Do you consider yourself a feminist?

In My Humble Opinion
161

Having seen a variety of different approaches to warning students/young adults about rape [this is in the United States, but with a campus heavily mixed with students from around the world], the best educational approach, IMO, is “this is what sexual assault looks like” paired with “this is what consent looks like” vs “this is a gray area” with encouragement of “seek consent, avoid the gray area, and if you find yourself in the area that’s definitely sexual assault, there’s a problem”. It’s not pointed specifically at men or specifically at women, but gives sex positive guidance to both genders and doesn’t assume that all sexual encounters are PIV sex. The college students I work* with are still as naive about appropriate sexual behavior and come from all over the world; reminding them what consent looks like, what’s a “red flag” behavior and how to avoid getting in that situation from either side does seem to help. (*I’m a librarian, not a sex educator-- I don’t talk to them directly about their sex lives, but I interact with them enough that I do end up hearing about stuff that’s going or or has happened. They’re doing a lot of the same dumb stuff that happened when I was in college a decade ago.)

That said, what one wears has very little to do with whether or not that person will be raped. There are plenty of places where one can wear as little as possible and have every person around them treat them with respect for the autonomy of their own body, and places where being as covered as one can get without getting into hijab/burka territory and still get sexually assaulted. If someone is looking to rape, they’re looking for someone who’s unlikely to fight back, not someone who’s wearing very little in the way of clothes.

162

I’ve never heard of a rapist saying specifically about their victim, “but she was SO HOT in that [small amount of clothing]! I couldn’t help myself.” I have, however, heard plenty of “she didn’t say no” or “she was flirting with me-- I thought she was interested” and plenty of people not involved as rapist or object of rape* say that a woman’s clothes were part of the situation. “She shouldn’t have dressed like that if she didn’t want it to happen” is generally folks outside of the situation trying to assign blame to the victim for the crime committed against her. (*For those who rape, are the women actually people in the event of rape, or merely objects to gain power over?)

I’m not saying that one should expect to be safe from violence anywhere, at any time from any person, but that it shouldn’t be the norm for women to have to avoid places or being out at certain times of day to avoid getting sexually assaulted.
Edit: When speaking of rape in the first response, I’m talking generally about sexual assault in the US. I have no experience with folks recounting rape to me outside of the US, where cultural norms may vary widely enough that the statement is plausible.

163

Okay, I was going to do this at the beginning of the thread, but ended up deciding not too because digging up links requires effort. Like I said, as long as y’all are around I’m perfectly happy to call myself a “feminist”, but to follow up on Lobot’s post perhaps I can explain why I stopped openly identifying myself as a feminist on the internet at large.

It started with this article, which I found a decent article with a couple of quibbles. But the thing that bothered me about it was its exclusionary tone. It’s not just “hey, feminist guys. These are things that I don’t think are okay, ponder them!” It’s literally “a guy is not REALLY a feminist if he interrupts a woman.” The paragraph on objectification literally calls you “not a feminist” if you subscribe to a school that believes that sexually charged images can be empowering. And best of all? It has a built in escape clause, if you don’t like the article, you’re not a feminist. HA TAKE THAT WOULD BE CRITICIZER. Now, like I said, the article wasn’t that bad, though I did take issue with the follow-up which goes ahead and says that “mansplaining” which as a term is admittedly pretty low on my list of “things to get worked up about”, is totally okay because men have privilege. So using terms like that is okay because they still have privilege at the end of the day. Or that a man is necessarily less of an expert on sexism than a woman, not just usually, but necessarily (who should I trust, a published, educated, qualified male sociologist or a female feminist blogger?).

None of these remarks, alone, is all that objectionable. But they’re very prevalent in the feminist blogger sphere, and it can get tiring. There was another article called A man is a rape supporter if, which includes such wonderful tidbits like “He defends the current legal definition of rape and/or opposes making consent a defense.” (For those of you that have trouble parsing that like I did at first, it’s saying you support rape culture if you oppose making people on rape charges guilty until proven innocent. I.E. if you oppose the idea that the charged rapist has to PROVE the woman CONSENTED, rather than the other way around), or “watches porn”. Again, this isn’t just “I disagree”, it’s “you support rape culture and should feel bad if…”

Oh, and then there was a blowup with the Tumblr feminists. Where one blogger was caught using the word “tranny”… in a blog post from 4-5 years ago. The blogger’s response? That she was young (16 or 17 iirc), didn’t know that “tranny” wasn’t the preferred term at the time and apologized. Didn’t work, the mainstream Tumblr feminists ate her alive, basically ran a smear campaign and generally treated her like shit and mocked her for it (sorry, lost my links on that one).

