Why Feminism Crashed and Burned: Scolding, Private Decisions, and the Left

Wow, this is bad.

As I've made clear, I think feminism went into a death spiral when it (a) moved to the left of liberalism and (b) allied itself with incoherent postmodernist/poststructuralist/etc. pseudo-philosophy.

One of the problems with the left is it's moral fanaticism. The extreme left is very much like the extreme right in that both love, love, love micromanaging other people's lives. "The personal is the political" is the bumper-sticker slogan beloved of leftists who long to invade your private sphere and scold you about everything from your eating decisions to...as it turns out...your reading decisions.

As it turns out, according to ladybusiness, you must weep and gnash your teeth and torture yourself over who has written the science fiction books you read. You must agonize over their life stories, the obstacles they have faced, whether or not you are reading equal numbers of books written by different types of people...or, well, men and women, anyway... There's no suggestion that you should consider, e.g., their economic background, nor any such thing...but, then, there never is...

And note: this is not even about the serious literature you read...  This is about the science fiction you read. (And I say that as somebody who likes sci-fi.)

Sigh

Look, people say silly things in every political movement. I do realize that. Consequently, it doesn't make sense to let stuff like this drive you away from a position that you otherwise accept.

But I have to say, I really find this sort of thing intolerable. Moral fanaticism is what drove me away from the right when I was young, and the more of it there is in any given political position, the less likely I am to be able to tolerate it, much less identify myself with it.

There's a kind of issue here, of course--that is, in the linked post. It just isn't very important. We certainly haven't accomplished equality between the sexes, despite some pretty diligent effort, and despite having done a lot of the really obvious things for awhile now. I do think that there are a lot of things in this vicinity that could stand some serious attention. But IMO, feminism isn't going to be much help the more it slides in this bad direction, and the more it adopts a strident tone about with respect to minor issues it isn't even obviously right about.

If I were going to write up a post like the one linked to, I'd have proceeded more like this:

1. Whoa, here's a surprising fact: men tend to review more books by other men than they do by women, whereas women seem to be a little better about that. That seems surprising...

2. Well, what's the base rate? That is, what percentage of sci-fi books are published by males and what percentage are published by females? Because men might just--indeed, probably do--just write more sci-fi books...

That'd put an end on things until we got the relevant information...  But ladyparts does not, so far as I can tell, provide that information. The very information without which the rest is useless just isn't there.

What we seem to have, rather, is the fact that men review more books by men, and women review more books by women, with women's preference for women being somewhat less pronounced than men's preference for men. Absent the relevant background information, however, for all we know, both men and women are biased toward reviewing books by women.

Stridently advancing weak arguments for the claim that we need to flagellate ourselves about our private, largely inconsequential choices is the sign of a dangerously irrational political movement. Feminism need not move in that direction. If it does, it will become part of the problem rather than part of the solution. In fact, it's already become, largely, part of the problem. There's still a rational, liberal core of the movement, however. If that core doesn't speak up and put down this sort of thing, feminism is dead. Worse, it'll be alive, but on the wrong side of justice.