On Feminism

 

A feminist asked me what I think of feminism, so I told her a joke:

Why was the fraction nervous about marrying the decimal?

Standard Answer: Because he would have to convert. 

Feminist Answer: Because marriage is an oppressive tool of the patriarchy designed to trade and hold women like property. 😅

I then shared a profound truth that only a minority discern, but I hope you will. You don't need to be a feminist; you only need to be an egalitarian. If you're a feminist instead of an egalitarian, you're probably putting ideology before equality of opportunity – drawing battle lines in a fight that should have no sides.

If you’re still unsure why, think of it in terms of set theory. Egalitarianism is the broad set of beliefs that uphold equality of rights and opportunities for all people. Feminism is, at best, a skewed subset within it, and at worst, a narrow, reverse-sexist agenda that actually pushes against egalitarianism. Everything feminism purports to seek already falls inside the larger egalitarian set - so the fact that it’s promoted under the banner of feminism rather than egalitarianism suggests that it is really pushing against egalitarianism.

The Liberty-Hating Feminists & SJWs Are Confused About What 'Societal Norms' Actually Are!

As a result of feminist duress, first the Professional Darts Corporation and then Formula One announced that they will be forcing walk on girls and grid girls into unemployment under the pretext that the tradition is "at odds with modern day societal norms".

As usual, the feminists and social justice warriors driving this are confused about what 'societal norms' are. Societal norms - a term that is problematic at the best of times - are created, not by top down hegemony, but by bottom up local decisions that result in net utility for the decision-makers.

The societal norm that means most of us don't drop litter, spit at one another or play loud music late at night is based on society's aggregation of revealed preferences. In other words, most of us don't like those things so we don't do them. It is the individual search for utility and the collective aspiration for cooperation that decides societal norms - and the irony being missed by those opposed to grid girls is that individual search for utility is far and away the most widespread societal norm that exists.

When feminists and social justice warriors tell us society should be opposed to something freely chosen because it departs from the rubric of 'societal norms', like jobs for women in sport, all they are really doing is forcefully imposing their own beliefs and views on people that have different wants, needs and priorities. They are doing the opposite of what they claim: they purport to be standing up for women, but what they are actually doing is trying to rob a proportion of women of something they value.

Madeline Grant makes an excellent point along those lines in this article:

"One great irony of the ongoing debate is the fact that, while the BBC and other employers are enduring a forensic examination over gender pay, feminist campaigners are backing moves to upset one of the few areas of economic life in which women have a clear advantage – the ability to trade on good looks – or “erotic capital”, to borrow Catherine Hakim’s phrase.

Jobs in pole dancing, high fashion, hostessing and the promotional modelling work, performed by the Formula 1 grid girls, all enable women to trade on their beauty. Often, the opportunities for beautiful women far outstrip those granted men. Fashion modelling, for instance, carries a female premium of anywhere from 25% and 75%."

This kind of short-sightedness stretches far beyond cases like this - the whole business is riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies, and most of them are based on one of two things: they either a) misunderstand how equality of outcome and equality of opportunity have to be traded off against each other, or b) fail to account for the factors surrounding revealed preferences and the liberty and freedom to enjoy them.

For example, they just cannot seem to grasp the basic principle that in a society in which everyone is totally free (within reason) to act in accordance with their preferences and priorities, the result will be a diverse assortment of highly unequal outcomes. Different people will trade on looks, on talent, on education, on risk, on unsociable hours, on physical strength, on interpersonal skills, on entrepreneurialism, and a whole range of other things that are valued differently in the marketplace, and that generate varying salaries accordingly.

Of course, when people are being unfairly treated, there is a human need to leap to their defence. How ironic here that the people being unfairly treated are those women who want to trade on their marketable assets but are being robbed of their income because of feminists' confusion about how societal norms are constructed.

Because, you see, it's the revealed preferences of individuals that make the trading on looks, on talent, on education, on risk, on unsociable hours, on physical strength, on interpersonal skills, and on everything else valuable in the marketplace, possible.

Feminists and social justice warriors need to wake up to the fact that these are the societal norms - and they are based on the fact that society is a multifarious mix of different people who want different things, and not always the same things feminists want or should feel entitled to demand to further their own narrow ideology.

The Needless Battle Of The Sexes: How Identity Politics & Faux Victimhood Hinders Women

John Lewis made the headlines the other week by announcing they are going to make all their children’s clothes ‘gender neutral’. Many reacted with dissonance, probably fearful that John Lewis is pandering to the rising snowflakery in our society.

