There are a startling number of women and men who believe in perfect equality between the sexes, but who are reluctant to call themselves “feminists”. The Merriam Webster WWWebster Online Dictionary gives this definition of “feminism”:
If that’s just exactly what they believe, why don’t they want to use the word “feminist”? As a feminist, I find this most peculiar.
Probably because the term has negative connotations.
Some things you don’t need to advertise or label.You can categorize people yourself after you talk to them. “Feminsim” as a word has sort of been overused and no longer has the impact it had at first.
matt_mcl asks:
[quote[There are a startling number of women and men who believe in perfect equality between the sexes, but who are reluctant to call themselves “feminists”. The Merriam Webster WWWebster Online Dictionary gives this definition of “feminism”:
If that’s just exactly what they believe, why don’t they want to use the word “feminist”? As a feminist, I find this most peculiar. [/quote]
At the risk of starting World War III, I will suggest that the Online Dictionary is a decade or so behind the living language in its definition. If we could guarantee that the meaning of the word “feminist” would never mutate, more people might identify themselves by this label. OTOH,asserting this is a bit like King Canute assuring prospective purchasers that beachfront property has no risk of being flooded out.
Without, again, going into the merits of the sociopolitical position oft called “liberal”, the current use of the word should be compared to its use in, say, the 1920s. That’s what happened to “feminism”, only faster.
“Kings die, and leave their crowns to their sons. Shmuel HaKatan took all the treasures in the world, and went away.”
Feminism has that male-bashing connotation attached to it.
I think it’s time for someone to coin a new word.
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Because they’re chicken.
Face it, “feminist” bacame even more degraded in meaning with the coining of the term “feminazi.” The two words became closely linked in the minds of the great unwashed, especially those opposed to the concept in the first place.
I don’t have a problem calling myself a feminist. I’m not into male bashing (not seriously, anyway - more like a weekend past-time) and I don’t think that men need to be “punished” en masse for their prior treatment of women, but I do firmly believe in social, political and economic equality.
I think “feminazi” adequately describes the more extremist female advocates out there; the rest of us can take back “feminist” and make it mean what it’s supposed to mean.
Most guys I know ARE feminists, too, by that definition. Some of them will even admit to it.
My favorite was a female satirist who was checking into various “militia” group websites and found them complaining about “feminazis”. Being as most of these groups openly admired Hitler, she figured these yahoos ought to like feminazis.
I agree with the origional beliefs of feminism, but refuse to call myself one because of the man-hating psychos out there who claim to be feminists. (My mother is one prime example.)
I use “equalist” whenever I accidentally stray into that territory of discussion with my husband. I get better results. FemiNaziism is a real sore spot for him.
Dawnbird, would it not just be better for those who believe in feminist ideals to reclaim the term from the extremists?
My (admittedly limited) understanding of recent feminist history leads me to the conclusion that it isn’t simply the man-hating element that has allowed that definition to take over, but the Dr Pat
Robertsons of the world who clearly have an interest in convincing women they aren’t ‘feminists’–even when, by the actual definition of the word, they really are.
It seems to me that by letting those types define the term, you’re granting them a victory.
Feminism comes from the same root as female. It originally referred to those who were promoting women’s rights. At the time this was equivalent to saying “equal rights”, because women were (under the law) considered less than men; as women gained more rights, they became (under the law) more equal to men.
Nowadays, certain self-described feminists use the term to denote the promotion of women’s rights, at the expense of men’s rights. Regardless of how the dictionary defines the word, in people’s minds it has become linked with the more militant end. (I was once present for a diatribe on how men are evil and disgusting, and should all be euthanized at age 13, after beign forced to donate sperm for use in artificial insemination. Fun, eh?)
I think I like equalist, it sounds much closer to what it means.
I don’t think it is possible to erase a connotation, even in one mind. I’d have to do it in a minimum of three (me, my husband, and my father) before I declared it publicly, just to protect my own sanity and home life. I’d rather just make up a new word that sounds closer to my own beliefs anyway.
Reclaiming ideals sounds really noble, but I have never heard of a moderate activist. How would we get noticed? Picketing fringe groups? Sending happy-grams to divorced men? Spamming my mother’s therapist?
I take that back, I’ve heard of Ghandi and Martin Luther King, but their ideas probably seemed radical at the time.
This is kind of a related subject, so instead of starting a new thread for this question I’ll add it here.
