CNN: "Time for women to give up on equality"

It's impossible, they say, on the occasion of another failure of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA):

Equality isn’t impossible simply because the people in power won’t give it to us. It is impossible because it cannot be faithfully implemented in supremacist and capitalist institutions created by men, for men. 

That's weird, because I thought women were actually doing pretty well. They're getting more college degrees, more graduate degrees, and are increasingly dominating well-paid office work (as opposed to the physical trades, where their participation lags but not apparently in a manner out of line with their preferences). 

Many feminists and proponents of the ERA cite abortion as central to their fight for the amendment’s passage. But abortion and issues pertaining to bodily autonomy, self-determination and human dignity of historically oppressed and marginalized people are not equality issues. Rather, these are matters of freedom.

Well, they're definitely not matters of equality. Nobody's even proposing giving men an equal opportunity to opt out of the duties of parenthood if they want to do so. Neither feminists nor conservatives are interested in that; I'm not interested in it either, to be sure. Freedom does not mean liberation from one's moral duty to one's parents or children; and if it entails a legal liberation from those duties, nevertheless one ought to do them. It's only scoundrels who seek to avoid such things.

[Better would be] respecting people’s human dignity, allowing them to fashion and become, for example, the woman of their dreams, rather than policing their gender identity and expression. Whereas an equality mindset reinforces the gender binary and limits women to a small box in opposition to men, a freedom mindset understands that the inclusion of trans athletes, for instance, elevates the competitive level of all women, and celebrates self-creation as the pinnacle of freedom....

From a freedom mindset grounded in accountability and care, abortion becomes part of reproductive health care. It isn’t oversimplified as an equal right to make a single “choice.” Abortion is never based on one choice but rather determined by a person’s circumstances, personal and financial supports, age, aspirations and dreams for how they want to build their own family.

All of this necessitates letting go of equality and an equality politics, built upon the patriarchal gender binary, of complicity and reliance on governments institutions to create a freer and more just world.  It requires asking new questions. How might our politics change if we, finally, relinquish equality?

So, ok, let's ask the question. Give up on equality and in return you get...? An absence of gender binary, I guess, so all the good things for women entailed by that. An end, I suppose, to all-female spaces like changing rooms; perhaps an end to female-only promotional institutions like scholarships and mentoring leagues for girls becoming young women. (Actually, the conservative feminist case against the ERA was that it would endanger such things, and affirmative action for women in general: this one wasn't a conservatives-versus-liberals fissure in plain terms. There were arguments on both sides against the amendment.) 

I guess it's not up to me, but if I were a woman I think I'd be a little miffed at the suggestion that I should give up my quest for 'equality' in order to make more room for others. I guess it's the time in the musical-chairs contest that somebody has to give up a seat, though. More than one somebody, it could be.

The only argument in favor of that awful capitalism is that it somehow finds ways to add chairs instead. I guess that's not as attractive a prospect.