Italy’s parliament on Tuesday approved a law that introduces femicide into the country’s criminal law and punishes it with life in prison.
The vote coincided with the international day for the elimination of violence against women, a day designated by the U.N. General Assembly.
The law won bipartisan support from the center-right majority and the center-left opposition in the final vote in the Lower Chamber, passing with 237 votes in favor.
The law, backed by the conservative government of Premier Giorgia Meloni, comes in response to a series of killings and other violence targeting women in Italy. It includes stronger measures against gender-based crimes including stalking and revenge porn.
Casually throwing feminism under the bus – a movement that focuses on women’s issues (to the overall societal benefit of everyone) – for focusing on women’s issues?
Huh. Is this socially acceptable now? I thought we were better than this.
Feminism has a place, but it is explicitly about promoting women’s interests – something which if allowed to continue unchecked, leads to significant disadvantages for men. It leads to the sorts of toxic masculinity backlashes that you see in the states, especially because moderates who question women’s privilege in advanced western economies start to support more extreme anti-woman positions, because there’s a perception that left wing feminist leaning ideologies work against their interests. And they’re right.
An egalitarian approach is better, once you’ve gotten to near parity. Most western countries have been at near parity for generations at this point.
I think that’s a dangerous belief. I don’t see the difference between saying that and saying “Equality for black people has a place, but it is explicitly about promoting black interests – something which if left allowed to continue unchecked, leads to significant disadvantages to whites.”
I don’t see anything wrong with that second note, translating the position into one about race instead of gender.
Equity-type programs often get started based off of aggregate differences in statistical data based on demographic slices, with good intentions. But I’ve yet to see any cases where they build in a process for removing equity support programs once a ‘goal’ is reached / more parity is visible in the data.
So as an example from Canada, equity employment programs were introduced in the mid/late 1980s to address the imbalance between men and women in the workforce. You can see how this played out in the public workforce data. In 1990, shortly after the leg came in, it was at about 54% men, 46% women. By 2000, it had flipped in favour of women, at 48% men, 52% women. By 2010, 45% men, 55% women – a greater imbalance than in the 1990s, the imbalance which had triggered supports to get put in place for women. That roughly 10% gap persisted through to 2020 at least. No legislation has been introduced to remove preferential hiring for women in the public sector, no legislation has come in to promote hiring men due to the shift in the gender imbalance.
On a racial basis, the same pattern can be seen in our post secondary education grants, bursaries and scholarships. Funding for these sorts of initiatives in Canada allows for them to screen for specific equity groups – what some term visible minorities. The roots of that being based on reasonable equity goals – ie. there’s a statistical gap in education levels for a minority group, so they allow people to target funding to minority groups. However, while these policies have been enforced, white men have become one of the least educated groups in Canada, with about 24% of white men attaining a degree, compared to 40% of asian guys (with the highest rate of attainment amongst chinese/korean guys, at ~60%). White men are still not considered an equity group, and so cannot have funding specifically targeted to them to try and address this equity issue. And we haven’t ‘removed’ the ‘disadvantaged’ minority groups from receiving systemic advantage, even though they are out performing the supposedly privileged majority group. The system quite literally has race-based controls working against white men, with a justification of correcting an imbalance that not only doesn’t exist in the data, but where the data shows white men as significantly worse off. The system is basically designed to kick them when they’re down.
I can highlight that education item a bit more using a personal example. A coworker of mine has a kid going to BCIT, one of our western province’s “leading” tech-type schools. They’re Canadian citizens, recent immigrants from eastern Europe, not wealthy by any stretch. They tried to get financial assistance for the kid through the school, but the advisor bluntly told him there were no grants/bursaries etc that he could apply for, since the kid was a white guy – all the available funding was targeted to different racial sub groups. He would have more charitable funding options available from the system we’ve setup here, had he been a third generation millionaire visible minority.