"Good job Malaysia!"
"Free Palestine!"

If you haven't followed the news, the above comments were seen on social media after Malaysia decided to deny Israeli athletes participation in the World Para Swimming Championship and was promptly stripped off the right to host the event. The social media outrage - and celebration - was swift. Hoards of people congratulated Malaysia for condemning Israel's "occupation" of Palestine. Politics was elevated as more important than sports in this scenario, echoing the days when South Africa was banned from sports events due to Apartheid. 

It would be business as usual if it wasn't for one comment that highlighted the strangeness of the position. I mentioned the fact that Palestine criminalizes homosexuality and Malaysia has a long track record of human rights violations. One person asked why I had brought up the "gay card" to the conversation. I was struck by the question as the Intersectionals (the dogma embraced by the left) conflate gay rights with the Free Palestine movement alongside feminism and a hoard of other causes. Why this dissent? After a bit more conversation it became apparent that this was a Jewish question, Israel being a Jewish state. And this led to more awkward questions. Muslims, whose religion Islam is a "protected" religion in Intersectional thought, are known for gender discrimination and homophobia, both rejected by Intersectionalism.

So what gives here? 

A couple of years ago I became concerned when I saw what I considered a blatant hijacking of feminism. As a woman I could no longer talk about women's rights, because talking about women (born as women) "erased" trans people; because I didn't properly highlight poc and their experience (and how could I have, knowing little about it); because I have "privilege," whatever that means. When I talked about women in Muslim countries and their need to secure equal rights, I was told I was engaging in Islamophobia. When I talked about women in the church and their struggle to be seen as fully human, I was told the women could leave; they had chosen to be in the church and therefore their experience wasn't important enough to be talked about. Everywhere I went I met a wall of "You can't talk about this/you need to talk about this to be a real feminist."    

A real feminist. 

A real feminist supports gay rights, trans people's rights, the freeing of Palestine, poc rights, animal rights, veganism, disabled people's rights, environmentalism, immigrant rights, and a number of new causes that crop up at a dizzying pace. But here's the question: if a person has to support all the causes found under the umbrella of feminism to be a real feminist, why is this test not applied to everyone in the same way? Why can people call for the freeing of Palestine while ignoring gay rights? Why can people congratulate Malaysia for denying participation of some athletes (based on religion, ostensibly due to politics), while ignoring their violations of human rights? Why can people support trans people's rights, while ignoring women's rights? Why are some groups allowed to discriminate in the process of advocating for their own rights and why must the rest of us allow them to do so without objection?

All of this points to the elephant that has been in the room for the longest time: no one can advocate for everything at the same time. When we attempt to do so, we find ourselves in a position in which we can no longer advocate for our own rights. We must become "allies" of people who work overtime to keep us from gaining equal rights. It's an untenable position. And this begs the followup question: how did we get here? 

The attack from the right in the West caused Islam to become a "protected" religion in the eyes of the left. Christianity doesn't enjoy this position, although Christians experience similar attacks in other countries, because the Intersectional dogma is intensely focused on the US and Europe, and Christianity is majority religion in these regions. Christianity is the villain, because it is linked to white supremacy. Intersectional dogma creates these links and with time they become so entrenched in people's minds that the two can no longer be separated. Since Islam is a "protected" religion, its practices cannot be criticized; the oppressed cannot oppress. This is the reasoning behind critical race theory that posits that black people cannot be racist and all white people are racist from birth to death. The weakness of the argument is obvious to anyone who considers it for a moment: it denies agency from the very people it tries to restore agency to. If black people cannot be racist, they are incapable of a human emotion white people are capable of. It makes hate an emotion only white people can experience, which is patently absurd. Similarly, if we cannot criticize Islam and it's repressive gender discrimination, we are saying we must elevate religion above women's rights, a practice Inersectional dogma claims to free us from. So far Intersectionality hasn't freed us from anything. It has instead created a hierarchy of human worth in which some humans have more worth than others, reducing its claims of inclusivity to a parody, and there is a reason for it. 

Morality is about emotions, as Jonathan Haidt so famously observed. The more hurt we are, the greater the temptation to see ourselves as good and other people as evil. When hurt people take this kind of morality and create an ideology out of it, they see all oppressed people as saintly and everyone else as demons. It's a natural reaction, but it doesn't end oppression; it only creates more of it. The perpetual chiding of the "oppressor" doesn't create anything other than resentment that in turn creates more discrimination; it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that keeps on renewing itself in endless cycles. At the same time, the "saintly" oppressed people get away with things they wouldn't otherwise, which creates more hatred in the name of righteousness, something anyone who has ever been part of a religion is familiar with. 

To find a way out of this maze we need to stop insisting everyone must advocate for causes they know nothing about. We must all be allowed to advocate for our own causes and we must be allowed to have conversations about subject matters we care about without the vitriolic denunciations that usually follow. In other words, we must return to a time in which diversity of opinion mattered and our value as human beings wasn't tied to our thoughts or beliefs. We all have value regardless of what we believe. Our thoughts may make us less valuable to society, but the needs of society cannot dictate the value of the individual. Either we are all human, or none of us are human. There is no other option.    
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"Why did I think you're a twit?"
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Yes, that was something said to me in a discussion about gender roles and the need to resurrect patriarchy. I looked at the comment, smiled and thought, "Why indeed did you think I'm a twit just because I disagree with you about the benefits of patriarchy?" (The whole discussion is available here). Although much can, and has been said, about modern feminism, the idea that feminism (or women in general) is the problem is in itself a problem. All the people looking back a few decades (or a few centuries) wishing they could return to those times glibly ignore that there already HAS been an attempt to resurrect patriarchy and it didn't end well. 

