Great respect but it’s time to step aside
Thought for the day:
https://twitter.com/laura_hudson/status/953707342951981056
Nope.
Not stepping aside.
Shocking and astonishing fact: young people are not always automatically right, and old people are not always automatically wrong. It’s a little more complicated than that.
I’m seeing the same sentiment everywhere. In education – new ideas must take over, young people with enthusiasm must be hired, older people must move aside because experience means nothing. Never mind if the old things might be working, they are old, they must go in favor of new, untried methods.
In playwriting: Paula Vogel said it was time for older writers to step aside and turn it over to younger writers. Younger writers, who can, of course, gain no wisdom and experience from working alongside the older writers.
Of course, feminism seems to be the most vitriolic about it.
Gosh, so old(er) women are not really women and should therefore shut up about what rights and protections women should have. Got it.
I was arguing about the old/young divide with a woman in her late 20’s the other week. She was maintaining that ‘old’ people were to blame for literally everything and were wrong about everything. She was most offended when I said I grew out of believing that when I was about 15 and regarded people in their mid-twenties as ooold.
One of the problems with being young is that it’s hard to have a sense of perspective, because you just haven’t been there long enough to have the opportunity to gain it. Still, by your late 20’s you should be well on the way.
Is this really any different, though, than it has been since… well, forever? The young always want the ability to start fresh without any baggage; the old don’t want to see all their good work cast aside thoughtlessly. Jack Weinberg’s “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” quote (which, of course, he mellowed about as he aged) comes to mind, specifically.
Incidentally, O/T
Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister of New Zealand, has just announced that she is expecting her first child in June. Generally the news has been well received, although a few heads have exploded. During the election campaign some questioned what would happen if she were decide to start a family. Now we know. She’s planning on taking six weeks maternity leave and will then all going well return to normal duties with her partner being a full time dad. Jacinda is a good sort who describes herself as ‘youth adjacent’ (she’s 37).
For those interested in seeing the mix of responses a quick Google will find plenty of material.
I hope to god we get the TV scene of our unwed non church-going female prime minister breastfeeding in parliament. That would tick a few boxes.
Doesn’t sound like “great respect” to me. I don’t really know anything, but, for whatever it’s worth, my distinct impression is that the dreaded 2nd-wavers were making real progress, whereas the last 20 years (±) – that’s on the 3rd-waver’s watch, people – have mostly been a period of setbacks and decline. I’m not saying that young feminists are to blame for this, but it’s hardly a reason to feel smug and superior on their end either, is it..
I’m afraid the my first reaction to some of these spoutings is to ask, “Which man told you to say that?”
That isn’t always justified. In fact I don’t often say it but the thought recurs and sometimes it is needed. There are too many people about who can be catapulted straight into apoplexy by my saying, “Yes, I remember that. In the early ‘80s I was spearheading the campaign at work to get an evidence-based job evaluation scheme introduced which looked only at what work you did, what knowledge you had had to gain and left out entirely matters of sex, race, class.” The previous model, such as it was, had paid far too much attention to where you were seen to be in some social hierarchy. We got there in the end, not solely down to me, as once we had the agreement in principle I stepped back and a new team took over to slog through the technicalities and the resistance of a few fairly useless managers who were going to lose their place at the top table.
Feminism has always been about race and class, as well as gender equality. Some of the great classics come out of the USA and they acknowledge that. An entirely different angle comes out of France, though I’ve read less of that because so little of it was published in English and my French is a bit dodgy.
In contrast, much of what we are now hassled with seems to pop out of the speil of political illiterates, float across the Atlantic on a raft discarded plastic and pop straight out of the mouths of those who have not yet engaged their brains.
It’s the old, old story – whether it was Marx who first said it or not – if you don’t learn your history you are doomed to repeat it. A far better idea would be to learn first, speak later.
A modest suggestion – try Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. You won’t like it. You certainly won’t agree with it: I don’t now either but I’m bloody glad I read it before I allowed my brain to be set in a couple of concrete cliches. An easier read is Norris and Liddington, One Hand Tied Behind us (the copy I have is Virago) but you need to know that too. Jill Liddington lives a couple of miles up the hill from me, technically retired but still at it. She’ll probably go on doing feminism her way, as will all us second wavers, until she drops.
Why should we not? We have achievements we can show you youngsters. We have proof that it works.
Hmm… pretty sure that the Trump crowd skews towards the old. Shouldn’t one be turning their pitchforks on that particular demographic of olds? Or is that too hard?
So basically “Get out of the way you old hags, we’ve got feminism to do”. Nice work, kids.
That’s a funny way of showing ‘great’ respect. Sounds a lot like churlishness to me.
I think the idea that older women need to get out of the way is not quite the same as the ide that older men need to get out of the way. And older man can let his ideas grow stale if he wants to *because he is in power.* An older man can be an “elder statesman,” even the President.
