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Yesterday, I heard a woman casually, as though it were self-evident, explain an undesirable outcome in her life with "because I'm a woman." I have heard this used by many women to explain: -Why they are not managers -Why their students cannot read -Why they follow pointless workplace rules that no one ever enforces and most employees don't follow -Why they live in fear of the disapproval of superiors -Why a waiter was rude to them -Why a waitress was rude to them -Why they must conform to community norms
Though the explanation sounds like a confession ( "I can't be a manager, I'm just a girl!"), in all cases it is an accusation, intended to imply that the patriarchy is manipulating things behind the scenes, or that "everyone knows" men never get punished/demoted/frowned upon, so only women have to actually worry about their behavior/reputations/whatever. I have been shocked both by how readily this explanation is confirmed/affirmed by other women present when it is offered, and also the wild confirmation bias on display. The women are not managers, but they never applied for the job, and their bosses are women. They have never been reprimanded at work, but neither has anyone else. The male students can't read, but neither can the female ones. None of this is considered. It boggles the mind.
Nevertheless, it is a fact about how a certain class of Western woman explains the world to herself. If people so privileged are so certain of how the deck is stacked against them, what hope is there for people with stronger evidence for that belief about themselves? How does a standard right-thinking (from "to right-think") respectable Westerner expect anyone else to transcend their culture or overcome oppression or break the cycle when their default, axiomatic explanation for why they only make 100k and three trips to Mexico per year is "society cheated me." What is a black kid supposed to think? Or a kid on a reservation? "I'll give it my best shot"? I have heard black dissidents make this argument against the idea of systemic racism- that even if it is real, thinking about it stops black people from trying things. But how can self-exculpatory models of the world be eradicated in people with somewhat credible claims to oppression when they are so popular even among the most privileged members of society? How do the "it's the culture" people expect the culture to change if the winning culture tells itself the same story as the losing one?
My mother is not, personally, very progressive. She is, however, a normie retired teacher and has definitely stewed in the general beliefs of the 'teacher' milieu. She sometimes says things like "you white men have it easy" not out of genuine belief- she knows full well that the poor behavior of blacks is the main reason they haven't caught up to whites, and that teachers simply don't make as much and have fewer advancement opportunities compared to male-typical careers with the same education requirements(she believes this is due to government payscales, not the patriarchy), and that women choosing to become teachers instead of engineers is mostly due to the decisions women make, and that sexual harassment in STEM is mostly perpetrated by east Indians but not the main factor in those decisions anyway- but because it's her coworkers' socially acceptable response to adversity and she picked up the habit.
It is extremely predictable that feminism is popular among teachers because it's a class interest movement for the sorts of women who hold a teaching career(and I think hold a teaching career is a key thing- the statistics on teachers leaving the workforce once they have kids make it kind of inevitable that the field will lean a bit to the left). Throwing race in there has been the cause du jour for long enough that we can just expect it to be a thing they say. And we should probably circle back to the class thing; this is a class of woman who, in every society ever, have been expected to work not-very-hard-compared-to-the-median and engage in a lifestyle with copious amounts of status display. Complaining about first world problems- which these people are aware of as being first world problems- is just part and parcel of that and "it's the patriarchy" is just the current-year formulation.
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