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Vaishnav Sunil's avatar

On the two points that you claim justify a "feminist" movement:

1. The ability for women (especially non-conforming) to choose a different path: Western liberal systems are already at the point where freedom of choice for such women is maximized (outside some religious communities perhaps). This is still absolutely a worthy cause to rally around, but not in the western world.

2. To politically represent women who are likely to be politically under-represented: There are two specific problems with this argument. One is that while theoretically, you could have a feminist movement full of disagreeable, high achieving women that are democratically representing the interests of women at large, this is currently as far from reality as one can get. I'm also sceptical that in the western context, the average woman's interests are better politically represented by women who don't look, feel or act like them as opposed to men in their lives. More importantly, it doesn't seem like we're at risk of having fewer women join economic or political life every year. It's not a trend that seems to warrant pushing against. If anything, your earlier posts seem to suggest that on the margin, women should be more, not less, willing to prioritize feminine values and families. If that's the world we live in, why do we need a movement that has other women advocate for women who don't seem to share their values or goals?

In practise, in order to speak to the woman that is likely to be underrepresented in public life, "feminism" is a bad umbrella to rally under. Most conservative women I've met don't associate the feminist movement, as it stands currently, with anything positive. Given that, it's unclear why this form of identity politics needs to continue under this banner. Why not strategically form alliances with groups of men and women on specific issues? Not everything warrants a mass movement...

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Dude Bussy Lmao's avatar

I don't disagree in principle with anything above, the problem I have is calling these beliefs 'feminist'. At the end of the day, I just don't think it is possible to reclaim that word, let alone use it to describe a movement whose foundational belief is the importance of innate psychological sex differences. When I'm in polite society, I pretend to be a blank-slatest, evopsych truther like all the other good libs. If I said "Sex differences are real, they impact men and women's brains, and you should acknowledge that if you are a feminist" wouldn't just have me branded as a sexist, but as an utterly insane one at that.

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