In fact, they tend to label much of first-wave or equity feminism as “anti-feminist.” Which, a convenient way to set yourself up as the spokespeople for contemporary feminism, that.
Christina Sommers (and I’d add Cathy Young) has been at the forefront of equity feminism — as distinguished from gender feminism (or what I’ve called establishment or academic feminism) — for years now. An adept of the first wave feminist movement, where feminism’s aim was equality before the law, not simultaneously promoting victimology while preaching empowerment, or the constant desire for special dispensations that, as a matter of necessity, create dislocation among some other identity group(s), Sommers is a frequent target of the more radicalized second wave feminists and more attuned to the post-feminist movement that began in the early 90s.
One of the major differences between the schools, and one of the things that has caused the academic feminist establishment to train their (phallus alert!) guns on Sommers, is her rather quaint idea that boys and girls do actually differ in some innate physical / chemical / biological way that can’t be fixed simply by wishing it weren’t so, then imposing that template onto society. Social engineering has real effects. And increasingly, we’re seeing the fruits of mapping radical feminist / identity politics theoretics onto real world populations.
And then just for the irony, men like Governor O’Malley laud their own gender equity public policy missteps as a giant step for mankind. Or personkind, if you’re of a particularly thin-skinned, semantically-challenged ilk.
On the plus side, though, if you’re a chick who likes to watch men stand at a urinal and piss, Maryland makes an ideal vacation destination.
But that’s just my editorializing. Here’s Sommers discussing the war on boys, which also happens to be the title of one of her important scholarly works:
Teach pirate knitting . . . . . . . with cutlasses.
Get boys reading. Good idea. But first, trigger warnings.
Books about wars are good. Or guns. Or how to build catapults and forts.
“The Dangerous Book for Boys” is a must-have.
“The Dangerous Book for Boys” may be a must-have, but John Locke’s “Second Treatise of Government” could prove more useful.
Fat chance.
I bought Satch the big book of gross facts.
I’m sure this would be frowned upon by many in the “academic” community.
It’s the status quo ante we’d have in mind to change. Which of course wouldn’t be likely without the attempt.
The boys had that one, too Jeff.
I really cemented my status as both “the cool aunt” with my nieces and nephews and persona non grata with my SILs when the first grade class of my nephew did a project where they mailed a stuffed wolf (cleverly named “Wolfie”) around the country. We received him one day and the project was to send a postcard from the city “Wolfie” was in to the class. We lived in Pittsburgh, so sent a picture of the Carnegie Science Center.
We also tied “Wolfie” to a child-sized chair, blindfolded him and took a picture with the calendar page of the day behind his head and my son’s six year old fist pointing a cap pistol at “Wolfie’s” head and mailed it to my SIL who was behind this project—not to the class, to her home.
She was not amused.
Going through the comments to one of the old posts of mine I linked to here, I came across this:
2005. Good thing I got kicked out of conservative thought circles when I did! Because that kind of talk is just so unhelpful in this day of GOP Hispandering, light bulb bans, and soda rations!
Makes one wonder what to do about the moral panic over the pervasive culture of sexual violence on college campi alleged by the same establishment.