On Feminism

[LinusK]

@Jack_of_Words

Meanwhile, those pesky extremists have the University of York (UK) by the nuts, tightly. Two hundred students (of over 15,000 enrolled) and a couple of feminist faculty members have obliged the University to cancel its plans for International Men’s Day…because ‘equality for everyone’ is “misogynistic rhetoric”.

That’s a feminist telling you you’re not feminists. Listening now?

[I considered the courtesy of links, but I thought to myself…‘If any of them actually give a damn, they’ll want to know what that’s about and seek out the story - perhaps even find themselves a properly feminist doublethink-piece artfully justifying it. But either way, we’ll sort wise wheat from chippy chaff’.']

Consider the currently popular catchphrase ‘Look up feminism in the dictionary’. I wonder if the ‘extremists’ can control dictionaries as easily as they control universities? (Is that not a privilege?) Feminism, I’ll grant, is a ‘doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men’. But it’s not the doctrine, nor to my mind the preferred one.

I didn’t make it through the “open letter.” It was too painfully Orwellian. It’s both sad and frightening that some of the most privileged people on earth feel threatened by something as innocuous as “International Men’s Day.” I got to the part about how it was “controversial,” and then I gave up.

[Kimstu]

@Ibanez

Here’s another one, Greg Elliotlife is being ruined for criticizing feminists when they said they were going to send a mob against a man for creating a distasteful video game.

That article doesn’t seem to mention that the charges brought against Elliot for criminal harassment seem to involve more than just criticizing a “Twitter mob”:

The first woman to go to the police was Stephanie Guthrie, a local activist who tweets prolifically about feminism and Toronto politics.

Guthrie had met Elliott via Twitter when looking for someone to design posters for a group she founded, “Women in TO politics.” […]

She then discovered that Elliott had a history of sending tweets she considered sexually harassing and offensive to women, and decided not hire him. In the months that followed Guthrie told the Star she received several harassing tweets from Elliott, and finally went to the police in November 2012.

Now, I’m not saying that I necessarily believe Guthrie or the other accusers when they claim that Elliot’s persistent pestering them with tweets amounted to actual harassment. But it’s clear that what Elliot was accused of wasn’t just publicly “criticizing” some feminists for doing something he thought was unethical: rather, the charge is that he persisted in sending adversarial (and allegedly threatening) personal messages to women who had told him to stop contacting them.

If Elliot did not actually engage in harassing behavior, then of course I agree he shouldn’t have been charged with harassment. But it sounds as though what he actually did is at the very least much more open to question than your innocuous-sounding description “criticizing feminists” makes it appear.

[LinusK]

@raventhief

Jack, you signed a petition that referred to “we feminists”?

**All ****feminists **are being wrongly portrayed here which is simply unfair. **We **are not man-haters and the university should go ahead with plans to celebrate all diversity, not just one gender.

I suppose they’ll be cancelling March 8th then.

[Emiliana]

@LinusK

I suppose they’ll be cancelling March 8th then.

Let it die, man, let it die. It ain’t dignified to keep the thing on life support.

[LinusK]

@Kimstu

Well, in the broadest terms and historically speaking, it’s like this: A patriarchal society where women are controlled by men tends to be overwhelmingly dominated by men at its high and low extremities. In such a society, prisons and vagrancy are primarily extreme measures for men to control the behavior of other men.

Women in such a society are more easily controlled by lack of legal autonomy and social indoctrination to be docile, ignorant and dependent. Men are more independent, legally and socially, so if they persist in behaving in ways that more powerful men deem antisocial, bringing them into line often requires stripping them of their livelihoods or throwing them into jail.

Now, those of us in the developed world no longer inhabit a formally patriarchal legal and social structure, but our society still has a lot of residual features of the one we used to inhabit. So controlling the behavior of women is still disproportionately about financial dependency and gender expectations, while controlling the behavior of men is still disproportionately about physically constraining them in some way. (But it’s still disproportionately men doing the controlling.)

Note that I’m not saying any of this disparity is a good thing in itself, and in fact all of it is in the process of changing. (E.g., incarceration rates for women are presently rising faster than those for men.)

But it explains why patriarchal societies where men are traditionally superior and privileged compared to women nonetheless have overwhelmingly more men than women in their prison and homeless populations.

