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Can women have it all? . . . The answer is less important than the fact that the question is vapid. Here's a better one: when did the message that 'girls can do anything' get twisted into the edict: 'girls must do everything?'
Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine
Young men do not worry about how they will achieve a 'work-life balance', nor does the 'life' aspect of that equation translate to 'partnership and childcare'. When commentators speak of women's 'work-live balance', they're not talking about how much time a woman will have, at the end of the day, to work on her memoirs, or travel the world, or spend time with her friends. 'Life', for women, is envisioned as a long trajectory towards marriage. 'Life', for men. is meant to be bigger than that.
Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine
Fredric Jameson famously observed (in 2003) that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, and that was the slogan that ricocheted around the left in the early years of the Great Recession. In fact, however, the two are linked: capitalist patriarchy has always justified its own existence by insisting that there is no alternative but chaos, destruction, the end of civilization as we know it.
Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine
What has come to be called 'political correctness' used to be known as 'good manners' and was considered part of being a decent human being. The term is now employed to write off any speech that is uncomfortably socially conscious, culturally sensitive or just plain left-wing. The term is employed, too often, to shut down free speech in the name of protecting speech.
Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine
Madness is often political. There are situations in which extreme emotional distress is the only rational response to overwhelming circumstance, where 'sanity' is little more than the medical term for acquiescence.
Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine
White male nerds need to recognize that other people had traumatic upbringings, too -- and that's different from structural oppression.
Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine
I believe the discussion about trigger warnings is being had in bad faith. I believe it is being used as a stand-in to falsely imply a terrifying leftist censoriousness, by people who don't understand where the term comes from and don't want to. As Soraya Chemaly notes at 'The Huffington Post', stern dismissal of trigger warnings has become a proxy for dismissing women, people of colour, queer people and trauma survivors as readers. It is saying that our experiences do not matter - that we should calm down and 'grow a thicker skin'. It says that any attempt to acknowledge or accommodate readers with difficult experiences is tantamount to Stalinism. Someone is being told to shut up here, but it's not F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine
Time and again, however, we are told that quotas themselves are the worst form of prejudice -- that they might prevent 'the best people for the job' from being hired. Let's stop right there. Let's unpack that assumption. What are you saying when you tell me that a political outfit, for example, that made a point of hiring 50 per cent women, would not be getting 'the best people for the job'? You're saying that the best people for the job aren't women.
Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine
