Having been steered into studying the natural sciences from an early age, I never really understood how people could go to university and do degrees in things like reading fiction (literature), looking at pictures (art), thinking about thinking (philosophy), watching the news (politics) and sums to make a political point (economics). The value of studying subjects that have no practical application was lost on me, but still, plenty of clever people who studied PPE or whatever could say the same about learning the Krebs cycle or the distribution of complex carbohydrates on snail glycoproteins. I must say that I still think fondly of metabolic pathways while I’m sending e-mails to colleagues or larking about with VLOOKUPs.
At the time when I was at university, I’d never heard of a thing called Women’s Studies and I still haven’t got a clue what it is to this day. I just know that it’s a thing to do with gender and feminism and I get the impression that its proponents encourage people to think in terms of being victims and take offence at the slightest thing, possibly on behalf of somebody else. Unless the person in question is a white man, because we all know that white men are evil and this means that they can be portrayed as thick and useless in adverts and TV shows (“Oh, look at the dad, having to be rescued by the mum because he’s made a balls up of looking after the kids or house for half an hour”); as pathetic in general language (“man flu”, because women don’t feel equally shit when they have a bad cold); or at the extreme, violent rapists and murderers..
Instead of feminism and gender identity activism being positive forces for the advocacy of equality, they seem to paint women, and anybody else they want to drag with them, as victims who should be protected from the nastiness of the world. We have safe spaces on university campuses so people can be shielded from criticism. Empty chairing, or walk-outs from debates is commonplace so that snowflakes don’t have to be exposed to views from outside their filter bubble, because you know, theirs is the only opinion and that opinion is right. There’s now something called “cultural appropriation”, which means that white people are berated for wearing clothes or hairdos traditionally associated with another ethnicity; this particular crime has some people choking on their falafel and quinoa. People making a huge song and dance about defining themselves as “gender fluid”, or “non-binary” because they hate labels that society imposes on them… but the ones they use are fine. They make up terminology and concepts, attacking the rest of us for being terrible people because we use the “wrong” words for something while they ignore or even defend misogynistic and homophobic cultures.
Try these words: get the fuck over yourselves and live in the real world. Get out of your safe spaces, talk to people, debate with those who have different opinions to yours and if they’re being a moron, tell them why. See the world from other perspectives and it will challenge you and help you challenge others when they hold views that are downright wrong and not fitting with a modern society.
We are in danger of churning out a generation of people who want to be social justice warriors who want to change the world by going on marches and waving placards, who assume that they’re the only ones who care because they shout about how much they care. They offer no practical solutions to problems; they just moan on about everything being unfair and how we should have quotas for this or that because it’s sexist and/or racist not discriminating against white men because of their gender or skin colour.
Quietly all over the world though, there are millions of women who are scientists and medics, engineers, designers, lawyers, teachers, police officers, military personnel, all working with *gasps* men and actually doing things: advancing science and medicine, building things, teaching youngsters, serving their communities and countries; in their own way, without any fuss, working to make the world better and safer. None of these things will ever be achieved in a safe space with a hashtag.