Patricia Arquette thought she'd become a feminist heroine by using her Oscar speech to demand wage equality for
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women. Instead she became the feminist laughing stock. Feminists at ThinkProgress and Reality Check are accusing her of "intersectionality failure" and "structural erasure" (seriously! I'm not making this up) — which are just fancy ways of saying that she upset their oppression scorecard.
Her comments, especially that women deserve wage equality with men because they give "birth to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation," were genuinely weird. But they were not her fault, I note in my column at The Week. Feminism and its identity politics encourages a search for oppression — real or imagined — even by rich, privileged, white women like Arquette who, incidentally, voluntarily accepted lower wages than her dog sitter to act in Boyhood, the indie film that took 12 years to make and won her the Oscar.
But feminism's bigger problem is not that it encourages white women to whine. It is that it prevents the genuinely oppressed women from getting redress.
To find out why, click here.
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