Fascinating Guardian article" Feminism is "outmoded"?

In My Humble Opinion
41

It’s pretty obvious what has happened to feminism.

Feminism used to be about freedom of choice for women as well as men, a generally empowering human rights movement that focused on helping women be free, but also considered freedom for men a good idea.

In the U.S. a splinter group of radical feminists pretty much took over feminism in the US (and in the UK too, from what I’ve heard) in the 1980s and turned feminism in a direction that sort of handed the playing field to the conservatives.

They became anti-sex feminists like Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin who didn’t like sexual imagery, i.e., porn, even mild stuff like Playboy, much less what you find on the Internet nowadays. They didn’t like “breeders” and stay-at-home moms as has been pointed out. Like modern racists, many of them are unwilling to admit publicly to their feelings, but its still easy enough to see that they have no interests in advancing the interests of family-oriented women. And middle class and lower middle class women DO have a feeling that feminism is only for upper-class women, as indicated by the survey cited upthread.

This radical anti-sex feminist splinter group allowed guys like Shodan to crank out rants like the one in his post without sounding like total whackos. (Of course, Shodan IS a whacko, but enough of his post has a distant relation to reality that he doesn’t SOUND like he’s living on another planet, though in fact he is).

Since then there has been a terrific backlash against feminism from the mainstream accompanied by a rejection of anti-sex feminism by mainstream feminists and even the formation of “pro-sex feminism” by folks like Sallie Tisdale and Nadine Strossen as they strive to regain the mainstream. This battle was mostly fought and played out a decade or more ago in feminist circles. But the political leadership of feminism have refused to categorically reject anti-sex feminism, allowing guys like Shodan to try to represent them as the whole of feminism. And frankly, a lot of “women’s studies” academics continue to crank out drivel that sounds like it came striaght from the 80s, giving guys like Shodan fresh ammo in their campaign to oppress women.

Pretty sad, really, feminism has a lot to offer us all, but that splinter group REALLY REALLY hurt the movement as a whole. This is one case where the “big tent” idea was not a good one.

42

Last I checked this was IMHO and not the Pit.

43

Well, good point. I was just trying to draw Shodan’s ideas about feminism and the role of women out a bit. Shodan is of course a fine fellow who is merely mistaken in his beliefs.

44

Thanks for the attempt at support, but I couldn’t disagree with you more. The trouble with your argument is that abortion is not simply a medical issue. For many, it is a religious, ethical, and moral issue. As a feminist, I am not going to sit in judgment of the religions, ethics, and morals of other women…or men for that matter.

As a feminist, I see my role as one of supporting women in their struggle for respect and the right to choose. I live the life of a free, independent, educated woman who earns her own money and makes her own choices. I do not dare say that this is what all women should do. I simply support their right to do so if they wish. My best friend is a mother of 3 who stays at home with her precious children while her husband works. If I sat in judgment of her and said she didn’t “qualify” as a feminist, I’d be a hypocrite. She chose her life, and I couldn’t be happier for her.

So while I appreciate your support, I’ll have to humbly disagree.

45

That’s all warm and fuzzy, but logically non-sensical. As a “feminist” don’t you have to sit in judgement of the ethical and moral behavior of others at some point in order to make critical distinctions about what is and is not appropriate behavior?

If being a feminist is “supporting women in their struggle for respect and the right to choose”, how do you intend on doing this in any meaningful or effective fashion without making ethical or moral judgements? If you’re going to call yourself a feminist at least have the ovaries to make judgements. The more radical feminists may have divisive opinions, but at least they aren’t apologetic or philosophically inconsistent about the fact that they are drawing ethical and moral distinctions.

46

Mod note:
It certainly is. Impassioned debate is fine but the rule is still “the idea, not the poster.” This hasn’t gone quite over the line but just as general reminder to all, please retain respect for those whose beliefs are contrary to yours.

Who knows what can happen if we all keep talking…and listening?

TVeblen,
for the SDMB

47

I agree with this whole post and, astro this line of thought leads into what you want me to clarify. “Mainstream” feminism is grassroots and as cowgirl pointed out, there are as many types of feminism as there are feminists. Feminist thought is spread far and wide and what takes place in universities is only a small part of it. Whether or not feminist thought should be consolidated with an egghead as captain is a different question but so far it has not been despite what some people might think.

