My wife, who is a second wave feminist that believes that women should be given the same opportunities, but are not victims, ran across some of the craziness a few years ago.
She was in a tech forum where a woman was complaining about her experience at a company. It amounted to this woman having a perception that she was not being valued as much as a male colleague and was immediately jumping to the conclusion that it was sexism. My wife jumped in and suggested that from the sound of things, it sounded like there may be some other things going on that this person could work on and that it may have nothing to do with sexism etc..
The other people in the forum, including men, crucified my wife for those statements. This along with her daring to suggest in other women in tech forums, groups etc. that not every piece of feedback that is not positive is sexist led her to be banned from several women in tech organizations. Many would not even tell her why, but if they did it was for "being harmful to women" and "suffering from internalized misogyny" among other things.
Given her experience alone, not to mention other things we have all seen in the community none of this is surprising to me. Ironically, one of her concerns when she saw the "micro-agressions" etc. trend take hold, beyond the fact that she felt it was trying to fix one wrong with another, was that it would lead to this...and here we are. [edited for clarity]
Feminism as it is practiced today in the West is a lost cause, but it's been dying for decades. Like many movements around social justice it was hijacked by radicals and became totalitarian in its beliefs, to the point that it brings dubious value to or even harms the interests of most women.
The big topics like violence against women have not been properly addressed and feminists focus instead obsessively on minor topics like abuse of Hollywood actresses or gender imbalance in software engineering.
The strategy has also changed - such factions are focusing less on equality and more and more on taking something for themselves, transforming the dialogue into an us versus them and turning it hostile. The problem with this thinking is two-fold:
1) One can take only so much before the ones that are being taken from push back, especially since there's no shortage of groups that want to take.
2) Other factions also want a piece of the pie and don't care about female victimhood. Feminism has for example failed to tackle both culturally influenced violence against women perpetrated by misogynist immigrants and the zero sum game they play with transsexuals.
She's lucky to have been kicked out from such a toxic environment.
What I do personally is to just avoid all of these people.
I have the impression it's harder to avoid them in California because people are particularly brainwashed over there - which is one of the reasons I avoid California as well.
as someone that has lived in other states for many years and now recently returned to California, I am finding this out the hard way as well. The issue is that the toxic environments simply don't realize how toxic they are. They think they're doing good and changing the world and most laughably, "smashing the patriarchy" by simultaneously reaping its benefits.
There is a form of entitlement that is becoming pervasive where people believe they will walk the world and face none of its ills. If you are a woman you will 100% deal with sexism. If you are a minority you will 100% deal with racism. If you’re not in the ‘in group’, you will deal with isolation. This is part of life.
We as a society only step in collectively when these things happen at an egregious level (what was going on in Hollywood), but if you think you won’t face some degree of it in your daily life then you are just not covering your bases. One must have the resiliency to deal with some of it, and that is fair and reasonable to expect because the contract is we are tolerant of imperfect humans as a society (that those who are sexist and racist have a flaw but are not evil, and we tolerate this imperfection through patience). It’s never going anywhere.
If nothing else this will be an interesting time for historians to look back on. At some point sanity must set in and after that I wonder how they will reflect on this period.
Well, its a pendulum that was swung for very long time into one extreme, and now it swung into the opposite similarly extreme one. We can hope that over time things will get to some sort of balanced state, but that might be a wishful thinking for very long time.
It's also quite geographic - in this case I mean US-centric (and spreads to rest of the western countries). Ie in eastern europe/former eastern bloc, there wasn't so much sexism, all women had to work and generally things were way more balanced. Not saying it was perfect, almost nothing there was, but to see current trends from that perspective looks like a bit as western world going slightly cuckoo.
> It's also quite geographic - in this case I mean US-centric (and spreads to rest of the western countries). Ie in eastern europe/former eastern bloc, there wasn't so much sexism, all women had to work and generally things were way more balanced. Not saying it was perfect, almost nothing there was, but to see current trends from that perspective looks like a bit as western world going slightly cuckoo.
have spent the past half a decade living in various countries from the former Eastern block mostly working for local companies and not much exposure to the outside. Over here women are generally more comfortable with choosing jobs in STEM and the male reaction to them isn't seen as competition or as toxic as it seems in US. idk what's the reason but perhaps they are not allowed to behave like princess barbies by their parents. But as you indicate the whole cuckoo from the US is spilling over to this region as well. Thanks to Instagram (beauty standards and trendsetting) and US propaganda that tells people how to apply any kind of norms (which is compared to "old" countries massively divisive).
I'm not saying people in the Balkans are less sexist (OMG no :D) but they seem a lot more chill in dealing with this issues. The number of times I had women use the most profane insults hurled at the opposite sex simply because this is how they speak (they swear a lot over here) often balances men's mysogonystic remarks.
"I'm not saying people in the Balkans are less sexist (OMG no :D) but they seem a lot more chill in dealing with this issues."
Exactly, probably more sexism, but the discourse around it and life in general is not venomous. My theory is that when you have real (economical) problems you tend to focus first on what matters.
Eastern Europe is generally behind on adopting the latest social transformations compared to Western Europe, which in turn is late compared to the US.
As such EE is currently not facing the turmoil which has engulfed the US and is well underway in e.g. France or Germany. On the one hand, there's more problems with discrimination and violence against women in EE (except those perpetrated by immigrants), on the other hand EE has the opportunity of not overcompensating like WE and the US did and finding a reasonable compromise.
I wouldn't say that the Eastern Bloc had it better. Based on the experience of my own mother and others from her generation, women both had to work and take care of the children. But the roles were very well defined and people didn't waste time debating everything ad nauseam, for better or for worse.
The US is behind Western Europe when it comes to reducing superstitious believes (religion)
No, what’s happening there now is indistinguishable from a religious movement. You’ve got prophets, holy books, commandments, taboos and shibboleths, confessions, original sin, the whole works.
Turn that perspective on the Roman Empire and say it again.
If you wait for other people to spontaneously agree with your outlook on like then the wait will be exceptionally long time even when measured in millennia.
The problem is that a number of good movements have been infected by the "right to not be offended" crowd. Once that happens, you're no longer allowed to disagree or ctiticize lest the mob tear you to pieces.
She was in a tech forum where a woman was complaining about her experience at a company. It amounted to this woman having a perception that she was not being valued as much as a male colleague and was immediately jumping to the conclusion that it was sexism. My wife jumped in and suggested that from the sound of things, it sounded like there may be some other things going on that this person could work on and that it may have nothing to do with sexism etc..
The other people in the forum, including men, crucified my wife for those statements. This along with her daring to suggest in other women in tech forums, groups etc. that not every piece of feedback that is not positive is sexist led her to be banned from several women in tech organizations. Many would not even tell her why, but if they did it was for "being harmful to women" and "suffering from internalized misogyny" among other things.
Given her experience alone, not to mention other things we have all seen in the community none of this is surprising to me. Ironically, one of her concerns when she saw the "micro-agressions" etc. trend take hold, beyond the fact that she felt it was trying to fix one wrong with another, was that it would lead to this...and here we are. [edited for clarity]