It was a metaphor, dear.
I’ll bet he’d be trying like a champ to change others if their behavior directly affected him…
Let me try to be more clear. All over the world, every day, powerful groups of people exploit and oppress less powerful groups of people. Now, each group of people certainly consists of individuals, some of whom suck and some of whom are perfectly lovely. While you personally treating every member of each group according to their individual attributes is certainly a good thing, it does absolutely nothing to educate the oppressive group or to help the oppressed group. All it does accomplish is to not ruin anyone’s day, and to make you feel like a nice guy.
I’m not impressed.
How is it that you think I should treat the individual members of oppressed and oppressor groups? Should I explain to every white male I meet that he is guilty of oppressing black people and women, and must atone? When people make bigoted statements in my presence, I generally identify the statements as bigoted, out loud, face to face. Generally those people become angry with me. But if I just see a man and a woman having a disagreement, I don’t really feel that I should support the woman because men are oppressors.
I am not trying to feel like a nice guy. I am trying to be a good person. I don’t think that my version of what a good person should do is prescriptive for the whole world. I knew a woman who is a Marxist. Now, Marxism has a very long history of association with hideous mistreatment of millions, including imprisonment, and death. She ran a food co-op, in a moderately poor part of town. She scrupulously attended to the distribution of unsold foods to the most needy in her neighborhood, precisely because she is a Marxist. Or, so she says. I think she did it because she is a very good person. How should I judge her? I try not to. I tried to support her personally, because I admire and respect what she does. Not so much what she says.
I am not impressed with me, either.
Tris
This is really confusing. Your main point thus far has seemed to be that you aren’t going to blindly follow somebody else’s ideology. But you’re the one who started proscribing thoughts here. You began the conversation by saying, basically out of nowhere, that “feminism is pretty much sexism,” which you were asked to explain. Now you seem to feel like, because people objected to your overbroad statement about a group of people (feminists), you’re being told you should run around being essentially a race/gender terrorist. Your whole outlook is so coarse that it’s hard to believe it’s really your outlook; as if the only two choices are total war against white males or having literally no interest in what’s going on at a broader level in society than person to person. I don’t think anyone is telling you how to treat individuals. It’s your party. Nobody would be challenging you on your own beliefs if you hadn’t taken it upon yourself to criticize ours.
For what it’s worth, you talk about yourself like you were an actual feminist (i.e. interested in equality between sexes), but then you talk about feminists like they were evil people. And say you’re trying to stop them. If all you’re interested in is getting rid of sex discrimination, I call that feminism.
There is not, as far as I know, any agreement among feminists that the right thing to do is start involving yourself in arguments between two strangers, because men are oppressors. I don’t think you need to take the feminazi stereotype quite that seriously. A good start, though, would probably be to stop calling entire groups of people bigots if you don’t understand their motivations. If you want to live your life only dealing with individuals on an individual level, “(people who believe X) are (Y)” seems incompatible.
Yes, it certainly is.
A point. I haven’t said one single thing about feminists, individually, or as a group. My entire objection is that feminism has at its core an assumption that social forces circumscribe the lives of women. There is a popular, although not universal corollary view that men are the oppressors, and women the oppressed. What the core assumption ignores is that social forces, driven by the actions and attitudes of both men and women circumscribe the lives of both men and women. The choice to make this ideology of sexual equality “feminism” includes a deliberate dichotomy that has strong consequences. I merely feel that ignoring that sexual stereotype entirely undermines the idea that feminism is in some way the opposite of sexism.
The posts above from me do not express a total disinterest in society. But, I happen to think that society does happen person to person. Further, I believe that the most effective way for me to change society is to change myself.
I don’t remember saying that. In fact, I said that judging anyone on the basis of an association with a group was an error.
I know I didn’t say that.
I was responding to a post directed to me that expressed exactly that. And assumed that I was advocating doing nothing in the face of an obvious evil.
Pointing out that feminism includes sexual stereotypes falls somewhat short of calling entire groups of people bigots. In the end, what you think, and what you feel, and what you use in your own view to rationalize that makes very little difference. What you do is what matters, and what you do happens one individual at a time.
The thing about isms that bothers me most is that they generally create dichotomies. You can’t have an us, without a them.