When feminist theory started to shift towards radical ideas like lesbian separatism and “all sex is rape” most women outside universities didn’t feel a new code of feminism had come down. Popular women’s magazines didn’t publish essays about how feminism had turned into a joke and we should all disown it. Women’s magazines carried merrily on with articles about sexual harassment and violence against women. In my highschool girls who couldn’t write a theme for English class were perfectly able to discuss and debate issues that were in the limelight such as gender bias in language, whether porn was degrading, what constituted rape, etc. I didn’t know or hear of a single everyday girl or woman who felt she was being forced to agree with extreme views because part of the fun of feminism was debating the issues and refining your beliefs. That was part of the duty of being a feminist. To think for yourself.

But what was creeping in was this outside blanket condemnation. It started to be that if you said you were a femninst, a certain type of person would roll his or her eyes and accuse you of believing things you never said and certainly didn’t believe. Pretty soon you couldn’t open your mouth to say, “that’s not fair,” without being told off for hating men. Many many women got sick of being cut short by the word feminist. It was non feminists who claimed you had to agree with every woman who ever called herself a feminst if you wanted to make a feminist argument.

If, over time, women have come to believe the slander against feminism, that’s an entirely different thing from saying that feminists all jumped ship because of exteme views within feminism that just ‘didn’t speak for them.’ I can’t stand to see people use surveys about women not wanting to be called feminists as some kind of proof that it was because feminism became ridiculous or rigid or redundant.

Many women just aren’t motivated to claim the word. Sometimes it’s because they don’t have the critical faculties to recognize a straw man. Sometimes it’s because they don’t want to give others an opportunity to use it against them every time they need to assert their rights. Sometimes it’s because they have youthful insecurities and can’t handle having their femininity attacked. But it’s not because something is wrong with feminism. (I do realize there are people who believe ‘gender equality has been largely achieved’ but all I can figure about those people is that they just skip to the community section when they read the papers.)

48

Jeez - this is what I get for not checking my own thread sooner. Last time I was here it had seven posts! It’s going to take me a couple posts of my own to respond to everything I want to.

cowgirl, with all due respect to your views, I cannot agree. And I do not take this issue lightly; I was raised from infancy by a divorced single mother myself, in a very conservative rural community where divorce was still somewhat stigmatized. In a high school of 800, I was one of less than a half-dozen kids who I knew were from single-parent homes (male or female).
Even worse, my dad was a “deadbeat dad” (hence the divorce). He moved to another state, visited infrequently, rarely stayed in touch, and ASFAIK, paid hardly a dime in child support.

Because of my upbringing, to this day I have a strong emotional affinity for single mothers. I am well aware of the consequences of choice (b). But (and here is my point, finally) you are forgetting another choice: the choice to take responsibility for the acts that lead to getting pregnant in the first place.
Frankly, in this day and age of the Pill and condoms available in every corner drugstore, what excuse does a woman have for getting pregnant? Yes, birth control can fail, rape happens, and there will always be teenagers who do foolish things out of ignorance. These might be considered special cases. But the point is, everybody knows how babies are made. If a woman is with a man who is not going to support her, if she is not ready to support a child, then why is she risking having one?
I’m not really trying to make the case for chastity, I’m trying to point out the incapatability of two feminist goals: sexual empowerment, and free choice. Sex has consequences. In your post, you seem to be saying that these consequences are unfair, but how can that be? After all, except for the special cases mentioned above, the woman freely chose to have sex. You seem to be saying (by implication, not directly) that women should be free to have sex, yet also be free from the consequences of that choice. You can’t eat your cake and have it, too.

So, even though it was unpleasant and made my life harder, I’m GLAD there is a stigma attached to single motherhood, at least the kind that is not the result of being widowed or divorced out of necessity. Maybe then more women will think twice about risking pregnancy, just as the threat of being forced to pay child support has forced more men to think about the issue. As a child, I desperately wanted to have a “normal” family, with a father figure, and I know my mother wanted that for me too. I know first-hand that it would have been a better way to be raised than by a single woman, especially one who simply chose to raise a child herself because there were “no consequences” for doing so.
In the latter case, the consequences of the choices made are removed from everyone except the children involved. They still need two parents to help them become well-rounded people, whatever “stigma” the mother has escaped.

And might I point out the “old-fashioned” way of doing things, where women mostly didn’t put out until they had locked a guy down into marriage, neatly solved this whole dilemma?

49

Sorry for taking so long to get back to you ** beagledave**.

It depends what you mean by ‘informed consent’. Many of these operations take place without being planned, on the spur of the moment and when a woman is at her most vulnerable i.e. when she is in agony, tired and possibly confused as to what’s going on. Of course in certain emergency situations these operations are called for and necessary to save lives but concern has and is being expressed by a number of different parties as to the number that occur.

