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How feminism liberated women (ha ha ha)

Posted by diogenes on 2024-April-8 17:52:20, Monday

My thanks to Sick Rose for putting me on to the essay “How Feminism Ends” by Ginevra Davis (https://archive.is/SLGer)

I've read through it twice. I think the essence of the piece is contained in the following passage:
If the goal of feminism is to improve the lot of females, then there are dozens of changes, social and scientific, that could help alleviate their condition. But if the goal of feminism is perfect sexual equality—that no mind should ever have to make sacrifices, in productivity or love, because of its body—then the end of feminism must, necessarily, mean the end of females. There is no other way.
The good news for women is that their minds are the equal of men's. The bad news is that their bodies are not, in ways that the author describes. As a result:
The female body—split, distracted—is a poor vessel for greatness. A female will never have the most time, the most focus, or the most desperation to make her own name. Moreover, the same barriers that prevent females from reaching “greatness” hold all of them back to an extent—a slight drag.
The result of all this is dissatisfaction on both sides of the gender divide:
Males see women everywhere: women police them in HR departments, mock them in the news, and, to add insult to injury, continue to insist that they are members of a protected class.
Females, however, are still haunted by a lack of female “greatness”—the same problem posed, seventy-five years ago, by Beauvoir. They work under male bosses. Their countries are run by mostly male leaders. Males continue to define the cutting edge in tech­nology and industry, while females play catch-up in remedial programs (“Women in tech!” “Women in business!”). And even the most liberated female must still take her pills, and count her cycle, and watch her fertility “window” while pretending that she doesn’t care. The female condition, one of constant self-monitoring and self-suppression, is now oddly similar to that of the gender-dysphoric... It also seems designed to create a degree of self-loathing: females are constantly set up to compete at tasks at which they are slightly disadvantaged, and are promised a life which, any rational mind will quickly discover, they will never achieve. Social media aside, it is unsurprising that a growing num­ber of women now report that they hate themselves.
Perhaps it is not surprising that more and more girls are deciding that actually they want to be boys. “A mind in a female body”, Ginevra writes, “is a mind shrunken, tweaked. And it’s not fixable. It’s not fair.” Unfortunately, nature isn't fair. So,
Today, females look for hope in technology: in artificial wombs and same sex reproduction. And I think that would be such a funny way for feminism to end—if someday, we get artificial wombs, and parents get to choose the body of their child, and they all choose “male,” and females can be, at long last, wiped from the face of the earth.
Well, I find what Ginevra Davis says very interesting. But there is a possibility that she doesn't consider. Yes, women will never be really equal to men – not because their minds are inferior but because a woman is a mind in a female body, and the female body implies that slight, though significant, drag.

But there is a choice available to women at which they are not disadvantaged by their bodies. It's called maternity. It isn't very fashionable these days for a woman to admit that actually what she really wants is to have kids, and career be damned. And I can already see the hackles rising for many a poster here who will think that I am just an old reactionary (which I am!).

And there is, indeed, a glaring problem. A wealthy woman can afford to stay at home and raise kids. But for women lower down the social scale this is more of a financial struggle, and feminism, the onward march of progress, had something to do with this. Feminism goes hand in hand with neoliberalism. The victory of feminism has something to do with the historic defeat of the labour movement. And to support this contention I am going to appeal to a feminist writer: Fay Weldon. I was reading the following interview: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/sep/05/gender.religion

It's a great piece - Weldon is always entertaining. In 2005, she had a near death experience, and saw the Gates of Paradise: “They were very vulgar, very middle-class with very rich colours and double glazed”.

The interviewer, who seems perpetually exasperated by Weldon's telling the truth rather than sticking to the feminist script, writes:
With the typical perversity that makes some feminists exasperated, Weldon says that she is not an unalloyed believer in the proposition that women going to work is a good thing. “As soon as women have the choice of marrying or not marrying, having children or not, the only choice they don't have now is not earning, which is a terrible loss to womanhood.” Why is that a loss? “Because capitalism crept in under the cloak of feminism and said: 'Wouldn't you love to go to work, ha ha ha. And then we can bring down wages, ha ha ha.' And so they did. And so now one male wage no longer keeps a family, and we have a falling birth rate.”


diogenes

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