House of Eratosthenes

I don’t form pet peeves out of single words, but the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve come to realize that people who throw around the word “must” seem to be the source of the worst problems in the world. These are people who have boundless energy when it comes to telling you what you should be doing that you’re not doing, or what you should stop doing that you are doing. Then, when the time comes to declare what bad things will happen if you keep doing what you’re doing, or don’t do what they’re telling you to do, the energy suddenly peters out. In other words, they can never seem to state a case why you should be doing things their way. Dictating, it turns out, is about all they can do.

And a four-year-old girl can do that. If she has a one- or two-year-old brother.

And most of this bullshit — and it really concerns me to be noticing it, and to see it proven over and over again with the passage of time — comes from Europe.

Now take, for example, the case of Gudrun Schyman. Gudrun sits on the Board of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research (TFF), and in that capacity has been given primary credit for a screeching, turgid and clear-as-mud manifesto about Feministiskt initiativ, or Feminist Initiative. It seems where we’re going with all this is that in the environment that surrounds the Board of TFF, feminism has been just dandy but it hasn’t gone far enough and they want more feminism. The manifesto starts out with the tried-and-true “we’re not paid as much as men for doing the same work” that gets sympathy from everyone, and then, it launches into the really spicy, radical stuff. This is the “camel’s nose in the tent” theory, or, the “frog in a pot of boiling water” theory. You get massive numbers of people to agree to something they’d never accept otherwise, simply by showing some discretion in sequence and timing.

In Sweden, the gender-based income gap is increasing. Female-dominated professions consistently have low salaries. Much of the work performed by women is still both invisible and unpaid. Women carry out the majority of domestic chores and take responsibility for providing care, in the public as well as domestic spheres. Women are discriminated against professionally, with the motivation that we bear children – regardless of whether we actually do. Women receive a smaller retirement pension than men. Women are underprioritized in medical research and health care.

Okay, equal-pay-for-equal-worth. Something everybody likes, right? No links to any studies, no hard data, no statistics, no allowing another side to be heard, no exposure of the premise to attack by people who might be more knowledgeable and who might have facts that create problems for the stated inference. Nope, just the inference. But at least their heart is in the right place, because if Sweden does have this problem, well, just about everyone would want to fix it right?

Feminist Initiative has grown tired of insufficient measures. Nearly all Swedish political parties call themselves feminist, but women’s lives remain unchanged, day in and day out, year after year. Despite many women’s tireless efforts within party politics, women’s interests have never been given adequate priority.

Swedish gender politics have hitherto been based on a view of equality as a non-zero sum game, meaning that women’s conditions can improve without affecting those of men. Feminist Initiative builds its politics upon an analysis, which makes it clear that women’s subordination results from the privileging of men. Therefore, men must agree to relinquish their privileges. We share this analysis with contemporary women’s networks and organizations, as well as with the women’s movement, which throughout history has fought for the human rights of women.

Men must agree to renounce their privileges. Yeah, and what happens if they don’t? Why should they? And most importantly, what privileges are these?

What is this political manifesto supposed to do? If I were thinking of jumping on this bandwagon, why, I don’t have any better idea about what I’m supporting after I get done reading the treatise, than I would have before starting the first paragraph. So it doesn’t do that, therefore, what good is it?

I haven’t been to Sweden, but over here in the United States there is an enormous pool of people who can get behind the idea of equal-pay-for-equal-work, but stop short of supporting something reeking with the odor of revolution by spoiled brats. So the platform has failed to state the case to the moderates. There are no reassurances of what the Feminist Initiative will stop short of doing. There is only the assurance to the extremists, that the Feminist Initiative wants more, more, more. What the TFF board will make men do.

Goodie for you. And if I wrote such a thing in Poli Sci, or in creative writing, even a professor with pro-feminist leanings would have to flunk me and s/he’d be right to do it. I don’t know what this manifesto is trying to tell me. It’s just a list of bitching, and demands. Vague bitching. Unclear demands. And must, must, must. It would appear that one word has distracted Ms. Schyman and the other angry, bitter she-male trolls on the TFF board from what they set out to do. And they’re telling us what we must do, and we’re supposed to listen?

Sorry. The Man Show beckons.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

Must-Tards IIISaturday, September 17th, 2005

Must-Tards III
Saturday, September 17th, 2005