Just when you thought that liberal academia couldn’t get much nuttier, a female professor (Leslie Kern) from Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, declares that tall buildings are “sexist.” Not only did Leslie Kern declare it, she wrote it in a book titled “Feminist City.”
Kern claims—in her book—that toxic masculinity “is built into the fabric of our urban spaces.”
She continues: “From the physical to the metaphorical, the city is filled with reminders of masculine power,” Kern writes in The Guardian. “And yet we rarely talk of the urban landscape as an active participant in gender inequality.”
And yet even the height and shape of a building reflects “patterns of gender-based discrimination,” she says, citing a female architecture professor who described skyscrapers as “rape” in 1977.
“Just as the patriarchy is enshrined in the urban environment, white supremacy is also the ground upon which we walk.” By first recognizing these unequal systems and social dynamics, we can then imagine new ways of inhabiting urban spaces.”
And what is the solution to sexist architecture? Feminists cities.
“The feminist city is an ongoing experiment in living differently, living better, and living more justly in an urban world,” Kern concludes. She calls for the creation of a city that lives up to the values of intersectional feminism.
According to Kern, this order could be implemented through housing policies and zoning codes that make it easier for people to live together in ways beyond the narrow definition of a single-family home. “You have to think about what counts as a family in this situation,” she says. “Who is this designed to exclude?” There it is. This unmarried mother is feeling oppressed.
Affordability is also a question of access. Rethinking transportation networks so that people can get where they need to go quickly and inexpensively is an important step toward creating a care-oriented, feminist city. “At various places in the book I touch on how many of our public transit networks are still designed around the idea of, like, a commuter that comes into the city at a particular time on a linear trip,” Kern says. “This doesn’t reflect the complexity of many people’s lives, and especially women’s lives.”
A feminist city oriented around care could also include police abolition. “We want to take women’s fear seriously, but by expanding and relying so much on policing and the criminal justice system to do that, we have created a situation where greater levels of policing and harm have been able to be weaponized against black people, indigenous people, people of color, homeless people, sex workers, youth, and so on,” Kern says. She adds her voice to recent calls to defund the police.
Summary
Tall buildings are sexist. They are toxic reminders of masculine oppression. That can make woke leftist college professors (redundant, I know) and unmarried mothers feel uncomfortable. And we certainly can’t have that.
We need feminists cities that operate without police departments (law enforcement). Laws make lawbreakers uncomfortable (Romans 13:3—5). We can’t have that either.
Housing that is designed for traditional families is oppressive towards singles, homeless people, thrupples, sex workers etc.
Rather than use city architecture as a reason to push nutty liberal ideas, it would be better to simply move out of them. “Get out of the cities as soon as possible and purchase a little piece of land where you can have a garden, where your children can watch the flowers growing and learn from them lessons of simplicity and purity”--2SM 356 (1903).
By the way, Kern is program director of…. WAIT FOR IT….Women’s and Gender Studies at Mount Allison University. No word yet on whether she will be invited to speak at an NAD function in the future.
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