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Like Mother

Not like daughter. Alice Walker's daughter rejects gender feminism.

Sounds like she should be grateful she wasn't born a boy. Who knows how badly she'd have been treated?

 
 

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8 Comments

Carl Pham wrote:

In one sense, I think Rebecca Walker is mistaken. Her experience is probably not primarily about feminism, and the ugliness of that experience is not an argument against feminism. Nearly everyone who is so driven in their professional life tends to neglect his family. It's an ugly secret (or not so secret) fact about many famous people, from Reagan to Einstein and beyond.

I mean, basically unless you are truly stupendous, you really do have to choose between career success and the quality of your parenting. This is one reason folks who seem able to do both strike me as really amazing.

It's also true that the personal qualities of the advocate are not a priori a reflection of the quality of the ideas. Alice Walker is very likely a narcissist shit, and would make neither a good friend nor a good mother. But that doesn't mean her ideas are wrong.

But all that said, I agree with one important thing Rebecca Walker says, which is that women in her generation (which is also mine) have been betrayed by the feminist/media imagery that tells them not to worry about the ol' biological clock, that you can easily wait until your late 30s and early 40s to start your family. So not true. The cause of so much misery.

Rand Simberg wrote:

I think that in this case, it was a twofer. Alice Walker is a selfish woman who shouldn't have had children, but she had an ideology that justified her behavior to herself and others.

Aleta wrote:

Good on Rebecca.

David Ross wrote:

It is a dirty deed Rebecca Walker has done, to use her family as a political stunt. If her mother was as she describes, then she has learnt all the wrong lessons from her...

David Ross wrote:

"as a political stunt" > to make a political point. (posted too fast)

Karl Hallowell wrote:

So David, what's dirty or political about it?

Carl Pham wrote:

she had an ideology that justified her behavior to herself and others.

Er, Rand, isn't that always the case? Isn't the main (if not only) reason we have an ideology to justify our behaviour to ourselves and others?

I mean, we don't sit down as children and think out a theory of behaviour, work out an ideology, and then start crafting our personality. It's quite the other way around.

That's still pretty condemnatory of the ideology, however. It's says something very unpleasant about 60s and 70s feminism that it was the ideology of choice for narcissist shitheads wanting to justify their self-absorption.

Ilya wrote:

It's says something very unpleasant about 60s and 70s feminism that it was the ideology of choice for narcissist shitheads wanting to justify their self-absorption.

Gee, you just noticed?

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This page contains a single entry by Rand Simberg published on May 23, 2008 12:33 PM.

527 Fodder was the previous entry in this blog.

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