Extremists

A close friend and I were discussing people from our past who had radically changed over the years since high school and this brought up a point that I'd like to share. Extremists are making good causes look ridiculous. This happens all the time, for every cause and it's annoying.

The particular evil that these people were combating was sexism. First off, sexism is pretty bad and has led to awful things, but there are worse evils. Like dying of starvation, or the ultimate sexist acts that make us wary of sexism to begin with. Second, there is certainly a scale of sexist offenses...rape being a pretty awful one and say 'mankind' a fairly mild one. Third, descriptions of factual observations are not sexist. Raising money for a women's shelter by selling kitchen products like aprons or oven mitts could be seen by some people to be sexist and may even contribute to the propagation of traditional gender roles...but it's raising money to help women. The overall good outweighs any possible bad. And let's take a look at the bad, shall we? No one is saying these aprons are to be used specifically by women. No one is saying that women must use aprons. But, ya know what? A lot of women enjoy cooking and many of them do so while wearing aprons. Not only that, but kitchen ware is a safe thing to sell because EVERYBODY EATS FOOD. And, might I add that I would vastly prefer buying an apron that I might actually use than one of those ugly little rubber bracelets all those charities are fond of these days.

Also, marketers do market research. It is also widely known that marketers do what they do, how they do it for one reason only and that is because it sells. "Green" products are everywhere these days because it sells. Food is marketed to women because women take up a large portion of habitual grocery shoppers. If you want to change who is targeted by certain products, change who buys them. Targeting a middle aged housewife for frozen dinners is actually progressive; it implies that they have better things to do than to sit around cooking.

I could go on about this, but I grow weary of this tired argument. Think before you complain about the state of the world. No, things aren't perfect, but a lot of people are trying really hard to improve things. Problem is, opinions differ as to what is an improvement. For some, it's all or nothing and for others, it's a slower progression of steady increments. Some people are realistic, and others are not. There must be some give and take, some compromise on some things in order for things to ultimately improve. To be honest, I think things have improved an awful lot, especially over the past century, so I'm pretty happy with things.