she can lay claim to a style that is the future of American politics: Her combination of incivility, bullying, and victimhood makes her the perfect reflection of our current moment.
.. Harris clearly tried to bully both Sessions and Rosenstein, cutting them off as they spoke and not giving them a chance to speak before she moved on to a new insinuation.
.. Male chauvinism is real and deplorable, as is racism. But what actually happened in the committee hearings bore little resemblance to the narrative that quickly took hold about them. Harris was not the victim here; a former district attorney, she was actually the one throwing her weight around in questioning Rosenstein and Sessions. McCain sought Burr’s intervention to begin with because in both instances, Harris had interrupted the witness, badgering him and rudely refusing to let him answer as she sought to produce damning clips for viral consumption
.. Harris is obviously not the first grandstanding senator in history to bully a witness in this manner. But it is, to put it mildly, unusual for cabinet-level officials to be treated like mafia dons.
.. there was no doubt that Harris was playing to her party’s base rather than “seeking the truth.”
.. Yet if the claims of Harris and her supporters were pure bunk, they were also brilliant political theater.
.. McCain’s and Burr’s pleas for civility in the committee — especially when a former colleague was being questioned — may have been easy to spin as racist or sexist, but they were really a feeble gesture of dissent against a sea change in American political culture.
.. By deliberately flouting conventional notions of civility in her questioning, Harris gratified the desire of liberals for their political leaders to get rough with the opposition. But in then posing as a victim who was being silenced
.. As the party that has linked itself inextricably to identity politics at the expense of its traditional working-class base, Democrats are particularly charmed by the idea of a minority woman standing tall in the face of abuse from white, male conservatives.
- .. In theory, Harris could ride some combination of
- an Obama-style appeal to minority voters,
- her newly burnished credentials as a feminist victim, and
- an appeal to the appetite of more militant “resisters” for total war on the GOP
all the way to the Democratic nomination in 2020.
.. Her incivility and appeal to identity politics may be everything that is wrong with contemporary politics.
Katy Perry Woke Up. She Wants to Tell You All About It.
Thanks to Madonna’s restlessness, female pop stars are expected to reinvent themselves every few years, but there’s no guarantee that listeners will accept the changes. For Ms. Perry, the stakes couldn’t be higher: She believes she is now revealing her true self. The old Katy Perry is gone.
.. She has a well-known strategy for frustrating the paparazzi (wearing the same Adidas track suit when she leaves home to make the photographs less sellable)
.. For all of Ms. Perry’s talk about feminism and unity, it felt like a conventional catfight.
.. you have to understand her relationship to her biggest album, “Teenage Dream.” It had five No. 1 hits, tying a record Michael Jackson set with “Bad,” and solidified her image as a charmingly goofy sexpot who sings about love, partying and inner strength.
.. Part of the pressure stemmed from maintaining her hypersexual image, which Ms. Perry takes responsibility for helping create. “I used to be scared of intimacy, I used to use my sexualization as attention, I used to oversexualize myself because that was the only way I knew how,”
.. later explained why she holds queer women in high esteem: “I admire that they’re doing it for themselves. They are not doing it for the male gaze.”) It’s easy to read her drastic haircut and new stylistic choices — her live stream finale outfit covered her in neck-to-toe sequins — as a reaction to having worn whipped-cream bras in the past.
.. Ms. Perry credits her shift in perspective on her sexuality — she calls it “a full sexual liberation” — to resolving issues with her father. “The reality is that I was retriggered on the election,” she said. “I was retriggered by a big male that didn’t see women as equal. And that had been, unfortunately, a common theme in my upbringing.”
.. the Katy Perry I spent several days with: gregarious, intense, bold, endearing and full of contradictions.
.. she proclaimed herself devoted to dialogue but spoke in a near uninterrupted monologue.
.. The old Katy Perry wasn’t a construct, she explained, and she isn’t dead. “I didn’t kill her, because I love her, and she is exactly what I had to do then,”
Feminist Gloria Steinem Finds Herself Free Of The ‘Demands Of Gender’
GROSS: If I asked you to make a list of the five most important issues for women today, what would be on that list?
STEINEM: Well, I can do it. But I would like to say that the most important issues are those to the women who are listening. I mean, it’s not about dictating to each other what’s important but supporting each other and solving the ones that are in our daily lives.
GROSS: I like that point that you just made (laughter).
STEINEM: However, if you add up, you know, in terms of the numbers of people, I would say that competing for No. 1 would be violence against females worldwide. If you add up all the forms of violence, whether it’s domestic violence in this country, which is at an enormously high rate – I mean, the most dangerous place for a woman in this country is her own home. And she’s most likely to be beaten or killed by some – by a man she knows. Or it is FGM – female genital mutilation – or it is female infanticide or honor killings or child marriage and too-early childbirth, which is a major cause of death among adolescent girls worldwide. So, you know, violence has reached an emergency – well, it’s – I mean, any violence is an emergency. But, you know, collectively…
GROSS: What – well, the sense of emergency has certainly increased with groups like the Taliban and ISIS…
STEINEM: Yes, yes.
GROSS: Truly attacking women and denying them any form of rights.