Is there anything patriarchy can’t explain?

Wait. Let me think… democracy, freedom of speech, modern medicine, air conditioning, the internet… Did I pick right?

[LinusK]

@iiandyiiii

I’ve responded to similar statements multiple times – it seemed like a repeat, so I didn’t bother responding to it specifically.

It’s many of your other assertions that are misrepresentations – you characterize feminists (and even women in general, one time, IIRC) in a certain way while ignoring the many assertions of feminists in these threads that are contrary to this. For some reason you spend much more time arguing against extremists you find on the internet instead of the feminists in this thread, while occasionally insisting that our beliefs aren’t real feminism. Why do you think you understand feminism so much better than feminists, and why would you expect us to accept this? Would you expect an anti-humanist, who thinks humanism is a terrible, evil philosophy, to understand humanism better than an actual humanist?

Suppose I started a thread about libertarianism, and I quoted Ayn Rand and Rand Paul and Ludwig von Mises. Then some people said, “I’m a libertarian, and I don’t believe any of that stuff!”

Should I say, “Well, you’re a libertarian, so you must know more than me”? Or should I say, “Random Person, maybe you should look more closely at the label you’re claiming”?

[QuickSilver]

@LinusK

Suppose I started a thread about libertarianism, and I quoted Ayn Rand and Rand Paul and Ludwig von Mises. Then some people said, “I’m a libertarian, and I don’t believe any of that stuff!”

Should I say, “Well, you’re a libertarian, so you must know more than me”? Or should I say, “Random Person, maybe you should look more closely at the label you’re claiming”?

Are all labels invariable and forever subject to be defined by (often dead) extremists?

[LinusK]

@BrightSunshine

Originally Posted by LinusK View Post
Look, I’m mere man. What I’m attracted to is physical attractiveness. I don’t think I’m telling a secret when I say that’s pretty common among people of my gender.

But you shouldn’t blame us for it. Attraction isn’t a conscious decision. You should be aware of that, too, as a woman. You don’t decide who attracted to. It’s why men constantly pursue women who’re not interested in them. It’s why women complain they’re attracted to the wrong men. It’s why you can’t “pray away the gay.”

Attraction is a biological matter, decided over millions of years of evolution. Attraction is amoral. That shouldn’t be surprising, since it’s a product of evolution, which is amoral itself.

It’s also why what attracts women and what attracts men are different.

So you think that women are attracted to responsible, mature actions in men,

No. That would be a stupid thing to think. Justin Bieber is the object of any number of teenage throbbing hearts, but he’s anything but mature and responsible.

whereas men are attracted to physical attributes in women only?

If you want to pique a man’s physical interest, you do it by looking sexy. This is not a secret thing. In fact, it’s something everybody knows.

Is there a more insulting characterization of men?

You can complain about it if you want, but it doesn’t change anything. It is what it is.

If women are attracted to men with your description of masculinity, how would they be attracted to the “wrong” men?

Natalie Lue explains it in a tactful way: 10 Reasons Women Choose Men…and why they shouldn’t!

Attraction is part conscious decision, part social conditioning, and part biological. Given how different attraction is in different cultures, how rapidly it changes with time, and how malleable people’s mate selection is when they move from one culture to another, there is no way that it is purely biological.

Physical attraction isn’t a decision. It’s only because of the context of this discussion that you’re arguing otherwise. In another context - homosexuality, for example - you’d agree with me.

[lance_strongarm]

@LinusK

Suppose I started a thread about libertarianism, and I quoted Ayn Rand and Rand Paul and Ludwig von Mises. Then some people said, “I’m a libertarian, and I don’t believe any of that stuff!”

Should I say, “Well, you’re a libertarian, so you must know more than me”? Or should I say, “Random Person, maybe you should look more closely at the label you’re claiming”?

No, you should say “Maybe libertarianism, like most labels, are far far more complex, and the range of opinions within it far more broad, than I realized, therefore trying to represent the entire movement with just three authors/leaders who I happen to know about best (only because I don’t know much about the rest of them) is a huge mistake.”

[Miller]

@LinusK

Suppose I started a thread about libertarianism, and I quoted Ayn Rand and Rand Paul and Ludwig von Mises. Then some people said, “I’m a libertarian, and I don’t believe any of that stuff!”

