Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Feminism shall smite thee, Mother Earth!

Oh, Jack Cashill. Oh, WorldNetDaily. This is just great. I don't think I've heard the claim that feminists are bad for the environment before (although young feminists as "wild" and "pole dancers" is an idea that seems to be going around).

I know that there are at least some occasional readers of this blog who identify as both feminist and some sort of environmentalist. Well, Jack Cashill has found you guys out: He knows you really just want to destroy the environment by not relying on men for your livelihood. You can stop pretending now.

"Equal pay for equal work also means equal commutes. In California, it is not at all unusual in two-income families for the two jobs to be an hour or more apart.

With only one parent in the workforce, the family has the ability to live closer to the breadwinner's place of employment, and most do.

Indeed, stay-at-homes moms save the state's highway infrastructure from meltdown, especially since a "nanny" often drives to the working mom's house, putting three cars on the road where otherwise one would do.

Homeschooling moms further ease the strain on the ecosystem by keeping their kids off the road."

Mr. Jack Cashill, I think, deserves some sort of acknowledgment for this absurd attempt at discrediting feminism without really addressing, you know, any of the true aims of the movement (which has nothing to do with environmental degradation). And I'm not talking about giving him positive reinforcement.

P.S. Happy Earth Day!

Via Feministing.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Absurd counter-argument: The US military upper echelons are all run by men. They use a large quantity of imported fossil fuels per year. Therefore they are the problem. :-P

Actually the armed forces only use about 1% of the annual fossil fuels consumed by the US[1]

But actually its the suburban culture we've built that causes this. We build cities for workplaces, and suburbs to live in. Then everyone drives their own private car, usually a big block sedan (status symbol) sports car (status symbol) or SUV (stupid symbol), to work on errands and back, most of these vehicles remain 80% empty as one person of five is in it. The link to feminism here is, of course, the gender roles imposed on our society that coincide with suburban life, mainly the soccer-mom. The nurturing non-bread-winning mother is bombarded with adverts for consumer goods; cleaning products, household items, yard and garden tools and cure-alls, as well as all the things that are targeted at her children that, of course, the "good mother" will provide to her children. It's this scenario that creates a process of extraction-production-one time use-to disposal that is so terrible for our environment. So I ask who is really to blame? I think its the patriarchal society that imposes these roles on women and quite frankly, society in general.

The only real link I can see between feminism and environmentalism is that they both seek to right wrongs.

Cashill is a tool. :-P


[1]http://www.energybulletin.net/29925.html

Anonymous said...

Here's a fun video about consumerism/environmentalism/human rights(kinda a time investment; 20 min.

It is quite clearly told from a strongly biased anti-materialist fair-trader stance, but it's quite thought provoking in regards to the statistics it gives.

http://www.storyofstuff.com/

you can directly download the clip from the site as well.

Jenn said...

I was totally going to point that out Andrew, but you beat me to the punch. I'm 100% certain that the largest consumer of oil in the world is the US Department of Defense. Perhaps if we would stop killing people we could save the world... and in more ways than one!