How is feminism failing us?

How has the history of feminist movements excluded groups who have also advocated for equality? How can social movements with differing aims and goals work together? Have you felt excluded by or negatively affected by feminists or feminist rhetoric?

In this salon we will welcome a diverse group of people to discuss the ways feminism has or has not failed to advocate for us. In doing so, our aim will be to find moments of healing between feminists of different races, classes, gender identities, and sexual orientations who may be at odds with each other.

While our aim will be to critique feminism and feminist viewpoints, our hope is that participants come with the following principles in mind:

  1. That feminism (or ideas attributed to feminism) is a necessary and important social movement in our society

  2. That listening to opposing viewpoints can enrich us, and that we should respect them

Questions

Ho can we question feminist without undermining the movement?

How does the gender binary get treated by feminism?

Listen to rhetoric and people's stories and a radical act of learning.

We think of listening as a passive act, where as being taught is active learning. Listening can be active

Different kinds of feminism

Since the 19th century, average life expectancies have risen for everyone (though not at equal rates) thanks to advances in science and technology. But over the past two decades, deaths attributed to inequality, isolation, and addiction have risen for both men and women without a college education in the US. In particular, as Princeton economists revealed today, white middle-aged men with a high school education or less, hit disproportionately by the Great Recession, are dying of despair.

In “Mortality and morbidity in the 21st century,” Princeton Professors Anne Case and Angus Deaton follow up on their groundbreaking 2015 paper that revealed a shocking increase in midlife mortality among white non-Hispanic Americans, exploring patterns and contributing factors to the troubling trend.

Case and Deaton find that while midlife mortality rates continue to fall among all education classes in most of the rich world, middle-aged non-Hispanic whites in the U.S. with a high school diploma or less have experienced increasing midlife mortality since the late 1990s. This is due to both rises in the number of “deaths of despair”—death by drugs, alcohol and suicide—and to a slowdown in progress against mortality from heart disease and cancer, the two largest killers in middle age.

The combined effect means that mortality rates of whites with no more than a high school degree, which were around 30 percent lower than mortality rates of blacks in 1999, grew to be 30 percent higher than blacks by 2015.

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/49/15078

Case and Deaton find that deaths of despair are rising in parallel for both men and women without a high school degree, and they deaths of despair have increased in all parts of the country and at every level of urbanization.

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/49/15078/F1.expansion.html

https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/mortality-and-morbidity-in-the-21st-century/

Lonliness —— can happen bc of family, or work slavery

Beginning in the 1980s, Schwartz says, study after study started showing that those who were more socially isolated were much more likely to die during a given period than their socially connected neighbors, even after you corrected for age, gender, and lifestyle choices like exercising and eating right. Loneliness has been linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke and the progression of Alzheimer’s. One study found that it can be as much of a long-term risk factor as smoking.

The research doesn’t get any rosier from there. In 2015, a huge study out of Brigham Young University, using data from 3.5 million people collected over 35 years, found that those who fall into the categories of loneliness, isolation, or even simply living on their own see their risk of premature death rise 26 to 32 percent.

Now consider that in the United States, nearly a third of people older than 65 live alone; by age 85, that has jumped to about half. Add all of this up, and you can see why the surgeon general is declaring loneliness to be a public health epidemic.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2017/03/09/the-biggest-threat-facing-middle-age-men-isn-smoking-obesity-loneliness/k6saC9FnnHQCUbf5mJ8okL/story.html

does life span matter if quality of life is improving? —

As surgeon and author Atul Gawande explains in Being Mortal, funding improvements in palliative care—making people in extreme pain or at the end of their life more comfortable—would much more meaningfully address the problem of death. You make death less terrible and inevitable by making life less painful. Silicon Valley’s simplistic life extension arithmetic—you improve life by adding more years—glosses over the complicated social forces eroding or hampering the quality of life for so many people.

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