I identified very strongly with your article. I feel exactly the same way and suspect the same things are going on in my brain when I hear really bad feminist arguments. They’re somehow more annoying than really bad (even worse!) gender regressive arguments.
This has lead me to question whether I should indulge myself in making my contrarian, actually-gender-progressive, arguments against what I perceive as mainstream opinion (feminism). Feminism really isn’t nearly as mainstream as it feels to me. I’m just privileged as a member of the intellectual progressive elite—I got to go to good schools, I’m a professional, I select progressive friends and grew up with somewhat progressive parents. Yes, it was a revelation when I realized how many problems there are with mainstream feminism, but I’m also a product of a pretty rare selection bias in a society that’s actually still racist. I actually buy the feminist narrative that there is still a lot of (level 1) sexism in our society, even though I tend to only see the problems with (level 2) mainstream feminism.
But there is a problem here for a consequentialist. No matter how clearly I put my criticisms, they’re only understood as “some reactionary rationalization”. People don’t grasp the nuance and count one more head on the wrong side. It seems like it will lead to better consequences if I spend a majority of time “me too”ing mainstream feminism and biting my tongue about most of the issues in it. Or at least building more explicit feminist cred before pointing out some of the problems.
So this leads me to a question for you: why do you think that, in the face of your realization about why you criticize what you criticize, continuing to do it is the right thing to do?
So this leads me to a question for you: why do you think that, in the face of your realization about why you criticize what you criticize, continuing to do it is the right thing to do?
At risk of sounding tautological, that depends on whether it’s the right thing to do.
If you have identified a systematic bias, try to remove it, then reevaluate your choices. You may still make he same ones; you cannot deduce reality from your bias. But you cannot know that if you’re still biased.
I identified very strongly with your article. I feel exactly the same way and suspect the same things are going on in my brain when I hear really bad feminist arguments. They’re somehow more annoying than really bad (even worse!) gender regressive arguments.
This has lead me to question whether I should indulge myself in making my contrarian, actually-gender-progressive, arguments against what I perceive as mainstream opinion (feminism). Feminism really isn’t nearly as mainstream as it feels to me. I’m just privileged as a member of the intellectual progressive elite—I got to go to good schools, I’m a professional, I select progressive friends and grew up with somewhat progressive parents. Yes, it was a revelation when I realized how many problems there are with mainstream feminism, but I’m also a product of a pretty rare selection bias in a society that’s actually still racist. I actually buy the feminist narrative that there is still a lot of (level 1) sexism in our society, even though I tend to only see the problems with (level 2) mainstream feminism.
But there is a problem here for a consequentialist. No matter how clearly I put my criticisms, they’re only understood as “some reactionary rationalization”. People don’t grasp the nuance and count one more head on the wrong side. It seems like it will lead to better consequences if I spend a majority of time “me too”ing mainstream feminism and biting my tongue about most of the issues in it. Or at least building more explicit feminist cred before pointing out some of the problems.
So this leads me to a question for you: why do you think that, in the face of your realization about why you criticize what you criticize, continuing to do it is the right thing to do?
At risk of sounding tautological, that depends on whether it’s the right thing to do.
If you have identified a systematic bias, try to remove it, then reevaluate your choices. You may still make he same ones; you cannot deduce reality from your bias. But you cannot know that if you’re still biased.