But hey, internet whackos, what are you going to do, right? Well, I was perfectly content to go on with that view, believing that the overly-exclusionist people were just a particularly obnoxious minority. Then Elevatorgate happened.

Don’t get me wrong, this has nothing to do with the specific event Elevatorgate (also, I call a moratorium on adding “gate” to the end of things) was centered around. In fact, if it wasn’t for that moment of utter internet insanity, I probably would have ultimately ended up in the Skepchick/PZ Meyers camp on it (the ORIGINAL camp, that the guy was kind of creepy; not whatever archetype of male privilege and rape culture he was made out to be after a few weeks of psycho-blog wars). What got me was the conduct. These are not small names in skeptic+feminist community, and the behavior (on both sides) was appalling. The words “misogynist” and “gender traitor” were being thrown about at a ridiculous level, they ceased to have any purpose other than to mean “person who disagrees with me” and were used for no reason to shut down discussion. Anybody who dared to just say “hey, guys, maybe we’re overreacting just a bit…” was branded as a non-feminist, and usually a misogynist. It was a witch-hunt, plain and simple.

[On Preview, let me add this before my conclusion]:

This is another “exclusionary” thing that got on my nerves. This video (I recommend you skip until about 1:15 or so) does a decent job explaining it. I don’t comment of feminist blogs, so it doesn’t really affect me personally, but there’s always been a sense of sterilization to the comment section on a lot of blogs. It got rather tiring.

So overall, for me at least, it had very little to do with the actual ideas, content, or thesis of feminism. It was literally me throwing up my hands and saying “fuck it.” It became clear to me that to a large and vocal contingent of internet feminists, you were simply just not allowed to identify yourself with feminism if you didn’t align yourself with The [del]Prophets[/del] Bloggers, and that you were a misogynist (or “gender traitor”, the stupidest term I’ve ever heard) if you dare to disagree that this or that (“this or that” dictated by The Bloggers of course) is a glaring example of Privilege or Patriarchy or Rape Culture. So I said “fine”, if they didn’t want people in their club, I didn’t want to go to their shitty little treehouse and eat their crappy cookies or drink their crappy lemonade anyway. I agreed with them a lot, and disagreed occasionally, but I just got worn down by the overall exclusionary tone of the movement. Rather than accepting people, faults and all, and being open to dialogue about gender issues and women’s rights it became a nasty, petty little quasi-religious club that branded those they didn’t agree with witches and that was the end of that.

It had nothing to do with the issues of the movement, I never stopped agreeing with the issues and ideals the movement embodies as a whole. It was a constant, absolutely exhausting barrage of exclusionary rhetoric. It had nothing to do, for me, with “crazy feminists” or “man hating”, it was the simple fact that I got sick and tired of so many prominent bloggers, many of whom I respected and thought had good ideas, refusing to entertain discourse, instead falling back on cheap shots, overused snark, and calling witch hunts. Those petty articles with built in catch clauses like “if you disagree then you’re not a feminist.” It was just me standing up and saying “well fine, if you don’t want me, then you’re rid of me.”

Were they the minority? I suppose if you tallied up all the feminists in the world, yeah, they’re probably tiny, but strictly speaking this kind of shit is the stuff that gets blog hits. The kind of snark they use is the stuff that gets them (non-academic) conference talks. It’s simple man bites dog. They’re not just “loud” so much as “everywhere.” It had nothing to do with whether on a given message board, or offline they’re the majority. It’s that their voice is the voice that is the most visible and gets the most views, they’re the voice that carries weight, their voice is the voice that can (intentionally or unintentionally) lead to legions of fans DDOSing your blog or flooding your inbox. And yes, this also means that when they post something petty or obnoxious, it’s the blog everybody links to so that others think that their attention-seeking rhetoric and minority view on that one topic represent what feminism is all about, for better or worse.

