Re Feminists and the Feminism movement, where are they days outside the universities? In talking with young women they will go about how the hiked they Mojave in sandals, killed a rabid coyote with a slingshot, marched for social justice in Washington, and changed their OS to Linux last weekend … but they’re not *feminists *. “I like men! I don’t hate men!” they say.
How did Feminism become synonymous with hating men in the pop culture mindset?
Ummm…have you ever read any feminist rhetoric? Especially from the 70’s? If you can force yourself to, there’s your answer.
I think it was always considered an aspect of feminism by some people - those who didn’t like the general idea would ascribe its most extreme and unpopular aspects to the whole movement. As time went by the more acceptable parts of feminism - equal rights, social justice, opening of opportunities, etc - became part of the mainstream culture and are no longer considered part of “feminism”. So feminsim no longer gets credit for all its sensible ideas and is left holding the blame for its handful of crazy talk.
To understand this, you should back up a few years. Feminism was around before your grandma was born, when women couldn’t vote. The modern movement came into full flower in the 60s and 70s, IMO. Writers such as Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer let women know how badly the system was screwing them, in terms of property rights, wages, and career opportunities. When young women found out the truth, they got mad. I got mad, too; I’m on their side.
Some men felt really threatened by the idea that women might even out their dominant position in the world. Just as the racists demonized blacks when equality threatened, sexist men painted the feminists as a mob of shrill, screaming, man-hating lesbians. Does “femi-nazi” ring a bell?
What feminists want is the same rights, opportunities, and access to power that men have always had. Is that unreasonable? I don’t think so. What was once radical (equality for women) has become mainstream. Sexism still exists in matters of pay and opportunities, but there has been a lot of progress.
Two words:SCUM manifesto
A short excerpt:
Radical feminism demanded an end to male oppression and was highly critical of a range of behaviors and traits that were quite common in men, as well as condemning instutional/structural male power and holding individual males responsible for their participation in them. Should it surprise you that lots of men felt “hated” when everyday women they ran into began giving voice to these opinions and crediting feminism with having awakened them to this?
Meanwhile, yeah, sure — assume any kind of serious and widespread oppression, then blow the whistle on it and kick off a movement to end it. The oppressed who are aware of their oppression and are brave and/or pissed off enough to want to do something about it, they come rallying to the cause. Are some of them going to harbor actual hatred, blind universal stereotyping category-wide hatred, for the folks who have kept them down and continue to keep them down? No shit, sherlock! And will some among the oppressed who already hated them anyhow be, perhaps, more disposed to give a listen to angry criticism of those folks’ oppressive ways, and retain their hatred alongside of their new political convictions? Yep.
Moving onward: lots of radical feminists were “fed up to here” with male chauvinism, patriarchy, sexism, and lack of life-opportunities for women, but they did not hate men. Guess how many of them felt like making a major huge priority of distinguishing (over and over and over again) between criticizing what (many or most) men do, and hating men? Guess how many of them felt like they had to justify feminism on the “please may I” grounds that feminism was not only not “against men” but would actually benefit men too, eventually and/or as a side effect? <—— that latter phrase lifted almost verbatim, incidentally, from Robin Morgan’s The Anatomy of Freedom.
Robin Morgan did not hate men. Marilyn French did not hate men. Phyllis Chesler did not hate men. Catherine MacKinnon did not hate men. Sheila Jeffried did not hate men. Sonia Johnson did not hate men. Elizabeth Janeway did not hate men. Gloria Steinem did not hate men. Andrea Dworkin did not hate men. Elizabeth Fisher did not hate men.
Or at least, if any of them did, they did not incorporate the hatred of men, or casting males as the enemy, into their feminist theory, and in fact explicitly said quite the opposite.
Susan StoHelit:
Yeah, OK, Valerie Solanas. I’ll spot you Mary Daly, too.
But aside from those two…
I think most of the problem is that today’s younger women don’t really see too many female-specific problems related to their own life that need a special movement to address. If I asked my executive wife or my female friends what female-specific issues need to be addressed in the U.S. in order to achieve equality, they would look at me like I have two-heads.
I have to give feminism of the past a lot of credit. They did fix a lot of problems that I would never want my daughter dealing with. However, a movement that insists on marching on after most of the core issues are addressed tends to have mainly Don Quiotes and radical lunatics as members.
