When I hear about people not supporting Kamala because she's "a" woman, as was said about them not supporting Hillary because she is "a" woman, with the often explicit statement that if she were not a woman, she would be running away with this election, I note that this smuggles in the idea that because female wisdom is untapped, that the first female president will somehow inherit all of it, and all this neglected wisdom of the generations will be available to her in a way it is not to males.
Men have made a mess of things, why not give a woman a try?! is an equivalent statement to Any woman will know things that are not available to men.
Really? How so?
5 comments:
There you go, all logical and male and stuff.
I think it's sometimes true that a woman has to be supercompetent in order to be taken as seriously as a man in the same position. But that's true only if the prevailing sentiment is to assume men have all the ability and women have none. If you switch to a cultural trope in which woman are assumed to have all the ability and the men none, suddenly a woman can rise to quite a high level despite being so mediocre that a man in the same position would have flamed out long since. There's no solution but to judge people as individuals on the basis of their ability rather than their blue blood, their club, their address, their sex, their race, etc., a trick I hope will catch on some day.
'a' woman is not necessarily equal to 'this' woman
I believe I read some time in the last year that the trend of blind auditions for musicians was encountering static from people who felt musicians were being chosen solely for technical ability, which represented a failure to take equitable account of race, gender, etc. What an insane time.
They didn't take that line towards Margaret Thatcher.
Good point. Conservatives worshiped at the feet of The Iron Lady, giving the lie to the charge that we can't handle a strong woman, way back in the 1980s. She was a trained scientist, BTW, which I somehow think must have influenced her intellectual steadfastness.
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