I’m a left wing socialist and I believe with all my heart that women and men are equal as human beings, but feminists in general irritate me for reasons that have nothing to do with equality. I dislike their tendency to support censorship and political correctness and I think the feminist movement, just like conservatism and libertarianism puts feelings and intuition on a pedestal above facts and principles.
It doesn’t help that most criticism of feminism I read on the Internet comes from misogynists, but I think there are a lot of things wrong with feminism that many leftists and even a lot of feminists themselves probably feel uncomfortable with yet are afraid to challenge.
I also dislike that whenever somebody makes a criticism of feminist theory, they tend to get the “No True Scotsman” (or is it Scotswomyn?) answer that I’m just generalizing about feminists and that it’s a “diverse movement” despite the fact that they all seem to believe in the same things.
Feminist theory makes the presumption that anything women fall short of compared to men must be due to the patriarchy, when in reality it could be a large number of different factors. This isn’t science. They also cherrypick facts and ignore the way men had things bad too. Being expected to be a “breadwinner” for example is a huge burden on a man and even today in our supposedly equal and enlightened society things like unemployment bear down much harder on the male sex because it makes men feel like inadequate losers since society judges them more harshly for not “contributing”. I’m not whining and saying men have it horrible because really we don’t, but I don’t think our life is that much easier - I mean let’s face it, being a human on planet Earth is hard, period!
Men are also far more likely to be found guilty by juries if they are accused of a crime and people tend to trust female strangers by default - this is definitely a form of privilege if you ask me. It’s not like men are the only ones who have privileges due to their sex.
I also dislike how feminism encourages women to identify as a victim class, even though they claim their intent is to empower women. Throwing out BS statistics like 1 in 3 women are raped isn’t going to help anything, all it’s going do is make women want to segregate themselves from men and feel like prisoners in their own homes. I think the idea that it’s in men’s nature to be sexually abusive is incredibly sexist to both men and women. This is why Saudi Arabia forces women to go everywhere with an escort and cover themselves head to toe - it’s “for their own protection”.
Lastly, I think it’s naive to think things like Slut Walks will change the culture much when even laws of affirmative action have often failed to help minorities.
Any thoughts people? I support women’s rights but I can’t consider myself a feminist since feminist theory is more than just believing the sexes are equal - it also entails believing in a lot of other things. Things I feel are false or biased.
Yes, feminism is and has always been about equality. But reframing the debate from “issues that women face” to “issues that humanity faces” smells like a distraction. It moves the debate from one specific issue which can be identified and dealt with to “but yes we all have problems.”
I’m not saying that feminism should be discredited as a real movement, but I think it’s inherently a form of identity politics and encourages seeing the world from a female-centric point of view in the same way Afrocentrism encourages people to see everything from a black point of view.
There is (in my opinion) a vast difference between feminism and feminine-centrism. Just to begin with, lots of men are feminists.
When there are actual disparities in income, wealth, opportunity, leadership, representation, and responsibility, it requires an assessment of the ingrained injustice that led us here.
(Also, total agreement with MostlyClueless that such limitations are harmful to both women and men. Obviously, much of the imbalance is overtly favorable to men: getting paid more money is nice. But benefiting from injustice is harmful to a man’s morality. it’s like receiving stolen goods.)
The point of feminism being white men see everything from a white male point of view.
Black people and women really can’t help seeing things from a white male point of view due to our acculturation, but if you get the opportunity to be the only white person in an African American studies class, you can glimpse that point of view. Women, minorities, the differently abled, GLBT, non-Christians - all those groups in the U.S. have a different view than the mainstream view.
There are lots of things I don’t view as a feminist. Economics - not much reason to see economics from a feminist centric point of view. Science. But there are topics where your point of view DOES matter. And there are topics that matter more to me because I’m a woman than they matter to my husband .
My school has instructions in public bathrooms on how to preserve evidence if you are raped. My previous job (which was high-risk) offers excellent counseling to victims of sexual assault. My friends are able to speak about their experiences with assault when appropriate, and are not harassed or stigmatized for it. My office offers extra security for people working late.
Compare this to a few decades ago, where women were discouraged from seeking justice and taught to feel ashamed when they were assaulted.
This is the result of taking sexual assault seriously. Millions of peoples lives are better for it. It’s not perfect yet, but damn it’s worth hearing a few tired statistics.
I think women are still taught to be ashamed of being raped. They are told their life is basically over and they will never feel happy again. With that in mind of course they’d want to keep it a secret. Nobody wants to be thought of as an object of pity or even worse as the living dead or mentally unstable.
