Wednesday, October 23, 2019

Speaker Pelosi


I wouldn't have said that "women form the bedrock of families and communities in every corner of America."  I don't think that's true. 

I'm not arguing with the "Core Principles" listed in the Tweet.  I'm taking issue with the stereotyped way that your first sentence describes women in the United States.

Men do a lot.  They work.  They take care of children.  They are in charge of a lot of families and communities.  The women's movement, unfortunately, was much less successful at creating equal opportunity for people to have the lives that they want regardless of their gender than it should have been.  It was also misinterpreted in sad ways to promote the idea that women should throw off oppression by imitating the worst of chauvinist male behavior, so now horrible men and women are all over the place, treating both men and women as horribly as they can avoid jail for.  

If you want real equality for women, then you also have to relinquish the more pleasant stereotypes about women.  There are plenty of women who are only out for themselves and who couldn't care less about family or community, or who only have concern for their own families and communities to the detriment of everyone else.  This last was probably always the case; greed is not specifically a male trait.  

It's interesting how infrequently the word "responsibility" is used in rhetoric about women's rights.  Personally, the worst thing about my life is how chronically I have been prevented from having the responsibilities that I am capable of by people who were sure that they were being nice to me.