How did Feminism become synonymous with hating men in the pop culture mindset?

Great Debates
21

Core issues still unaddressed?

I’m sitting here next to my girlfriend. She’s 52 now. About 20 years ago, she was doing all the work of a financial manager while receiving a secretary’s salary; she spoke to the higher-ups about getting the official job title and the commensurate pay and was flat-out told “If we’re going to pay what the work is worth, that position is going to go to a man with a family to support, not to a woman”

We’re not talking my Mom’s generation.

My sister was happily welcomed into the world of engineering as a female in the 1980s. The doors for women had definitely been opened by the feminists of the previous decades. Then she had a daugher with birth defects and although her career wasn’t intrinsically of less worth than that of her husband (also an engineer), someone had to drop out and do nearly full-time child care. Guess which one of them? The child died a few years later and it hasn’t been easy for her to reenter the work-world with that gap in her work-record. Even if employers don’t hold a bias against employing women on the grounds that they might quit to have kids or something.

Neither of those things is easily addressed by a simple law. (The first example might be in theory but in practice it would be hard to prove and therefore the behavior hard to eliminate through legislation alone).

Within the last 5-6 years, a mildly retarded girl in New Jersey was gang-raped by some High School aged fraternity boys. It was pretty ugly. One of the uglier parts was the assertion made by some in the community that she had willingly gone into the house to be with the boys and therefore had somehow forfeited any right to decline subsequent attentions.

I know parents of 14 year olds who, in 2005, continue to conceptualize sex as “boys misusing and taking advantage of girls, who are sluts if they let them do it”. I know parents of 5 and 7 year olds who are seriously bent out of shape when the boy plays with his sister’s dolls.

A great deal of what still needs attention consists of attitudes and perceptions. In some cases, policies and laws and official standards could help change things, but ultimately the big stuff is in peopel’s heads.

I could list more stuff. I shouldn’t need to. It’s out there and you can probably make your own list if you think about it.

22

I think it’s a common cultural phenomenon whereby the most radical, outspoken or iconoclastic members of a movement get the most media attention. She who screams the loudest gets the camera time. This explains folks like Jerry Fallwell, Louis Farrakhan, PETA, or Ann Coulter. They take their beliefs to an extreme and yell about them as loud as they can.

Of course, the media is always ravenous for an easy sexy story. So the extremist and the media are willing if odd bedpartners.

As to feminism, I’ve always felt that the vast majority of feminists (and women, and men for that matter) believe that women should be treated equally. But that doesn’t make much of a story. So when the fringe elements scream for mens’ heads on platters, that’s what gets covered.

Rationality, prudence, moderation – those things will never get you air time.

23

With all due respect none of the items you listed are what I would consider to be currently in play as “core” social justice inequities. Your mother’s experience is more or less against the law nowadays. The job gap issue in a fast moving, highly technical field like engineering would affect both men and women depending on who had the “gap”. The “she was asking for it” assumptions in the rape case are specific to that case, and these “she was asking for it” opinions are often held by women more strongly than they are by men. The gender inappropriate toy issue response by the parents may be somewhat reactionary, and not be to your liking, but it is hardly (IMO) a core social justice issue for most people.

24

Goodness.

I wasn’t expecting such a reaction…and I’m not really up for writing a manifesto.

But yes I do think there are issues unadressed. It’s wonderful that we’ve arrived at a point where female and male professors and sciencentist are being paid the same. And it took quite a bit for women to even get to that point. But not everyone is at that point.

Not everyone is educated and sucessfull and for those who aren’t…well menial crappy jobs for women still tend to pay less then menial crappy jobs for men. And they still have to take care of the children. And they still find themselves isolated (and in fear of not having a male income) and abused.

I think there are a few issues still worth addressing.

25

astro:

a) As I said, it was my girlfriend, not my mom, and it was in the middle 1980s, not in the dark ages. It was against the law when it happened. It still happens.

b) A big part of my point was that these things are not easily addressed by legislation. “Social justice” is therefore perhaps the wrong nomenclature. For some of us, these things are all examples of ongoing social problems we would like to address, therefore unfinished business for feminism. (The assumption being that each example is a true example of a phenomenon, rather than being an incident explainable by specifics unique to that case)

Obviously. My point was that (with no law coercing folks, just lots of attitude and tradition and expectation) if someone’s gonna drop out and stay at home for the needy kid, it still tends to be the female. Each female in each situation could decide otherwise, but as long as those societal expectations remain intact and still insufficiently thrown into question, she does so at the risk of other consequences. And, in parallel, perhaps the expectation of “no gaps” can be considered perniciously patriarchal —i.e., that, as long as the culture has women doing the “gaps” thing when the need is present, an expectation of “no gaps” can reasonably be met…by men, who didn’t have to drop out 'cuz their wives did.

I’ve read of surveys of college freshmen that indicate that quite a few people (plenty young enough to not be old fogeys reflecting old & dying attitudes) come short of believing that a woman can flirt, make out, go to a guy’s bedroom to have sex, and then change her mind, retaining the right to do so and to say “no” at that point. Yes, many such people are women themselves. That in no way detracts from it being a serious feminist issue. And serious it is. Until rape victims can win cases in court despite acknowledging on the witness stand that yes they were seeking sex and yes they did things to make this guy think they were gonna sleep with him but then he acted like a jerk and she changed her mind and then he forced sex on her anyway, it’s a social problem. It remains a social problem in need of feminist attention even if you, on reading this, think there’s no easy legal fix that wouldn’t unduly threaten males with prison sentences for she-said / he-said murky events, etc — indeed, particularly then; it’s the knotty complex murky gender problems that need the most serious feminist focus, the obvious and straightforward stuff has in large part been won.

