• Ilya B Shambat
    194
    I have written at great length about the intellectual abomination known as political correctness. At this point I am addressing their main claims.

    Claim: The Western civilization is the root of oppression of women.
    Answer: In the non-Western Muslim civilization, the situation is far worse than it has ever been in the West.

    Claim: Western literary and cultural legacy is patriarchial / racist.
    Answer: You obviously haven't read Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mary Shelley, Marina Tsvetayeva, Dorothy Parker, Walt Whitman or Mark Twain.

    Claim: Men see women as sex objects.
    Answer: Some men do. As someone said on the Internet, women see men as success objects. I see no reason to see either one as better than the other.

    Claim: Sexual industry is the root of exploitation and disrespectful treatment of women.
    Answer: Afghanistan, Congo and Bosnia during the war did not have sex industry, but they've had mass rapes. Women have it much better in Netherlands or San Francisco than they do in these places.

    Claim: Social or personal problems are rooted in low self-esteem.
    Answer: If that had been true, then for the bulk of recorded history, in which self-esteem was not encouraged, nothing good could have happened. Many good things happened in all societies, whether or not they believed in self-esteem. As was once told me by a woman from World War II generation, self-esteem used to be called conceit, and her generation was in no way a failure.

    Claim: Abuse of women is committed by men with personality disorders.
    Answer: In most of the world - and in much of America - abuse of women is the social norm. It is not committed by "sociopaths" or "borderlines" or "narcissists"; it is committed by your average Joe, Igor, Abdul, Praveem or Jamaal who believes that real men beat women, or that love is for sissies, or that he owes it to God or to other men to keep women down.

    Claim: Beauty is only relative or culturally dependent.
    Answer: In a study that was conducted by an American woman - Judith Langlois - it was found that a face with a particular set of proportions was regarded as beautiful by everyone. Actual beauty - such as the Sistine Chapel or the Burmese stupas or the works of Anna Akhmatova - takes talent and effort to produce and deserves respect.

    Claim: Physical beauty and inner beauty are incompatible with each other.
    Answer: I see no reason at all why attractiveness and being a good person would correlate one way or another. There will be people possessing of both, either or neither. This idea allows the women who have neither to attack and abuse women who have either or both.

    Claim: Beauty is a patriarchial institution that destroys women's self-esteem.
    Answer: That some people are stupid does not mean that people can't be intelligent, and that some people are poor does not mean that people can't be wealthy. We are all endowed with different gifts, and we do different things by way of developing or not developing them.

    Claim: Love is a patriarchial racket.
    Answer: Many of the people who championed love in the West - and in any number of other places - were women, and not stupid or weak ones either. A man who champions love is far less likely to be ugly to his woman than either a traditional man who believes that real men beat women, or the "rational" man who believes that anything with emotions is an inferior form of life.

    Claim: Love is narcissism.
    Answer: Love worked out for many people in World War II generation. The World War II generation - unlike the baby boomers - have not been accused of generational narcissism. It has been practiced successfully by people who were in no way narcissistic, so it is not narcissism.

    Claim: Relationships should be about equality.
    Answer: I see no reason why they should be. Most relationships are not about equality nor will they be about equality, however much you seek to put human nature under a Marxist mold.

    Claim: Anyone who takes objection to political correctness is a misogynist.
    Answer: Crying wolf discredits you when the real wolf appears. The Ayatollah is a misogynist. I am not.

    Claim: Anyone who takes objection to political correctness is a sociopath.
    Answer: This is a Soviet trick. They too diagnosed with untreatable disorders people who disagreed with their party line.

    Claim: "Sociopaths" and "perverts" are evil and can only be evil whatever they do.
    Answer: This contradicts most basic reason. If people are responsible for their actions then anyone, including a "sociopath,"can act rightfully; and if some people cannot act rightfully then people are not responsible for their actions.

    Claim: Male perspective is by nature destructive.
    Answer: Tell that to Mohandas Gandhi.

    Claim: Women who are pretty or nice are sellouts to men.
    Answer: Gender war is not the solution, gender war is the problem. The solution is for men to be good to women and for women to be good to men. I am not a sellout to women because I refuse to let Michael Murphy speak for me.

    This should pretty much cover most of it. Feel free to comment anytime.
  • YuZhonglu
    212
    Claim: Beauty is only relative or culturally dependent.
    Answer: In a study that was conducted by an American woman - Judith Langlois - it was found that a face with a particular set of proportions was regarded as beautiful by everyone. Actual beauty - such as the Sistine Chapel or the Burmese stupas or the works of Anna Akhmatova - takes talent and effort to produce and deserves respect.

    My response: the women portrayed on Tang Dynasty vases are almost all fat.
  • Maw
    2.7k
    No one makes these hilariously straw-man claims
  • TheWillowOfDarkness
    2.1k


    Some of the statements made in the OP are, but they just don't mean what the OP says they do.

    I pick one to show you what I mean.

    "Beauty is only relative or culturally dependent."

    Lots of people say this one. I'll eliminate the edgy "subjectivist" who equate it with their opinion, since The OP is talking about in the context of social analysis.

    In term of analysing who we are and our social relations, beauty (to humans) is culturally dependent because it existence is a human reaction and culture. The point is that beauty is some how "subjective." It's that our understanding of beauty is a state of human understanding and culture. Thus, no matter how widely held (or not) a standard of beauty might be, it is a cultural fact, present in virtue of a particular human existence.

    The point is not that beauty lacks objectivity, but that it is a feature of human the human world as it occurs, rather than some truth of a different realm which pre-exists human understanding.
  • YuZhonglu
    212
    What is beautiful to a human may not necessarily be beautiful to a dog. And vice versa. I can agree with that.
  • Anaxagoras
    433
    No one makes these hilariously straw-man claimsMaw

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