Spiked says solidarity is the work of the devil
Spiked has another “contrarian” what’s all this fuss about sexual harassment piece, this one by Ella Whelan. The target this time is Time’s Up, which turns out to be rich women condescending to poor women, I guess by not ignoring them.
No one should have to put up with injustice. But this patronising campaign assumes working-class women are incapable of sticking up for themselves. How did women ever win equality in the workplace in the first place? Was it through Hollywood-run schemes to stop bad male behaviour with lawsuits? Of course not. Equality was won by ordinary women standing up for themselves and demanding their freedom. This is what #MeToo types can’t understand – that women aren’t all helpless creatures, simply waiting to be freed by a hashtag or a handout.
That is, equality was won by was won by ordinary women standing up for themselves one at a time and separately and without conferring or joining forces in any way whatsoever. Yeah! No need for solidarity, no need to organize, no need for campaigns, just each woman square her shoulders and be as great as she can be. If women dare to band together then by god they’re all treating each other as helpless creatures.
Wait. What? Women won equality? When did THAT happen? I must have imssed that headline. Last I heard the battle was still being fought. Again. And again. And again.
This is the story conservative America tells itself over and over again about how equal rights were fought for.
I grew up hearing that Rosa Parks was really tired one day after a hard day’s work, so she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white person.
–Wait, Rosa Parks was secretary of the Montgomery NAACP? She had marched for civil rights and workers’ rights? She’d attended activist training? She wasn’t the first black person to be arrested for resisting bus segregation, but her case was chosen for the lawsuit challenging it?
What a disappointment. Rights are supposed to be won by individualistic individual heroes who are so strong and brave and good they vanquish the meanies and win over the public by virtue of their individual awesomeness. Anything else would be people organizing and fighting together against the powerful, and we can’t have that. That’s communism, and collectivism, and being contemptible helpless creatures.
Funny how libertarian/conservative types rundown Hollywood while clinging to the most hackneyed and unrealistic star-vehicle narratives. It isn’t superheroes who win equal rights, Whelan.
God, exactly. Great parallel.
[…] a comment by Lady Mondegreen on Spiked says solidarity is the work of the […]
Lady M, there may also be the desire to diffuse the power of the group by convincing people that they need to work separately, and that working together is bad – because when people work together, and things change, that makes some people unhappy (the people that don’t want change). So they tell the narrative of individuals standing alone like some sort of Superman (or in this case, Wonder Woman) facing down the problems one at a time. Never a mass movement – because mass movements succeed.
Of course, the whole thing doesn’t really require any devious intentions, because it’s like you say. We’ve been brought up hearing the “great man” story of history, about one lone genius or brave soul who made changes for everyone. Harriet Tubman ran the underground railroad all by herself. George Washington bravely fought against the British and won (oh, he had a handful of scraggly run down minute men, too, but no, no French army helping him, of course not). And, I too was raised on that Rosa Parks story. I didn’t find out the truth until college.
It suits the national narrative of individualism and pulling up by the bootstraps, and the brave frontier pioneers who never, ever, ever, ever hid away in a fort manned by soldiers with government guns (because the west wasn’t won with a registered gun, you know). That suits the mindset here, so then we can blame the poor and downtrodden for their poverty and downtroddenness. If they were superior beings, they’d be like Paul Ryan, rich and powerful, and itching to take benefits away from all the people who think they might just have a right to get a little back of what they’ve paid into the government all their lives.
And with women – well, once a woman achieves a position writing for a magazine instead of standing in a kitchen, the temptation to see herself as superior to all those other women is probably as great as it is for a Paul Ryan standing in the Senate. So women join forces with the men to form a great barrier of superiority against anyone else who might threaten the fortress of superiority.
Sadly, there are some people who know the American story of feminism, anti-racism etc better than they know the British ones. Or rather they know the re-writing of them. C’mon, Ella!
Again the link from red-diaper pseudo-progressivism to anarcho-capitalist ‘Libertarianism.’
Lefty Trumpism.