No. I was saying that whether feminists’ words match their actions is part and parcel of a debate called “on feminism”. It’s at least as relevant as your claim that LinusK’s actions don’t match his words.
I don’t have proof one way or the other. I doubt such proof could be found; no one person speaks for all feminists, no one person’s actions can be said to represent all feminists. We’re left with a few peripheral data points we can measure, like representation in STEM fields or achievement in school; therein lies the debate. There are interesting statistics and examples on both sides; I’m interested in looking for more.
However, I don’t see proof on either side. it seems popular in this thread to simply assert the egalitarian goals of feminists, or to say that their actions are nobody’s business. That strikes me as a bit of a cop out.
But that “feeling” completely ignores the abundant evidence that feminists do care about the negative effects of gender stereotyping and other forms of sexism upon men and boys. To take just one example, here’s the well-known blogger and author Crystal Smith of the blog “The Achilles Effect: Boys, Masculinity and Gender Stereotypes”, on boy-specific problems in education:
Here’s the article she mentions, written by a feminist female journalist and citing the research of a feminist female psychologist:
While antifeminists like LinusK sit around whining that “feminists only care about girls” because their awareness of feminist thought is limited to outrage-du-jour soundbites, it’s overwhelmingly feminists who are doing the actual research on disadvantages suffered by boys, who are raising public awareness about the problems boys face, who are counseling and supporting the parents of boys with educational difficulties, and who are proposing strategies for improving the educational success of boys.
Which, when you think about it, makes a lot of sense. For one thing, many, many feminists are mothers of sons, and they generally care just as much about the ways sexism harms their sons as about the ways it harms their daughters.
Antifeminists, by contrast, have a pretty shit track record on actually doing anything to alleviate the problems experienced by men and boys. What they mostly seem to care about is using those problems as a grievance in order to whine about how men and boys are disadvantaged so it must be feminism’s fault.
I’m confused by your comments. On the one hand, you say you’re "genuinely unhappy with a lot of the mainstream feminist narrative because it seems so fundamentally alienating to men; on the other, you accuse me of being “emotionally invested” and of having a “very narrow view of what feminism is.”
If feminism is fundamentally alienating to men, is it surprising men would be alienated by it?
I have no way of knowing, of course, how many of my comments about feminism you’ve read, or how many of comments about me you’ve read. It was my intellectual curiosity that drew me to the subject of feminism (of which you claim I have none).
There were a couple of things I was interested in. One was a Munk Debate, “Be it resolved men are obsolete…” The debate was among four feminists. Hanna Rosin (“Women are not just catching up anymore; they are becoming the standard by which success is measured;”) and Maureen Dowd “So now that women don’t need men to reproduce and refinance, the question is, will we keep you around? And the answer is, ‘You know we need you in the way we need ice cream — you’ll be more ornamental.’ ” argued that men are obsolete.
The “debate” was shocking, on two levels. The first was it’s callousness: is any human being obsolete?
The second was it’s cluelessness. It was as if they’d never seen the people who build the office towers these privileged women work in; had never seen the men who build their luxurious homes; never seen the people who fix their plumbing, or pick up their trash, or make sure the electrical grid works. The combination of callousness, elitism, and cluelessness was appalling.
The second thing I was interested in was a video called 10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman. I had clicked “play” expecting to see some truly awful things. I didn’t get what I expected. Instead, despite 10 hours of filming in what appeared to be some of the sketchier neighborhoods of New York, I got less than 2 minutes of harassment - some of which wasn’t even harassment: it was just men saying “hello”.
Despite posting in good faith, the responses to the thread were hostile, personal attacks. I should have realized then that questioning the catechisms of feminism was taboo on SDMB. But I reasoned instead that I’d posted in the wrong forum. In “Great Debates” things would be different. Only, they weren’t. The same hateful group of sycophants followed me here, and proceeded to post the same pathetic insults.
It was as if they were not interested in discussing anything, but only in attempting to shut me up, by hurting my feelings. This kind of tactic is used, in my experience, by people who are deeply emotionally invested in a paradigm, and aren’t able to discuss it intellectually.
In fact - with perhaps one or two exceptions - if there has been a response, by a feminist, to anything I’ve said, that hasn’t been either purely a personal attack, or at least contained one, I can’t recall it.
Oh my God! **Four **feminists said this thing!? Shocking! Well, since it was a debate I presume two were opposed. **Two **feminists said this thing!? A shocking condemnation of the entire feminist movement if two people say a thing.
Just so I know who to hate, which of these two people was elected leader of the feminist movement?
Oh, hey, you forgot to mention that the majority of the audience sided with the “Con” position both before and after the debate. It probably slipped your mind to mention that. You probably just forgot. Not deceptive at all for you to not mention that. You probably just forgot.
The second thing I was interested in was the responses to your posts on feminism. I had read them expecting to see some truly awful things. I didn’t get what I expected. Instead, despite hundreds of posts in what appeared to be some of the sketchier neighborhoods of the Straight Dope, I got less than 2 sentences of harassment - some of which wasn’t even harassment: it was just posters saying “hello”
Just so that everyone knows who the anti-feminists are, consider this: Men’s rights activist Peter Andrew Nolan called mass murderer Anders Breivik “a hero.” Breivik, who murdered 77 people in 2011, wrote a manifesto declaring that fathers had become “disposable,” that women use their “erotic capital” to “manipulate” men, and that “the media turns men into a 'touchy-feely subspecies who bows to the radical feminist agenda.'”
