Sixteen Volts

Panu, the number one antifeminist in the Finnish blogosphere is these days getting paid for writing commentary for a large Internet portal. In his latest column he examines the current state of feminism in Sweden now that the Finnish TV finally played Evin Rubar's documentary "Könskriget" about the infamous Swedish feminists in full, instead of the heavily edited version that was shown earlier. The money quote of this column concerns the relationship between the Swedish feminists and the large population of Muslim immigrants. I want to translate it here since it so nicely touches several issues that have recently come up in the blogosphere:

The more oppressed position that the immigrant women find themselves in when compared to the native Swedish women is used as a rhetorical weapon to attack the Swedish men: if Hamid beats Fatima, this is somehow Olle's fault, so Olle must give more money to Yrsa in compensation.

Feminists will not make any demands for Hamid to behave properly, because ultimately they don't view him as a full human with moral agency: he is an automaton created by his culture, and it's not like he would even listen to the feminist lecturing. Dear lord, it might even be dangerous to go tell him that wifebeating is wrong! For all their big talk, feminists will never take any real risks. They also won't find the sad fate of Fatima all that interesting. It's actually better for them to have Fatima around as a pitiful victim so that the Swedish feminists could falsely identify with her and whitewash themselves as being equally oppressed. Fatima is merely cannon fodder in the war between sexes.

Of course, this attitude is never called out as racism that it so clearly is. If Hamid and Fatima are equals with Yrsa and Olle, Hamid must behave respectfully towards women, just like Olle, and Fatima must have the right to express herself just like Yrsa. And if Ranja, the daughter of Hamid and Fatima, wants to date Nalle, the son of Olle and Yrsa, feminists should ensure that Ranja has the practical freedom to do this. Well, they should. In the real world feminists don't care one iota when Ranja is married off to some 70-year-old Ali Akbar who lives back in the old country. In fact, they prefer this to happen, since they get to shed crocodile tears of how "patriarchy" oppresses "women". And since all women bear the burden of patriarchal oppression equally, the feminists again get to use Ranja's sad fate to make Olle pay a little bit more compensation to Yrsa.

Elsewhere, AngryBrownButch explains her demands that white people need to stay out of ethnic neighbourhoods instead of gentrifying them in her post "Since apparently my many previous clarifications weren’t enough". Perhaps they weren't, but there is very little left to clarify after paragraphs such as this one:

If white people were moving into poor neighborhoods of color and had no negative effect on the low-income people of color living there, it would not be a problem. The problem with gentrification is that the white folks who are moving in most often bring real negative effects to the low-income people of color. The primary negative effects are forced displacement - people having to move out of their homes or the neighborhood against their will - due to drastically rising rents and immoral (and often illegal) landlord methods like forced evictions and cut-off services; and the gradual erosion of the neighborhoods’ ethnic culture - businesses, restaurants, social organizations, etc - that the community has built up over time, to be replaced by more mainstream, white, middle-class culture.

Fair enough. Just don't start complaining when some other group of people living somewhere else also decides that people of other cultures moving in would be detrimental to their particular culture that they want to maintain, since they believe that they are somehow magically entitled to live forever in that particular area so that their culture should never have to change or be in danger of displacement. Off the top of my head, I could name a few such reactionary and intolerant groups that have gotten a lot of publicity lately. Good luck then explaining them why they are not entitled to seclude themselves inside their historical neighbourhoods, happily living in their own culture that is artificially kept safe from all external socioeconomic pressures.

I also find it rather humorous that since the feminists are always complaining about their inalienable right to feel safe, the post then goes to inform us that it's not just the evil rich people who are guilty, but all white people are guilty of gentrification by making the place safer:

However, I do think that low-income white folks can still have a negative involvement with gentrification, because of the whole thing where having some white folks in a neighborhood makes it “safer” and more appealing to other, richer white folks, who then move in and displace the low-income white folks right along with the low-income people of color.

This gives me one simple idea of how those poor minorities could very easily keep the white women (and thus indirectly also the white men) away. But let's hope that it doesn't get to that, but that AngryBrownButch gets her wish so that white people will voluntarily stay away from where her beloved underclass dwellers live in their authentic and real culture. There is plenty of space available in the great nation of America for the white middle class to flee in, and they already seem to be doing that in record numbers. Hey, maybe Toll Brothers or some other suburban construction company could adopt AngryBrownBitch's arguments to convince more customers to choose the suburbs instead of the inner city. I can already vividly imagine the advertising brochures.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Tuesday, June 27, 2006 at 9:39 AM