Response to Vesta Vayne, aka The Cowardly Feminist

Many thanks to Vesta Vayne, AKA The Cowardly Feminist for commenting on my recent video, The Cowardly Feminist can’t grasp the term ‘Gender Gap’, I’m pleased to see that you welcome open debate, a fact which already separates you from most prominent feminists. However, it doesn’t change the indefensible position that seem adamant on advancing.

In my previous video I pointed out that in your blog, The Cowardly Feminist, you use the term “Gender Gap” so loosely that you may as well be the Porter from Macbeth:

For the record, here is your comment:

“I can see why you found my post contradictory. I do believe there is truth to Edwards' article, and this issue of medical complaints not being taken seriously happens with greater frequency to women than men. However, as I wrote, yes it happens to men too (but less often). A gender gap doesn’t mean it never goes the other way. I appreciate hearing your views.”

And your comment does nothing to clarify matters.

Any writer worth his salt understands at least implicitly the concepts of denotation and connotation, and primary and secondary meanings. Sometimes the primary meaning of a word is contained wholly in its denotation, for example, “house” means that and nothing more.
However, once we move beyond a kindergarten vocabulary, we find that the primary meaning of many if not most words, especially key terms in blog posts, comprises both their denotations and connotations, such as “home”, which means much more than simply “house”.

So with “gender gap”, the denotation is simply, “numerical difference between the sexes,” but unless you are utterly stupefied when using popular feminist terms, you should be able to grasp that “gender gap” has a very strong connotation (not least in the minds of your fellow feminists) of injustice, discrimination, systemic bias, etc.

In order for the term “gender gap” to have any meaning, you have to posit a statistically significant difference between the treatment of men and women -- and just in case you get a little confused, this means that it has to take into account the fact that many men don’t go to the doctor in the first place, and only go when their symptoms are debilitating. (As opposed to women, who are much more likely to realise that something is awry early on)

To your credit, thanks to your natural intelligence and unwillingness to divorce yourself from reality, you don’t ignore the fact that many men also suffer, but having established the Great Injustice, i.e. that many women suffer, the suffering of men in possibly equally significant numbers is a mere after-thought, a kind gesture to placate the egalitarian masses, I suppose.

So this puts you in a bind. Like any religious dogmatist, you try to find some way to reconcile the irreconcilable, to defend the indefensible. What reality tells you is that systemic problems in the health care system hurt both men and women, but your feminist training induces you to contort your presentation of the issue to fit the “gender gap” paradigm.

Were you liberated from this kind of thinking, you would have been free to employ your considerable talent in writing a blog post that pondered the following:

• That many doctors are women;
• That many men simply don’t go to a doctor in the first place;
• Why these uncaring doctors seem so unwilling to listen to their patients in the first place;
• What the effect of Obamacare might have on this;
• Whether men and women in other Western countries get the run-around from their GPs or whether this is a peculiarly American phenomenon;
• etc etc etc.

But, as your blog’s name indicates, the courage to break from these ideological shackles will probably be found wanting. As friendly and pretty a face as you try to put on feminism, the essence of your reasoning is as supremacist and ugly as any other Dworkin-type minion.