So an anonymous donor has granted a big chunk of money to colleges run by women, stipulating that the money be given as scholarships to women and minorities. NPR Claudio Sanchez reporter evidently asked whether colleges run by men would get any money.
Twisty Faster of I Blame The Patriarchy response illustrated two things it’s really important to know about her. First, she understands (heck, she taught me!) that the goal of radical feminism isn’t so that women can gain access to the slightly nicer cage men are trapped in, it’s to get everybody out of the damn cages. Second that she thinks hyperbolic misanthropy is the best way to explain radical feminism.
No, Claudio. I’m afraid men are shit out of luck. It’s the Law of the Conservation of Human Dignity, which states that, within a social order based on dominance and submission, the total amount of human dignity must remain constant. In other words, whenever women are treated with an iota of decency, a reciprocal diminishment of men’s humanity must obtain.
A consequence of this law is that whenever a girl gets to kick a soccer ball, somewhere a boy will be made to play with Barbies. Whenever a woman exercises sovereignty over the contents of her internal organs, somewhere a man will have to wear a frumpy 19th century calico dress and do the family laundry by hand. Whenever a woman publishes a paper on particle physics, somewhere a man will be waterboarded for a week before being shot by a firing squad of hairy humorless feminists. Etc.
Another way to put that first paragraph would be that no, the donor probably noticed there are plenty of schools who’s presidents are men, and plenty of scholarships available to men, and so no, there will still be plenty of money for men in academia.
And another way to put that first paragraph would be that it’s probably not a zero-sum endowment. Given the nature of the grant the choice probably wasn’t between women vs. men in academia but instead a choice between advancing women in academia vs. advancing, say, women’s health, reproductive rights, or political freedom. Therefore the endowment is just as likely to have increased the sum of money available to academia rather than shifting it from men to women.
And another way to put that second paragraph is that no part of feminism, especially radical feminism, is a zero-sum game with men where for every gain a woman makes a man must lose.
If you want to put it hyperbolically one might perfectly correctly say an endowment for women in academia isn’t a blow to men because advancing feminism isn’t about redistributing deck chairs on the Titanic, it’s about getting everybody safely off the Titanic! And not just because the Titanic is gonna sink under a combination of bad design and bad management. It’s because once you get off the Titanic there’s a whole rest of the planet’s worth of possibilities.
Putting it any of those ways, though, demonstrates that including misanthropy in one’s argument isn’t necessarily the most effective way to make one’s case.
