Our own friend MrFancyPants wrote Andrew Sullivan’s Dissent of the Day for today. There’s glory for you!
I’m also disappointed in the continuing scorn that you heap upon feminism. You don’t seem to understand even the most basic facts about it and the sneering tone that you take is unbecoming and not like you. You seem to lose all ability to understand nuance when you write about it. I’m a “straight white male” and even I realized that, in that video, my demographic “as a group” was not being disparaged. You’re like a walking poster child for the #notallmen hashtag and the enraged, entitled, petulant man-boys who complain on it.
And the strawmen – could you just stop with that? You wrote: “Instead of seeing the web as opening up vast vistas for all sorts of voices to be heard, they seem to believe … that women are not strong or capable enough of forging their own brands”. Um, what? Show me a feminist who thinks that women are “not strong or capable enough.” Go on, show me one, anyone, anywhere. You cannot, because they don’t exist. It’s the anti-feministswho think that. Just look at the words of Phyllis Schlafly, for example, and the immeasurable damage that she has done.
And then there is this: “They want gender quotas for all media businesses, equal representation for women in, say, video-games, gender parity in employment in journalism and in the stories themselves.” Gender quotas, huh? Well, I looked through WAM’s “About us” page, the “What we do” page, and the “Action center” page, and didn’t see a thing about “gender quotas.” In fact, what they seem to want to do is simply to raise awareness of the disparities – there is no call for legal action to implement and enforce some quota. It’s intellectually dishonest, Andrew, to write things like that when you know them to be untrue.
Sullivan responds:
[L]et me address the assumption that I am pouring scorn on feminism. I’m really, really not. I favor the removal of any formal or legal barriers to women’s success.
Just not any of the other kinds of barriers – the informal barriers, the belittling, the patronizing, the interrupting, the overlooking, the underestimating, the sexually harassing. Those all have to stay, because to get rid of them would be tiresome to the people who don’t want to.
But I’m still a conservative-libertarian. I don’t believe in an identity politics that seeks to remove structural oppression by forcing others to say things they may not want to say, or do things they may not want to do, or by ostracizing people for whatever-ism they are found guilty of.
Wow. That’s quite an admission. He doesn’t believe in seeking to remove structural oppression by forcing others to say things they may not want to say, or do things they may not want to do.
Really?
He doesn’t believe in seeking to remove structural oppression by forcing others to say things they may not want to say, or do things they may not want to do?
How about forcing people not to say things they may want to say, or not do things they may want to do? Does he also not believe in that?
So in the workplace, for instance, I guess Sullivan is opposed to policies that forbid employees to harass other employees for being of the wrong gender or race or class? He’s against “forcing” people to talk and act in ways that refrain from treating other people as inferiors and/or subordinates?
Still. He did say he would stop using the epithet “SJW.” He said it voluntarily, I think.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)