A misanthrope hates people.
A misognyst hates women.
What is the name for a person who hates men?
Please don’t say feminist or lesbian. That’s what I heard all weekend.
Sorry for going off topic.
Feminism is the apparently simple and straightforward idea that the sexes are equal and should be treated as such socially and legally. However, although it is not something that rises up and smacks you in the face in 1999 the first time you look around, the historical underpinnings of our social system were PATRIARCHAL, i.e., based on male supremacy. There are still distinct vestiges of these roots, including furious reactionary social attitudes towards women, sexual equality, and (of course) feminism. You could definitely fill up a large banquet hall with publicly outspoken people who believe that society would be better off if women stayed at home and took orders from their husband, who had legal, physical, and economic control over them; that sex should be available to young men only if they had in their pockets money they had earned from older men for whom they have been working; that this should be accomplished by eliminating birth control and abortion and reintensifying the double standard as harshly as it used to be; and by making it virtually impossible for a female to survive comfortably in the absence of economic dependence on a male.
Feminists have often been portrayed as extremist man-haters; actually, from a long list of alleged man-hating feminists [Robin Morgan, Marilyn French, Mary Daly, Sonia Johnson, Andrea Dworkin, Shelia Rowbotham, Gloria Steinem], you’ll find, if you read what they actually said in detail, that very few of them promote anything much more “extreme” than “sexual inequality continues to persist and it is a centrally important social problem and we’re determined to fix it and will point to specifics as often as possible”. (You may not agree about its importance, but that doesn’t make them man haters). Sometimes in a statement here or there an individual may have made some cynical comment about men but exasperation of this sort is different (to me) than an agenda of organizing against men as a permanent enemy or saying there is something inherently inferior or hate-worthy about men per se.
The only major feminist figure that I would describe as genuinely anti-male is Mary Daly. Even Andrea Dworkin is not anti-male so much as she is anti-sex (and sees sex as victimizing women); Marilyn French is eminently fair to men in her theoretical writings and her explanations of patriarchy and feminism; so is Robin Morgan, and Sonia Johnson. Others less overtly so, but seldom asserting anything you could really call man-hating.
I have writings on feminist theory at my web site.
http://home.earthlink.net/~ahunter
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Misandrist, assuming you mean “specifically male” when you say “men”, and that you are thinking of females doing the hating. The word for “man-hater” that you more often hear is “misanthropist”, which uses “man” in the same sense as “mankind” and “modern man” and so forth.
Our language has used “men” to mean “people” as well as “male people”, not because males were thought unworthy of having their own word, but because the perspectives, beliefs, attitudes, etc., of females was once simply not thought about by men. Females were labeled by their behavior, not by their belief systems.
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I’ll resist the urge to use a number of punchlines to say that it’s “misandronist”. I think it’s a recent coinage, and I’ve mostly seen it on internet postings.
AHunter, I’m surprised you haven’t mentioned Catherine MacKinnon (sp?), the “feminist legal scholar” who is credited for saying that all heterosexual sex is rape. Whether she actually said that or implied it and the context is something I can’t be sure of but that’s the person various people conjure up when they describe the disdain they have for feminism.
I think many women who claim to be anti-femiinist are in fact vehemently “equalist” but dislike the anti-sexuality of some types of feminism. MacKinnon is usually the feminist most associated with asexual feminism.
Alphagene
Alphagene
Yes, she’s definitely another who is associated with man-hating. She is not as severe as Dworkin on the subject of heterosexual sex; what she says, in essence, is that IN OUR CURRENT CULTURE, given the various pressures on women to go along with male sexual initiative (including economic pressure and lousy legal recourse for rape victims, intimidation, etc), the only way you could KNOW if sex were truly volitional would be if it were the female’s idea (her initiative). She doesn’t say all men are rapists or that all hetero sex is rape; she says “consent” is a very murky term. She definitely doesn’t say that this will always be so due to some built-in characteristic of either men or heterosexual sex. Again, you may not agree (I don’t) that pressures on women are so bad that they don’t really have the free will to say “no” when they mean no, but I don’t think her position makes her a man-hater.
MacKinnon is more widely painted as an opponent of freedom of speech.
Her book Feminism Unmodified is a good summary of her positions.
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To: Alphagene & AHunter3
Thank You, Thank You, Thank You, a thousand times Thank You.
I thought that word was gonna drive me crazy. Thank You, Thank You, Thank You.