Sadly, these days it is quite easy to encounter a tantrum from a social justice warrior who thinks that racial associations are so rigid that you can't even host a continental fancy dress party without written permission from the local Lord Mayor, but gender is so fluid that some hairy-chested, bearded bloke called Kevin can put on a padded bra and high heels and shout "Call me Kathy' and suddenly she's a woman.

But many have reacted to John Lewis's move in a fairly phlegmatic way, stating that it doesn't really matter much, as people are still free to shop as they wish, and are quite capable of making their own decisions on the colour and style of the clothes they buy for their children.

Whichever side you're on, one thing is clear - our society did for a long time relentlessly reinforce the stereotype that young boys like wearing blue and playing with action men and tanks and little girls like wearing pink and playing with dolls and make-up kits. The common view has been that this is less to do with biological hard-wiring and more to do with the ways in which boys and girls are socialised at an early age, particularly as for a long time our past society has perpetuated the female-as-caregiver paradigm, and that this manifests itself very early through (among other things) the toys children are given.

It turns out, however, that in all likelihood the toy preferences of boys and girls are not primarily driven by socialisation, but by genes. This study shows that non-human primates show preferences for gender-typed toys similar to those seen in human children. That is to say, sex differences in toy preferences exhibited in non-human primates give strong indication that these are independent of the socio-cultural mechanisms first thought by many to be the primary influences on toy preferences.

That said, it still is the case that socialisation plays a significant part in human development, and that there are traits imposed upon children and young adults that are negatively brought to bear on them as adults. A good example is how girls are frequently discouraged from being direct for fear of being thought of negatively, whereas values such as assertiveness and competitiveness (which one often needs to get to high-powered positions in business) tend to be associated with masculinity, and are explicitly encouraged in young males (and may well have political ramifications in terms of women and men on the left-right spectrum).

Identity politics has always been a precarious thing, because the merits and demerits of intellectual and ideological propositions do not stand or fall on the sex, ethnicity or skin colour of the person making them. Currently the personal and the political regularly become entangled to the extent that many tend to conflate criticisms of their views with an attack on their personal identity - their biological, ethnic, sexual, religious self.

Intellectual challenges are (or should be) blind to things like sex and ethnicity, and as such, the responses should be too. We've seen too many people whose arguments have been challenged cry foul that the motive for the challenge has been their sex, skin colour or religion. Alas, the contemporary mindset for a significant proportion of the population is that political disagreement is taken as an assault on the entirety of their character and sometimes on their sex or ethnicity too.

This engenders a kind of paradoxical figure that becomes utterly supine when facing challenges to their worldview, but at the same time hostile and intolerant towards those that disagree with them, even going so far as wanting to censor or sometimes even decimate contra opinions and viewpoints.

The very real danger is that genuine threats of violence get lost in a wave of noise against people who've offended them on Twitter or who've held a public opinion they want to shut down. But it is very unwise to act this way: as I wrote a few years ago, affording people the liberty to speak freely is also of huge benefit to the individuals trying to rob people of that liberty:

"Whenever we hear a voice or read an opinion which is vastly different from our own, or the common opinion, not only should we give that person the right to express themselves, we actually deny ourselves the right to hear or read the expression if we choose to seek refuge in the false security of consensual opinion. Not only does the person in front of you wishing to speak have a right to be heard, it is also the right of everyone to listen; and every attempt to silence somebody makes the silencer a prisoner of their own actions because they deny themselves the right to hear something.  In other words, your own right to hear is as involved as the other person's is to have his or her view. The freedom of speech is incomplete unless it means freedom of speech for the person who thinks differently.  We may not agree with everything we hear, but we do ourselves an injustice if we fail to hear the dissenting voices." 

Similarly, with the emergent (and awfully named) Westminster sex dossier that's gathering pace at the moment (and ditto wider allegations in society), there is a pressing need for genuine cases of rape or sexual assault to not get lost in a barrage of witch-hunting from women who've merely been on the receiving end of inappropriate jokes, improper suggestions and tasteless banter and labelled it 'sexual harassment'.

 

Let's all work together in whatever way we can to expose sexual assault, bullying and tawdry abuses of power, and see that justice abounds. But let's also frame this in its proper context and speak out against blanket condemnations from extremist groups who want to believe that the whole of society is one gigantic, overwhelming, dangerous patriarchy where all women are subjugated under the thrall of male-dominated hegemony. Because if you're running with this narrative, you're not helping anyone, especially women.