Maybe I’m just a mental weakling for proverbially taking my ball and going home when people on the internet were being MEANIES, but I just got tired of it which is why I stopped using the label for myself. I just didn’t want to be associated with it anymore. I didn’t stop believing in feminism as an ideology, I stopped being a feminist as it related to a movement.

164

One of the top three ridiculous statements in this thread, congratulations.

Females aren’t human. Understood.

165

No, it points out that claiming to be a “humanist” and not a feminist is ridiculous. Not being a feminist is a pretty explicit choice, so you are explicitly stating you do not support women having equal rights to men.

It’s like someone claiming they are a “humanist”, but also a racist: a ridiculous position.

166

It’s a definition disconnect, that’s all. Some people take feminism to mean “flavor of the month feminism” meaning whatever set of values, political and social theories (i.e. Patriarchy), and rhetoric embraced and endorsed by the majority and/or most vocal proponents of “feminism” at a given time. Others take “feminism” to mean the basic conceptual underpinning that binds all movements that do or at one point did take the label.

People who say that they’re “not feminists” but “are humanists” are meaning that they disagree with the current in vogue platform espoused by prominent self-described “feminists”, but agree with the platform espoused by “humanists”. Gracer, Diosa, etc, are using the “basic terms” with no regard to whatever the current “flavor of the month” of a given movement is. I think that’s the root cause of the disagreement present in the vast majority of the thread.

167

I think you’ve got the inverses mixed up. Humanism should include Feminism in that a hypothetical Humanist would be working for the betterment of all persons regardless of gender. Attempting to be a Humanist *and *a Feminist simultaneously would be the “ridiculous position” in that a Humanist would not consider women’s issues to be a higher priority than men’s issues.

But I don’t have a dog in this fight, as “feminism” seems to have been defined away from what I understood it to mean back in the 1970s, when it seemed to be about gender equality. I cannot identify myself as a Feminist without much more study as to what the word means today.

168

I think this is a really good point. I don’t interact with the former very much, so to me ‘feminism’ is not a militant man-hating philosophy. But there are people out there, and people in this very thread who are perpetuating that stereotype as the only iteration of the term, which is why they demand that people who don’t follow that definition of feminism to “change their name” or go along with some other group who doesn’t have women’s rights specifically as their root cause. To me, there isn’t a need to change the name of anything, but the people furthering the stereotype that all feminists are militant shouldn’t be able to then complain that the stereotype is that all feminists are militant and anyone who isn’t shouldn’t call themselves a feminist.

169

I’m a man and don’t consider myself a feminist in that I’ve put absolutely no thought into whether I’m a feminist or not.

170

That’s ironic, because another recent feminist web-scandal was over radfemhub, a gang of.. well, radfems, who hate transexuals because they don’t play into the feminists’ gender stereotypes. They don’t think men should be able to invade “female safe spaces”, for example, just because they are now women. As if a man would have his genitals removed just to get into a women’s changing room.

171

You’re right, of course. And it is a silly discussion. It’s just sad that so many people don’t want to say they are a feminist because Someone Is Wrong on the Internet. People don’t stop being Christians because of the Westboro Baptists, and don’t stop being atheists because of Der Trihs (nothing against you, Der, I agree with you most of the time). Either you think women should have equal rights to men, or you don’t.

172

Most anti-feminists I’m talked to have some spectacular story about they came to be anti-feminist, like being raped by a woman then laughed at when they talked about it, or being beaten by their wife and then phoning the police only to be arrested, I’ve got none of that.

Once upon a time I would have called myself a feminist, I was and am in favour of equality, and that’s what I’d heard it meant. The thing that changed my mind was feminists. I came across some, and found I didn’t agree with them at all. They didn’t believe in equality at all, but in turning every little thing into a tale of female woe. Naturally, I first thought they were radicals and crazies, but the same approach has since proven to be universal. Any discussion with a feminist ends the same way. Talk about the draft, they’ll tell you it’s only on men because women can’t fight in combat roles. Talk about child custody, it’s because sterotypes of women pressure them to be primary carers. Talk about anything and the best you can hope for is the nonsensical “Patriarchy hurts men too”.

