Quote: (12-16-2013 12:51 AM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:
Athlone, a few things:
1. What the iphone does first and foremost is introduce itself as the object of supreme necessity in the life of a hamster. Once the hamster handles an iphone and learns how to use it, it understands one main thing, which is that there is nothing more important in its life going forward than to attend to the iphone at all times and at any cost. This by itself causes significant changes in females which have been too extensively documented to need rehearsing.
I'm not denying any of that.
I'm saying that this is not enough to guarantee the spread of modern western feminism to any substantial degree. It is not wise to point out the spread of the modern smartphone as a sign of modern western feminism's inevitable march to global dominance in our lifetime.
Smartphones will continue to spread globally in the coming years, but the women using them are going to continue to be a far cry from your typical western feminist.
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2. What social media does is that it exposes everyone with said iphone -- which is increasingly everyone -- to the dominant culture of the time, and this culture is certainly western feminism. Women in particular are conformist in the extreme and are always ready to get with the program, once they find out what it is. And once they have an efficient delivery system in the form of a smartphone, they can't help but find out, from every possible source.
The program (western feminism) requires:
1. Money
2. Cultural imperative
3. Acquiescent men
4. The lack of a brain drain
5. Stable, transparent, working government (with the aforementioned money).
It doesn't matter how many smartphones you've got logged into facebook if you lack all of the above. You're not going to get widespread western feminism without them.
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3. The point about Communism is precisely that in backward societies you don't need to have particularly wide penetration of an ideology in the population to get things done -- all you need is a determined cadre ready to assume power and impose the ideology by fiat.
Which you are extremely unlikely to find outside of a western European context.
Men within the western European elite essentially "white knighted" on a grand scale, pushing modern feminism into the legal and social mainstream (the access to which they totally controlled) and allowing its more extreme elements to gain hold. Most of the negative elements of modern western feminism today are the product of male acquiescence: men not only allowed for major changes to occur, but then proceeded to encourage and enforce those changes. All of the seemingly ridiculous feminist liberties we complain about today are the product of western European males (starting with their elite) essentially rolling over and allowing their women to have their way with them.
In short, western European men are the biggest white knights the world has ever seen. No group of men allows its women the kind of unrestricted license for extended fuckery that western European men do. The rise of western feminism as we know it is a direct product of this acquiescence (along with the other financial and historical factors I mentioned above).
Good luck getting elite African, South/Central American, and South Asian men to roll over for their women the way elite western European men have. Good luck getting the elite in a place like Nigeria or Jamaica to tolerate a "slutwalk" in their nation's capital (even the elite women in these societies wouldn't put up with that). Good luck getting Filipino, Russian and Pakistani elites to tolerate the notion that gender is entirely a social construct with no strong correlation to biological sex, and that men and women are really the same and all major differences observable between them are social constructs that need to be eliminated.
You'll need a substantial number of them to do so in nations like these for this "determined cadre" theory to come to pass on a global scale.
Is it possible? I'm not going to bet on it.
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While there are differences, the presence of a western-educated elite that is absolutely persuaded of the truth of an ideology in combination with a political system that allows for radical laws to be imposed with relatively little resistance creates important similarities. Thus, it will not surprise me to see some of the most deranged feminist experiments conducted precisely in societies which seem least ideologically disposed towards them.
Again, while you are completely right that western feminism can't work as an economic model, that has never stopped similarly unworkable ideologies from being implemented in one way or another with disastrous consequences for all. I don't believe that feminism is likely to be implemented as state ideology in the same way as Communism was, for example, but I do think that its ideas will have increasingly far-reaching effects on societies all over the world. Its momentum and growing pervasiveness should not be underestimated.
Don't overestimate it either.