Should I say, “Well, you’re a libertarian, so you must know more than me”? Or should I say, “Random Person, maybe you should look more closely at the label you’re claiming”?

The problem, here, is that the only person claiming that Andrea Dworkin is as important to feminism as Ludwig von Mises was to Libertarianism… is you.

[MrDibble]

@LinusK

Suppose I started a thread about libertarianism, and I quoted Ayn Rand […] should I say, “Random Person, maybe you should look more closely at the label you’re claiming”?

Maybe you should look more closely at what Ayn Rand thought about libertarianism…is what a Random Person should reply.

[Jack_of_Words]

@Miller

The problem, here, is that the only person claiming that Andrea Dworkin is as important to feminism as Ludwig von Mises was to Libertarianism… is you.

I’m tempted to point out that you’ve not counted me, but that would be to buy into your questionable implication that anything can be established by counting the number of people standing on either side. ‘We’ve got a louder mob than you’ may accurately sum up the breadth and depth of feminist thought and action, but I’m not sure that making it so obvious does you all any favours.

[Bruce_Wayne]

@QuickSilver

Are all labels invariable and forever subject to be defined by (often dead) extremists?

Laci Green and Anita Sarkeesian are both alive and batshit crazy.

[Memnon]

@Bruce_Wayne

Laci Green and Anita Sarkeesian are both alive and batshit crazy.

And, quite literally, about a million times more popular than any of the posters here claiming to be the “real” voice of mainstream feminism.

[PigArcher]

@Bruce_Wayne

Laci Green and Anita Sarkeesian are both alive and batshit crazy.

A sex positive blogger/educator and a feminist media critic who catalogs stereotypical gender representations in video games? Neither on the surface appears to be particularly radical. I assume you have some evidence to support the claim they are “batshit crazy?”

[Memnon]

@kenetic

A sex positive blogger/educator and a feminist media critic who catalogs stereotypical gender representations in video games? Neither on the surface appears to be particularly radical. I assume you have some evidence to support the claim they are “batshit crazy?”

Sarkeesian doesn’t just catalogue sexist representations of women in video games, she also claims that these sexist representations cause sexism in the real world. This is a claim fore which there is no solid empirical evidence whatsoever.

[Bruce_Wayne]

The multitude of rebuttal videos on YouTube for both of them should really speak for itsellf.

[Banquet_Bear]

@Tithonus

Sarkeesian doesn’t just catalogue sexist representations of women in video games, she also claims that these sexist representations cause sexism in the real world. This is a claim fore which there is no solid empirical evidence whatsoever.

…thanks to Gamergate Sarkessian has been put under the microscope more than any other feminist in the world over the last year.

And thanks to that microscope we know that the statement “she also claims that these sexist representations cause sexism in the real world” is not an accurate representation of her words at all.

Sarkeesian is a media critic who made youtube videos and wrote articles about comics and movies and only came to the worlds attention when she started to talk about games. And batshit crazy people started to attack her with messages of hate.

The Last of Us was one of the best games of 2013. It featured a grizzled man and a young girl killing people in vicious horrible ways. The guy in charge of the Last of Us, Neil Druckmann, said this about Sarkeesian when he presented her with the 2014 Game Developers Choice Ambassador Award:

Game reviews and editorials constantly reference her work when discussing the treatment of women in games.

Many developers now have a greater understanding of character tropes and the shortcomings they can lead to.

I know for me, Anita’s work was highly influential in my approach to writing for The Last of Us – greatly improving its story.

If Anita Sarkeesian is the new face of extremism in feminism, then all power to Anita. The world needs better video games with better stories.

[Banquet_Bear]

@Bruce_Wayne

The multitude of rebuttal videos on YouTube for both of them should really speak for itsellf.

…you mean like this video, from Thunderf00t, where at one stage (3.11) he creepily zooms the camera in on Anita’s breasts?

[Bruce_Wayne]

@Banquet_Bear

…you mean like this video, from Thunderf00t, where at one stage (3.11) he creepily zooms the camera in on Anita’s breasts?

Context is everything. What about the part where he zoomed in on her red lips and hoop earrings while she was talking about how to differentiate between male and female characters on video games. I don’t believe for a second you didn’t understand the point he was making and I think that’s really disengenuous of you.