Wait- This isn't Tuesday.
For all of those curious as to why I didn't update Bluh Bluh Something Clever yesterday, it was due to some chronospacial mishap with my temporal-reconstructionalist wave function. That is all. It is not because I was lazy over the long weekend and had to do all of the work that had backed up since Friday. I mean, how irresponsible and undisciplined would that be, am I right?
Anyway we're here to talk Feminism.
So building off of what I was talking about in my post-script last Thursday, I do make a distinction between gender dynamics and feminism. Essentially, the difference between gender dynamics and feminism is the same as that between class dynamics and Marxism. While divisions of the population based on economic assets have been a long standing tradition in just about all civilized culture (by which I mean cultures with large collections of people in a single political unit, a stationary lifestyle, and capacity for graphic communication), Marxism is a specific philosophy which describes and politicizes the dynamic and constructs an ideal dynamic. Likewise gender dynamic is the division of populations based on sex, gender and sexuality (in fact, gender is a bad descriptor for this dynamic, but there really isn't a good word to describe all three so it'll have to do), while feminism is a series of western movements over the past 120 years which describes, politicizes and constructs ideals. These movements, most of which I will not describe are advocates for the civil and cultural enfranchisement of traditionally suppressed peoples within the gender dynamic (women, homosexuals, the transgendered et al.). These can range anywhere from self deprecatingly modest to militantly extremist, with about the same distribution as any other political movements. However, the three big cultural pushes are known as "waves" with the first being the civil enfranchisement of women in the West from the 1870s to the 1920s, the second being the shift towards cultural equality of women in the 1960s and 1970s, while the third, which, having begun in the early 1990s and, is still in full force, and among other things, advocates for the political and cultural enfranchisement of LGBTQ and the dispelling of gender based corruption.
However, like many political movements, philosophies have taken root around them. Now, I really dislike politically based philosophy, because they tend to focus less on describing the world as it is, and more on describing the world in a way which is advantageous to their cause. All political based philosophies do is muddy the water with partisanship, which is no good. My specific problems with Third Wave Feminism stem primarily from their support of post-structuralism and their lack of any good historical theory.
Now, my qualms with post-structuralism could (and most likely will) make up an entire post on its own, but I will briefly explain one of the ways it effects feminism (and much of social justice studies). A core element of post-structuralism is the destabilization of meaning, or making meaning wholly subjective. If you have read my earlier posts (especially On Beauty and Shit) you will be very well acquainted with the fact that I find this sort of thing to be pointless and annoying. However, as this is a politically based philosophy, the ability to dance around like like a childish tit and avoid any sort of challenge by pulling out the rug of definition from under your critics is an excellent way to win an argument. This is the primary difference between politics and philosophy: politics is a tribal game of Us vs Them, where it doesn't matter how you play the game, so long as you win, while in philosophy when both parties challenged and corrected with various arguments, they are both more able to come to a sensible conclusion. While post-structuralism is a perfectly valid field of metaphysics and semantics, as soon as it gets employed in politics, it's a toothbrush shiv designed to gut your opponent with underhanded tricks.
My second qualm with Feminism is their historical theory, which (from my own experience) is something along the lines of: "so men ruled everything in a patriarchy for a long time and that was super bad but then 1869 some women got the right to vote and then men got all upset, but it's really their fault anyway. Anyhoo real history doesn't start until the suffragette movement, except for all these cool ladies who stuck it to the MAN!" What I find most infuriating is that there isn't any question to HOW the patriarchal gender dynamics arose in the first place, or why they existed the way they did, why patriarchy almost universally arose in wholly independent cultures and why it was only in the late 19th and early 20th century did women actually successfully challenge this state.
I have a hypothesis which answers all of these questions, actually, but I'll save it for next time. I'll end with this: do I support feminism? Well, it's complicated. On one hand, I do think that most of their conclusions of what are just gender dynamics are legitimate, and I will concur that gender based corruption is in many aspects a political and cultural issue which needs to be resolved. However, Feminism is a political movement at heart, and any political party I look at with a contemptful mistrust most people reserve for the Ol' Nick himself. I, therefore, will caucus with this meerkat and share a tub of popcorn as pro-skub and anti-skub vainly duel for supremacy.
Sincere Regards,
Michael Coffey
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