It’s great we take sexual assault seriously but I think inflating the numbers is irresponsible because it makes women much more afraid than they need to be in order to be safe.
political and social groups have power and need leaders. being a leader is a career and ego fulfillment. being a member is ego fulfillment.
in viewing numbers you define your group with the widest possible definition. when any benefits are produced then you want to have the number with the narrowest possible definition.
many problem solving groups don’t want the problems to be solved. always having a new or deeper problem defines your own power and importance.
this social and psychological behavior happens in many situations.
In fact, because the number of rapists is very small, and most are frequent, serial offenders, they find that prevention messages are better aimed at potential victims rather than perpetrators, because they find most perpetrators are, more or less, insane fuckers who don’t give a shit about being told not to rape. This is just completely contrary to most feminist rhetoric (and I say that as someone who would normally tow the party line of “teach men not to rape, not women not to be raped”)
(Note that the article does address “victim blaming” as offers an attempt at analysis of risk-prevention counseling vs victim blaming).
Of course, one has to be careful with “rape culture” as a term. Some feminists use it in a completely sane sense, decrying the kind of cover-ups and support lampooned by the Onion here. Where people know it’s bad, but refuse to do anything about it because “my friend can’t be bad” or whatever nonsense. Others go off the deep end and see “rape culture” everywhere in the way RAINN describes, and sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which.
One criticism I’ll lodge is that it’s been corrupted by consumerism, and not just of the “this yogurt is so empowering” consumerism.
Working class women have worked outside the home since the early days of the
Industrial Revolution. But, of course, only the middle class and above count as real people, so what happened there?
Women militated to break out of the pink-collar ghetto in skilled jobs. The boys in STEM fields put up a bigger push-back, so fewer inroads were made there. But, in the post-industrial 80’s thru 00’s, the real opportunities weren’t made by making stuff, but by arranging and rearranging. Legal, real estate, financial. There the feminine traits of consensus over conflict, not making waves, keeping it all positive found, you should pardon the expression, fertile ground. The result were the crash of 2008. This economy was fucked up by a bunch of empty suits, and that included pantsuits. Own your part of that, feminism.
Feminism turned it’s back on the class struggle it had once been, and became something to enable middle class women to become executives, not just executive wives. Its loudest theoreticians don’t talk about that since there’s no money to be made doing so. They can make money talking about the violence and selfishness of men (and even offering some much-needed suggestions), but where is anyone talking about the human problems generated by its female side, such as the hypocrisy and entitlement of women?
Cite: Barbara Ehrenreich, feminist author of Nickle and Dimed and Smile or Die
I do think feminism is about equality. Disagreeing with parts of the ideology, or the way in which certain parties promote that ideology, doesn’t mean I have issues with the whole thing.
RAINN’s argument is that most people are not rapists, and those that are rapists are not responsive to messaging. If you read the article, you’ll see that their number one recommended method of prevention is actually “bystander education” which encourages people to intervene if someone they know if about to be sexually assaulted, or is about to sexually assault someone.
The idea is that since the number of rapists is very small, focusing the messages on what innocent, good people can do in response to rape will help catch more rapists, while trying to tell people who don’t care not to rape isn’t going to go anywhere.
It isn’t about telling women not to wear short skirts, they think the most effective method is to get non-rapists to police the rapists and potential rapists, because if the 97% polices the 3% they’ll get more of them behind bars or on at least their best behavior.
Essentially, they seem to treat rape as a natural disaster. Their argument seems to be that this kind of reasoning is harmful and like saying “what’s the number one cause of Earthquakes? The Earth!” They find the best way to deal with Earthquakes is not to ask the Earth to be less quakey, but to educate people on what to do after one happens, and how to protect their loved ones if one is predicted to happen.
Do note that this isn’t some random blog somewhere, RAINN is the largest anti-sexual assault organization in the US. This article is based on the experiences of what works from the perspective from an organization entirely focused on sexual assault.
For most of my life I was always told that anyone who wants equality between the sexes was a feminist. Recently I’ve learned that if you don’t buy into the rape culture theory that you cannot be a feminist.
Feminism means so many things to so many people that I find it hard to believe people claim not to be feminists. There is no single definition, and half the people who do try to define it find themselves coming up with diameter opposed definitions.
Well, there are quite a few rather loud No True Scotsman feminists on the interwebz, who really like to claim that if you don’t agree with pet theory Y, or exact definition Z you’re not REALLY a feminist and are probably, in fact, a misogynist!
It’s the internet, we love extremism here.
Edit: There are, of course, plenty of good feminists too who don’t do that, and I prefer to follow them even if I disagree with them because they’re, y’know, rational. It’s just the loud obnoxious ones are rather… loud and obnoxious. And they make good headlines, so I can see how someone can get that idea.