And a few more thoughts on quotas
There’s a few pieces of framing that came out around ManBanGate (yep, I went there) which tickled me, but my last post was getting waaaaaaaay too long.
Quotas are ~patronising~ to women
No, what’s patronising is having the old boys’ club keep on giving their mates the cushy jobs, and then trying to distract us with bullshit like this.
What’s patronising is continually not seeing women (and every other oppressed group) getting judged on their fucking merits and then being told that, essentially, the reason we’re not succeeding is because we’re not good enough to succeed.
I recall a glorious Twitter spat with a National supporter who insisted that National’s overwhelming numbers of male MPs had nothing to do with sexism, it was a pure meritocracy over there, and no, she didn’t feel less valued at all! Which, if we assume all those statements are consistent with each other, leads to some rather interesting conclusions.
Why do you bring ~gender~ into this?
Gender’s already in this fucker of a system. We can tell by the way THERE’S A FUCKING GENDER GAP.
It’s the equivalent of every argument which starts with Person A saying something fucking disgusting, Person B saying “hey, that’s fucking disgusting”, and everyone jumping on Person B for ~starting the fight~. The fight’s already well under way.
Quotas let [even more subgrade than normal] subgrade minorities in over saintlike privileged people!
I refer to the swim team example I used earlier. If your team is all white kids, and you want it to reflect the school better, and this means you pick a brown kid with a time of 2:57 over a white kid with a time of 2:56, you are not “lowering your standards”. They both made the under-30-minute grade. All you’re doing is countering fucking generations‘ worth of white kids getting automatically passed through because they’re white.
Women hate this, so it must be bad!
Yes. A lot of women have been convinced through a really effective marketing strategy known as patriarchy that they are totally equal, that quotas or affirmative action mean they get “special treatment”, that feminism is their enemy. Some individual women have even been really successful, so there can’t be anything standing in our way but our own silly ladybrains.
Guess what: getting an oppressed group to buy into the means of their oppression is a really successful strategy for oppressors. Apparently we on the Left have no problem buying this concept when it’s National selling “aspiration” to the working classes, but once girls are involved, well that’s just silly girl-talk.
More recommended reading on the topic
Diane Revoluta
Jan Logie
Deborah Russell
No Right Turn
Andrew Geddis
Ideologically Impure 
“If your team is all white kids, and you want it to reflect the school better, and this means you pick a brown kid with a time of 2:57 over a white kid with a time of 2:56, you are not “lowering your standards”. They both made the under-30-minute grade. All you’re doing is countering fucking generations‘ worth of white kids getting automatically passed through because they’re white.”
And – as is more commonly the situation in real life – if you pick a brown kid with a time of 2:53 over a white kid with a time of 2:56 you are definitely not lowering your standards, you’re just fighting against the inherent bias that has everyone preferring the white kid for some conveniently nebulous reason.
(And I acknowledge that racism is not a perfect analogy for sexism, but there are definite parallels.)
Oh, absolutely. I was … kind of confusing myself trying to make the analogy clearly because despite being such a basic fact of reality it’s so difficult to explain it to people who refuse to see it!
Currently a hell of a lot of 2:56 white kids are getting ahead of 2:53 kids of colour because white kid’s parents went to the same high school as the coach. Or they just assume kid of colour cheated because kids of colour obviously can’t be that good.
Or white kid “has a better attitude”, meaning “doesn’t make me uncomfortable”. And when they occasionally do let through a kid that’s not white, they will spend the rest of that kid’s swimming career holding him/her up as proof that they’re CLEARLY not racist! (And didn’t this kid do so well, coming from such a “challenging” background? And maybe other kids should try as hard to bootstraps bootstraps bootstraps.)