 If a woman was ever arrested for the unenforced New York state law forbidding body-hugging clothing, would it be a misdemeanor? Okay, first things first. If you believe that things like culturally ingrained racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination are all in the past and have no substantial relevance to most people today, I strongly urge you to watch this video first. Go ahead and click it. It'll open in a new tab. I'll still be here when you get back. So hopefully, if you're still with me, we're in some sort of agreement that culture has some issues. The society that we live in pushes predetermined roles for every demographic. Men, women, homosexuals, Dungeons and Dragons gamers, everybody has a little box that they're supposed to cram themselves into in order to fit with cultural preconceptions. And if we don't, people get upset or at the very least confused. There are social movements that have developed in response to that pressure, basically fighting the current of cultural conformity so that people have the freedom to engage in whatever lifestyle makes them feel happy and fulfilled without judgment or condemnation. But as these groups become larger, a microcosm of that same process happens within the revolution against cultural norms. A revolution within a revolution. I really hate it when I do that. For example, there's a big divide within feminist communities about how sex fits into the ideal of equality between the sexes. Sex-positive feminists see cultural repression of women's sexual agency as something that should be fought by embracing that sexuality. That women who have been told to be pure and chaste and innocent their entire life should instead pursue sex and revel in it. Sex-negative feminists, on the other hand, see an obsession with sex as part of a cultural idea that women are to be desired and valued solely as objects of sexual gratification. Or that sex itself is inextricably linked to cultural ideas of male dominance and female submission. And that the best way to combat that is to abstain from that culture of sex. The debate between the two groups is pretty intense. It's sometimes referred to as the feminist sex wars, which sounds pretty epic. Now, it's possible to dismiss this sort of tear within a community as just something inevitable that happens when you get enough people together. After all, Star Trek fans all love narratives of aliens and technology and exploration. But some of the most bitter arguments that I've ever read online have been disagreements over who's been the best captain. By the way, it's Picard. Just saying. But that divisiveness seems to happen like clockwork within groups that form in opposition to cultural norms. Violent versus non-violent civil rights campaigns, flamboyant versus straight-laced gay rights advocates, it seems that there's no movement for cultural acceptance that doesn't have some sort of bitter schism. And unfortunately, some people take that divide as grounds for dismissing these ideologies altogether. I mean, if they can't convince each other, then why should I lessen? Intuitively, if you're trying to turn the tide of public opinion, it would seem better to offer a unified image and a consistent message. Why does it seem to be so hard to keep these movements cohesive? Well, just looking at the sex-positive-sex-negative division, neither side is wrong. Culture tells us both that women are supposed to be chased flowers of innocence and hypersexualized objects of desire and gratification. Culture itself isn't particularly cohesive, and there are contradictions like this everywhere. Like men are supposed to be sensitive and stoic. Asians are supposed to be nerds, nerds are supposed to be weak, but Asians are also supposed to know kung fu. If culture itself is schizophrenic, no wonder we disagree about how best to change it. Another reason you might see fiction within these communities is that language necessarily has to reference a shared culture in order for us to communicate anything to each other at all. It's kind of impossible to make a totally egalitarian statement, because in order to say anything about anyone, you necessarily have to label them, and in so doing, you're drawing a little box around them with words. Women should have equal rights as men seems like a decent enough sentiment, but it emits trigender and pangender and transgender and gender-neutral people, and it might make it seem like you're deliberately snubbing those alternatives. The only really all-inclusive egalitarian statement is everybody should have equal rights, which isn't really specific enough to mean anything. Being vigilant with how we label people is important because language shapes thought, but it can make it really difficult to communicate, even with other people who share our ideals of acceptance. No wonder the messages these groups try to communicate to the world and to each other get fractured. Finally, we tend to focus on and discuss differences in opinion rather than similarities, which can make it seem like we don't agree about anything. It's easy to forget the common ground we share when we're discussing the details about what we don't. Men's disagree about the role of sex in culturally ingrained sexism, about whether some men perpetrate it or are victims of it or perpetrate it because they are victims of it, about whether we should focus on media or politics or education or even language and how much we should push others to try and fix it. But I think that we all react pretty much the same way when we hear that if a person auditions for an orchestra without revealing their gender, like by playing behind a curtain or something, women get hired 30-50% more often than they do if the people holding the auditions know that they're women. We all think that's messed up. We all think that a French hornist's gender shouldn't have any impact on whether or not they get to play Beethoven's Fifth with the New York Philharmonic. And in that, we're all feminist by definition because we think that women should have the same rights as everybody else. Answering the question of how best to do that is harder, but dismissing feminism in its entirety because there's a disagreement between people who believe in that ideology is like dismissing Star Trek because there are Kirk fans. No, but seriously, Picard all the way. Has any group that you've been part of faces a divide like feminism? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah, blah, subscribe, blah, share, and I'll see you next week.