...Now of course you’re saying “But Sarah, they were voting against their interests.” Stop it. Stop making me roll my eyes so hard they’ll fall on the floor.
What you’ve just slipped into, whether you realize it or not is “Argument by Marx.” You probably don’t realize it, because even though lately the establishment has got a lot more bold and started making self-satisfied noises about neo-Marxism (it’s like stupidity. Calling it neo-stupidity makes it sound so much better) it’s permeated all thought and all teaching for decades – unexamined, unthought-about. It’s in the bin marked “unexamined foundational beliefs” which in your ancestors’ time held the idea of G-d creating the universe, something that permeated all thought, even that of self-conscious atheists.
And it is the other thing that is wrong, wrong, wrong about that comment.
The comment presupposes what some of their comrades (da, tovarish) said more boldly. That by saying it is men who are getting the short end of the stick in our society and by standing in front of the feminist mob yelling “stop” I’m a “gender traitor.” It does this by equaling me with Victorian women who were against their “gender”’s rights.
This is pure Marxism. It strips me of me and my circumstances in life and what I want, and reduces me to one salient characteristic: the fact I was born with a vagina. It is one of the most dehumanizing and demeaning theories of history ANYONE could come up with. And Marx did.
Take your Victorian anti-suffrage woman. She lived a pretty contented life, and in her experience she didn’t need the vote. And if you’re going to say “but what about her sisters?” Her sisters probably had similar lives. If you mean other women in general, a woman of that time and class remembered the French revolution and was likely to have a sneering disdain for all lower classes. These were not her sisters. And the lower class men were not her brothers either. The whole idea would seem absurd to her. Before you condemn her ask yourself “Why shouldn’t it? What reason did she have to think of herself as belonging to any group? Why should she fight for more than what guaranteed the best life for her and her immediate loved ones?” (Bringing up nonsense about “false consciousness” and “group betrayal” is not thinking, it’s tourettes. You’re assuming again that Marx was right. This is some leap of faith since his ideas have yet to work on real people.)
Now, take me. Yes, I have a vagina. I checked this morning. It was still there. BUT I have a lot of other circumstances in my life. I have two sons, for instance – sons I’ve seen systematically discriminated against in school starting with the type of work required (group work is deadly for boys. It’s also dominant now) to the style of teaching (most male brains learn more visually and kinetically. Most teaching is verbal) WHY would you presume I’m more interested in bullying males and getting more and more benes for my as yet non-existent female descendants, rather than in fighting for my sons to have at least the same basic treatment as their female peers? Or, presuming I’ll have female descendants some day (I could have all granddaughters) and I can’t know, WHY would you presume, since I have kids and I don’t know what the future will be, I would want anything beyond “equality under the law?”
Leaving all that aside why would you presume I have more in common with a single woman working in a factory somewhere in the Midwest than with a married man with sons who writes articles for a living a hundred miles away? What earthly sense does that make?
And before you lecture me about how Marxism envisions people as belonging to several interest groups – thank you muchly. I was raised in a country that was going head over heels for Marxism. I studied Marx in several classes. I also had the dubious pleasure, a few months ago, of reading what earnest Utopian American Marxists in the seventies viewed as the ideal system of government. It was bewildering and vomit-inducing. They wanted the country organized into “soviets” (in real soviet, country organizes you) each of them representing an interest group to which you “belonged” in some way. For instance, take me (please) I’d be in the women’s soviet, the Colorado soviet, the mother’s soviet, the Latino soviet and – presumably – the intellectuals soviet (Okay, for minus three seconds, after which I’d be in the Gulag soviet.) Each of these would elect representatives.
And none of these would represent anyone. For these to work, it presupposes that you have more than a marginal interest in common with other people in the same group. Heck, even if you put me in the “Portuguese immigrants soviet” I’d have barely nothing in common with most of them because for one most don’t come from my part of the country and very few write or read SF (Okay Larry Correia, but he’s third generation. Also, I’d be more likely to be with him in the Gulag soviet.)
The essential failure of making individuals go through groups with which they share a characteristic, is that ultimately groups are too amorphous for the representative to represent anything but himself. The last irreducible group is one. Which is why our system establishes rights of the individual and equality under the law. ANYTHING else, no matter how “progressive” it sounds is a shambling step back into the mists of tribalism and irrational group think.
(And yes, I realize group people by region as we do has its issues too. OTOH if your city is razed, it kind of matters to you. But I’m not saying that representation in other ways can’t or shouldn’t be considered. I’m just saying multiplying the number of “representatives” and subtracting from the individual is not a step in the right direction. And that groups aren’t as obvious as you think.)
The only place where it is appropriate for me to “think as a woman” or fight for an issue “as a woman” is the type of situation as in Arab countries where women AS A WHOLE are subjected to prohibitions in driving, working, learning or dressing the way they please (and no, it couldn’t happen here. NEVER to that extent. It’s the result of complex forces of culture and history. Correction: It couldn’t happen here that fast and without some serious foundational changes.) That fight has been fought for me already, and I’m guaranteed life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Oh, yeah, and equality under the law. And I will fight for those for EVERYONE, man, woman or yet undiscovered sentient being. Yes, even against a group to which I nominally belong because you think I do.
And now that we’ve gone through why that comment was stupid and irrelevant in general and in particular, let’s talk about why it was wrong as a comment to put in my blog…
Having unpacked the levels of unthinking and unreasoning repetition of college-learning in that comment, we can now stand back and be amazed at the staggering arrogance of it. To wit, the person making it assumes that a) I’d never heard it. b) I’d never studied history. c) I didn’t have the ability to reflect upon my situation in the light of history.
Given that this is the blog of – forget formal education – someone who is addicted to books, interested in history, and who has written historical fiction, the hubris in that comment is staggering. And it shows something else. It shows the desperate need to count intellectual superiority over anyone who disagrees with you, without even giving it a moment’s thought. (None of these people said something like “I’m surprised someone like you didn’t realize” – no, the presumption is always that I never thought in historical or self-reflective terms.)
Make a note of it: if this is the only type of argument you can marshal – one size fits all and regurgitated from college classes – and if you think it will win the discussion, you’ve already lost.
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