People who present themselves lewdly and unsuitably can easily face the charge of being sad, immature, pathetic and of lacking urbanity if it helps - but unless there are better demarcation lines between serious sexual offences and ill-suited words, it is women who will suffer most by being categorised as feeble and overly-delicate by a small minority of feminist women who don't have their backs at all, but pretend they are speaking on their behalf. There was no better response to this than Julia Hartley-Brewer's response reprinted below:

 

 

On Harvey Weinstein, #MeToo, Supply & Demand, Feminism & A Quote To Die For!!

The Harvey Weinsteins of this world may be grubby sexual opportunists, but the people calling for his head on a platter need to understand the landscape on which the likes of Harvey Weinstein operate. Not that that's any excuse for his behaviour (obviously!!) - but it does have a context, and it's a context that the people that become his victims help facilitate.

The way I usually summarise these situations is like this: When demand astronomically outweighs supply in a winner takes all market, the ground is fertile for manipulation and coercion. And that's what we are seeing here.

When consumers wanted to fill their tanks during the petrol crisis, some garages took advantage with higher prices, ditto water sellers after hurricanes hit America. When there is exceedingly high demand in a situation with very limited supply, the suppliers can have excessive power over the consumer, because power lies in the hands of those with a scarce resource in high demand.

Take any institution in which wannabe celebrities court fame - Hollywood, The X Factor, even the BBC -  and you will find my formula (demand astronomically outweighs supply in a winner takes all market) is highly prominent. Supply and demand are in extreme disequilibrium on Hollywood's yellow brick road, which means the power is skewed in favour of people like Harvey Weinstein, and heavily skewed against people wishing to carve out a career in Hollywood, and who may make themselves vulnerable if they think it will give them a leg up (pun intended).

Aspiring stars in a winner takes all market already have to fight hard to get on the ladder to stardom: usually their career begins with long hours, low pay, fringe roles and susceptibility to manipulation and coercion that wouldn't occur to anything like the same extent in other industries.

Just like how readers have to take a smidgen of responsibility for what the gutter press releases in its newspapers, would-be celebrities should be mindful that obsessive courting of wealth and fame makes them susceptible to the thrall of powerful people who will capitalise on those hopes and dreams (this does not exculpate the perpetrators {obviously!!}, but it's true that some crimes have a wider context that should be explored*).

What about the #MeToo gesture?

Here's the thing. On October 17th I made a prediction - I warned that genuine sufferers of abuse may end up being washed into similitude by floods of socially-conformist #MeToo gestures - and that is precisely what happened, I'm sorry to say.

But naturally, that isn't all that has happened - and despite some inevitable protestations to the contrary, I never said otherwise (again, obviously!! Who would?) The positive side of #MeToo is that it hopefully helped a lot of women who've been abused - to be reached out to by friends and family that otherwise might not have known, and to be supported in issues they may now feel more comfortable confronting.

Yet, alas, it also created a platform for the misandrous wing of feminism to spew out some pretty unpleasant things - and that is what I also warned against - that scores of socially awkward and intellectually inept women would take to their keyboards to paint a far too bleak picture of men, and hard-sell a worldview of women as being little more than pathetic victims in a harsh, patriarchal watered down version of The Handmaid's Tale.

To me, and I'm pleased to say, to quite a few women I know who are with me on this (pugnacious feminism is, thankfully, a minority level phenomenon), this radically departs from the well-worn wisdom that the best way to achieve progress for women and men is to be conjoined in striving for progress for both sexes, not in pitting one sex against the other in completely erroneous pursuits (like this one).

There are loads of examples I could pick, but as a couple of Facebook friends shared it, let's go with this one by a feminist called Jeni Harvey who writes a charming little piece in which she refers to people who don't agree with her as 'pus gatherers'. She divides these 'pus gatherers' into three categories, with each of her categories being as myopic as it is charmless:

1) First is blanket denial, whereby men and their cheerleaders deny that sexual abuse on such a massive scale exists at all. Women are fanciful, lying, exaggerating for effect. There is a bandwagon onto which women are joyfully leaping in an attempt to malign men and revel in their perceived victimhood.

Er…yes, damn right - we are denying that in the UK sexual abuse exists on a massive scale. It does not. Several things are getting erroneously conflated here. Of course we are all too painfully aware that every instance of sexual abuse is one instance too much - and we will always fight against it (I've done so myself in the past), but the vast majority of men are not sexual abusers, and it's a lie to say otherwise.

