Who wants to be with someone who so clearly holds you in contempt?
I think, too - thinking both about Silmarien's excellent post and the reading I've been doing on the sex industry - there are some other, underlying issues and assumptions which play into both. For example, somehow along the way as we tried to build a healthier culture around sex (as an activity, not an identity), we seem to have created the cultural assumption that everyone is entitled to sex, on their terms.
But while I think we all have a right to be free from sexual exploitation or violence, I don't think we have a right to expect as much sex as we want, the way we want, within the relationship that we want. All of that is negotiated, and the reality is that for many people those negotiations won't be "successful." This was true even when the cultural expectation was that sex was for marriage; there were always some who didn't find the right person or for whom that didn't work out.
And I don't know how we re-wind that assumption without coming across as either anti-sex or heavily controlling; and yet I think that assumption of entitlement is doing an awful lot of damage.
It sounds to me like the offending "incels" have identified completely with the anguish of rejection (known to many) and then around that whole-body anguish construct an elaborate mask-identity that claims that the initial anguish should never have existed. It's a kind of self-erasure, a sustainable suicide fantasy. All I am is Rejection, but Rejection should not be. It's very painful to see.In my admittedly very limited contact with incels my first thoughts were " Gee, I can't blame women for rejecting you."
Over here, it seems everything is scapegoating, and everyone's goal is to end up NOT being the scapegoat. Which I guess is always how scapegoating works...Kind of touches on some other discussions I've been having over the past few days; one thing I'm noticing (here in Australia, at least; I'm not sure how this is playing out in America) is the desire to find someone to scapegoat for the pandemic. It seems to me that a lot of this is really about people's anxieties that this is something that can't entirely be controlled (and that might, therefore, end up severely affecting them); but because we can't admit that, instead we'll lash out at someone whom we'll load up with all the blame... Currently where I am it's being directed at a few poor souls who happen to have had the bad luck to unwittingly spread the infection (admittedly probably involving some unwise choices), but I'm a bit concerned because once that kind of blame game is going on it never ends well.
But more to your point, yes, in the end, feminism and conservatism have incompatible concerns driving them. Feminists are looking for change, and by definition, conservatives aren't (unless that change is a return to an idealised past). So I agree that lasting alliance is probably deeply unlikely.
Frankly, I don't hope for it, because what they would be making common cause against really frightens me...
it's so easy to imagine that the political / social / theological pies can only be just in this one familiar way, but it's just not true.
@bekkilyn: I've been following some of the more conservative transwoman voices: Blaire White, of course, and another one who I think is very interesting is Kristina Harrison, a British National Health Service employee who was apparently banned from Twitter for tweeting that "sex and gender are not the same thing." I'm noticing that whoever is behind this firestorm is all-in on silencing transpeople too if they step out of line. Only voices that are sufficiently "inclusive," which appears to mean committed to a very specific ideology, are permitted. Which I have to admit is basically the modus operandi of the left in general, unfortunately.
I think it's important to note that the fact that there are transwomen championing inappropriate content and prostitution does not necessarily mean that the interests of transwomen are in opposition to the interests of biological women--it seems to be in line with the conflict within feminism itself between the pro-inappropriate content feminists and the anti-inappropriate content feminists. I really suspect that there's a link between the claim that biological sex is irrelevant and the claim that inappropriate contentography and prostitution are empowering, since both buy into the idea that the female body itself is unrelated to the oppression of women. Still, I'm not convinced that this in and of itself means that transwomen's interests are more similar to men's interests than to women's interests. Just that a lot of them, like a lot of feminists in general, are buying into ideas that are ultimately really harmful to women. (I would say "patriarchal" ideas, but I'm not sure that the push to devalue the body has much to do with patriarchy, except insofar as the otherworldly rejection of bodily reality has always been more of a masculine thing.)
It is disturbing to see that letting transwomen represent women at the head of major feminist events is what it means to be "inclusive," but I think the underlying problem is probably something a lot deeper than the "transgender question" itself. I think it's more about the larger war that's been waging within feminism itself, and the transwomen who have voices are championing stuff like prostitution because that's the side of feminism that has won in general, and it's canceled everyone else, transgender and "cis"-gender alike. I'd be careful getting too reactionary against transgender people themselves, though, since a number of them really are our allies. They are just the ones getting banned everywhere.
Long live progressivism, I suppose. (This sort of totalitarian craziness is why I haven't identified as a progressive for a while, though I think I'm going to drop "leftist" now as well since the SJW horde seems to be more a symptom than the disease. I think I'm going to go with "liberal distributist" now, or possibly even try to self-declare into moderate conservatism to really confuse people. I can feel like a conservative and still vote Democrat, right?)
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