This made the peeves very snappish indeed
There are things that are more irksome than this kind of misunderstanding of what feminism means, but it's pretty bad, nonetheless:
Antony Hegarty: 'We need more oestrogen-based thinking'.
It's not just that it's essentialising about gender (honestly, do we really think that men and women are 'like computers with two different operating systems'?)
It's that whole thing about 'men and patriarchal thinking have made a huge mess of the world - Wymmynz, come in and clean up the mess!' - 'the necessary transfer of power between the sexes in order to save the species' - pass the sickbag, and hand me my silver bullet to kill the Angel in the House yet again.
Paging Joanna Russ, recently quoted here:
To call X a feminist issue did not then mean that there was a good way to do X and a bad way, and that we were trying to replace the bad way with the good way. X was a feminist issue because it was the locus of various social pressures (which it made visible) and those social pressures were what feminism was all about.
It's so not about 'more oestrogen-based thinking'.
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