Wednesday, February 02, 2011

Today's Hilarious Right-Wing Anti-Feminist



Via Atrios, you have the pleasure of meeting Dennis Prager:
The most common left-wing objection to the right is that it wants to control others' lives. But, both in America and elsewhere, the threat to personal liberty has emanated far more from the left.

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Honest discussion of male-female differences is also largely gone -- a lesson the former president of Harvard Larry Summers painfully learned when he simply asked if fewer women succeed in math and science because of innate differences between men and women.

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The left owns the language. Married women are not to be referred to as "Mrs." but as "Ms." And the words "lady," "feminine" and "masculine" have largely gone to their graves.

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Back to leftist controls on speech: One can only speak of male-female differences if the difference shows the female as superior. Thus to say women are innately more intuitive is perfectly acceptable, but to say men are innately more likely to excel at math is "sexist."
A woman may reveal as much of her body as she wishes. But if a man is perceived by a woman as looking too long at what she reveals, or if he comments on what she reveals, he may be fired from his job and/or sued for "sexual harassment." A woman may wear a miniskirt and crop-top, but a man may not have a calendar of women wearing miniskirts and crop-tops on his desk at work. That constitutes sexual harassment and a "hostile work environment."
Mr. Prager also hates most other groups which don't consist of white heterosexual Christian men.

I quoted the beginning of his article (farticle?) because he sees all these changes as a threat to his personal liberty to own definitions. Yet all those discussions do go on, don't they? About whether girls can do math and so on. We even allow silly people to argue that differences are innate when there's no way of knowing if they are!

No, what he requires for HIS personal freedom is that nobody talks back to him or argues with him or suggests that his ideas might be wrong. It's a property-rights kind of thing. His interpretation should be the rule.

Likewise, his idea of his personal freedom includes his right to women's bodies. Note how he wishes to ogle and comment and to present his own collection of women's bodies. It is he who should determine whether women are called Mrs., Miss or Ms., and if someone dresses "provocatively" in his presence (a very unlikely event in the usual office), he should have the right to be provoked without any consequences. Or women should cover up.

And no, Dennis. Women are not more intuitive than men for some weird essentialist reasons. I can say that! Wow. Perhaps I can offer a new abbreviation that will be used only for married men so that we know if they are taken. Mrd?