First wave feminism was about giving women legal rights to reflect the changing nature of social life in the industrial era. Obviously, giving women the vote was a tragic mistake, but it is an understandable one. In the industrial age, there were a lot of unattached adult women that had to work and participate in the economy. They needed the same rights and privileges as men in order to do that.
In some respects, second wave feminism was just a mopping up action to address things not adequately addressed in the first wave. But, it was mostly focused on crotch issues like birth control and abortion. This is where feminism began to lurch into madness, claiming that biology was just a social construct. For example, women could be as sexually profligate as men, as long as men invented and provided adequate birth control and abortion services.
Third wave feminism, what is behind the social justice warrior phenomenon, arose partially as a response to the perceived failures of 1960’s feminist causes. It turned out that biology was not a social construct after all. Freeing males from the responsibility of fatherhood and the proper treatment of women, women suddenly found themselves living with cats and wondering why that guy in the office never asked them out for a beer.
The result is a movement that has been reduced to a temper tantrum, where feminist womyn scream at anyone that foolishly notices boys and girls are not the same. Here is an example a friend sent me the other day.
Czech Republic-based bike manufacturer Superior has incurred the wrath of cyclists worldwide after making a host of seriously sexist remarks in its blurb for its new women’s mountain bike.
Superior claim that female cyclists ‘do not generally need to push their limits’ and that they ‘just want to enjoy the time spent in nature’ when they ride downhill trails.
The blurb reads: “Female cyclists do not generally need to push their limits, race against time and increase their adrenaline when riding rough downhill trails.
“They just want to enjoy the time spent in nature on the bike, and their expectations from the bike are completely diff erent than men’s. They look mainly for safe, easy and, of course, stylish bikes that have good and natural handling.”
Unsurprisingly, and justifiably, this hasn’t gone down too well, with cyclists taking to Twitter to share their surprise and distaste for the context of the blurb.
The only thing unsurprising here is that the pussified editors of Cycling Weekly would turn themselves into pretzels condemning what they and everyone knows is true. Women are just not that into physical competitions, nor are they very interested in pushing themselves to extremes. That’s much more of a male thing. Companies that sell athletic gear know this and they make their products accordingly.
There are exceptions, of course, as there are exceptions to most rules of human behavior. I know plenty of men who were soft and afraid of competition in their prime years. I know a few gals I ride with on occasion who love pushing themselves physically. Most men my age are fat slobs sitting on the couch waiting for grim death. I’m an exception. The rules, however, still stand and cover most people.
I think that’s what is at the core of the histrionic response to nature by the social justice warriors. These are women marinated in feminism from the cradle through college, just like many of their mothers. Unlike their mothers, third wave feminists truly believed what they were told. They got into the world only to find that reality is not going to yield to their 32-page senior thesis on gender as a tool of the patriarchy.
The novel element in all of this is feminism, like most Progressive causes, used to rely on the turtlenecked liberal arts types in the social science departments to call their thing science! Real science has moved the field into the lab, in the hands the numerate. The result is a staggering volume of data contradicting most of what feminism has been arguing for the last fifty years.
Faced with disconfirmation, the true believer will seek the comfort of coreligionists for support in the face of what they cannot possibly accept. The group then responds to the disconfirmatory evidence by proselytizing against it. The social justice warrior business is just the age old response of religious cults, updated to use the tools of modern communications. If Dorothy Martin were alive today, she would be all over twitter.