That’s a wonderful, thoughtful argument, jsgoddess. The “you’re wrong” argument is so compelling, in fact, that I’m at a loss how to respond to it.
Oops. Looking at your post again, I see I’m “laughably, demonstrably wrong”. Still at a loss, however.
You’ve been shown to be wrong. How many times must you be shown to be wrong before you say, “Oh wait, I’m wrong”?
You said feminists don’t talk about the draft. We do.
You said feminists don’t talk about differences in sentencing. We do.
You said feminists don’t talk about differences in child custody. We do.
You said feminists don’t talk about “man up.” We do.
You were wrong about these things. But you say you aren’t wrong about feminism. Shouldn’t there be some evidence you can get anything right about feminism before you announce that you’re right about everything?
So, on one hand, we have half a page of quotes of thoroughly unreasonable assertions from feminists, and on the other hand, we have your assertions.
Is this the general behavior we should expect? When someone says to you “Hey, this group of people seems to be behaving badly, here’s my lived experience of that.”, should we mock them because we haven’t seen that bad behavior in our own lives?
Also, what’s the threshhold for talking about a movement having attributes? One posted link? Yes, feminists do in fact talk about the various issues you name. They also call in bomb threats, kill pets, make and advocate making false criminal reports, and commit all manner of assaults.
Surely we need some way of talking about the average case, rather than just looking for some magic incident threshhold of feminists behaving well or badly to assign that behavior to feminism as a whole? I mean, does Schindler mean we can’t say that the Nazis were pretty anti-Jew?
The answer is “103 posts in”. Can anyone give me the question?
And the evidence.
See, when you say “group x doesn’t do y” all someone has to do is show that they do y and you are demonstrably wrong. If you say demonstrably wrong things, people will think you don’t have your facts right. If you don’t have your facts right, conclusions you draw from those mistaken facts can only be right by chance. If you say, “I was mistaken” about a fact, well, that shows you are capable of learning and admitting you were wrong. But if you just ignore the being wrong part, the factual gaps, and continue to trumpet how right you are, why in the world should anyone believe anything you say? Why should your conclusions be trusted if your facts can’t be?
I think you should pick one or the other between ridiculing other people’s arguments for being childish and arguing like this, because this is just silliness. I don’t especially want to argue about it with you, but since you’re currently contemplating whether you might be looking at feminism through a lens other than the perfectly objective, dispassionate fact-based one: 1. I think we’re all probably clever enough to realize that when an author goes on the bloody radio to talk about the book she has written, and then talks about something she wrote about in the book, what she wrote in the book about the thing is probably a good representation of her opinion about that thing, and so whether or not the ten minute interview might “comprise everything she’s said in her life” isn’t really the point, is it; and 2. no, he really didn’t, and if he had, so what?
Oh, OK, let me take the rest of my day to tell you; your interest seems genuine.
¿? I have made no observations about you as a person or your beliefs, so I do not know what you are claiming that I know about you.
Why? Any individual may be a nut job or be preternaturally sane. Looking at a short list (or a cherry picked list) of individuals does not actually provide a basis on which to identify the goals or objectives of a group unless they are universially recognized as leaders by way of a vote or scientific poll. I do not recognized every woman on your list, but I am aware that among the women I do recognise, there is enough controversy and divided opinions that none would be recognized by all feminists as undisputed leaders. The movement has a number of sub-movements with active debate separating many of them.
Getting my views regarding individual members would be boring and would add nothing to this discussion.
I recognize several as feminists. I do not recognize any of them as Species typica because, of those I know, each is involved in some major conflict with other feminists.
That is rather my point: declarations that “feminism” says/believes/does/promotes any particular thing is most often wrong because different members of the movement hold conflicting views. It is much more accurate to identify the sub-movement or speaker when challenging any particular phenomenon.
What is feminism? It is a movement that recognized that social and political power was unfairly divided between men and women and proposes a number of (occasionally conflicting) solutions to reduce or eliminate the imbalance of power.
How does the average animal rights supporter feel about pit bulls?
So, all I need to do is find assertion in which LinusK was correct and you will humbly admit you were mistaken, and capable of learning from your egregious errors?
Ooh! All I need to do is find one feminist who doesn’t talk about all of those topics. Then there is (at least) one feminist who doesn’t talk about the aforementioned topics, therefore (some) feminists don’t talk about the topics, therefore feminists don’t talk about the topics!
Or we’re saying that one member of a movement doing something does mean you can claim that about the entire movement, at which point feminists, in addition to talking about a wide variety of topics, also advocate murder and domestic terrorism.
Somehow, I don’t think you’ll be leaping to embrace the singular claim rules when they’re describing positive traits you don’t want rather than negative traits you do.
Er, I dunno. I haven’t surveyed animal rights supporters. My guess would be that it would be broadly positive, since supporting animal rights implys giving enough of a damn to look into the poor statistics around violent dogs being misidentified as pit bulls or German shepards, but I don’t know with any certainty if this is the case. For all I know, there’s good and well-supported studies out there saying pit bulls are the assholes of the canine kingdom and should be phased out for the good of other animals.