Similar stuff about coercive gender polarization of children, like the dolls thing, and the perennial sexual double-standard like the parents-of-teenagers thing.

Or, to put the whole mess another way: you may not see a need for seeking further social change in the name of sexual equality, but some folks do, and we’re not all just a bunch of nutjobs with no case to make.

(Well, I’m a nutjob, but I still have a case to make :wink: )

26

tomndeb and Rystro already answered this, but I just thought I’d affirm that no, I didn’t mean that the SCUM manifesto justifies anything, just that it was (as Evil Captor noted) a tool that could be used by people who stood to lose if feminism ‘won.’

27

Heck, this happened to me as recently as last year. I opened the door for a woman walking into the local courthouse, and you would have thought I was raping puppies. She grabbed the door out of my hands, screeched at me for “treating her like a weak child” and called me a pig. I support many of what I would consider to be feminist causes, but this woman’s behavior will stick out in my mind as a “man-hating” attitude and does taint the whole movement. In almost all social causes, it is the extremes that get the notice and are remembered.

28

Is there an official stated reason why the ERA never passed?

I ask because reading statements similar to the one I quoted makes me a bit uneasy when I think about things like a wartime draft. If we ever found ourselves in another large-scale war, with a hundred thousand body bags of drafted infantry coming home, I would hate for fifty thousand of those bodybags to contain women.

29

We have had Great Debates about this and nobody was ever able to explain what the ERA was supposed to DO. Proponents claim that they want it as part of the Constitution for symbolic reasons. That is fine until the court cases brought by on by both men and women start rolling on. Constructionist Supreme Court rulings wouldn’t necessarily be beneficial to women at all especially today when normal state and local laws have largely addressed the issues that the ERA was somehow suppoosed to fix.

30

Why?

Not, mind you, that I’m saying a woman’s place is zipped up in a body bag, but what’s your thinking here?

There’s no “official reason” because its failure to pass was due to the myriad reasons that an insufficient number of state legislatures failed to pass it. Reasons given at the time included:

• redundant; that women already had equal rights as established in other legal clauses elsewhere.

• fear of unintended consequences: that it would require unisex bathrooms, legalize gay marriages, and cause a host of other legal problems not intended by those who drafted it.

• fear of intended consequences: that it would make the sexes equal before the law, which would be horrible and inappropriate, because as everyone knows men and women have as much in common as horse chestnuts and chestnut horses.

• fear that it would be used against women’s interests more than for them: that maternal custody preference and alimony would disappear, the draft would go coed, insurance companies would charge women as much as men for auto and life insurance, and ladies’ night at the bar disbanded, but men would still get better pay and laws favoring men would be ignored during the execution of the amendment as law.

• fear of feminist momentum: that if the ERA passed, the feminists would go on to the next big thing, and since feminism is clearly the work of Satan and the enemy of the Fambly it must be stopped at all costs.

31

Fair enough. In that case I agree.

32

Some years ago I remember a Time magazine cover story, titled something like “Are men really pigs ?”. I remember it contained quotes from feminists supporting the falsification of rape claims against men. They said things like ( going by memory ) “Sending an innocent man to prison is the highest act a woman can perform”, and “Being raped in prison will be a learning experience”. Even earlier, I remember another article about a woman who kidnapped children and terrorized them into making false accusations of molestation against their fathers of molestation; her defense : “Of course he’s a molestor, he’s a father.”

I heard a feminist claim that since men value honesty, lying is a virtue.

I recall reading a book that was a collection of debates pro and con genetic engineering; the feminist position was that science is male, nature is female, therefore those with genetic defects should die.

When Gloria Allred was asked if women who lacked the proper strength for the job should be firefighters, she said that if people died that’s the price we must pay for equality.

Really, I’ve heard lots of nasty things from self proclaimed feminists over the years; I’m not surprised that the word “feminist” is so unpopular.

33

Your objection is not 100,000 dead, but that half are women? Why would the loss of a female combatant upset you more than the loss of a male?

34

Moving thread from IMHO to Great Debates.

35

Because of attitudes like this:

36

In the Boston area in the mid-80s, campus feminism had degenerated in to factionalist tribes. I consider myself a feminist, and I was distressed to actually hear my girlfriend declare that if you were not a black lesbian rape victim, you could not possible understand “true” feminism. Sad.

37

Well, the officiial reason is that, by the deadline set ten years after Congress voted in favor of it in 1972, 35 states (not the required 38) had ratified it.

The holdouts were:

Alabama
Arizona
Arkansas
Florida
Georgia
Illinois
Louisiana
Mississippi
Missouri
Nevada
North Carolina
Oklahoma
South Carolina
Utah
Virginia

Find any group of three in that bunch that would likely have ratified it, and you at least have the people to post your question to.

Actually, because the "Madison Amendment " barring congress from getting a pay raise without an intervening election was ratified over 200 years after its submission to the states, some are hoping that the ERA can be revived. Read here

38

I could have sworn I started a long thread on this same subject a month or so ago, but when I did a search on it, I came up blank.

Men must have deleted it!

39

There’s your problem right there, too few letters per word for the search engine to parse.

Eve Say Men Bad - Man Not OK - You Go Now! Go Far!

40

What is a “Feminist?”, Eve, 10-12-2005, 06:51 PM, Great Debates.