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The conveniently toothless word “empowerment” is easily mocked, but the mockery itself serves a darkly useful purpose: What cannot be taken seriously need never be examined, let alone condemned. This comfortable habit of casual derision prevents Western media watchers from grasping the real import of certain ideas, like this one, “empowerment,” which is now become a fig leaf for questionable claims and even outright fakery, especially where women’s rights are concerned. Beyond this, the kind of rhetoric in which “empowerment” appears is often the kind that is meant to make you stop thinking about something, rather than keep thinking about it. [...] Empowerment is a word you can use to distract, to deflect criticism, and even to raise money. In the context of specific foreign policy influence, putting an empty, pretty concept in the place where a fact or an idea or an action might have been is… well, it’s one way of practicing dismediation.

In his statements to the committee, Judge Kavanaugh said that the allegations against him had ruined his life even though he may well be confirmed to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court. Mr. Hockenberry and Mr. Ghomeshi also lament how their lives have been ruined. The bar for a man’s ruin is, apparently, quite low. May we all be so lucky as to have our lives so ruined. History is once more repeating itself and will continue to do so until we, as a culture, begin not only to believe women but also to value women enough to consider harming them unacceptable, unthinkable.

We expect women to perform a specific kind of resilience: they must loudly and spectacularly demonstrate that they have overcome patriarchal oppression. Noisy feminism is both a new gender norm for women to embody and a tool white supremacy uses to scapegoat non-white men for lingering sexism.

…men also tend to be unaware of their own privileges as men. … I thought I’d compile a list … focusing on the invisible privileges benefiting men.

Palin and Perry, sittin' in a tree. "She kisses a girl—sure, okay. She likes it—um, and? Oh, and she hopes her boyfriend doesn't mind, because sexual autonomy is inextricable from the male gaze, and that's fucking awesome. 'I Kissed a Girl' is infuriatingly ass-backward: cynical adherence to outdated values made into titillation, snide calculation dressed up as the underdog, the same old bullshit disguised as rebellion."