Anti-Feminism

Spot the difference between the following two statement forms:

  1. School of thought X says Y.

  2. Claim Y has been made in the name of X.

I mean look are we citing personal stories and using those to make sweeping claims about what feminism is?

Because I was a Christian kid with vague misgivings about feminism until I went to college and took an English course from a Radical Feminist, a very outspoken and snarky one to boot, who made it absolutely clear that she would not take bullshit from a dude just because he was a dude and also made it absolutely clear that feminism is directly good for men because it offers a way to help men counteract ugly stereotypes about men and escape the pressure to be “manly” etc. She didn’t just express this view, she demonstrated it regularly in class discussion. It wouldn’t be right to say this was her main theme or anything, but it was a major point she returned to many times, and she was clearly passionate and sincere about this point. It rubbed off. That marked the beginning of the time I myself became a feminist* though I didn’t actively own the name until quite a bit later.

*Note: It ain’t really right to become a feminist JUST because feminism is good for men. :wink: But my history is what it is. Also, this telling greatly simplifies things. I also was into the for-women side of things, just was afraid Feminism wasn’t the way to do it prior to this course.

Yes, my Christian fundamentalist relatives have their own term for this: “don’t blame the soap for the dirt.” For when homophobe preachers are found out in homosexual assignations, etc.

Feminism is the advocacy of equal rights for women. And it’s result has been the demonization of men and boys. Maybe not its intentional result, but there the baby sits, whether it wanted it or not. True, there’s no feminism in Algeria, and when the women get away from their husbands all they talk about is what bastards their husbands are. So male-bashing is not feminism. But a large amount of male-bashing is committed in the West under the protection of feminism.

ETA, IRT to your teacher who took no shit from men. But, as I wrote pages ago, not taking shit is often measured in how much shit people have to take from us. Stalin didn’t take any shit either. Ghandi took bucketfuls.

What is this post in response to?

When I quoted Thoreau, I assumed he was talking about people, not just men. He’s dead, so I can’t ask him, but that’s what I’ve always assumed.

I’m sorry, I don’t really understand the question in the bolded part. [Bolding mine.]

My memory, such as it is, is that ST was saying something along the lines of feminists aren’t obligated to care about men, so long as any injustice is perpetrated against women. My reply was that that means feminists will never care about men, because injustice is just a fact of life - for both sexes.

Your condescending #381.

I’m typing this after a long day that involved me taking shit off other people, as many people’s days do. It’s the wise thing to take shit sometimes, despite what your college professor displayed. It’s a pretty sweat deal being a RadFem soft sciences professor, or a right wing radio host with a thumb on the dump button. Nice work if you can find it. And now I’m going to wisely take shit off you and not counter your points, though you’ve really not bothered to make any.

I don’t know how it’s supposed to be condescending, but it was in any case a direct refutation of your argument, meant to point out you had begun by making one claim, but then defended another instead which was more defensible and much less remarkable.

The fact that a claim has been made in the name of feminism does not license the view that feminism itself makes that claim. Since you did try to support the latter by citing the former, it follows that your view is without support. It’s now incumbent on you to change your mind [ETA: By this I don’t mean “agree with me” but rather “begin to think maybe you don’t know what feminism says after all” at least] or explain what further support you have instead.

I’m sorry, I honestly don’t know what has happened here. I don’t understand why you’re saying any of the above.

Maybe you could try making one, to show me how it’s done.

Clarification: I’m disturbed that boys are treated as acceptable collateral casualties. For the feminists who engage as in a war between the good feminine vs the evil masculine, this seems to be the mindset. Where LinuK and I differ is that I don’t think this is all feminism has to it, any more than I believe Jesus thought “but you know, for this whole Christianity thing to work, we’ll eventually have to burn people at the stake.”

For the record, ZPGZealot does not, will not, and cannot in any way represent me or my positions. Her positions on most things are vile and hateful, and I do not believe she would be considered mainstream by most feminists.

How can you think she’s a credible feminist if she directly and explicitly disagrees with what, IYHO, feminism actually says?

I can’t speak to general feminist thought about Tolstoy. I’ve only read a fraction of his writing, though it’s one of those things where I always tell myself that I’ll read more and then I pick up a mystery novel instead. I’m lazy!

I don’t know what you mean by drawing lines. Can you explain?

As for me being a genuine human being, well, I’m genuinely human, with all of the follies and foibles that go into that, and genuinely flawed, but I’m saddened by your story and I wish there were a way to keep good memories and erase bad ones without losing the valuable lessons the bad memories often gift us with.

Women are disproportionately affected by prison, because they 93% of prisoners are men.

There’s not much you can do, but laugh.

I answered this question already, but since you ask: it’s evidence that society values the safety and well-being of women over men.

I’ll say I was puzzled by that sentence as well. I can’t laugh at it, because frankly I have no idea what it’s even supposed to mean.

This is going to be the last time I do this, but if this is all you’re capable of, please take your comments to the appropriate forum.

Thanks.

No. Similarly, if someone said, “African Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites” nobody would say whites are “are disproportionately affected” by prison. I honestly don’t understand the absurdity of feminist reasoning.

I think you could invent scenarios where a system is designed for one population, then another is thrown in, and the later population is penalized more despite being a smaller number. This will be a VERY STUPID ANALOGY but you could have an animal shelter system that is designed for dogs. Then you start putting cats into the dog system so that 93% of the animals in the pound are dogs and 7% are cats. Someone might say, “Oh, those cats are suffering more because not only are they at the pound, but they are at a pound that was designed for dogs, not cats. Cats shouldn’t be sent to the pound.”

So, we can imagine this scenario. It falls apart when it comes to humans because men aren’t from Pluto while women are from Bastet. But I guess you could make an argument, though not a really good one, that if you think the pound is bad for both the large number of dogs and the small number of cats and you are wanting to design a new system, you could view the cats as the canaries in the coal mine and use them as guinea pigs (suddenly, this post is more zoological than sociological) for the new design.

This is something you see in education, where the outliers are more often taken out of the regular population and treated differently, while the normals are left in a system that isn’t necessarily ideal, because we see the outliers as more impacted by the less than ideal situation.

But I don’t think it makes sense in the case of prisons because given such a huge number of male prisoners, and given a claim that male prisons are simply not suited for women, it makes more sense to try to figure out how to improve male prisons for men, and thereby hope to improve conditions for the 93% asap, because the system “ideal” for women, if this gendering were true, would not be ideal for men.

Don’t worry about it. It is just useless snarking from the usual suspects. You made some good points as did others with great cites. This thread has also produced some useful dialog. I have learned there are good feminists in the world like jsgoddess and a boatload of bad ones. I think it useful to learn to how keep the apples apart so that the whole bunch doesn’t spoil even if many of them try to actively poison them. I am still not a fan of feminism in general (understatement of the year) but I can understand that a select few of them are sincere and genuine.

Is everyone waiting with bated breath for him actually to catch up in the thread and realize that he IS being pitted? Oh, the tension! Oh, the suspense!