STEINEM: Yes. No, it’s the extreme forms of patriarchy, often religious – so-called religious – and the violence against females in warzones – sexualized violence in the Congo and, you know, many in the former Yugoslavia. You know, and all of these have mounted up to a real emergency. But tied, I would say, for first place is the ability of women to decide when and whether to have children because that is a major cause of death. The lack of that ability is a major cause of death. And it is also a major cause of inability to be educated or to be free outside the home or to be healthy. You know, so I would say those two concerns, violence – sexualized violence against women and reproductive freedom or reproductive justice are right up there in our focus in every country.
The Problem With Intersectional Feminsm
The concept of intersectionality was introduced into academic theory and social justice activism in the late 1980s by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Professor of Law at UCLA and Columbia Law School and founder of Critical Race Theory.
It gradually became the dominant social justice framework. Crenshaw opposed the mainstream liberalism of the time for its aim to look past categories of race, gender and sexuality, thereby levelling the playing field and enabling all people to succeed by their own abilities. She felt this neglected identity and identity politics which she argued to be personally and politically empowering.
.. “We all can recognize the distinction between the claims “I am Black” and the claim “I am a person who happens to be Black.” She advocates the former as positive, powerful and celebratory and rejects the latter as striving for a universality that is less likely to be productive.
.. In reality, women of color, the LGBT and disabled people are to be found along the whole range of the political spectrum and subscribe to a vast array of ideas, whilst intersectionality is decidedly left-wing and based on a very specific ideology
.. intersectionals see themselves as radical reformers of a liberalism which was too mainstream or too centrist.
.. The problem with positioning an ideology on the far-Left and claiming it to represent women, people of color, LGBTs and disabled people is that this requires all members of those groups to be far-Left which they simply aren’t.
.. Americans identifying as liberal reached a record high of 24% in 2015 in comparison to the conservative 38%. [1]
Britons are almost evenly divided between Left and Right. [2]
- Women are generally somewhat more likely to be left-leaning than men [3] but very many are not.
- 47% of African Americans identify as liberal and 45% as conservative. [4]
- In the UK, the Conservative party claimed 33% of Black and Middle Eastern voters in comparison to Labour’s 52%, with Black Britons being most likely to vote Labour,
- whilst among the Asian community, Hindus and Sikhs are more likely to vote Conservative and Muslims to vote Labour.[5]
- British LGBTs are as likely to be right-wing as left-wing [6]
- whilst American LGBTs are much more likely to be left-wing,[7] almost certainly because of the religious nature of the American Right and its implications for LGBT equality.
- There is nothing to suggest people with disabilities are more likely to identify with any particular political position.
.. Intersectionality, simply by positioning itself on the far-Left of the political spectrum, immediately closes itself off from a significant proportion of women, people of color, LGBTs and disabled people.
- how many are intersectional feminists, how many are
- radical feminists (opposed by intersectional feminists), how many are non-intersectional
- liberal feminists (opposed by intersectional feminists) and how many
- have no ideology of feminism but simply consider it the name for the gender equality supported by the vast majority of the population.
.. Left-voting people of color are significantly less likely to be supportive of LGBT equality than White Lefties.
.. in California, 70% of African American voters voted to ban same sex-marriage.
.. Large proportions of people from marginalized groups simply decline to be intersectional and this is a problem for an ideology which claims to listen to them and represent them.
.. This has resulted in bizarre situations in which Peter Tatchell has felt compelled to explain why it’s not racist to object to Black musicians singing about killing LGBTs [18]and Muslim and ex-Muslim feminist
.. We are, in fact, listening to a minority ideological view dominated by people from an economically privileged class who have had a university education in the social sciences and/or the necessary leisure time and education to study intersectionality, critical race theory, queer theory and critical analyses of ableism.
.. It is, of course, perfectly possible to support the rights of marginalized groups and campaign for their greater representation whilst accepting that they have a range of political views including those which contradict yours. However, this is not what intersectional feminists do. We are told repeatedly that intersectionality is the only way and that it is not optional.
.. Non-intersectional feminists are labelled “White feminists” and vilified furiously. It is important to note that not all “White feminists” are White. The term refers to any non-intersectional feminist.
.. Because inherent in those terms is a sinister implication: ‘if you disagree with how I think a brown person should think, you’re still a nigger’ – a slave subordinate to the interests of white people. ‘If you disagree with me, you can’t be thinking for yourself’ is the message.”
.. Intersectionality, by undervaluing shared human experience and rights — universality — and personal autonomy and distinctiveness — individuality — and focusing intensely on group identity and intersectional ideology, places individuals in a very restricted “collectivist” position previously only found in very conservative cultures.
.. The idea that if one is not an intersectional feminist, one is a misogynist, White supremacist, homophobic, transphobic ableist demands an utter ideological purity that few people can meet or wish to meet.
Instead, centrists, moderates and universal liberals of all genders, races, sexualities and abilities continue to oppose discrimination, promote equality and value diversity, independent of intersectionality.
- .. It is regrettable that intersectionality in practice so often manifests in restrictive ideological conformity,
- exclusionary tactics,
- hostility,
- tribalism and even racist abuse.
.. Until intersectionality respects diversity of ideas as well as of identity and supports every individual’s right to hold any of them regardless of their group identity, it cannot be said to represent anything except its own ideology.