Feminism and Females

There's an article in the New York Times today about the rise of the pro-life women, and lamenting the fact that the traditional reluctance of such women to enter politics allows the left to portray pro-choisism as being critical to feminism. There are, actually, a lot of more minor logical errors in the piece that I would mention were I to debate its author, Ramesh Ponnuru, but I won't bother with them here. The main premise is that because women are just as likely to be pro-life as men are, in other words about 50% odds, pro-lifeness must be at least a plausibly feminist position. To illustrate why this logic does not hold (not necessarily showing per se that he's wrong substantively in this case, though I think he is), I saw a stat in Harper's Index recently that suggested that two-thirds of Egyptian women, women, were in favor of allowing wife-beating under certain circumstances. Would anyone like to defend the claim that wife-beating is a feminist policy? Keep in mind that feminism is "the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men." I don't think that getting women beaten up counts as feminist. I don't think that allowing men to beat women up counts as feminist. And the fact that a supermajority of Egyptian women are in favor of it doesn't change that. The point is, I guess, that policies are policies, and wikiality doesn't really work. If 90% of Americans believed that exploding a nuclear bomb in the middle of Manhattan on a busy weekday would kill no one, they would be wrong.

This has something to do, I think, with my response to a little throw-away line from Maureen Dowd's column about Obama's relationship with the press. She comments that he, like most/all Democrats, expects the press to be on his side. I don't think that's because the press has a liberal bias, or because Democrats expect the press to have a liberal bias. It's because Democrats expect the press to have a bias in favor of the facts, in favor of reality, and Democrats also tend to believe that reality and the facts are on their side, in a way that I don't think Republicans really do as much. It wasn't a Democratic President whose aide said the thing about the reality-based community. I think this is a similar thing, about wanting issues to be evaluated on their merits and not on the basis of what the two parties have to say about them (or something like that).