You’re right, in your way, as you generally are.
Again, the value generated by these disputes of ours, and for my part the compelling motive to continue them, is in illustrating that no monolithic summation is ever quite adequate to the task of responsibly evaluating history and one’s place in it.
I live and work and interact eyeball-deep in a generations-old matriarchy that sustains its powers over men and everyday life, with less resistance to it every day. In this setting I have to explain to people what terms like “micro-aggression” or “misogyny” even mean before I can make sense to them about anything in this part of my life. This is just an ordinary town full of ordinary people, where the most self-destructive social offense anyone could commit would be three words: “I voted Democrat.”
You live and work and interact, in the shark-infested waters of a world ocean of hostile feminism and grievance-mongering leftism, where if you tried to tell anyone that the American home and community, and a great many of its workplaces, are run by women who never heard of feminism, most of your students and colleagues would laugh you out of the room.
I’ve seen the same kind of effect toward you, when you calmly recount a lifetime of simply being Russian and knowing a thing or two about Russian life and times, and somebody who speed-read the Cliff Notes on “Gulag” and maybe watched a documentary on Youtube about Putin tries to tell you how uninformed you are about what “everybody knows” is REALLY going on in Russia.
I assure you, that what I say about the American matriarchy is accurate in detail, and that it would be effortless to show you extensive examples of it given an opportunity to, and that on our tour we would meet an overwhelming majority of professional working wives and mothers with advanced degrees, who would need to be brought up to speed on who Betty Friedan or Helen Caldicott were.
You assure me, and I take you at your word, that your workplace and your community are just short of under siege by denouncers and slogan-chanters, who would want to have you arrested if one of us tried to tell them that (as you claim yourself constantly) most women are not all that interested in feminism or its doctrines of self-sustaining grievance.
And neither of us is wrong. The world is a big place. People are complicated. Nothing that meets the eye, explains everything. Sources are flawed and contradictory and become compromised by hidden agendas.
Even in the realm of VAWA and its reign of terror, I probably neglect to mention often enough that not everyone is buying into it. It has been consistently women and mothers who have been as offended by its machinations, and even more convinced of the falsehoods of its denunciation culture, than I ever was. I’ve seen judges railroaded in their own courtrooms with it, and I’ve seen other judges who are out in front of it and sustaining the rule of real law despite it. The world is a big place, and complicated.
And you have yourself as the working example, and I assume a large contingent of your students, of people who are not overtaken and subverted by the propaganda going on all around them on campus. I can introduce you to a whole lot of folks with degrees, who never had time for it in the first place.
Perhaps it is both ourselves, and each other, along with maybe the masses in the bargain, that both you and I are prone to under-estimate, from time to time. I like to think that’s why we do this.