Keep in mind, Solanas was batshit insane and tried to kill Andy Warhol.
Is this site parody, or is it insanity? There’s no reason in it, that’s for sure.
Yeah, feminists can be really mean. I had an ex-girlfriend who was really mean to me because I was a man, she was about ten years older than me, and even said that I didn’t have the preconceptions about women that men her age did.
My current wife has a lot of power in her life, and the thing that holds her power back the most is realizing that she has it. She oftentimes feels like someone pushes her down, but it’s because she let them intimidate her, and didn’t just tell them to go screw that causes this.
I’ve found in my dealings is that men tend to be aggressive by nature, it’s not that they are trying to be intimidating but women tend to get intimidated. Not all women, but it’s a tendency I have observed, when men just expect them to push back. However, what happens is women will take it personally and be mean aggressive back, instead of just intense aggressive. It’s kind of like how a guy can plow his good buddy into the ground playing football and still drink beer with him later that night and be fine.
I think it’s that mean aggressive tendency that came out a lot in the 70s that has characterized the idea. My step-mother told me once that the only reason we had men was for their sperm, and that one day technology would overcome that nuisance. She of course renegged, and said she told me “Some women believe…”, when I related this to my father.
Erek
Not a parody, AFAIK. We went over the SCUM manifesto in a Women’s Studies class. It doesn’t matter how crazy she was- her manifesto answers the OP’s question very nicely.
Saying that the SCUM manifesto is the basis for the mischaracterization of feminists as “men hating” is as unreasonable as holding Louis Farrakhan responsible for those who claim that all African-Americans are militant.
I was an adult woman and a feminist during the 1960’s and 1970’s. I knew many feminists – both male and female. Not one of them hated males. Men-haters were few and far between – so rare that they drew a lot of attention when they surfaced. If someone wanted an excuse to object to gender equality, they would drag out something written by one of those very untypical women. But they had to pass up a lot of well-reasoned essays and conversations to find it.
I was going to say looking to the SCUM manifesto as an example of feminism is like looking to Fred Phelps for an example of Christianity. But, same thing.
There was a certain amout of anti-male rehetoric in feminism particualry backing the beginning (when rehetoric tends to be heated). The media latched on to it to a disproportionate degree because…well because it was more sensational and not as hard as dealing with the really issues feminism was bringing up.
Kind of like bra burning…a great image the media ran with regarding those wacky feminist, even though no bras were burned (well ok i think there were one or two but it was a joke).
One pychopath very nicely justifies the mischaracterization of a whole movement? I hope I’m misreading you.
:dubious: I thnk your post was very accurate. Right up to this point. Just because some sucessful women are…sucessful and no longer see a reason for arguing about female equality does not mean the core issues have been adressed. For a lot of women they haven’t been.
The OP is asking how it happened, not whether it was right.
Out of curiosity what specific core issues are these?
Conservatives have generally hated feminism. It’s no coincidence that conservatism commentator and drug addict Rush Limbaugh coined the term “feminazi.” They used the outspoken rhetoric of the more radical feminists to convince everyone that feminism was about man hating and sex hating (remember Andrea Dworkin’s famous declaration that “All heterosexual sex is rape”?). Basically, feminists like Dworkin and a few others pounded out all the weaponry any conservative could ever wish for to destroy the public perception of feminism. So they took it, and used it relentlessly, just like they relentlessly attacked the term “liberal.” You see the results.
As noted, this does not justify anything. However, it indicates a particular phenomenon that impressed itself on the public consciousness.
My sister started college with a roommate who had no problem politely walking through a door held by my sister or another woman in the dorm, but if a male student happened to hold a door open just because he got there first and she was close enough that he didn’t let it slam in her face, he was liable to receive a five-minute harangue about his “oppressive” and “patronizing” habits. Was this twit a typical feminist? Absolutely not. She was, however, a very visible image of feminism to some large number of people in East Lansing in the early 1970s.
I am honestly curious about what these are too. The only thing that I could think of is some vague sticking points about abortion. I asked my wife and she couldn’t really think of anything.
I am just reading this as a case of “equal opportunities but not always equal outcomes”.