So…I have a slave job, but it’s a job and I need the money. Like most slave jobs, it’s poorly organised. As a result of the lack of organisation, we are all given free reign with the rota.
I work with this girl. She claims to be an asexual feminist. Today she abandoned her shift with me to work another shift with a boy she has a crush on.
It’s not really the fact I had to go on a wild goose chase to find work I could do alone, it’s more the irritation I feel towards her mistakenly classifying herself as an asexual feminist.
I’m not a feminist. I am a big fan of Iris Murdoch, Cordelia Fine, Leila Ahmed. Not a feminist though.
However…I get irritated when feminism is self-attributed to women who don’t stand up for the tenets of their ‘belief’.
This girl is one in a long line of girls who act like this. She even had the mendaciousness to say ‘…the word feminism sometimes makes me cringe.’.
It’s possible for an asexual person to have a crush on another person. Crushes are about a lot of things, not just sex.
Also, you’re not a feminist? Really? So, do you then believe that women have no right to equity in voting, property ownership, marriage, work, school, and other areas of life? The term feminism covers a lot of ground, but what it really boils down to is that rights should not be determined by gender.
Me? I get irritated when people start complaining and judging with very little compassion or insight and no real interest in what motivates the people they complain about.
Your coworker isn’t betraying the ideals of feminism by asking to work with a man she is interested in. She may have bad priorities, and she may be making some unwise choices, but she hasn’t denied rights to anyone else because of their gender. If she happens to be one “girl” (is she 18 or older? Because if she is, referring to her as a girl is just a little condescending) in a long line of girls who act like that, take comfort in the idea that you’re just one “boy” in a long line of boys who minimize, disregard, and disrespect other people when they’ve been slightly inconvenienced.
The idea of feminism cannot be simplified to basic rights. We no longer live in a time where the right to vote, to claim equal pay, to stay at home, or to work, is only quietly debated. Woman have a loud voice in 1st world countries, but despite this, there is still subtle and dangerous prejudices that fail to distinguish sexism from racism, classism, and other forms of injustice. Most of the time the idea that if an individual is suffering sexist oppression, then an important part of the explanation why she is subject to the injustice is that she is or appears to be a woman - this is a short-sighted, simple way to look at the world. -So…yes, phouka…I am not a feminist. Nor am I an anti- feminist – which would, of course, be absurd, as I am a female/girl (pejorative?)/woman myself.
When colleagues choose to act in a way that could be interpreted as ‘typical-girl’ (and by that I do mean it in the pejorative) behaviour, they are playing up to a stereotype which is damaging to most feminist ideology which fights to improve on spurious and out-dated practices. This includes cases in which women as a group are explicitly targeted by a policy or a practice, but also includes cases where the policy or practice affects women due to a history of sexism, even if they are not explicitly targeted. All too often, women are still seen as less determined, less intellectual, and vulnerable to obsession – and this sort of thing is immature and ill suited to the work place.
I am not a feminist. I am a just a female who wants to earn enough money to pay off my grad debt
So…yeah…my bearbug is the unfortunate use of the word feminism. The word has been bastardised by people who failed to learn from the likes of Mary Wollstonecraft - one of the first and most vocal feminists (for those of you who don’t know
Well, part of the problem is that feminist theory indicted male behavioral norms as problematic (in need of explanation rather than accepted as the self-evident default) and found many of them to be somewhere within the continuum between “unhealthy” and “oppressive”.
Not without good reason, mind you.
But that leaves the question of female behavior considerably more complicated. It’s figuratively been geological eons since the egalitarian ideal for feminist women was “We are just as good as the males and wish to be regarded and treated and valorized according to the standards used for them”. Even where we stipulate that we’re speaking of an egalitarian feminism that believes in the underlying and ultimate equality of the sexes, an individual feminist may value traditionally female behaviors (i.e., “typical-girl”) as better behaviors than those manifested by men and/or enshrined in male behavioral norms (i.e., “generic workplace norms” which are male-derived norms), or at least acceptable human behaviors that are disparaged only because of being historically associated with female people etc.
I ran into this in a big way this summer - apparently even in 2012, the medical profession is still using men as the norm for human biological standards. My middle-aged female heart wasn’t exactly like a middle-aged male heart, so I did months of invasive and uncomfortable tests to find out that my heart was middle-aged female normal. It blew my mind to find out that the reason for that was because they still haven’t bothered to establish normal standards for women.
in most of an adult females life she has varying levels of hormones changing in a cyclic manner. in science and medicine to compare things you want everything else to be equal, or in a complex living organism as close to equal as can easily be had.
maybe with new and better methods of analysis and data comparison methods better information can be obtained.
I was speaking figuratively (as I said) and I was referring to geological eras as in “dating back to the days when the precambrian shield was being formed” and so forth.
Take into account that the literal meaning of the word feminist and the perceived meaning of the word feminist can be very different.
There are a lot of intelligent people on this board, judging by what I have read since joining today, so you probably all know the correct meaning. Being a feminist means believing in equal rights for women.
By that definition, I am a feminist. Many of the men I know could even be called feminists.
What many other people think is that “feminist” is basically synonymous with “lesbian”. It means you hate men, or think that women are superior to them. It means that you reject traditional gender roles, and are more interested in having a career than having a family.
