Morgan won’t answer a simple question:
I’m hardly going to take the bait you’ve dangled and offer up any ten points to just please you and your Amen Chorus.
See Morgan write. See Morgan evade. The usual pattern. This is why she remains, intellectually speaking, a featherweight. If one wishes to be taken seriously, one cannot argue that I am attacking an extremist, straw version of an ideology by asserting that one’s own version on the ideology is different and then refuse to define that version. To do as she has done is a tacit admission of either intellectual cowardice or intellectual incompetence. I assume the former, but the latter is always possible.
To summarize the discussion to date:
VOX: Feminism is bad.
MOTL: You can’t say that because there are many different kinds of feminism. Never mind that there is a recognized canon which is taught in major universities across the country, my feminism is different.
VOX: Fine, so what is your feminism?
MOTL: I’m not telling!
I’m amazed that she doesn’t find this even a little bit embarrassing. I’d abandon my column in a heartbeat if I was ever reduced to that sort of pathetic evasion. And before she attempts to sidetrack the issue by claiming that I am avoiding what wasn’t even a direct question, I will point out that women have always worked. 29.6 percent of the workforce was female in 1950, prior to “liberation”, the difference is that married women, especially married middle-class and upper-middle class white women, did not work.
Since the workforce is now 46.6 percent female – an additional 48 million women – this has suppressed wages to the point that Moglie’s husband can no longer earn enough to provide her with the sort of insurance that would serve as an adequate safety net. The great irony of feminism is that through its advocacy of work for women, it has effectively removed the choice to stay at home for lower class, and to a certain extent, lower middle-class women.
This is not debatable, it is merely the operation of the iron law of supply and demand. And as Camille Paglia points out, the sole concern of feminist leaders from the very start has been the white, female upper-middle class.
As for Morgan’s bizarre attempt to muddy the issue with Christian denominations, I merely ask this: what is the feminist analogy to the belief in the birth, Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ – not to mention the Bible – in which the failure to the orthodox view makes it clear to all that the self-professed Christian is not a Christian at all?
It is a simple matter to define Christianity as well as the differences between Southern Baptists, Catholics and Methodists. Given that feminism has been around for significantly less time and that many of its leaders are still alive, it should be even easier to provide equally clear definitions for feminism and its various strains.