If Obama pushed gun rights, abortion restrictions, "down home common-sense" (whatever that is), and encouraged his audience to chant "USA! USA!" a lot of the people who "hate having a black guy in the white house" would be eating out of his hand.

 

I'll address the actual topic of the thread later, but I do want to comment on this real quick. I'm kinda reluctant to do so, because what I'm about to say can be misconstrued easily, but it has to be done. Now, before I start, I firmly believe that people can support whoever they want, and that black Americans are certainly free to support the GOP. However, that does not change the fact that Herman Cain is popular in conservative circles for the same reason Bobby Jindal is: Because he's not a threat to white privilege.

 

The Teabaggers are okay with Cain and Jindal and other minorities in the GOP because they are good little tokens who know their place, so to speak. They don't try to change the existing white-male dominated power structure

 

Obama is a black man. He identifies as such, and he connects to black culture. That's the real sin. He does not cast off his black heritage and act like it's not part of him. Obama would be okay with the Teabaggers if he did not seek to change 'white privilege', if he wasn't a threat to the status quo. But, he openly seeks parity with whites. He has openly worked against the status quo by climbing the ladder to power on his own merits, and seeks to help other blacks and minorities to do the same. This is why he gets so much hatred, and why so many Teabaggers try to claim he's racist against whites: Because they see actively seeking to elevate blacks to an equal status with whites as a threat to 'natural order'

 

The ethnic and racial demographics in America are changing. We are heading towards a country where there will no longer be a racial majority. What you are hearing is the last dying gasps of the old America struggling to stay alive.

 

My only point was that it's culture and espoused beliefs, not purely skin color (i.e. a lot of people who "don't like a black guy in the White House" would be just fine with Cain or Jindal). If you're gonna bring in terms like "white privilege" into this... yeah, it is prolly gonna need its own thread :p
Link to comment
Share on other sites

 Share

×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.