I don’t know where that misconception came from, but it is a scary word to assign to yourself when it could possibly be interpreted that way.
I don’t think I have ever or will ever refer to myself as a feminist aside from what I wrote in this post, but of course I support equal rights. Of course I think women deserve to be paid the same as men who are doing the same job.
I don’t call that being a feminist, I call that being a decent person.
There was a thread on here not very long ago in which it was indicated (and if memory serves, agreed with by many posters) that you couldn’t claim to buy into feminist theory without also buying into the concept of “rape culture”… that rape culture was an integral and accepted part of modern day feminism. (I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m misremembering here).
It seems to me that there are a lot of pedantic and esoteric ideas like this that academia has decreed are now part and parcel of “feminism”,(which may or may not survive the test of time, in my opinion). While some subsets of feminists may quibble and disagree with various things like this, I think the lack of a universally accepted base definition and the addition of a lot of add-ons dissuades people from self-identifying as “feminist”.
a) As you probably already know, not all lesbians hate men or think that women are superior to men. There are even lesbians who have the male chauvinist belief that men are superior to women (although that’s unusual). And lesbians who embrace (most) traditional gender roles.
I am familiar with the stereotype that you’re alluding to. It includes being a lesbian with the rest of what you mentioned. But the rest of those characteristics are not intrinsically characteristics of lesbians.
b) Let’s assume that feminism came into existence in a world where women were indeed systematically denied equality. Feminism was the movement (therefore) against patriarchal oppression as well as for equality. Feminism would not appeal ONLY to women who were angry at men already, nor would it inevitably make all women angry at men, but you can sort of see how it would be relatively difficult to NOT become at least somewhat angry at men as you became increasingly aware of women’s oppression, yes? Anger is not hate but it can come across as hateful. Add in some women who really do hate men and aren’t just angry at them. Add in some men’s perception that any woman who would accuse men of oppessing women (even categorically as a class, without reference to them as individuals being deliberate participants in that) must be women “who hate men”.
c) As far as feminists thinking women are superior to men, first glance back upthread at my first post, about how feminism came to see male behaviors and male-based norms as problematic. Many feminists came NOT so much to see women as superior to men but women’s way of being in the world — behaviors, personality traits, collective roles — as not necessarily being inferior to male behaviors and traits and roles (which had been the original simple assumption about equality, which was sort of “we no longer accept the premise that women are inferior, we are JUST AS GOOD” etc) and in some specific areas, yes, superior to those male ways. Add in some feminists who believe that some of these characteristics are innate and biologically built-in and not just cultural. I guess you could call such feminists "female chauvinists’, but yeah there have been some and they have believed women to be intrinsically superior.
d) A lot of feminism has indeed been about rejecting traditional gender roles, at least rejecting them as the standard to which everyone should aspire. You can’t establish equality for women in a world of sexist sex role expectations without saying “It is NOT wrong for women to do what has previously been reserved for men!”. This includes manifestations of personality and behavior that goes beyond occupational choices. Feminism has tried to embrace choices for women and not disparage anything that isn’t a non-traditional choice, but you can sort of see why feminism would have more personal appeal to women who want to do non-traditional things in either their personal lives or their career lives. It is also true that some aspects of equality mean not holding onto female roles that lock males into their own traditional role: you can’t (easily and consistently) demand workplace equality while also supporting the propriety of women seeking male financial support, at least not except in a world where men would be equally able to seek female financial support.
One of the problems a lot of people see with feminism as it’s practiced is that it says it’s about gender equality, but then it proceeds to largely approach problems from the female point of view.
For example: ‘Rape’ is officially defined as ‘Sex without consent’. However, in practice, almost the only kind of rape people talk about is when males violate females. That’s where practically all of the focus is. Any other kind is minimized as statistically unlikely, which, whether that’s true or false, does nothing for the people who are victims of those ‘unlikely’ forms of rape.
Another example is the word ‘patriarchy’, which, despite its official definition, makes the current situation sound like “males get all the good parts”, which is patently untrue. The fact I might actually have to list ways in which the current sexist culture harms males is, in fact, a rather large example of how the current sexist culture harms males.
I know that most feminists don’t want to harm males in any way. But they need to be reminded, sometimes, that explicitly mentioning how feminism helps males is both politically sound and just basic human decency.
There is no contradiction in being asexual and having a crush. If you don’t want to have sex, but the idea of being emotionally intimate with someone excites you, you are still asexual. There are a ton of asexual people (many of them women) who are married for this exact reason.
Secondly, asexuality is not a belief. It is not a political position as much as an orientation. Now, proclaiming it loudly in the workplace could be seen as taking a stance against, for instance, gender/sexual conformity. Sometimes when I’m cornered at work and asked why I don’t have a boyfriend, I feel the urge to angrily wave a banner of some type.
Your coworker may be an idiot. Actually, she probably is one for telling all her personal bidness to people at work who couldn’t care less. But I can’t get worked up about it because of your judgmentally tone. If you don’t even consider yourself a feminist, why do you care that someone else does? I’m sure there’s a third coworker somewhere, shaking her head at both of ya’ll.
