So the gist of this article in Slate is that white privileged, successful middle class women don’t like the word ‘feminism’, and they’re successful and those not informed or educated about the history of feminism think it’s unnecessary or negative and man-hating. And if successful women like Mayer at Yahoo dislikes feminism and being called a feminist and Sandberg thinks mentoring younger women is “therapy” (What’s the difference between that ignorant/sexist statement coming from a woman instead of a guy? Answer: no difference at all!), then that means feminism / feminist must be wrong or outdated or about women with chips on their shoulders (how nice to have so much money to disparage other women) as terms and exclude them. This is blindness and ignorance. It is precisely only thanks to the countless women over hundreds of years who have fought for women’s rights that Sandberg and Mayer are able to be where they are now. Without feminism they wouldn’t have had access to education or any other kind of power.
The other irritating thing about the article is that the author and citing Mayer and Sandberg think equality of the sexes is a given. There’s also no mention of impact of those in poverty, on impact of the double bind of racism coupled with gender, of challenges to access quality education, of violence against everywhere, of women in homes and on the streets and sexism at work or of the right wing, sexist fight to deny women full health care choices and the many challenges that involves and – well, the list goes on. Ignorance is bliss, clearly, for those too privileged to care about the majority of women not having equality compared to men with regard to freedom of choice, political or gender or race or environment or economics.
