Image by rickey123 from Pixabay
People of all races, genders, sexualities, religions, and other groups are dying from COVID-19, and yet feminists are still finding a way to position women as the only ones who suffer.
Instead of upgrading to humanism to address the threat Coronavirus poses to all humans, feminists are descending to, ahem, feminism.
In the Bloomberg article, Women Are Bearing the Brunt of Coronavirus Disruption, Janet Paskin opens with a paragraph featuring several data points that seem to indicate that men are hit hardest by COVID-19:
In an analysis of nearly 45,000 cases in China, the death rate was 2.8% for men, compared with 1.7% for women. And men made up a slight majority of the infected, at 51%.
But then, with a speed slightly faster than light, she pivots to her real point — that women are the real casualties — which takes up the rest of her article:
The vast majority of nurses, flight attendants, teachers and service industry workers are female, and their jobs put them on the front lines of the outbreak. At home, women still do more caretaking, so when the virus closes schools, restricts travel, and puts aged relatives at risk, they have more to do.
That pesky patriarchy is at it again, killing off its own members to give more work to women so that men can be all lazy and dead. Quite the caper, really.
And if you're thinking of disagreeing with Ms. Paskin, remember that she was professional enough to include a quote from a completely unbiased expert, Laura Addati, a policy specialist in women and economic empowerment for the International Labor Organization:
"The challenge of the emergency really puts additional strain on existing inequalities. If there's not already an egalitarian sharing of child care or housework, it will be women who are responsible for remote schooling, for ensuring there's food and supplies, for coping with this crisis."
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According to Helen Lewis' Atlantic article, The Coronavirus Is a Disaster for Feminism, COVID-19 is undoing all of the meaningful achievements that women have made for decades:
But one of the most striking effects of the coronavirus will be to send many couples back to the 1950s. Across the world, women's independence will be a silent victim of the pandemic.
Almost all of us have had our independence depleted by shelter in place orders that have been implemented around the world, but really, it's women's independence that's really taking a hit.
Purely as a physical illness, the coronavirus appears to affect women less severely.
Perhaps I'm being needlessly nit-picky, but her phrasing of this statement is odd. Her emphasis is on women, and not on men; it's not that men are suffering more than women, it's that women are suffering less than men. She can't even pay lip service to the idea that men face their own set of challenges and responsibilities that women don't. Nuance dies when absolutism is born, I suppose.
Of course, Lewis deserves credit for being one of the few intellectuals trying to impart to her audience the most important lesson to be gained from this catastrophe:
Grim as it is to imagine now, further epidemics are inevitable, and the temptation to argue that gender is a side issue, a distraction from the real crisis, must be resisted. What we do now will affect the lives of millions of women and girls in future outbreaks.
You're a real Coleman Lantern of Wisdom in these dark times, Ms. Lewis.
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Despite my problems with modern feminism (and I'm intentional in pointing out that it's the contemporary iteration of feminism that skewering and not feminism as a whole), I'm no men's rights activist. Frankly, I find both MRAs and modern feminists woefully misguided in both ideals and tactics, even though I believe both, on occasion, acknowledge genuine inequalities that should be addressed. I go after feminist more because they're the ones with the social megaphone (it wasn't MRAs who wrote and published Why Can't We Hate Men? in the Washington Post).
In the midst of this pandemic, I'm deeply troubled that feminists are still finding a way to create a hierarchy of oppression out of a global disaster that threatens us all.
Women are not the only victims of coronavirus. We all are.
Is it too much to for a temporary ceasefire of the Battle of the Sexes so that we can all focus our attention on helping each other, regardless of what we have between our legs?
The snarkastic bastard in me is tempted to point out that if feminists really care about gender equality in this time of chaos, maybe they should sign themselves up for some Coronavirus exposure to even out that infection gap. But then I'd be adopting a mindset that's dripping with the same spite and cynicism that fuels modern feminists and, yes, men's right activists.
Hate and hysteria are a bad mix.
The world is mired in panic and confusion, and identity politics does nothing but split us up when we should be putting aside our petty squabbles to find our common humanity.
But that can only happen when we agree that bickering over which group suffers more in life is trivial when people of both sexes are dying of something that doesn't care about your gender.
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