Tris
[QUOTE=Triskadecamus]
A point. I haven’t said one single thing about feminists, individually, or as a group.
[/QUOTE]
Well, I’m not trying to mischaracterize your perspective, and for what it’s worth I think you have been a bit unfairly characterized here. And to clarify, whether or not you agree with feminism as a worldview that defines your life is one thing, and I’m not trying to touch that. But I don’t see any way around the fact that the objection you’ve actually made - “Feminism is sexism” - and the ways you’ve expanded on that are statements about feminists, since feminism doesn’t exist other than as ideas in people’s heads. You’re saying feminists have sexist beliefs. I think I recall that you’re a Christian - when certain people say Christianity is a mental illness, do you think they’re saying anything about you, or about Christians as a group?
The important thing, though, is that I think your statement is inaccurate. I don’t want to parse this to death, but my point is that, whether you realize it or not, it seems like you came into this with a pretty specific preconceived notion about what feminism is. I know this is where you’re coming from because of basically everything you’ve said, but it boils down to this:
What you’re saying is that feminism is about categorizing - men do this, and that’s bad. Men do that, and that’s bad. Women can’t do this, this, or this, and it’s all men’s fault. And since you think that kind of stereotyping is bad, you’re against feminism. Again, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but that seems pretty clearly to be what you’re saying, and I think you’re stereotyping, and inaccurately. I think you’re wrong, though. I think feminism is about an outcome, and it’s only when you look at how fucking far from that outcome we are that men start to look awful. That’s not the feminists’ fault, though.
Advocates for equality might seem to have an agenda against the group that’s currently benefiting from inequality. They might even have one. That doesn’t mean they aren’t advocating for equality. In the actual world, it’s called feminism because that’s what it is. But it doesn’t require the kind of dichotomy you’re worried about, except to the extent that the dichotomy is already present in our actual everyday existence. You’re concerned with the philosophical purity in theory of an ideology that in practice has the goal of elevating women’s rights; like what if women were more powerful than men, isn’t feminism super scary in that light? It’s a really common objection to progressive movements: basically “since we should all be equal on this axis, we should immediately all ignore classifications made on it.” It was responsible for the death of Reconstruction. What it misses is that the “social forces” you’re talking about are still present, and won’t change unless some other social forces change them. It’s like walking into a room where one kid’s got all the toys piled up in front of him, and the other kid is crying and has a black eye. You could enforce equality by sitting there and making sure that for the rest of the day each kid keeps exactly the same number of toys they had when you walked in, but you’d be missing something important.
Feminism is just the name of the social force that corrects for a historical tendency away from gender equality. If the world was different, it could be called He-mancipation or something, but this is the actual world. The goal is still equality, and if you’re for that, you’re working for the feminists.
On examination, I think you are right; my original unexpanded statement was inflammatory. Yes, attitudes need to be explored publicly, and it was a disservice to something important to make the simple unqualified statement.
I support the encouragement of anyone who has suffered from laws, customs, and social attitudes which impose discriminatory limits upon their lives. I strive to practice examination of my own attitudes and habits to change the ones which are based on categorical assumptions. I do not feel that I am belittling any person if I simply disagree with an opinion they hold, but I understand that that might be their perception. I certainly have not meant to imply that struggles to overcome such social attitudes are wrong. I do not get that impression from re-reading my words, but I must accept that that is how I was perceived.
Tris
White guys can still be the subjects of discrimination, no matter how unpopular such a belief may be.
Of course he can, he could be gay. Oh wait, you were using white guy as shorthand for heterosexual and every other assumption for what is default in our society. Like it was a position of privilege or something. Funny how that works.
My point stands though- it’s still entirely possible for White Guys (in the “shorthand for what is what society sees as default” sense) to be discriminated against, although people like to pretend otherwise or try and argue that it’s irrelevant.
Two favorites who fit here…
“Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.”
~Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler
“You don’t have to be anti-man to be pro-woman.”
~Jane Galvin Lewis
Sigh. Dude, of course someone can, on an individual basis face prejudice from another individual because they are white or straight or a man. But there is no systematic institutionalized bias against men because they are men, or white people because they are white, or heterosexuals because they are straight. And because of that, your point is the very essence of fucking irrelevant within the context of the conversation at hand.