Methodology to the madness
Swedish meatball alert: Equality gives you cancer.
So, there you have it. Feminism causes cancer. According to American
journalist, Naomi Schaefer Riley, it also makes you more likely to be
raped and murdered because feminists go out in the evenings and drink
more than we should. (And, laughably, we think that whatever we wear
and wherever we go, yes means yes and no means no. Idiots.) ….The argument that feminism has undermined masculinity is strange since
it suggests that, in order to show strength, men must see weakness
manifested all about them; no matter if that weakness is faked or
forced or cajoled. It's a bit like Henry VIII demanding incredibly bad
tennis from all his tennis chums. It might have made him feel better,
but he's not going to get any better at tennis, is he? In this
ideological portrait, men cannot handle challenge, do not seek
excellence and need to be indulged through lying. It interests, but
doesn't surprise me, that the people who most keenly hate women also
seem to hate men. As a feminist, might I say that we don't hate men. We
believe all humanity to be as capable of greatness as the generosity of
its nature and scope of its imagination will allow; this is why we
don't pretend to be scared of spiders and/or in the throes of an
orgasm, unless we are, genuinely, scared of spiders and/or in the
throes of an orgasm.
Clearly, I'm doomed.
I'm also deeply offended, but I guess that's my prerogative as a fist-waving feminist.
The article you link to doesn’t link to the original article, which of course I couldn’t read anyway if it’s in Swedish. Anyway, if they’re saying that correlation proves that feminism is bad for your health beause of the correlation they found between gender equality and the presence of disease in a household, they are committing one of the most common and avoidable of statistical errors.
Correlation does not prove causation. For instance, there might be a correlation between warm temperatures and headaches. It would be wrong to assume that warm temperatures cause headaches, however. Warm temperatures instead might cause people to eat more ice cream, and eating more ice cream might cause headaches.
In this case, it might be that gender-equal families are more likely to live in urban areas (just as an example). People who live in urban areas are exposed to more disease-causing environmental factors, like pollution, stress, drugs, etc. Therefore a correlation between gender-equality and disease is meaningless without controlling for other factors that may be correlated with both and may be the real cause.