Romanes eunt domus

The other night I heard someone say that she wasn’t a feminist. This surprised me muchly since she is a person that inherently dislikes hypocrisy. Maybe that’s the point?

Her stated view was roundly approved by my round friend who is not a feminist and probably thinks it’s just another conspiracy theory, with Hillary at the helm.

The Uber driver wisely stayed silent. As did your pondering scribe.

It got me thinking, am I a feminist?

First, to definitions….according to Wiki and the OED a concatenated definition could read;

“A feminist is a person that supports a range of movements and ideologies that share a common goal: to define, establish, and achieve equal political, economic, cultural, personal, and social rights for women.”

My italics, not theirs.

Is support simply the absence of antipathy, or do you need to be a card-carrying member? There’s a lot of daylight between these two extreme versions of support.

Equal must be an unachievable aspirational goal; they should say so. There’s no avoiding the Bell Curve in all things human.

Rights; does this mean opportunities or outcomes?

I wish there was a single word for the removal of discriminatory anti-rights, which I wholly agree with.

But I get a little squiffy when outcomes rather than opportunities start to be hardwired into our legislatures because this can cause discrimination against the more worthy.

And finally, when they say women, surely they mean any minority (such as overweight tinkers), or even any downtrodden majority?

Picking one disadvantaged group over all the others as your mission d’etat seems like a form of bigotry to me.

Especially as a woman where you could expect to be a beneficiary of your actions in this regards. Conflict of interest alert!

So, in summary I would say that, although I applaud many of the goals of feminism, I am not one.

When it comes to actions, I will happily vote in favor of the removal of discrimination in all its forms.

I might even voice this support under the influence of a couple of beers.