Around thirty years ago a portion of the church decided to bring back gender roles in a way that emphasized patriarchy as the central force. Women were sent home, discouraged from seeking higher education, and encouraged to have as many children as possible. Men were taught to be bold leaders and seek well-paying jobs to feed all those children. Thirty years later we have found two things: 1) there aren't enough well-paying jobs to support large families 2) and instead of creating healthy relationships between men and women, the experiment increased misogyny at an alarming rate. It's not what modern advocates of patriarchy want to hear; hence their near complete ignorance of the Quiverful movement and the church as the bastion of deliberate gender engineering. And of course they want to remain ignorant of it as most of them do not wish to join the church or have a dozen children. They want patriarchy, but not the crushing responsibility that comes with it, especially in an era in which income inequality has made life rather difficult for everyone.

So what do we find these people wanting? Instead of adding to their own responsibilities, the modern advocates for patriarchy want society to force women to marry and stay married. We are told giving women choices is bad for society. And it's undeniable that forcing women to marry as a means of survival may create an outwardly stable societies, but it doesn't create stable individuals, nor does it create a healthy society. All the pathologies the Victorians set out to eradicate were part and parcel of the patriarchal world that created more dysfunction than function. Slavery, child labor, dangerous working conditions, hunger and illness are usually found in heavily patriarchal societies and the Victorian Era was not exempt from these. The reformers focused on sobriety, education, and the elevation of the working class and women into full participation in society in an attempt to change a system that cemented people's futures before they were even born. And it worked. We all inherited a world where we have more choices than previous generations, but with those choices came also responsibility, and it is the fact that we have to make choices, and accept the responsibility for our choices, that seems to be behind all the calls for a return to a time when our choices were more limited. 

Limiting women's choices is not a new idea, nor is the belief that society's well-being hinges on women's behavior. "The world will end if women don't behave" is an old and trite complaint that solves nothing, but gives everyone a handy outlet for their frustrations. It's understandable that men would feel that way, but we find also that women are, and have always been, some of the most ardent supporters of patriarchy. They are convinced society's health and wealth depends on their behavior to a much larger degree than is realistically possible. At the same time we are told men build civilizations, women have nothing to do with it. We hear also claims that for men to build civilizations women have to give them what they need - sex. We are told men need sex to quell their aggressive tendencies, and that they need a good woman to realize their responsibilities and to be willing to perform backbreaking and dangerous labor to build a civilization. Without a woman, a man will become a lazy unproductive slob, and for this reason women must be forced to marry and stay married. This is, of course, precisely what the (Protestant) church has insisted on for centuries with its emphasis on marriage as the only vocation for women since the Reformation. 

And we all know it doesn't work. 

Forcing women to marry in order to create a stable society doesn't create mutual love or respect. It creates resentment, and resentment is the breeding ground for abuse. Churches have seen a huge resurgence in women's rights advocacy in recent years and calls for greater accountability in cases of abuse have caused even the Southern Baptist Convention to reverse its position. The frank recognition that patriarchy isn't the solution comes at the heels of a huge drop in attendance. Money does most of the talking when it comes to our recognition that patriarchy doesn't create the utopia it promises. But neither does modern feminism with its emphasis on victim creation and endless Oppression Olympics that causes women to become either entirely self-absorbed or so scared they can barely leave their homes. Only equality (the recognition that we all possess the same worth, while we all have our own individual talents and abilities) creates a healthy society in which individuals can thrive. 

Yet, there is something to the claim that women are partly responsible for the outcomes of our societies. The more educated women are, the more freedoms they enjoy, and the higher the respect afforded to them by society, the greater the society is. And this is the dilemma patriarchy faces in every generation: a society must educate its women to remain a civilization, but exactly how much education will keep women sufficiently informed without creating in them a desire for choices beyond marriage and childbearing? The same is true of the working class: a civilization requires a large working class to keep the wheels moving, but education creates aspirations in people. The uneasy alliance of society versus the individual is the real culprit behind the insistence that women should concern themselves with the re-creation of the next generation and not their own individual lives. Existential angst cripples us quickly if we don't resolve to revolve our existence around life rather than death. 

So what should we do? We must realize life isn't just a sum total of predictable events. Neither can we control every outcome, because we can't control every aspect of our lives. What we can do is affirm the fundamentals and let life evolve as it wishes. But this is of course where patriarchy comes around and insists it IS the fundamental that must be affirmed. But for patriarchy to be the fundamental, it would have to affirm the humanity of all humans, and it is something it has stubbornly refused to do during the many millennia of its own existence. The only times patriarchy has been somewhat benign on a societal level is when it has co-existed with other philosophies that have affirmed human rights, and on an individual level when people have adopted an egalitarian outlook (while claiming to eschew said outlook). Left to its own devices patriarchy has, and always will, create a society in which the few rule and individuals exist only as cogs in the machine. It doesn't make one a twit to realize it's not a way to create a stable, healthy, and prosperous society.