I wanted to address the thing upthread about ‘choice’, ‘values’ and ‘feminism’.
Some people seem to believe that ‘it is un-feminist to have values’ and they get to it by the following flawed logic:
- Feminism is all about women having ‘choices’, because oppressed women have no choices - they are essentially the property of men.
- Because of this, every time a woman makes a choice, no matter what that choice is, it intrinsically is a feminist act in and of itself, and no choice made by a woman can be more valuable that another.
Therefore evaluating which choices are better or worse and then internalising these considerations as personal values, is un-feminist.
Well…. Everyone has values, whether they like to think they do or not. An essential life skill is to evaluate what is better and what is worse and to live by it if possible. It is one thing to say ‘you are entitled to your own values, but I don’t share them’ but another to say ‘oh well- I think this is better, you think that’s better, it’s all relative’.
The whole point of having values is the belief that some things are better and some things are worse. Saying ‘we don’t share the same values’ is a polite way of saying ‘I think my choices are better than yours and you think your choices are better than mine- it’s personal and we’ll never agree’.
People on this thread who don’t share my family and child-centred values, have shown themselves to not share my other values too - the important of arts, culture, science, technology, accrued human knowledge and understanding. We as species might as well just become extinct, we as a culture might as well just die out, the last person to know a folk song passed down through millennia to just die alone in an old folks home, with no one to pass it on to - it’s no loss.
I don’t not share the values of joyless, nihilistic fun-sponges, I don’t feel their miserable negativity is worth celebrating, and there’s nothing about feminism to suggest I should.