Anti-Feminism Is Just Another Lifestyle Brand
"Consumer Antifeminism" is a Racket
In this week's original essay, featured author Katherine Dee takes on some of today's prominent "anti-feminists." These women ignore decades of previous debates within feminism, while espousing positions more "anti-woman" than "anti-feminist."
Fairer Disputations
Anti-Feminism Is Just Another Lifestyle Brand
KATHERINE DEE
Pearl Davis doesn’t really want to “repeal the 19th.” She wants clicks. If girl-boss feminism has been reduced to a “lifestyle brand,” so has its mirror image. Pearl Davis and her counterparts represent “consumer antifeminism,” just as the Target sweaters that read “she/her” represent the most commercialized expression of liberal feminism. If it paid to be a feminist, if the competition weren’t so stiff, many “anti-feminist influencers” would be. Indeed, many anti-feminist women claim to be disillusioned feminists, often with failure-to-launch feminist personas tucked away in their past if you know where to look. Feminist or anti-feminist, but always with the ambition to “make it” on social media.
This Week's Links:
First, we have a piece by Dr. Rittarkerttu Kaltiala, a Finnish adolescent psychiatrist. Dr. Kaltiala speaks out about the dangers of "gender-affirming" care for youth—dangers she witnessed firsthand as she helped roll out, and then roll back, the so-called "Dutch protocol" in Finland.
The Free Press
"Gender-Affirming Care Is Dangerous. I Know Because I Pioneered It."
RITTARKERTTU KALTIALA
Soon after our hospital began offering hormonal interventions for these patients, we began to see that the miracle we had been promised was not happening. What we were seeing was just the opposite.
The young people we were treating were not thriving. Instead, their lives were deteriorating. We thought, what is this? Because there wasn’t a hint in studies that this could happen. Sometimes the young people insisted their lives had improved and they were happier. But as a medical doctor, I could see that they were doing worse. They were withdrawing from all social activities. They were not making friends. They were not going to school. We continued to network with colleagues in different countries who said they were seeing the same things.
Next, featured author and AAI Senior Fellow Erika Bachiochi makes the case for political and economic policies that prioritize the family.
Institute for Family Studies
Healthy Families Should Be at the Center of Economic Policy
ERIKA BACHIOCHI
We human beings aren’t the self-sufficient individuals of early modern imaginings—especially at our vulnerable beginnings and endings, but really throughout the course of our lives. We are always and everywhere necessarily embedded in societies upon which we are inescapably dependent and to which we are deeply responsible. Because of the kind of being the human being is, each is born into and needs a family, and the family (which is essential but itself incomplete) depends upon civic, religious, and political communities for its own flourishing, to carry out the deeply human, formative work with which the family is uniquely and properly entrusted.
Too often, policymakers think in terms of the individual, the market, and the state.
Finally, a piece about a disturbing use for new AI technology: creating and spreading images of child sex abuse.
UnHerd
Predators are Exploiting AI for Child Abuse Images
KRISTINA MURKETT
Predators use real videos and images of child sex abuse to “train” AI programmes to create more content, or use social media images of children to create “deepfake” lookalikes. In one small town in Spain, over 20 girls aged between 11-17 had AI-generated naked photographs of themselves circulated; they weren’t “real”, but that hardly absolves those responsible.
Events:
If you're local to the US North East, you're in luck. Featured Author Mary Harrington will be in town next week and speaking at several events, all free and open to the public:
"Did the Women's Movement Make a Wrong Turn? (With Erika Bachiochi)" Curtis Performance Hall, Assumption University, Worcester MA, November 9th, 11:30am
"Has Feminism Made Progress?" Building 2, Room 190, MIT, Cambridge MA, November 9th, 7-8:30pm
A Conversation with Mary Harrington at Abby's Coffeehouse. Abigail Adams Institute, Cambridge MA, November 10th, 3-5pm
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