Megan McArdle
brings some meat to the table in a post on how she's a
feminist, yet not. She boils down her feminist inclinations into 3
points, and then notes her heresies. (Quick plug: This makes
reading Christina Hoff Sommers's feature in our July/August issue
all the more necessary.) To wit, McArdle's a feminist because she
believes:
1) Society is set up in ways that limit women's
choices and opportunities--men's too (it's awful hard to make the
choice to stay home with kids, or become a nurse), but women more.
Men are not, for example, socially punished for monogamy the way
that women are socially punished for promiscuity.
2) Privilege exists, and is in many unfortunate ways invisible
to those who possess it.
3) We should try to change those things.
Her heresies focus on "how we should change this," i.e. she doesn't
like the idea of forcing equality at the end of Uncle Sam's magnum.
It should be no surprise I like her heresies, but I still quirk my
head a little at her reasons for being a feminista, which she
collapses into the basic point that she "endorse[s] the project of
changing social values to increase the scope of human possibility."
Her point assumes that it is possible to reach a near-perfect
equilibrium in which the social pressures can be neutralized. I'm
assuming here she's not suggesting that tax codes are structured to
favor men as the primary breadwinner, but instead that the organic
traditions of the population are biased toward moms being
traditional moms and dads being traditional dads. In that case,
though, I always wonder. If you have a group of traditional moms
who have chosen to be mothers, perhaps because of false
consciousness, or perhaps because of their own free will, they will
be inclined to believe that different choices made by others are in
some way flawed. We see this behavior currently, and we see the
opposite coming from feminists who think that the traditional moms
have sold out The Cause.
In other words, I can't imagine a world in which everyone will
be okay with what everyone else will be doing. If you don't buy
that there are systemic legal obstacles
inhibiting female achievement at companies (aside from the possibly
sexist dispositions of the men who run them), I don't really even
see her point about the existence of privilege as being relevant.
But maybe I'm misreading.
My point is that I think that getting the more lukewarm
responses from people might actually be more difficult to achieve
than getting the more volatile ones. I think it's easier to
polarize people on the points of Ultimate Feminine Liberation vs.
Be Tradition, than it is to get people to say, "Eh, whatever you
want."
topics:
Law, Oil