They also have a disturbing tendency to be conservative, from the point of view of a long-haired pacifist hippy like me.

So I am now an anti-feminist.

173

And if you believe everyone should have equal rights, none more equal than others, why call yourself a feminist? Why not just be an egalitarian?

174

It’s about your lenses. When I analyze Lysistrata from my perspective of a 21st century gay male in a 1st world country, I come away with certain themes and concepts relevant to that perspective. When I analyze it through a neo-classical lens, different aspects come into focus and themes that are striking from my personal point of view become muted. The same is true when I view it as a humanist, or a feminist or an egalitarian. These are all schools of thought concerned with equality and how to achieve it but the methods may differ and the POVs are not the same. A feminist interpretation, for example, would be hard-pressed not to focus on the role of Lysistrata, both within the context of the play and the wider society as well as what the traditional drag aspect imbues the character with. A humanist interpretation may, while still being focused on the concept of equal rights, may be more focused on Kinesias. This is not to say that one cannot look at masculinity through a feminist lens or vice versa but that a feminist perspective should always be tying the interpretation of the material back to the female experience, while a humanist perspective need not go that far, but simply stops at human. It’s a false dilemma to say you can only be a humanist or a feminist. Both are interesting ways to look at life and philosophy and art and one cannot fulfill all the functions of the other, although they may sometimes overlap.

175

I voted no. I strongly believe in gender equality, but to that end, I believe that the term feminist has outlived its purpose. It made sense to call it feminism in the past, and though we still don’t have gender equality, that difference is considerably smaller and it doesn’t only affect women either (eg, selective service). The moral solution is to identify inequalities for either gender and at least raise the standards for the one that is lower if not raise them for both.

Feminism also carries with it a lot of connotation and social stigma. Yes, a lot of that isn’t exactly fair, but regardless, it can interfere with the message and the purpose. By that, I mean that if a person has an association of feminism with “man-hating”, they might actually have ultimately agreed with the underlying point, but tuned it out.

Further, I think there’s choice and biological elements to it and that’s often overlooked. For instance, if a man and a woman both choose to pursue their careers and not have children and are similarly qualified, they should be similarly paid. But if a woman, or a man, decides to have kids and take time to take care of them, that reasonably ought to affect their pay and that’s something that’s often not properly factored in with that discussion. That will tend to have more of an impact on women, because of the biology of giving birth, but there are also the social elements that can be worked on to have a greater share of taking care of young children more equally on both parents. Similarly, a man or woman who wants to have a more traditional gender role ought to be able to choose to do so without fear of setting gender equality farther back.

So, instead, I’ll just call it what it is, gender equality, or more generically humanism or just equality since I also believe in racial equality, sexual preference equality, etc. I want people to just hear the message of equality, opportunity, and choice and not get stuck up in some antiquated ideas.

176

I don’t believe in changing names of things to make it easier for stupid people.

177

Anyone care to theorize the huge disparity in male and female answers here? Women overwhelmingly identify as feminists, while the male vote is far more split up. What’s the reason for this?

178

Thank you. :smiley:

Most social issues are very, very complex. There are way too many people who like to jump right into the middle and declare their opinion, without considering the background, context, or even what the person right before them said. And then get all confused when people roll their eyes and tell them to STFU.

179

Because it is a useful term. In many situations there is still work to be done on the issue of women’s rights, when you are doing that you are involved with feminist issues. Like racism is a useful term. Just because we could call it “non-egalitarian” when something is racist, doesn’t mean it’s useful.

Like in 1984 “double-plus-ungood” instead of bad, it narrows the minds of people because they will have fewer words in which to express thoughts. Institutionalised sexism exists, taking away the word feminism doesn’t help the cause of egalitarianism. It just narrows your capacity to express yourself.

180

I’m shocked that the author of the thread about why rape convictions should be lower than their already embarrassingly low level (hint:because women lie) is an anti-feminist. Shocked I tell you.