Remembering the founder of Fox News also demands remembering the many women in his orbit—women who refused to be silent.
Ailes took her to the day after she accepted her job with the network. During it, she claims, Ailes asked her, “When did you first discover you were sexy?” When she replied that “I am finding this conversation very embarrassing,” her new boss persisted. “He continued to explain,” she recalls, “how much he believed in loyalty and how much he believed the best expression of that loyalty comes in the form of a ‘sexual alliance.’”
.. Other women at Fox remembered Ailes asking them a litany of personal questions, ostensibly to expose vulnerabilities that he might exploit later on. “He asked, ‘Am I in a relationship?’” one woman recalled. “‘What are my familial ties?’ It was all to see how stable or unstable I was.”
“Roger had made sure I knew the stakes, telling me: ‘I don’t like to fight, but when I do, I fight to kill.’ The message could not have been clearer: ‘If you tell anyone, I will destroy you.’”
.. But Ailes, in the end, had aged into a new context—one in which women have access to recording devices, and in which, through the internet, women have access to each others’ stories, and in which, in general, women have had enough. Secrets, now, have a way of getting out. The sins of the past have a way of becoming the scandals of the present. Women today have more ways than ever of fighting back.
How Mormon Polygamy In The 19th Century Fueled Women’s Activism
Many states still followed the common law Doctrine of Coverture, which declared a woman civilly dead once she married. It’s not just…
GROSS: So she had no legal rights over her money, her property. She had no ownership over them.
ULRICH: Her money, her – her money, her property – she couldn’t sue or take a case to court except under a father or a husband – so dependency. The right to divorce – although divorce laws were greatly liberalized in the 19th century in most parts of the country, it was definitely – you had to prove either adultery – it took a while for physical abuse to be grounds for divorce.
.. Utah had no fault divorce from the beginning. It was very, very open and pretty common. And particularly, I think that made plural marriage workable. If you didn’t like it, you could leave.
.. It’s a very different world than we imagine. And so instead of comparing plural marriage in the 19th century to our notions of women’s rights today, we need to compare plural marriage, monogamy and then other institutions that really distressed people in the 19th century, like prostitution for example, different kinds of bigamous relationships.
So Mormons would argue, many American men have multiple sexual partners. They’re just not responsible. They don’t acknowledge them. They don’t give them dignity. They don’t legitimate their children. So polygamy is a solution to the horrendous licentiousness of other Americans.
.. So one of the things you’re famous for is a phrase that you originated in – I think it was like an academic paper in the 1970s – and the phrase has since shown up on like T-shirts and bumper stickers. I know you’re asked about this all the time, but the phrase is well-behaved women seldom make history.
Now, knowing your work, knowing that you write about, quote, “ordinary women” who kept journals, and you’re trying to understand what the lives of, like, ordinary women were in their time, I interpret that quote as meaning if you’re just looking at history, you won’t understand the lives of ordinary women because ordinary women seldom make history. But I suspect that that has been – that quote has been interpreted as ordinary women seldom make history so women don’t be ordinary, do something special so you can make history. Don’t be ordinary.
.. Yes. It’s been turned upside-down. On the other hand, you know, I was an ordinary girl from Idaho who got involved in the feminist movement and I’ve been on a collective bargaining team, and my former university, you know – I’ve done a lot of not very well-behaved things. And so I guess I embrace both sides. I embrace the contradiction of that crazy accidental slogan.
Get Ready for the Pillorying of Pence
If Trump leaves office prematurely for any reason, President Pence will immediately be denounced as far worse. In fact, it would happen before he even took office. In fact it’s already happening. That this is true is testament to the fundamentally unprincipled nature of the Left.
.. I have long concurred with many of the points the Left makes about Trump, and some of those points are becoming more salient by the day. He really does seem frighteningly erratic, unprepared, sloppy. It’s hard to believe he would provide reassuring leadership in the event of a foreign-policy crisis. And it’s possible he committed obstruction of justice with respect to James Comey’s investigation of Michael Flynn.
.. His promotion would make progressives reach for the old playbook: Attack as a dangerous theocrat who hates women, minorities, and gays.
.. Opposition to abortion, or even opposition to government funds being directed to the nation’s leading abortion provider, will be recast as posing a supreme danger to “women’s health.”
.. But Pence will be called even more abnormal because he deflects questions about evolution as beyond his pay grade.
.. the ludicrous attempt to tie the secular, non-moralizing Trump to the neo-Puritan misogynist dystopia imagined in the new TV series The Handmaid’s Tale will be recharged
.. Pence will be labeled an extremist for being part of the American Christian majority.
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.