I am writing an article for a magazine on the imposition of feminism, entitled ‘A Different Kind Of Corset’. So the main body of my article will be about how feminism has, in fact, begun to restrict certain areas (for example staying at home as a mother is now has bad connotations.) I was curious as to whether anyone was interested in sharing their views on the subject, if so I would be very interested to hear them.
4 thoughts on “A Different Kind Of Corset”
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A couple thoughts for whatever they’re worth
Feminism and other modern trends:
1. Restrict what’s available for choice. Not only is “wife and mother” looked down on as a career choice, but it’s less possible because marriage is less stable so it’s not sensible to rely on it. Also, all the other women are out bringing home the bucks so if one woman does otherwise her family’s relative standard of living will suffer. It’s not a niche that’s practically available for most women.
2. Say that women are sexually free, that what a woman does sexually is her choice and doesn’t carry any necessary implications or connections with it. But if that’s the social attitude toward women it carries over to the man’s attitude toward the woman as well. The result is that women become sexually interchangeable, and in fact commodities. The problem is that if something becomes a matter of absolutely free choice that no one else can judge then one loses the ability (and therefore the freedom) to do something of that kind that means something.
3. Downgrade the family so it’s no longer basic to personal identity. But to the extent it does that, so that the connections of private life become transient and insubstantial, identity falls back on the things people still agree matter, career and consumption (“I shop, therefore I am”). That strikes me as a kind of slavery. Also, it means that a worthwhile identity is really only for the few.
4. The general point: we always live in a world that determines what’s on offer for us. So the question as to feminism, women and freedom is whether a feminist world offers women more of the things they most want so they’ll be able to live in a way that makes sense to them and satisfies them.
Rem tene, verba sequentur.
Feminism, as a way of
Feminism, as a way of looking at oneself and at the world, is in itself a corset. It restricts thought. All must be viewed through the prism of feminism, so that everything becomes a “women’s issue,” which immediately transforms that topic into a paradigm of victimology (the woman is of course the victim). Victims require oppressors, so entire oppressor classes are created. The world becomes binary, a have and have-not world, in which good things exist but are arbitrarily being denied to women as a class and solely on the grounds of their gender.
Feminism borrows entirely from Enlightenment categories (which were all invented by dead white males, by the way), which for familiarity’s sake we can call the categories of liberalism. And it suffers from all the pitfalls, incoherence, and contradictions that liberalism suffers from. Therefore, within these categories the individual human will is sovereign, which means that the woman’s will is sovereign. If the woman’s will is sovereign, then where does that leave husband, child, family, community, nation? They orbit around the will of the woman, as appendages, inconveniences (which may be aborted if need be), or oppressors. The woman obviously lives in a battlefield, full of enemies, adversaries, and (not always wanted or loved) dependents.
So, feminism prescribes an escape, either through a “career,” or through legislation, or through judicial decisions, or through “consciousness raising,” or through “sisterhood,” etc.
Consider if feminism considers the obvious alternative, which is to get back to earth and integrate into the natural communities in which she finds herself, cooperate with the people in those communities, and make herself useful (that is, subordinate her sovereign will) to others she finds in those communities. This may mean a family, children, volunteer work, or a career as a physician (or a combination of all of these); there is no necessary path.
But the insistence upon the sovereignty of the will of the woman makes a woman a caricature of a human being, and misleads individual woman into destructive personal choices. Of all the social experiments initiated since the 60’s, women are obviously the big losers.
MD, that is brilliant!
> Feminism, as a way of looking at oneself and at the world, is in itself a corset. It restricts thought. All must be viewed through the prism of feminism, so that everything becomes a “women’s issue,†which immediately transforms that topic into a paradigm of victimology (the woman is of course the victim). Victims require oppressors, so entire oppressor classes are created. The world becomes binary, a have and have-not world, in which good things exist but are arbitrarily being denied to women as a class and solely on the grounds of their gender.
Yes! Feminism is indeed a corset, an ideological corset… I’m going to have to remember that for future use… Thanks!
You’re welcome.
You’re welcome.