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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28355 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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I'm not so sure that the progressive agenda is to remove gender. There is a lot of progressive effort to promote female role models and that doesn't seem consistent with removing gender unless the goal was to promote female role models that would influence women to act more like men.

Any discussion of the progressive agenda is going to be confounded by the fact that a) there is no pope of progressivism, empowered to speak on behalf of progressives or set doctrine progressives must adhere to in order to be proper progressives b) not everyone is even referring to the same groups of people when they talk about progressives (elected officials like the CPC make an obvious standard, since they actually represent millions of people and have a hand in making laws, but they're usually not going to be avant-garde as academics/activists/pseudonymous bloggers).

I'm not so sure that the progressive agenda is to remove gender.

I mean, you're not obligated to agree with me, but I did provide a fair bit of evidence you don't appear to have actually gone over.

There is a lot of progressive effort to promote female role models and that doesn't seem consistent with removing gender unless the goal was to promote female role models that would influence women to act more like men.

Female role models, yes. Feminine role models, no, at least not qua feminine role models.

I included the links I did quite deliberately; the Louise Antony interview concludes with her commentary that she supports the transsexual movement to the extent that it undermines the gender binary. To add to that, Sally Haslanger has written that "when justice is achieved, there will no longer be white women (there will no longer be men or women, whites or members of any other race)." Any time you see the phrase "eliminate gender inequality" you are looking at words that mean "eliminate gender differences" which is functionally equivalent to "eliminate gender"--because if all genders are identical, then there is only one gender, and since gender exists to distinguish different things, collapsing gender into socially identical constructs collapses gender entirely.

I also found this blog which agrees that

Gender, or some forms thereof, is seen by the vast majority of feminists as undesirable in many ways

The article goes on to note that some feminists think that gender can't be abolished in every possible way, but even this is marked as "unfortunate":

One can wish to abolish gender roles and gender stereotypes, but preserve gender identity and gender norms as unfortunately inevitable in some way.

Feminism, as I said, has been broadly gender eliminativist for more than a century, and progressivism is avowedly feminist. It's not a selling point! It's not something you're likely to hear from a Democrat politician any time soon--any more than you will hear them say "abolish the family." But it is one of the core values of the whole movement, something that informs every other action, even actions by people (most people!) who have no idea that the point and purpose of their activism was written long ago. As Keynes observed:

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

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