The left should revisit the good old days of the feminist collective.

So says the Guardian’s Julie Bindel.

Our fearless scribe is pining for the days of “anti-hierarchical collective working” in the twilight of the Seventies. When, coincidentally, she was young. “In many ways collective working was successful,” says she, though the basis for this claim is somewhat sketchy, beyond a further claim that “eminent professionals” and “working class women” bathed in mutual respect and “recognised we could learn from each other.” Ms Bindel’s attempt to persuade us of the virtues of feminist collectives is, however, derailed by sharing her memories of actually being in one:

I recall a collective meeting about setting up a weekly telephone support service for lesbians. It was decided that each collective member would volunteer to take turns manning the phones at their own home, until we could raise the money to rent a space. One of the members did not have a telephone in her house, but insisted she was being discriminated against and “oppressed” by being left out of the rota.

Some difficulties involved scheduling conflicts:

Whenever the media wanted a quote from a feminist organisation, the collectives always missed out in favour of those with a hierarchical structure. All decisions had to be made by consensus, so if the journalist’s deadline was the next day, it was no use explaining that our next meeting was a week on Thursday.

The list of problems does in fact take up quite a lot of the article:

Sitting in endless meetings, unable to reach agreements, and taking days to produce one leaflet because someone objected to the word seminal.

Perhaps sensing that her sales pitch is faltering somewhat, Ms Bindel stresses the immense radicalism of it all:

There was a total resistance to the cult of the individual… until the Thatcher government declared war on society.

What, you didn’t know?

Paul Joseph Watson on people who like the idea of a “white privilege” tax: 

Asked to sign the petition to support a 1% income tax on all white Americans in order to “even out the playing field” and redistribute the wealth amongst minority communities, the first man in the clip is incredulous that such a policy would pass but signs his name to it anyway. After a Puerto Rican man signs the petition, another individual who admits he is a non-resident asks for clarification, remarking, “so in other words, tax the white man?” before signing the paper. “We’re gonna take the silver spoon out of the white people’s mouths and put it back into yours,” [prankster Mike] Dice tells an African American man who enthusiastically signs the petition before stating, “appreciate it, man!”

Somewhat related and somewhat less funny. 

Heather Mac Donald on women in science: 

The myth of a sexist science hiring process has persisted, even though it is contradicted every day by the observable characteristics of faculty searches. And that myth has given rise to a stupendously expensive campus bureaucracy tasked with increasing diversity and combating alleged faculty bias. Last month, the University of California at Los Angeles hired its first vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion at the jaw-dropping salary of $354,900 — enough to cover the tuition of nearly 30 underprivileged students a year.

And again, on the University of California’s plan to extinguish WrongThought™: 

The “message” conveyed by this particular microaggression, according to the university’s “Recognising Microaggressions Tool,” is that “people of colour are given extra unfair benefits because of their race.” Now where would anyone get that idea? Well, you might ask any high school senior, steeped in his class’s SAT rankings, if it’s true that “people of colour” are given “extra benefits” in college admissions. He will laugh at your naïveté. A 2004 study of three top-tier universities, published in Social Science Quarterly, found that black students were favoured over whites by a factor of 5.5 and that being black got students an extra 230 SAT points on a 1,600-point scale. Such massive preferences for “under-represented minorities” are found at every selective college and graduate school. Every student knows this, and yet diversity protocol requires pretending that preferences don’t exist.

Regular readers will be familiar with ‘progressive’ interference in school discipline policies and the emergence of punishment quotas based on race. And familiar, too, with the grotesque consequences. 

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments.

Ms Hegarty, a self-described Women’s Studies enthusiast, “tweets about feminist & feminist-adjacent matters.” 

Via Ace. 

When my wife told me she wanted to open our marriage and take other lovers, she wasn’t rejecting me, she was embracing herself. When I understood that, I finally became a feminist. 

Says New York magazine’s Michael Sonmore. And so, 

As I write this, my children are asleep in their room, Loretta Lynn is on the stereo, and my wife is out on a date with a man named Paulo. It’s her second date this week; her fourth this month so far. If it goes like the others, she’ll come home in the middle of the night, crawl into bed beside me, and tell me all about how she and Paulo had sex. I won’t explode with anger or seethe with resentment. I’ll tell her it’s a hot story and I’m glad she had fun. It’s hot because she’s excited, and I’m glad because I’m a feminist.

I don’t think Mr Sonmore is quite making the persuasive case he presumably hopes for. Still, his children, aged six and three, must be thrilled by their parents’ progressive, self-embracing relationship, and delighted to hear that Mommy is out all night shagging strangers again.

Via Ace, who shares a few thoughts on this. 

Franklin Einspruch on the Great Boston Kimono Outrage of 2015: 

Just when you think we’ve reached Peak Sensitivity, the scolds of social justice sprinkle more sand into their underpants… This incident — call it Kimonogate — demonstrates just how far the new puritans are willing to reach to impose their version of politics upon all of our pleasures. Watching Chinese and South Asians lump themselves into an aggregate for the sake of claiming offence on behalf of the Japanese, when that conflation of Asian identities is an established microaggression, is weird enough. Worrying that someone might touch a robe Orientalistically is out there in tinfoil-hat territory. Is that the kind of person you want deciding which activities you’re allowed to enjoy at the art museum? 

Franklin also has a message for the modishly indignant.  

Thomas Sowell on favoured narratives and unintended consequences: 

To many on the left, the 1960s were the glory days of their movements, and for some the days of their youth as well. They have a heavy emotional investment and ego investment in the ideas, aspirations and policies of the 1960s. It might never occur to many of them to check their beliefs against some hard facts about what actually happened after their ideas and policies were put into effect. It certainly would not be pleasant to admit, even to yourself, that after promising progress toward “social justice,” what you actually delivered was a retrogression toward barbarism.

And Katherine Timpf reports from the throbbing edge of academic enquiry: 

Sociology researchers are now insisting that we as a society start accepting people who choose to “identify as real vampires” – so that they can be open about the fact that they’re vampires without having to worry about facing discrimination from people who might think that that’s weird… Dr Williams [director of social work at Idaho State University] explained that no one should be bothered by a person wanting to drink another person’s blood because “it is generally expected within the community that vampires should act ethically and responsibly in feeding practices,” and it’s not their blood-drinking that’s the real problem here — it’s the fact that they have to worry that other people will judge them for their blood-drinking.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.