After discussion of how fitness is now feared as yet another gateway to right-wing politics, the author makes a good point: the left is who is building all these gateways.
The Left has made a habit out of forbidding things that are normal or even admirable to pursue—physical excellence is just one of those things. Raise doubts about transgender pronouns or election integrity and you—moderate, well-adjusted, not-even-all-that-political you—are suddenly a potential Unabomber.If you wanted to force people into the arms of conspiracy theorists, you could hardly come up with a better strategy than to pathologize normalcy and make observing basic facts into a thought crime.
Who among us can define woman, though?
I'd argue that if an individual has two X chromosomes and no others, then she is a woman. She might suffer from gender dysphoria, or some genetic anomalies that lead to hormonal problems later in life, and she certainly does not have to act in a sterotypically Victorian "womanly/feminine" way, but she's a woman.
ReplyDeleteBy the by, it is it just me, or do certain segments of society have a terribly limited view of what men and women actually DID back before the 1970s? The woman who ended up leading Gurkhas cross-country out of a trap, or the ladies who explored Africa and South America while "botanizing" come to mind. Not to mention all the "roommates" or "dear friends" of both sexes who lived together and did whatever they did or didn't do.
LittleRed1
More to the point, when everything is either a political statement or a firing offense, or both, society is about to break. To caution a woman that unless she loses weight, she will have major medical problems including joint failure and a heart attack, should not be "offensive" or "judgmental." Nor should lifting weights or playing basketball at Ye Local YMCA be about nationalism, whiteness, or whatever else people are claiming.
ReplyDeleteCome back, sanity, we miss you!
LittleRed1
“By the by, it is it just me, or do certain segments of society have a terribly limited view of what men and women actually DID back before the 1970s?”
ReplyDeleteI’ve often said that I expect young feminists to work this out themselves because I’ve read a thousand thesis papers that all say the same thing: ‘As a feminist historian, I’m interested in strategies women used to live the lives they desired during periods of patriarchy. My subject is XXX, who definitely succeeded. Ironically, many of her best allies were the men in her lives who supported her efforts to live as she wished.’
After you see it often enough, you begin to suspect that the quasi-Marxist feminist analysis of relations between the sexes just isn’t the true picture.