Do you know how logic works?
It depends on how you go about it. Are you going to follow the path of the Islamophobes, point to an incident in which Muslims behaved badly, and declare “Islam is evil”? Or are you going to speak more responsibly in the manner of those who say, “the Salafists/Wahabbists/Taliban/ISIS/al Qaeda/Iranian mullahs have done this bad action”?
When one takes the actions of a sub-group and state or imply that it is the equivalent of the larger group behaving in same way, one is engaging in dishonest debate.
I do not recall anyone in this thread claiming that no feminist has ever spoken an irrational or hateful idea. Several odd statements have been provided by those who are not attacking feminism. The problem is that all those hateful and irrational feminists associate with like-minded people who can be identified in some manner as a subset of feminism. If one cannot be bothered to discover and identify the group with whom one disagrees, choosing the lazier (or more prejudiced) approach of condemning the entire large group for the actions of a subset, one is going to fail to persuade others of one’s position.
I agree with this. Echoing what I said earlier…
“Feminism” as a broad concept goes back to the Suffragettes and beyond. “Feminism” has accomplished much that is good and necessary. I don’t think anyone would argue to take away women’s right to vote.
When one wants to criticize the current excesses of modern feminism, the usual code-words are “radical feminists,” “third-wave feminists,” “feminist activists,” “feminists in modern academia,” and so on. These are assumed to be the hotbeds of feminist excess. Many debates on feminism allow debaters to designate more extreme feminist sub-sets in this manner and fire away at them. (Though liberal SMDB’ers may fight even that.)
Then there are codewords for specific pet peeves. For example, “feminist attitude of entitlement,” “feminist infantilization of women,” etc. These ideas aren’t necessarily confined to a subset; hence one specifies the specific pet peeve rather than the subset. And then I guess you argue about how pervasive that particular problem has become in the feminist culture or mindset in general, or what kind of a toll it is taking on the victims.
I agree, however, that one can’t just say, “Feminism sucks” and then tack on a bunch of random pet peeves about hairy-chested, fire-breathing, ballbreaking harpies. Not really fair.
I don’t believe anyone on the SDMB has advocated this…but there are still a handful of really regressive souls who argue for exactly that. Ann Coulter comes (nauseatingly) to mind.
It’s a silly trick that can be used against nearly anybody. Islam? ISIS beheading videos. Christianity? Westboro Baptist Church. Judaism? Ultra-Orthodox rock-throwers. Every significant group of people will inevitably include a few utter jerks.
First of all, that’s not exactly what I said.
Second, I’m guessing you’re talking about the links posted by Miller (#61) (Did you read them?) Truthfully, I rarely read posts consisting entirely of links. I realize pretty much anything that can be said, has been said, somewhere on the internet. If I’m going to respond, I’d rather respond to a person, not a link.
But anyway, the title of the first one is “Why Using the Draft as a Weapon Against a Feminist is Ignorant.” The point is not so much “How to get women eligible for the draft” as it is “how to defend against people who argue it’s sexist.” The answer, apparently, is to blame men. (It’s men who passed the law so, it’s men’s fault.)
The second one is blog post by someone who does not appear to be a feminist. Here’s his “about” page. I may have more time to read the blog later.
The title of the third is: “The Truth About Father Bias in Family Courts.” The first two sentences are:
The focus here seems to be on winning arguments.
It admits there is a bias against fathers in divorce courts, and then moves on to assigning blame: “the source of the bias is not in the courts – it’s in the marriage… The institution of straight marriage perpetuates patriarchal gender roles during marriage as well as during its complement, divorce.”
It goes on to attacking Men’s Rights groups, for, among other things, “value[ing] fathers’ rights over children’s rights.” They “need to put the rights and needs of the children before their own.” (bolding original)
It ends with blaming men: "In order for fathers to be considered equally worthy caregivers in the eyes of the court, they must first be equal caregivers within the home." (bolding original) And of course patriarchy. The solution, she argues, is for men to be better fathers.
The fourth one is a video of a rapper. I don’t know if he’s a feminist or not. It doesn’t say.
I guess what I’d say about the links is that at least two of them appear to be feminists talking about the draft and family courts, respectively.
The problem is that they’re responding to what they perceive to be attacks on feminism. They are, in other words, not saying: “Here’s a problem of inequality. As a group concerned about inequality, lets work on ways to fix it.” They’re saying, “We’ve identified some arguments our opponents use: here’s how to defeat them.” In both cases the solution appears to be the same: blame men as the source of the problem.
When I said:
Feminists discussing ways to silence people who do complain about such things was not what I was talking about.
Sorry, Linus, I didn’t realize you’d need so much hand-holding to get through those links. Let me help you out:
Why using Selective Service as an argument against feminism doesn’t work.
What you missed in that link is the fact that feminists tried repeatedly to open the draft up to include women. So when you say, “[F]eminists don’t complain about not having to register with the selective service,” that is objectively and demonstrably wrong.
Bias against fathers in the family court system.
