The Rationalist: My worldview going forward.

No matter how long you've been on social media, whether Twitter or Kik, someone will invariably ask you what your social worldview is. It just happens. Even if you wish it didn't, even if explaining it seems harder and harder, it does. So it's better just to deal with it and figure out the best way to handle the inevitable question that would come.

It used to be that I would call myself a feminist, full-stop. And for a while that seemed to be an acceptable answer to the question. But, as years went by and we moved from the 2nd wave to the 3rd and that 3rd-wave became increasingly tied in with political action, that became a harder and harder thing to deal with. I began to wonder what the feminism I grew up with, the feminism that dealt with real problems and figured out ways to solve them, had turned into while I wasn't looking.





So I did what any intellectually curious person, regardless of gender, should do. I researched. And in my research, I discovered people with whom I had serious disagreements. And I discovered positions that I had serious disagreements with.

Let me be clear; I still do believe in equality for the sexes. I am unshaken on this point.

But I am, increasingly, shaken by the idea that somehow believing that means I am for "the rest of it."

The rest of it is a movement towards "listen and believe" that ignores the American history of Emmett Till, and countless other men of color who were lynched and murdered for the crime of something as ghastly as, in Till's case, FLIRTING with a white woman. Let me state that again, for the record: Emmitt Till was lynched for FLIRTING, and you expect me to believe that your hot take of "all survivors need to be believed" isn't problematic in the slightest if you're a man of color? Ok, cool.

Because if you wanted actually to be useful in solving the problems of rape and sexual assault that exist, here's what you could ride herd on your politicians to do:

Get them to earmark all the money and attendant manpower necessary to run through the backlog of rape kits that exist in most major metropolitan cities. That's a real problem because there are real rapists right now running around who haven't been caught because their DNA hasn't been processed, or has been allowed to denature.

Create and properly fund a legal aid system that is solely for sexual assault accusers, which can walk them through best practices for every step of the process so that they are fully educated and aware of everything that needs to happen.

Provide consistent training for judges on how to properly deal with sexual assault victims, and further, strengthen the rape shield laws and rules on what you can and cannot question a complainant about.

Those are all useful things, which can get done with some sense of political will.

At its core, that is my biggest problem with third-wave feminism. The idea of doing something useful has been sacrificed on the altar of twitter hashtags, demonizing people for things they never did, and generally acting as though they're entitled.

So that's why I've left the movement. Because a long time ago, degrees at a time, they left me behind.