This week, Meghan Murphy makes the case—against those who propose jettisoning feminism—that women’s legal rights are a good thing.
Meghan Murphy
The women’s movement was not rotten from the start. Indeed, for most of its history, it was quite rational. Extending the fundamental premise of Western democracy to women as full human persons with dignity and rationality equal to those of men is something that differentiates the West from the oppressive and authoritarian regimes that have existed and continue to exist in other parts of the world. By all means, criticize the excesses, mistakes, and pure nonsense that is third-wave feminism. I certainly do. But discounting or attempting to undo the essential progress made by the first- and second-wave feminist movements is misguided and ignorant.
Featured Author Darby Saxbe responds to the recent announcement from US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth that all US service members would be screened for low testosterone.
Darby Saxbe
In nature vs nature debates about education, gender, and class, the left is often (correctly) accused of putting too much faith into nurture, assuming that we can engineer social outcomes through culture and socialization while ignoring biological realities. But the right is equally apt to err on the side of nature, forgetting that people are flexible, oversimplifying why groups differ, and confusing general descriptive trends with prescriptive mandates. There’s no better example of stupid gender essentialism than trying to boil our complex behavioral phenotypes into a simple hormone measure.
Next, Fairer Disputations Editor-in-Chief Erika Bachiochi offers a philosophical case for a “paternal ethic of care.”
Erika Bachiochi
Even with rapid technological and cultural shifts, the existence of a particular child today still transforms a particular woman into a “mother” and a particular man into a “father”, at least as a matter of biological relation. Engaging the classic work of care ethicist, Eva Feder Kittay, I seek in this article to offer a more capacious – and indeed, normative -- account of fatherhood, or a paternal ethic of care. Like a maternal ethic of care, the paternal ethic of care is based on a unique personal relation of embodied care, an obligation that arises from being an equal (paternal) source of the child’s existence, one who is specially situated to care for this particular child and his or her mother. As such, paternal care is characteristically distinctive from maternal care in its uniquely situated, special responsibility to create the safe, secure and just conditions that caregiving mothers need to carry out their duties of care with freedom and confidence and that dependent children need to become mature, agentic adults.
The Many Fallacies of Antifeminism, Elizabeth Grace Matthew, The Dispatch
Violent Porn Is Behind the Rise in Youth Sexual Offences, Stella O'Malley, UnHerd
How One Sentence Changed My Experience of Childbirth, Elizabeth Kulze, mom·osophy
The Wrong Side of the Mountain, Jesse Singal, The Dispatch
Last time Meghan Murphy wrote for us, she examined her own evolving understanding of feminism in light of Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress.
Meghan Murphy
“Pretending away human nature did not serve me—nor does it serve most women.”
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