From: Brian Manning Delaney (bdelaney@infinitefaculty.org)
Date: Fri Sep 17 1999 - 14:22:00 MDT
k_aegis@mindspring.com wrote:
> In view of Lee Daniel's pronouncements
> on the irrationality of feminism, I
> suppose the following question is
> in order: How is feminism irrational?
[....]
> The logic of feminism in its original form: The
> fact that 50% of the population is cut off of
> economic and cultural resources has no
> rational basis, but is, rather, based in
> religious dogmas and cultural superstitions.
Feminism is most certainly not irrational.
The heart of the political issue is how to redress imbalances.
That's where things get tricky: equal access or _forced_ access?
Well, not that tricky -- the issues get interestingly tricky
when one tries to define "equal" and "forced" in ways that show
that they are actually distinct. Not as easy as one might think.
(I am not a liberal.)
Another complicated issue involves measurements of success of
attempts at redressing imbalances. Here's where biology tends to
get tossed into the mix: if women are more likely to be away
from work because of pregnancy, then they are more likely to
have made less money, ergo stats showing that women make less
money are partly just reflecting the fact that they are more
likely to have been away from work than men, because of this
simple fact of biology. So we have to define success as "women
making 90% of what men make" -- so this simplistic line of
reason goes.
There are obvious feminist rejoinders to this, of course. (For
one, it is by no means "a simple fact of biology.")
Anyway, things get heated, for men, because of reverse
discrimination anxiety. As a white male, I feel the pain of
while men who have been dicked over (or "dicklessed over," to be
a vulgar Freudian). In graduate school, applying for
fellowships, it always annoyed me that there weren't Person of
Other categories for me to check off. But so what? My sister was
told growing up that she couldn't do math. That's an
unquestionable disadvantage. Let her have a box to check off. I
can get the fellowships anyway.
(Persons of other defined by race raise far more interesting
issues.)
Brian.
-- Brian Manning Delaney <b-delaney@uchicago.edu> (No need to CC replies to me.)
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