Germaine Greer goes into this in detail in her book The Whole Woman though I was aware of this concern before I read her book. Only just a week or two ago and Irish woman successfully sued her gynaecologist for removing her womb after the birth of her first and only son, leaving her infertile, distraught and depressed for no good reason (or so the court decided after a long and drawn out hearing).

As for cites - there are too many to mention. Just go to Google, do an advanced search and search for the exact phrase ‘unnecessary hysterectomies’ and you will come up with a large number of sites. Then do another Google search for the exact phrase ‘unnessary Caesarean’ and you will come up with an even larger number of sites.

I’m quite busy in work today :frowning: and haven’t read the rest of the new posts yet so apologies of I’m repeating anything anyone else said.

50

All this talk, and no one called Satsfying Andy Licious on this whopper:

Cite, please? The line about male-bashing tends to be a giveaway.

51

IMO SAL goes well overboard on his “bashing” claims, but he is on point with respect to the fact that despite paying lip service to true gender equality, when the rubber meets the road and child custody legislation or access rules are being debated or determined NOW and related organizations are firmly in the camp of the mother getting preferred custody rights and access in almost all cases unless abuse (by the mother) can be proved.

Most fairly conservative people might look at this and think it would be relatively unsurprising that mothers woud be largely favored for custody preference, because mothers and children traditionally have a special bond, but these feminist organizations have to twist themselves into some interesting philsophical knots in doing this. It’s oddly like Orwell’s Animal Farm where true, non-discriminatory equality is the stated goal but in the end “some are more equal than others”.

52

See, if he’s entitled to say stuff like that, then I’m entitled to say this, too: women get custody because men still aren’t doing their share of the housework or childcare. You can’t give them equal custody rights because they haven’t performed equally in raising the kids. The fathers’ rights groups he refers to aren’t so much interested in father’s rights as they are in control, and they tend to be supported by nice, equality-minded groups like the Promise Keepers.

Yeah, it would so help if we weren’t dealing with the very stereotype of feminism that gets people so turned off in the first place. A great number of people associate the phrase ‘male-bashing’ with over sensitive guys who throw temper tantrums when they stop getting their way. And speaking as someone who got fired from a job after my coworkers threatened me with rape and retaliation, I find this screed a tad hysterical. It smacks of those people who believe the Jews secretly run the country, but people find that offensive. The time has come, I suspect, to apply Godwin’s rule to the phrase male-bashing.

The fact is, there’s ‘equality’ and there’s ‘fairness.’ The term equality is most often used by people who know the situation isn’t equal, but still want one, one-size-fits-all rule so they look like they’re being fair. Fairness, however, is more complicated, and it ensures that differences get recognized and everyone arrives at the same place. One thing fairness recognizes is that if the guy didn’t do much or any childcare before the marriage, he hasn’t proven that he’s more than a hobby daddy anyway. Another thing is this: how are fathers getting screwed, when they face a judiciary dominated by men, and not noted for their liberal attitudes toward women?

I’m still waiting for that cite, **SAL. **

53

Yep, we’ve got the Orwell reference, always a good sign. Maybe mothers and children have a special bond because mothers are still doing most of the childcare. Oh, and which feminist groups? Philosophical knots? Care to elaborate?

54

The cite is in the post: “As someone who has seen self-professed feminists in the workplace …”
Unless your unclear comments are referring to the former part of the quotation, in which case ask any father’s rights group.

55

Why certainly. Nomimally NOW’s National Organization of Women) agenda is

If part of the core goals are to eliminate sexism and discrimination and to promote equality one would assume that NOW would be all for maximal participation by caring fathers in their children’s lives to share the workload of child raising and would be eager to see this goal realized.

Instead we have a fairly predictable dichotomy of divorced man vs divorced women rhetorical posturing with the man seeking increased custody rights or modified child support practically asssumed to be the moral equivalent of a batterer ( see posiiton statement below) and elevating the generally rag tag collection of national and regional father’s rights groups into a “well funded” bogeyman ready to oppress women and children at a moment’s notice.

Re the “philosophical knot” comment you inquired about - To bend from a clear, upright moral and ethical postion statement of eliminating sexism and discrimination and promoting equal rights for all to a backroom realpolitik position that you could only assume playing twister, that essentially says men are dangerous and oppressive if they want to see their children more or have the ability to seek support modification and punish false reporting of child abuse, does involve some some degree of philosophical agility.

