One of my favourite blogs is Why Evolution if True by Jerry Coyne. I can also recommend the book of the same name. However, the post of November 25th concerning Suzanne Moore, who has recently resigned from the Guardian, misses the point.
The Guardian used to to be a fine, slightly left leaning, quirky and liberal newspaper. Latterly it has gone to the ‘woke-side’ and largely reflects the views of privately educated Oxbridge, English Literature graduates. Suzanne Moore is a little unusual in that she comes from a relatively humble background and that may have been part of her problem.
The story is far from one of an innocent victim being consumed by woke culture but a much older and regularly repeating story of an individual being consumed by an ideological purity spiral that they themselves were a part of. Think Robespierre, Danton or Saint Just who were Guillotined during the French Revolution. Or think Grigory Zinoviev or Lev Kamenev both figures in the Russian Revolution who were murdered by later waves of Bolshevics. What these figures all have in common is that they were consumed by forces they unleashed. It is one of the oldest stories in the world.
So it is with Suzanne Moore. Luckily for her you no longer face public decapitation or bullet in the back of the head in a lonely basement. The worst the woke have to fear is ‘intolerable working conditions’ and personal attacks on Twitter. That, it seems, was too much for Suzanne Moore and she has resigned. Call it feminist fragility if you like.
Suzanne Moore has been guilty of some pretty unpleasant tweets of her own. For example, when Jordan Peterson (like the rest of us a complex flawed human being) was in an intensive care unit in Moscow she tweeted ‘Hello Editor types. Jordan Peterson holed up in rehab in Russia. F*** me gently with a chain saw … let me do that story. Come on!’
She has used her column in the Guardian to launch vicious and personal attacks on a wide range of mostly male characters and if some of that bile has come back her way … good.
There is another reason for schadenfreude. Feminists such as Suzanne Moore have long argued that gender and gender roles are purely social constructs and this is one of the reasons for their visceral hatred of evolutionary biology. The problem with a purely social constructivist view of gender, as opposed to a nuanced approach combining biology with socialisation, is that it leaves the door open to those who wish to identify as any sex they choose and then demand to use female toilets and changing rooms. So, to the feminists at the Guardian- these are creatures of your own making and when they turn on you with their tweets the rest of us are inwardly smiling.
toxic feminism 