Here, we have feminists acknowledging the unfairness in the family court system, and saying that it’s something that needs to be addressed. You don’t care for her solutions, but again, when you say, “[Feminists complain about] women’s better chances of getting custody after a divorce,” you are, again, objectively and demonstrably wrong. You’ve also read it as “blaming men,” when what it’s actually doing is something that’s very common in feminist critics: pointing out that patriarchal power structures are damaging to everyone, not just to women.
Feminist researchers find women get slaps on the wrist.
This one (which you incorrectly identified as the “second” link) is not by a feminist - it’s by an MRA asshole. But the paper he’s quoting from is only available from behind a paywall. And the paper, published in a journal called "Feminist Criminology, studied sentencing by gender, and found that men are, indeed, given harsher sentences than women for the same crimes. So, when you said, “[Feminists don’t complain about] their smaller chances of getting arrested…” Well, okay, this one isn’t directly on point to your criticism. But it does show that feminists talk about the gender bias against men in the criminal justice system.
Ten responses to the phrase “Man Up”
Not actually a rapper. There’s this thing called “poetry?” Maybe you haven’t heard of it. It used to be pretty popular. His whole piece is about the inherent sexism in the phrase “man up,” coming from a clearly feminist perspective. And, of course, linked to approvingly by a writer at a cite called Everyday Feminism. So, for the third time, when you said " Feminists don’t complain about men being told to “man up”," you were - say it with me now - objectively and demonstrably wrong.
If we’re expected to parse out the particular feminists who seem to be notably bad into their subgroup, then we should be doing the exact same thing with the provided links. If we’re allowed to shrug and section off the TERFs, for example, then we can just as easily shrug and section off every feminist from the links, declaring that they are members of the reference class Less Evil Than Usual Feminists, and continue to assert that evil feminists are the majority.
This works both ways, or neither. If we can’t say feminists are hateful because some of them hate, we sure can’t say that they’re not hateful because some of them don’t.
Either one link doesn’t mean you can’t use a group to describe a movement, or “Feminists are in favor of killing most-to-all men.” is unarguably true.
Or you’re pre-decided that group A is of course full of assholes and group B is of course isn’t, and therefore you can crow about individual examples of assholdom from A and post sad defenses of #notallB without noticing the inconsistency, but this is the Straight Dope. We should be better than that here.
Innocent until proven guilty. Otherwise, prove that Christianity isn’t hateful, because of WBC.
Most feminists aren’t hateful. But that isn’t my duty to prove. The burden of proof lies on the accuser. If you believe that feminism is hateful, you need to demonstrate this, with actual evidence – and single-point anecdotes are not statistically meaningful. Again, if they are, then every group of people is hate-filled, because it contained at least one jerk.
Right-wing talk radio is hateful. Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, Savage, Hedgecock, a hundred others. The evidence is statistically undeniable. Feminism doesn’t have anywhere close to that degree of pervasive hatred.
Jimmy, I’m sorry I’m not sure what you’re saying:
I think you’re saying that my response to Tomndebb was silly. I’m not sure what part you thought was silly (maybe all of it?), but for my part I’ll just say that I mentioned an interview with an academic feminist, which, in my view typified what I saw as one of the most objectionable aspects of feminism: the tendency to focus on any unfairness done to any woman or women at any time, while ignoring the bigger picture. (In this case, outrage over quarantining prostitutes, rather than quarantining the soldiers; while ignoring the fact that the whole reason the men were there in the first place was that they’d been drafted to fight in the trenches of Europe - a war many of them would not come back from.)
I never said I thought the woman spoke for all feminists - in fact, I think I explicitly said I didn’t. It was meant merely as an example.
Nevertheless, Tomndebb replied:
It was hostile, pretentious, and - worst of all, from my point of view - disingenuous. Like I said, I’m not sure what part of my comments were silly, so I can’t really respond. I will say, when I respond to people, by tone often reflects the tone they used on me.
As far as #1, certainly if a person writes a book, and also gives an interview, the book is going to be a more complete example of her thinking. But I have no reason to think she didn’t also believe what she said in the interview. In any case, I didn’t mean to make this an exegesis about what she really thinks. It was just an example of the kind of thinking that turns me off of feminism. If Tomndebb wants to say I should have ignored the interview, or else my entire view of feminism comes from that one interview, he’s free to do that. But I’m also free to think he’s being disingenuous.
As for #2: “no, he really didn’t, and if he had, so what?”
I’m not sure what “no he really didn’t” refers to. If it refers to “the type species/Species typica of [feminism],” it was an exact quote. (Except I wrote [feminism] instead of “that philosophy”.)
Anyway, what I’m getting from this thread is that you can’t criticize feminism for what any particular feminist says, because there are so many of them, and they so often contradict each other. Which means if you do it, you are “cherry-picking” and stereotyping them (and turning Great Debates into the “Great Anecdote Exchange”). You also can’t criticize them for what they don’t say, because of the near-certainty some feminist, somewhere, has mentioned it in some way.
Which - I guess - means that, by way of its incoherence, feminism can’t be criticized. If it can’t be criticized, debate about “feminism” is pointless.
You should actually listen to those shows sometime. Savage can go over the line at times but to describe them as categorically hateful is the mere comfort of intellectual delusion.