And on the second point, again, yes, damn right, there is a bandwagon onto which some women are joyfully leaping in an attempt to malign men and revel in their perceived victimhood. Once again, if Jeni Harvey is oblivious to this, she is ultra-selective in how she views reality.

2) Second, we have the more modern form of denial which concedes that yes, sexual abuse is a common problem, although not a gendered one. There are simply some people that abuse other people and all abuse is equally bad. The inconvenient and statistical truth that 98% of all sexual crime is committed by men, and that the overwhelming majority of their victims are female, can be pasted over with obfuscation and the politics of individualism.

This still skews the reality somewhat, and misses the point in doing so. Even if 98% of all sexual crime is committed by men, and even if the overwhelming majority of their victims are female, this still compromises a relatively small proportion of the population. Again, that doesn't trivialise all the dreadful instances of abuse that do go on, but to pretend this is a problem that indicts most men is a lie.

Moreover, even if we move away from sexual abuse onto other things that social justice warriors like to bemoan - like sexism and racism - you'll find this is greatly exaggerated.

If racism is accurately defined as:

"Unfair and unkind prejudice against someone based only on ethnicity or skin colour"

And if sexism is accurately defined as:

"Unfair and unkind prejudice against someone based only on their sex"

Then there is very little racism or sexism in the UK. Almost all prejudices (both fair and rational, and unfair and irrational) are not intrinsically about sex or ethnicity, they are about the distal factors associated with those things. I think despite all the bellowing out there, it is fairly obvious that actual racism and sexism is very miniscule in the UK.

By the way, don't be tempted to lump Internet abuse into neatly demarcated categories like sexism and racism, even when it looks very much like that is what it is. Most Internet abuse is driven from another place - a place of immature anonymity which takes the personhood out of communication. Face to face, most of these online trolls wouldn't act like as they do - social media is a mask behind which many insecure people spew out their bile because, like the experiments of Millgram and Zimbardo, they can do so under a different, morally less-culpable, persona.

3) Lastly, we have the outraged hyperbole. The shock! The fury! Whoever could have imagined such horrifying evil existed in the world?!

Oh do stop it! Look, those men that abuse women are awful, but most men would stand right behind you in a direct challenge to abuse. Men in general have done so much for women (and women for men) - men have gone to war to defend the household and toiled and sweated in hard industry to provide for their families. They do not deserve this level of misandry - and if the signposts were reversed, women would rightly be calling out misogyny.

"Do they seek to ameliorate or weaponise suffering? If it's the latter, they're fakes"

Paula Wright

Melting socialist snowflakes

One final point and I'm done. It's no coincidence that most of the belligerent feminists that feed off female insecurity are also statist socialists who rather resemble conspiracy theorists in their distrust of markets, competition and the individual ability to act according to liberty and the free exchange of opinions and ideas.  

And I'm afraid that this is the triune responsibility of their parents, the education system and the media - all of which play their part in leaving young people thoroughly ill-equipped to deal with the society into which they will grow. Many are corralled inside a gilded cage of paranoia, and are imbued with a spirit that gravitationally pulls them towards safe spaces and an inability to encounter views and opinions that radically depart from their own.

This gets sold as society being more tolerant, sensitive and understanding - but if only that were true - it is a small subsection of society being selectively tolerant, sensitive and understanding towards views they agree with, and radically intolerant and dismissive of contra-opinions and afraid to have their ideas challenged. They are putting up walls for wallflowers, and this is a sure-fire route to an exaggerated perceived victimhood that convinces itself to look for offence, unfairness and injustice when it isn't there.

An analogy for the harm it does - when a child falls over and grazes their knee, if a parent fusses with 'Oh diddums' they will start to become cry babies every time they fall over. If a parent says 'Now come on, up you get, it's only a fall' they will habitually start to pick themselves up, dust themselves off and move along. 

The biggest amnesia from which the young need to be rescued is the one whereby they have forgotten that it's the free exchange of opinions and ideas that breeds the highest levels of tolerance, progression and clarity of facts and truths.  

I am going to close with an awesome statement I read the other day from someone called Kristina Blount Guyban. I don't mind admitting it brought the vapour of a tear to my eye:

"We will not sit back and watch our husbands and sons be disrespected by women who don't know them because they are men.

We will not sit back and watch our husbands and sons be lumped into the same category as disgusting and depraved men.

