Feminism has succeeded – so why don’t we call it quits?

Article here. Excerpt:

'You would think that the British Film Institute’s sponsorship of a month-long festival celebrating some of the most memorable female characters in cinema would draw plaudits from feminists. You would be wrong.
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Like many a liberation movement, the fight for women’s equality has steadily suffered from its own success. These many ‘waves’ of feminism roil across an ever more level playing field. Today’s much-deplored ‘gender pay gap’ is overwhelmingly a statistical fix, engineered to seem yawning by comparing carrots and kumquats; in the main, equal pay for equal work is the form.

More women than men go to university, while poor white boys sit at the bottom of every variety of league table. It’s not as if the balance of power between the sexes is all perfect, but the scales are roughly evening out, and sometimes they’re tilting unfairly in our direction. Meanwhile, a liberation movement in its senescence — sensibly on the way to the trash heap, having largely achieved its purpose — becomes neurotic, and pathologically petty.
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A suggestion, then. There’s no paucity of sexism abroad. Little girls married off to old men in Africa get fistulas from underage intercourse and are ostracised because they can’t stop peeing themselves. Girls are still having their clitorises carved out to keep them from enjoying sex too much. Saudi women may finally be able to drive, but they can’t actually go anywhere without a male guardian’s permission. The Taleban still burns down schools to keep girls from getting an education. Turn outward. There’s plenty of genuine injustice out there to go round if you’re gagging for it.'

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