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Thread: Are Lesbians Obliged to Support Mayor Pete 'Cause Gay?

  1. #31
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    IMPress Polly's Avatar Senior Member
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    Quote Originally Posted by nathanbforrest45 View Post
    Question: Why are leftist ALWAYS changing the names of whatever cause they are pushing this week? Before WW2 the left were fine with being Socialist, then it changed to Progressive, then to Liberal now to what ever is the flavor of the week. Women's studies becomes gender studies. Its as if they can't make up their minds what victim is doing what to who.
    Most of the shifts described above never happened. However, I'm in agreement with the perspective of Dr. Sheila Jeffreys (a retired women's studies professor herself who witnessed this particular shift first-hand) as to what appears to be motivating the shift from women's studies to gender studies on college campuses in recent decades. In this interview Meghan Murphy conducted with her a couple years ago, Jeffreys contended that this shift, among others, reflected a decline in funding for colleges and universities after the Cold War. She specifically argues that this drop-off in university funding resulted in a desire of administrators to make sure their course offerings were inoffensive and inclusive of men, such as to shore up funding, and that the political philosophies justifying such shifts -- such as intersectionality theory, $#@! theory, postmodernism, etc. -- were popularized systematically as a result of that new goal. I think you might find that interview of interest.
    Last edited by IMPress Polly; 05-06-2019 at 06:31 AM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by IMPress Polly View Post
    It was still called women's studies in my area during my college years, although that has changed since to the more vague and obscure term and concept that is "gender" studies, which is a change both of terminology and mindset that I disagree with. But yeah, it's essentially the suggestion that there is no such thing as false consciousness.

    The politics of personal identity are a concentration of the idea that knowledge acquired by way of first-hand experience outweighs knowledge acquired academically in importance. I don't agree with that view of things at all. I believe that academic and experiencial knowledge are both very important.


    My assessment would be that Americans overall are a privileged group on the world stage, but that there are obviously social classes that make up the United States nonetheless (or else we wouldn't, for example, have a gargantuan and growing wealth gap or poverty).
    Americans are on top because of our republican form of government.

    The wealth poverty gap is not as big as some would have us believe. Once you add in the welfare benefits that is- something Piketty got wrong in his epic, Capital in the 21st Century, the majority make up the middle.
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  4. #33
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    Quote Originally Posted by IMPress Polly View Post
    Ellen DeGeneres and the LGBTQ Victory Fund have endorsed the presidential campaign of Pete Buttigieg because he's gay, yet many lesbians and bi women seem to favor female candidates instead. This includes me. The whole thing seems to be causing a bit of split in the so-called "$#@!" community. Why this? Don't gay people all have the same basic interests?

    The answer is no. We don't. Matter-of-factly, the fact that Buttigieg is gay and in his 30s are just about the only things I feel like I have in common with him. Many lesbian and bi women, in fact, feel that we have more in common with heterosexual women than with gay men, taken as a whole. The article sums up this situation well:



    By definition, neither Pete Buttigieg nor his husband will ever become pregnant, so any child they may have will be acquired either through adoption or (grumble grumble) surrogacy. I don't feel that he is hence able to personally understand issues surrounding pregnancy like the importance of paid family leave and reproductive rights, which might explain why he doesn't talk about or seem to prioritize those issues on the campaign trail. By definition he can't relate to these things on a level that even most men here could, being married to women and/or having a daughter.

    Likewise, his enthusiastic support for granting men access to the women's restroom and locker room and prison and so on may be explained in part by the fact that, as a strictly gay man, he can't personally understand how anyone might take advantage of such opportunities for voyeuristic purposes or worse because obviously he by definition wouldn't be so inclined.

    Buttigieg's adult life so far, similarly, has seen him go from military service to government. In other words, he seems to have spent his adult life in spaces that are one-sidedly dominated by men to a greater degree than most fields are today. He just hasn't spent and doesn't seem to spend much time around women in general. Putting all that together, I think the female candidates in this race can all understand someone like me and are more attuned what my needs, interests, and priorities are better than he can and is.

    He also just seems to be benefiting a lot from male privilege. The article points out some examples of what I mean by that:



    It's also not a coincidence, in my opinion, that most of the women running for the Democratic nomination are running on more left-leaning economic platforms than Mayor Pete is. Women understand women enough to know that women tend to be poorer than men. This applies to gay people as well: lesbians tend to be poorer than gay men. Indeed, the general significance with which the priorities of gay women are taken in the "$#@!" movement is well-concentrated in our historical exclusion from books and literature outlining the history of the movement. Much like among heterosexuals, women in the "$#@!" movement are and have always been taken less seriously, seen as less important, than our male counterparts.

    So, putting it all together, while Pete Buttigieg and I may both be gay, the fact that he is gay and male suggests to me, if anything, that at the end of the day, he may well be the candidate least able to understand someone like me and the least likely to stand up for lesbians in a broad sense. Being lesbian is a significantly different, indeed in many ways opposite, experience from being a gay man.
    I understand where you're coming from, but on the flipside, I'm a straight guy. I have the most in common with men, particularly straight men. So, I understandably tend to favor straight male candidates.

    Granted, for me, sex and sexual orientation factor into my voting preferences a lot less than many other concerns -- primarily policy stances and political record.

    I understand why being a minority will cause sex and sexual orientation to be more significant for your preferences than they are for mine, although it seems like the most successful minorities I know are the ones who focus the least on identity politics. When people focus on their careers first and foremost, it usually liberates them from feeling like they lack control of their fate. This naturally leads to support for policies that are more about freedom of choice than for government intervention.

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