We will not sit back and allow the world to become a place that is hostile to our growing sons just because they are men.

We will not allow our husbands' masculinity and manhood be dragged through the mud because some women think all men are worthless.

We will not sit back and watch our hard working husbands sacrifice blood sweat and tears for our families only to have their earnings taxed to pay for things that are against their values.

We will not sit back and watch the legacies our husbands are building be torn down. This is our proclamation: some say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, we say hell hath no fury like a woman defending her husband.

We're not here to oppress you. We are here to defend our men. Don't underestimate us. We are smart, we are brave."

Kristina Blount Guyban

Amen! And I reciprocate that wholeheartedly to all women out there, and, of course, men too!!

 * We've been here before with feminists getting the wrong end of the stick about an argument - Arguing With Feminists About Rape

Further reading -- A Cost-Benefit Analysis Of Cheap Fame

Ladies, Strength Not Timidity Is Surely The Answer!

I've written before about how this hyper-sensitive 'generation snowflake' society that is being created is turning our young men and women into liberty-unfriendly, censorious whinge-bots that are thoroughly unprepared for reasoned critical debate and understanding the superlative qualities of free expression for all.

I also pointed out on Facebook the other day the sharp contrast between thin-skinned second rate MPs wanting sexism to be a hate crime, and women on the front line in Syria courageously doing battle with the sanguinary thugs of Islamic State.

It's not for me to tell others how they should fight their battles, but I can, I think, make a couple of suggestions on how all this is being perceived in some quarters, and on whether there may actually be a method of handling these situations that's possibly a teensy weensy bit better.

In a blog a few weeks ago I made a point about how exposed modern day socialists are when they shout in anger about issues in which free market economics has claimed victory long ago. This got me thinking about whether, just possibly, the same might be starting to be true in the UK about women’s liberation. It’s pretty clear that for most of our history men have dominated the landscape and oppressed women in all sorts of horrible ways.

As a consequence, women’s liberation has certainly been a necessary and laudable part of history. But now that brains are the key to a successful career, not brawn, and that from the years up to 40 women are now out-earning men, is it perhaps worth considering that in some cases women’s liberation is beginning to send its artillery into battles that have already been won?

I ask because if the answer is largely yes, then there are probably an awful lot of feminists expending energy in places in which such energy is no longer needed, which, by definition, means they are not expending energy in places where it might well be needed.

I'll leave it to feminists themselves to judge where best to devote time to causes - I shall not presume to know the battles they should pick better than they do. But I'd happily offer a couple of suggestions of battles that need a reappraisal.

First, as alluded to in the link above, a good example of poor use of energy is in a video like this one, with the reliably misinformed feminist Kate Smurthwaite arguing with the reliably well-informed Kate Andrews from the ASI about gender pay, and making a mess of things because she has her facts wrong, and is therefore pursuing something that needs no pursuance.

Second, I think when it comes to women facing negativity in the public arena - insults on Twitter, unpleasant comments on Facebook, or vile abuse at the bottom of the articles they write, the women who are saying the right things on this matter and doing the most for women are the women who absolutely refuse to be timid and self-pitying, and who repudiate the merest suggestion that women require any special treatment in the hostile world of Internet debating (contrast Ella Whelan's response at 7mins 38 compared with the feminists on the their side of the debate in this video clip here).

In my opinion, the women that do the most for the feminist cause are not the masochistic, whinging harpes with whom the word 'feminism' is most readily associated; rather they are the women who influence and inspire simply by doing what they do well - being smart, witty, intelligent, creative and (ideally) kind.

For just as it is one of those ironies that we rarely feel sorry for damaged people who are always moaning and feeling sorry for themselves - it is only when they stop that we actually feel sorry for them - so too it is the case that the women who are always running on about how much they are trying to do to fight the good fight for women are usually the ones doing far less good by imploring others to 'Look at me!', 'Look at me!', 'It's really about me!'.

In my opinion, the real champions of women are not the household name members of the witterati with those children's birthday party magic shows going on in their heads - the likes of, Julie Bindel, Polly Toynbee, Laurie Penny, Jack Monroe, Salma Yaqoob, Zoe Williams, Suzanne Moore, Kate Smurthwaite and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. They are women like Janet Daley, Kate Andrews, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Dia Chakravarty, Gillian Tett, Camilla Cavendish, Claire Fox and Ella Whelan (who competently nails it in this interview on Sky News).