"Modern feminism is silent on the real issue of freedom for women" nice read.

DevilishRogue · 2015-09-09T13:19:23+00:00

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pnw_diver · 2015-09-09T19:48:32+00:00

I found this writing reasonable, if understated in denouncing how vacuous first world feminism has become. While in some places women are functionally property an entire generation of blue haired princesses, doted upon their entire lives, has decided to base a hate movement on how men sit on the bus sometimes.

seanhead · 2015-09-09T21:42:18+00:00

The mention of Julia Gillard’s 2012 misogyny speech at the weekend Festival of Dangerous Ideas attracted an eruption of audience applause. That reaction is a reminder of the corruption of modern-day feminism and the debasement of national debates.

During the Sunday panel discussion, when The Australian’sChris Kenny pointed to the political opportunism and base hypocrisy behind Gillard’s speech, the audience booed and jeered him. Seconds after Kenny said the increasingly feral tone of Twitter impaired our national debates, someone in the audience yelled out “wanker”.

It’s a shame the Festival of Dangerous Ideas didn’t explore something truly dangerous: the immoral detour taken by today’s feminists away from real issues of freedom.

Instead, successful women who have soared to great heights choose to feast at a smorgasbord of whinges and whines, victimhood claims and misogyny games, and Western world obsessions about pay gaps, quotas and glass ceilings.

The notion of triage — of prioritising problems, of addressing those who most need help — has been inverted by modern feminism. If today’s feminists ran a hospital emergency department, they would be racing to fix an otherwise healthy middle-aged woman with a common cold over a young girl facing a life-threatening injury.

Brave riders of feminism’s third-wave include pop stars such as Taylor Swift, who said recently: “I didn’t see myself as held back until I was a woman.” As Heather Wilhelm responded in The Federalist: “Held back from what?” Building a net worth of $US250 million?

Today’s modern feminism is a corruption of what feminism should be. If feminism is not about freedom, what’s the point of it? If it’s not about freedom, it’s just a lobby group for pet grievances and low-rent political point-scoring.

Gillard’s misogyny speech was crude politics from a prime minister on the ropes. When she became Australia’s first female prime minister, Gillard said she wasn’t interested in playing the victimhood gender card. Yet as soon as her leadership stocks dipped she did exactly that, making asinine claims of misogyny and sexism against then opposition leader Tony Abbott. The woman who said she would call out sexism when she saw it overlooked the sexist texts of then Speaker Peter Slipper because base politics demanded she support him.

Something else happened on the same day Gillard gave her confected misogyny speech. In the northwest of Pakistan, in an area where the local Taliban regularly banned girls from attending school, a young Pakistani girl, Malala Yousafzai, hopped on board her regular school bus.

A gunman boarded the bus, too. He asked for Malala by name, raised a gun and fired three shots. One bullet struck the left side of Malala’s head, travelled through the length of her face and lodged in her shoulder.

Just imagine if Australia’s first female prime minister had made a heartfelt speech about Malala rather than confecting episodes of sexism to suit her political purposes. Imagine if the women who applauded Gillard’s speech as the defining moment of our times instead lifted their gaze to the real challenges around women and freedom?

Of course, women can walk and chew gum. But feminists today are so gummed up with petty Western grievances they fail to try walking in the shoes of girls such as Malala, girls forced into child marriages, girls subjected to female genital mutilation or women who have been the victim of so-called honour killings.

“The horror!” exclaimed Greens senator Larissa Waters last year. Was she responding to Islamic State’s propaganda that says “it is permissible to buy, sell or give as a gift female captives and slaves … It is permissible to have intercourse with the female slave who hasn’t reached puberty if she is fit for intercourse.” Of course not. The Greens senator was emoting over the fact a Liberal MP, Michaelia Cash, chose not to wear the feminist label.

Feminism has been corrupted by Western self-loathing and cultural infirmity. While hostages were being held at gunpoint by a terrorist in the Lindt cafe last December, high-profile Australian women rushed to join a feel-good hashtag campaign — #WISH — women in solidarity with hijabs.

Instead of assuming Australians would default to Islamophobia, why didn’t these women show more concern for the hostages inside the cafe or have a more nuanced debate about the fact millions of women are forced to wear a veil as a medieval form of oppression?

The scandal of modern feminism is its strategic silence on real issues of freedom for women. It’s much easier to talk about feminist labels and confected misogyny than female genital mutilation or child brides or so-called honour killings which, logically, may require you to make judgments about cultures that oppress women.

Feminism’s warriors, both male and female, have become the natural allies — or useful idiots — of those opposed to Western freedoms. There was more self-indulgence and hypocrisy when keyboard feminists recently rose up against Mark Latham’s recent crude tweeting. I’m not defending the former Labor leader. In his various media roles he descends into gratuitous nastiness that detracts from what can sometimes be a kernel of confronting truth. But it’s uncanny how the sisterhood strikes for political rather than principled purposes.

It’s apparently fine for Fairfax Media’s Clementine Ford to call Daily Telegraph columnist Miranda Devine a “f..king c…” on Twitter but it’s unacceptable for Latham to Twitter for equally crude purposes.

Some years ago, Latham called me a skanky ho in federal parliament. Not versed in the phrase, I googled it, only to be inundated with more porn than is decent when sitting in your study with young children nearby. Where was the feminist outrage against Latham for labelling a female commentator a smelly whore? As he recorded in The Latham Diaries, Latham was dared to put those words into Hansard. Dared by a lefty feminist.

Modern feminism’s focus on petty grievances and politically opportunistic outrage debases our public conversations and undermines the intellectual scaffolding around freedom. It is symptomatic of a wider and deeper malaise. The corruption of feminism emerges from a decades-long corruption of human rights.

Once the notion of human rights became untethered from classical notions of freedom, feminism was destined to do the same. The notion of free speech, for example, doesn’t seem to cut it any more. It’s about fair speech instead, about not offending or insulting people. The future of feminism is inextricably linked with the future of human rights. When the latter rediscovers classical notions of liberty, so will feminism.

Title	"Modern feminism is silent on the real issue of freedom for women" nice read.
Author	AndrewLevin
Upvotes	12
Comments	3
Date	September 9, 2015 12:42 PM UTC (10 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/3k8h2u/modern_feminism_is_silent_on_the_real_issue_of/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/modern-feminism-is-silent-on-the-real-issue-of.971727 https://theredarchive.com/post/971727

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