Saturday, November 11, 2017

The Crazy Vanguard Of Contemporary Feminism: Hatin' On Taylor Swift Edition

There's nothing in any way surprising about feminist attacks on Taylor Swift...who, I must admit, I don't really know from Adam. I don't think I could name a single one of her songs. So anyway, I'm not exactly a fan or anything; I've got no bias in favor of defending her.
   I'm in the majority in the U.S. in that I am an egalitarian about the sexes, but I don't categorize myself as a feminist. Last I checked, even the majority of female college students don't think of themselves as feminists. The vocal vanguard of feminism has gone off the rails--it's not liberal, but PC / illiberal progressive. As such, it viciously enforces its orthodoxy--i.e. viciously punishes apostates.[More to the point: it viciously punishes even tiny and/or imaginary deviations from its ever-changing, highly impressionistic doctrinal fashions.]
   I know many people have warm, fuzzy feelings for the old feminism, and for the term 'feminism.' [I do too, incidentally.] And many don't want to surrender the term. I get that, and I'm not saying that my way of going is better. And under certain conditions, depending on what's meant in a given conversation, I'm willing to back them up and defend the view that today's unhinged, anti-liberal, irrationalist "feminism" isn't real feminism. But to the extent that's just a semantic dispute, it's not so much worth having. One of my main reasons for choosing the other route is that calling oneself a feminist is de rigueur in academia and polite middlebrow society. (So, of course, the ambiguity becomes very important.) At any rate, part of my refusal to say I'm a feminist is a result of its being declared mandatory.
tl;dr: don't tell me what to do. First-world anarchism FTW, baby.

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