Women, back to the stove!

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Zurich is a cosmopolitan city, it is an experimental field for social experiments, for progressive human coexistence! As a test, civil servants are honored to serve only 35 weeks; private terraces and gardens should be combined for the common good; and recently, female municipal officials — and, of course, trans men — were given the privilege of monthly menstrual leave on a probationary basis. Five days a month.

Times change and we change with the times. Right. But how exactly?

The splendid male pilot was launched by two women on the green-left of the political spectrum—or, more accurately, in their own ingeniously invented language: two members of the human species who are born and read as women with female bodies. As one of them, Anna-Beatrice Schmalz, explained in a statement, it’s long past time to “take the taboo” off the subject of menstruation, menstrual leave has been “a longstanding feminist demand.” These are words that sound strongly reminiscent of the 1960s and 1970s. And indeed, then it was about women who fought for the same rights as men. A lot has happened since then. Now it seems that some are more equal than others – equality is obsolete, affirmative action is there.

An early feminist would vehemently reject the call for menstrual leave because it is essentially anti-feminist. Just like gender-specific speech times and prescribed quotas for women, gender-specific special treatment perpetuates the image of a vulnerable woman who doesn’t know what she wants and can’t assert herself in a male-dominated world. Political successes of this sort are credited to all those who believe they have always known that women tend to weep and cultivate a distaste for performances. Those who hate the women they play into their hands intuitively understand that whoever favors women puts them at a disadvantage. Because he scolds her. And the one who scolds them makes them bad.

Thus progress turns into regression, freedom into frivolity: women on the left-green spectrum wish their fellows (and those who read like this) back to the stove or to the menstrual bed. Even the bravest feminists of the early days could not imagine such a somersault in their wildest dreams.

René Scheuil is a philosopher and director of the Swiss Institute for Economic Policy (IWP) in Lucerne. He writes to Blick every second Monday.

Source: Blick