But our society never has had the least bit of use for “old” women, however experienced or wise we may be. Note that we’re not being told simply to step aside, but to listen to our betters. We’re done. Nobody wants us around anymore because women are to be looked at and screwed, not heard or learned from. We are expected to sit down, shut up, and dissapear from public life all on our own. To do otherwise would just be tacky.
And yes, I *do* think issues being raised by “young feminists” are a “misguided distraction from the Real Issues” when those “issues” are things like pole dancing classes and why bepenised people should be allowed in women’s spaces. But I’m post-menopausal, divorced, and a tad overweight. This makes me, societally speaking, a bitter old cat lady nobody has to listen to, not an “elder stateswoman.” And it makes my opinions worthless no matter what they are.
What do we want? Change!
When do we want it? Now!
Why do we want it? Because!
Its part of the Dunning-Kruger generation. ‘We don’t know shit about anything, so we have blithe confidence in our virtuous, indignant, fervor.’
It isn’t really much different from Trump. ‘Our’ whipped-up emotional fury is MUCH more important than actual knowledge or ability. Hillary should step aside for the New Ideas of idiot libertarians and theocrats.
I’m curious about how accurately this statement describes all, or any, historical patterns of the feminist movement.
For instance, in the US during the 1920’s-30’s, shortly after national Womens Suffrage was achieved, did this in anyway describe the relationship between young women (say age 18-30) and the older women (say 40+ years old) who’d fought the decades-long battle for womens’ right to vote?
* Was there a widely-held sentiment among the younger women along the lines of, “We appreciate what the Suffragists accomplished, but they do not understand/appreciate the issues we are fighting today, and so are not qualified to continue leading the feminist movement.”
* Was there a sentiment among the older women that the issues that younger women focused on were a distraction from “Real issues”?
* Was there any aspect of the battle for womens equality during the 1920s-30s that was raised by younger women, but hindered by older women who didn’t consider it to be a “Real issue” worth fighting for?
* Is there any evidence during the 20’s and 30’s that the feminist movement achieved greater success as a result of younger women deciding to “leave the older women behind”?
“Here’s your ice floe, crones!”
How old is Laura Hudson?
I don’t know why they even have to listen and learn if we’re just getting rid of them.
This is the same I hear with the environment. The younger generation has invented environmentalism and we older folks never did one damn thing. The truth is, the biggest decade for environmental progress was the 1970s, when Richard Nixon signed nearly all the major environmental bills because he was worried about having to run against Edmund Muskie, the darling of the youngsters in the environmental movement. Since 1980, it’s been all downhill, and since 2000, it seems to be downhill incredibly fast. The candidats (Obama, Sanders) backed by the 20-somethings have not really had great environmental records (though admittedly at least somewhat better than Bush 43 and way better than now).
Next thing you know, the youngsters will be claiming that they are the ones who were responsible for Civil Rights (30 years before they were born); stopping the Vietnam War (20 years before they were born); and building the Great Pyramids in Egypt (thousands of years before they were born).
The Baby Boomers did have the idea that the old people had somehow failed, but they did accept those oldsters who were allies. And the older people did not just sit down and join the collective idea that they were worthless, as I see way too many Baby Boomers and Second Wave Feminists doing.
chigau – Laura Hudson was saying yesterday, in her indignation that older women and people in general were retorting, that she’s nearly forty herself (so OBviously she’s not the least bit hostile to older women), then later she specified 37.
Freemage @ 3 – no, not really, at least not in public discourse. The relations of young to old were largely deferential, whatever the young may have thought in private. The cult of youth is a fairly recent development.
To be fair, the idea is not always daft. The big social explosions of the 50s and 60s were to a considerable extent a matter of younger people saying hey it’s time to FIX this now.
I’ve developed a bit of an allergy to being told to “listen.” It’s always from someone I’ve already listened to, who I’ve BEEN listening to, who isn’t going to tell me anything new this time around but just wants me to stop disagreeing, and who thinks they know what I have to say already and doesn’t need to listen to me anymore.
What Patrick said. “Listen to me” is usually nothing but “agree with me, and do so publicly where I want certain people to see you accept my opinion, or I’ll use every dishonest tactic in the book to make your life socially difficult.”
Thanks, Ophelia.
I bet the 20yearolds are thinking that Laura should get into her rocking-chair already.
From what I’m seeing, if this was an American phenomenon to begin with, it is spreading.
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BKSA #7, one wants the Trumpists to shut up because they’re demonstrably wrong. Not because they’re old.
Slagging off any group of people for some trait unrelated to the point, even if that group is powerful old white males, is just a subset of the logical fallacy of argumentum ad hominem. It’s bigotry, not an argument, no matter who the victim is.