I’ve been watching interviews with #JordanPetersen given my
fascination that begun after my husband was given his book #12RulesforLife. He
gets a lot of flak, mostly from women who hold the patriarchy to account for
much of society’s ills, but I find a lot of what he says makes sense and he
certainly knows how to think things through. I am a feminist in that I believe
men and women are equal and I would and do fight for equal opportunity and equal pay and against women being attacked in any way shape or form by men, or by women, but I believe
in attributing consequence to where it actually arises from. Also I don’t
believe in tokenism unless competency and full support is inherent or a given;
for me, competency must play a role for the common good. For me it’s about
widening the net of opportunity as much as possible. Wider access to good
education is what is needed here in the UK, but we have an ancient and entrenched
class system that needs dismantling.
One of the things I find most annoying about the many voices
that attack the patriarchy, is that the women in the media that are often making
the attacks are where they are because of the very patriarchy that they attack. I hate sexism and misogyny, as much as anyone but I think sometimes the class system is more
the issue, particularly in the UK. Their privileged position is theirs because
of their elite education and the status of their parents. I made this point to
an Oxford educated film director when in a key election some years back when I
voted differently to her, she accused me of not wanting my housing association
flat that I was given when I was a homeless single mother to go to a refugee.
She could not have known whether I wanted that or not. She was making a
projected assumption. She had unfriended all the friends that voted differently
to her having used language against us such as: ignorant bigoted pigs.
I put it to her that she wasn’t grasping the irony of her
words (behaving like an ignorant bigoted pig in order to supposedly highlight
ignorant bigoted pigs). She complained that I was denying refugees my council flat (actually it was ill run Housing Association flat and subject to constant rent hikes that I had had to work many jobs to afford so that I would not be a burden on the system). I put it to her that if she was in a tizzy about
the flat I gave up (possibly so a refugee could move into it – who knows? I saw
a lot of corruption in the system when I was accessing it out of genuine need)
then perhaps a good start would be either to give up her flat in London or her
country house in Somerset (that she owned thanks to her parents) to a refugee family. The fact that I worked with the homeless, the addicted and those recently released from prison or that risked my life by standing up
against apartheid as a teenager in South-Africa, or made extended trips to the Thai-Burma
border to actually help refugees whilst working (unpaid) as a chair of a
charity that raised money for people that actually risked their lives to help
the #Karen people of #Burma, she likely
wouldn’t have been interested in because it did not fit in with her privileged
albeit ignorant worldview; she had already been fully initiated into her tribal
thinking.
I had a similar conversation with a very privileged young lady
who had been privately educated and medicated, and had never accessed the state
schools, social housing nor the NHS she was ranting about. She had never had to
look for a job given the patriarchy gave her one – she holds a privileged
position in her father’s company. Of course this woman was entitled to her
opinion, but I doubt whether she was planning to part with any of her inherited
entitlement. In my view, this kind of lazy thinking is as much a danger
as extreme right wing thinking. The end result is fascism, totalitarianism.
It’s dictatorial and undemocratic and suppresses freedom of speech, whilst
driving the extreme voices underground. Politicians (or anyone) that refuse to
speak to politicians (or anyone else) who disagrees with them are vying for a
‘one party state’ whether they realise it or not. Perhaps they need to live in
Zimbabwe for a while to aid their thinking. They’re also missing a trick:
potentially changing their opponents minds for ‘the better’ and a treat: keeping
those with potentially dodgy intentions above ground where they can be seen and
heard rather than underground where dark forces divide and proliferate.
