Shikha Dalmia on the Misplaced Feminist Outrage Against Patricia Arquette
Feminism no longer knows how to help real women with real problems
Patricia Arquette thought she'd become a feminist heroine by using her Oscar speech to demand wage equality for women. Instead she became the feminist laughing stock. Feminists at ThinkProgress and Reality Check are accusing her of "intersectionality failure" and "structural erasure."
But the problem is not with Arquette, but feminism itself, notes Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia. Feminism and its identity politics encourages a search for oppression—real or imagined—even by rich, privileged, white women like Arquette. 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.