Remember feminism?

Interesting to see what is essentially a feminist piece in a prominent newspaper. I thought the following comment was particularly interesting: "Going from Tess Harding to Carrie Bradshaw, Dorothy Thompson to Candace Bushnell, is not progress." Sexualization of women, anyone? It took my mother pointing it out to me to realize that both Sex and the City and the late Ally McBeal were fundamentally anti-feminist tv shows. They're both about women as sexual entities and women struggling to make up for their incompleteness and essentially helplessness without their Mr. Right.

That said, I've always had trouble reconciling myself with feminism. I agree wholeheartedly with its observations. Corporations and government are run based on the way men, and not the way women, interact, and women are considered in the public psyche to be subservient and often simply sexual objects, etc. But I could never quite get comfortable with the conclusions of feminism, the calls to arms and the demand for revolution. Yeah, so, the world sucks...what now? The world was shaped by men. That's how the chips fell. I don't think the world would be any better if women had set it up. Merely different, with a different set of problems. And the fact is, women _didn't_ set it up. The chips fell the way they did because that's the way we are, just the same way that some people are rich and some are poor. Sure, there are institutional mechanisms that reinforce those kinds of divides and resist efforst to change them, but those institutions evolved as a result of human nature. To fight those tendencies is to fight our very nature, and a system that fails to accomodate that nature will crumble.

So sure, it's an admirable goal...government and civilization are in some sense contrary to natural law, and we instinctively want to hurt or kill those we hate, and it's probably best that we don't. But the best you can probably aim for is simply to be aware of such prejudices and do your best to limit their effects, recognizing that they will never go away entirely. Capitalism has serious problems, for instance, but the solution is not pure communism. Communism is totally untenable because it's fundamentally contrary to human nature. Better to rely on capitalism, which jives nicely with our innate competitiveness (our genes, after all, are here because our ancestors managed to reproduce where others didn't), but make damn sure there are safeguards to minimize the shit that can go wrong.

I dunno...it's kind of moot since feminism is more of a dirty word even that liberal these days, but it made me think. *shrug*

My, I have been prolific tonight...be sure to watch the little Social Security debate we seem to be having. :)