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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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My mother is not, personally, very progressive. She is, however, a normie retired teacher and has definitely stewed in the general beliefs of the 'teacher' milieu. She sometimes says things like "you white men have it easy" not out of genuine belief- she knows full well that the poor behavior of blacks is the main reason they haven't caught up to whites, and that teachers simply don't make as much and have fewer advancement opportunities compared to male-typical careers with the same education requirements(she believes this is due to government payscales, not the patriarchy), and that women choosing to become teachers instead of engineers is mostly due to the decisions women make, and that sexual harassment in STEM is mostly perpetrated by east Indians but not the main factor in those decisions anyway- but because it's her coworkers' socially acceptable response to adversity and she picked up the habit.

It is extremely predictable that feminism is popular among teachers because it's a class interest movement for the sorts of women who hold a teaching career(and I think hold a teaching career is a key thing- the statistics on teachers leaving the workforce once they have kids make it kind of inevitable that the field will lean a bit to the left). Throwing race in there has been the cause du jour for long enough that we can just expect it to be a thing they say. And we should probably circle back to the class thing; this is a class of woman who, in every society ever, have been expected to work not-very-hard-compared-to-the-median and engage in a lifestyle with copious amounts of status display. Complaining about first world problems- which these people are aware of as being first world problems- is just part and parcel of that and "it's the patriarchy" is just the current-year formulation.