— only, we’ll call it “parity” — and suggest that, rather than act as individuals, women will act as identities. Which, of course, opens up those who don’t act as women should to charges of false consciousness, inauthentic womanhood, etc. But then, that’s just nitpicking:
The video, courtesy of Newsbusters, cuts off a bit too soon, in my opinion — NB wants us to concentrate on the “white male” formulation — because what Shipman follows up with here is the suggestion that, as in countries like Norway (and even in the UK), where there is a move toward proportional representation (women, because they make up x% of the population are granted x% of the governing power), we here in the US should be looking toward just such a system.
But of course, the very idea is anathema to the ideas of individual autonomy upon which this country is based. And it reinforces the odious idea that women as a peculiar class are purveyors of their own special kind of logic or rationality or decision-making abilities — the very same type of argument that can be used to declare any identity group different and deserving of special dispensations, which, in addition to justifying demands for proportional representation, can also justify scapegoating of entire groups, and the reduction of individuals to mere representatives of some ascendant identity group narrative, itself merely a reflection of who among that group has control of the narrative, and who among that group the rest of society decides to recognize as “authentic.”
Proportional representation — like the entire “diversity” movement — is an attempt simply to Balkanize a culture while pretending to democratize it. Unless and until we recognize that, say, a woman be as ruthlessly aggressive as a man, or that a man can be just a emotionally invested in a problem as a woman — that is, that much more goes into a person’s decision making than a mere cataloging of skin color, or genitalia, or what kind of special hat or wrap they may wear — we will be working away from the idea of America and toward the progressive idea of a society run by coalitional movements of identity groups, an idea that is intended to sound the death knell for individualism.
Or, to put it another way, Claire Shipman is a leftist moron, and her hubby Jay Carney is proof that men can be feckless, timid, and soft.
Sounds on its face like a re-run of the stupidity that took Larry Summers down at Harvard.
I was watching Mean Girls the other day and remarked to myself, “self, you know what would make this scenario better? Thermonuclear weapons.”
And the reason that male politicians do what they so often do is rather obvious – women are attracted to status, male politician gets status and with it access to tail (quantity and quality) he never had access to before, and he can’t resist. So much so that in the grand old days of espionage a tried and true method was the “honeytrap.”
Barbara Mikulski did not leapfrog over a bunch of Victoria’s Secret Angels on my hotlist by virtue of having taken her Senate seat.
Left unspoken are the built-in assumptions that people will automatically and inevitably vote to support only those candidates who belong to the same identity groups to which they belong – women voting only for women, left-handed people only voting for southpaws, 34-year-olds only for those who graduated high school in the same year they did, etc., ad nauseum…
Taken to its logical conclusion, this leads to every man or woman voting for him/herself, as their own perfect representative.
Everyone standing up for themselves? Gaia forfend!
But when have progressive policies ever stood up to their own consequences?
There is a test case for this proposition. One which has been explored a bit.
It manifests itself in different ways, obviously, but at least in an environment full of vain high achievers, I find that women can be just as loopy. When I was in my twenties, the women in their thirties that I worked with used to scare the shit out of me. Especially bad were the ones who used to be attractive but knew that they were losing their looks. But, alas, when nobody is buying what you’re selling, you just become something of a smirky joke rather than a lecherous pig.
Totally ridiculous. You can gerrymander by race in most areas. Sometimes folks will self-segregate, despite the government pressure not to do so. So you can cherry pick minority neighborhoods into legislative districts.
You can’t really divide married couples by gender into legislative districts.
It was smart of them not to include a man in the panel. Otherwise the whole premise would have been quickly refuted.