NOW’s 1996 National Conference Resolutions

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56

Lizard

I don’t think “unfair” came into my post anywhere. What I am trying to point out is that men and women experience the consequences of accidental pregnancy differently: ie men can walk away (I’m not beginning to imply that men will walk away, or that there aren’t many men who would not. Just that the option is there) and women cannot. To me being feminist means recognizing that men and women experience things differently, and what this works out to in practice is that these differences are often to the detrement of women.

Or, what margin said re: fairness vs equality.

SAL It is nice that you know “some self-professed feminists.” Please allow me to remind you that while this may make you an expert in those self-professed feminists that you know, in itself it gives you no authority whatsoever on “feminists” or what they may have to say.

57

You are “entitled” to say anything stereotypical and ignornant.

So if fathers want to share their lives with their children, it’s really just a plot by the patriarchy. You are very well versed in the loony arguments feminists have used to obscure their hypocrisy.

The hallmark of the bigot is the refusal to admit that bigotry exists. You’re fitting the profile to a T.

In my experience, your attitude is entirely typical of radical feminists – only you are allowed to have grievances. Everyone else is just “whining.” All talk of grievances must revolve around you.
Get over yourself, margin.
(And your anectdote about getting fired is just a bit too pat.)

In other words, you want to silence any discussion of man-bashing, rather than admit it exists. Sweep it under the rug, as feminism does with anything inconvenient.

Feminists like Margin will always define “fairness” as “whatever benefits me and to hell with anyone else’s rights.”

One thing margin proves is that feminist will promote any gender stereotype that promotes their immediate goals. Also, folks, note how she defines being a parent as being a mother.

Boy, you really will pull out the stalest of feminist cliches, won’t you? How can men face discrimination in a system dominated by men? Simple – because not every man is the agent of every other man. That male-dominated system sends far more men to death row. All margin would need to do is open up her mind (hah) and ask any father’s rights groups about the discrimination they have faced in the courts.
To put it another way, how could women get choice on abortion in a male dominited judiciary. Well, they did, didn’t they.

58

Wow, it’s Nostalgia Night in the Land of Hoary Feminist Cliches. Under this method of denial, folks, a man is required to personally interview every existing feminist before noting that any single one them is a bigot.
Having seen well-organized, coordinated, card-carrying, activists feminists in action, I have every grounds to comment on those feminists. So cut the crap, cowgirl.
Or if you are so horrified by generalization about feminists, why do you stand aside why your sisters make absurd claims of all feminists being pure and moral?

quote:

Originally posted by Zoe
Feminists support choice for both men and women. Equal rights, equal pay, equal opportunity.

59

One advantage that those who debate the more radical feminists have is that radical feminists do not recognize when they have descended into self-parody. I post that feminism has come to require explicit and unquestioning support for Roe v. Wade, and almost at once there is a flurry of posts proving me right. And others name-calling me for daring to raise the question.

Not to mention that NOW posts that you have to support abortion to be part of their organization:

And then this gem (bolding added):

So if you are in favor of joint custody or mediation, or against lying under oath, you are battering women.

I couldn’t make this up if I tried.

In other words, they don’t even want any research done. Even asking the question “what is best for the child?” is enough to get you accused of being a “biased judge”.

And why? Because NOW is sure that this is a “father’s” rights movement - not mother’s, just father’s, and therefore automatically bad. Because, after all, men are bad.

And worse than that - these woman-battering father’s rights groups are actually involved with (horrors!) conservative Republicans! This is the liberal feminist equivalent of saying that someone is in league with Satan Himself.

And Goddess help anyone who refuses to toe the line. Because feminism is all about preserving freedom of thought for all women to believe without question 100% of whatever the leadership of NOW tells them.

Or else you don’t get to call yourself a feminist.
Regards,
Shodan

60

That’s not what that says. It says they want to make current research available to those who have an interest in promoting the other side of the ‘father’s rights’ story.

I can understand people worrying about whether custodial rights are given or denied unfairly but I can’t for the life of me understand why the problem has to be addressed from outside feminism as if women organizing to raise awareness about what non-custodial parents’ are trying to achieve (and how they are trying to achieve it) translates to ‘all mothers are innately good parents.’ If, statistically, mothers are less effective at putting their family members in the hospital, that’s maybe something that should be considered in questions of automatic rights. It’s important that women maintain the credibility that they have achieved when it comes to protecting their children from abuse. Of course it’s important to find ways to make sure women don’t vindicitively use children as pawns in power struggles that have nothing to do with the children’s interests but eliminating that kind of abuse of the system is very much a part of making the system more fair in general. There is NO reason NOW should stay away from the issue just because someone could read their involvement as taking an unfair interest in the welfare of women and children over men.