Consider the two extremes of the movements: on the feminist side you have two feminists who debated in favor of the proposition that “the age-old power structures associated with “maleness,” [are] permanently in decline.” (But didn’t manage to convince a majority of the audience). And on the anti-feminist side you have anti-feminist Anders Breivik, who murdered 77 people and then gets called a hero by the MRA movement.
Maybe you should educate yourself before you comment. First, the group voting weren’t feminists. Second, read this link, where they say
Before the doors opened, the organizers polled the audience and found an 84/16 split in favor of men’s continued relevance. At the end of the debate, the audience voted 56/44 for the same. By Munk standards, Rosin and Dowd won for changing the most minds. I suspect the swing was mostly due to Rosin changing the resolution, but also due to a little silent joke.
The organizers gave out yes or no stickers. I saw more than a few young men standing next to their girlfriends wearing “I voted yes” stickers. A few smirked when I caught their eye and indicated the sticker.
So the vote doesn’t indicate what you think it indicates.
In the future please do the minimum due diligence before commenting, thanks.
You were interested in this debate, but apparently not interested enough to watch it.
If you had watched it, I suspect you would have noticed that your specific criticisms were addressed. For example, you say “It was as if they’d never seen the people who build the office towers these privileged women work in; had never seen the men who build their luxurious homes; never seen the people who fix their plumbing, or pick up their trash, or make sure the electrical grid works.” Which seems like a valid criticism, unless you’d actually watched the debate. See, if you would have actually watched the debate you would have heard Pagilia say:
Indeed, men are absolutely indispensable right now, invisible as it might seem to most feminists, who seem blind to the infrastructure that makes their own work lives possible. It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments… The modern economy, with its vast production and distribution network, is a male epic in which women have found a productive role. But women were not its author. Surely, modern women are strong enough now to give credit where credit is due.
So your specific criticism was addressed, in the debate that you cited, and you didn’t bother to mention it? Strange.
Maybe you just missed it? Well, you also missed the feminists discussing ways to improve outcomes for men, which I believe was also a criticism of yours. For example:
I’ve been calling for twenty years for a revalorization of the trades in modern education. I feel that there is a very banal, compulsory college track these days, starting in primary schools, funnelling smart students along to a university curriculum that is extremely vapid, and that what is needed is something much more like what is going on in Germany, which is a cooperation between primary schools and industry, and a real vocational technical training. I think that the upper middle class has to get over its social snobbery about manual labour
I guess that’s something else you missed when you were watching the debate that you claim you were interested in.
Maybe in the future if you’re going to provide a cite, and claim that you’ve watched it, you should do us all a favor and *actually *read/watch it, thanks.
I already told you what I think it indicates, and I provided a link to someone who was there telling you what happened during the voting. I also posed above that the debaters changed the topic of the debate during the course of the debate.
This is the second time I’ve told you these things, and I’d prefer not to have to tell you a third time.
For fun, I thought I’d post some more quotes from that shocking debate, that **LinusK **clearly *actually *watched:
When half of us fall, the other half staggers. If working-class men are struggling, the first people it will impact are working-class women. It’s easy to forget this but we are the same species. Woman are not from Venus and men are not from Mars.
Shocking!
Think about it. Do women gain anything from men becoming obsolete? If we are the only ones triumphing in work and education, and the economy and politics and business, but yet we still retain our old kingdoms of homemaking and child-raising, do we win? No.
Divisive!
If it were up to me, we would just put all the damn factories back in all the places where the men have lost their jobs.
Cruel!
it’s very important, as I said in my opening speech, that we should stop talking about problems of men and problems of women, and start talking about problems of humanity.
Oblivious!
I can see why **LinusK **was so shocked by the things he heard when he “watched” this debate that he was so interested in.
I shouldn’t have had to. You have a link to the actual debate. If you want to discuss it, go watch it.
I left out roughly 99% of the debate, which is why if you want to discuss it you should go watch it.
To be honest I don’t think the debate was particularly interesting. The only really interesting part was that **LinusK **gave it as an example of how bad feminists were, even though he clearly hadn’t actually watched it. It’s obvious he got his description of the event from other people, who also told him what to think about it.
I noticed the same thing in his description of the walking in New York video. Nothing I’ve been able to track down as word-for-word plagiarism in his description yet, but similar language and opinions as extreme MRA websites.
You and me both. Unfortunately, the antifeminist movement as a whole seems to have decided to exploit the issue of boys’ educational difficulties as a tool to bash feminism with. (Apparently based on the lazy and self-serving rationale that if women/girls are outperforming men/boys at anything, it must be because those horrible man-hating feminists are unfairly discriminating against the men/boys.)
As I’ve said before, the traditional educational system that many boys are now being seen to have trouble with goes back hundreds if not thousands of years before feminism. It wasn’t until feminism significantly equalized opportunities and support for girls in education that anybody besides a handful of alternative-education “hippie” types started noticing that the traditional education system and traditional socialization of boys conflict in some respects.
I sometimes think that there may have been a missed opportunity back in the 19th century, when there was a widespread crisis in American rural education due to “difficult” or “wild” older boys wrecking schools for fun. The educational system seems to have addressed that problem with tighter discipline and more hierarchically organized schools, as well as tougher crackdowns on truancy. (In fact, this seems to be one of the major reasons that elementary and secondary education in the twentieth century became so heavily skewed towards female teachers: there was no longer any practical need specifically to seek out male teachers who could physically control and discipline violent adolescent boys on a regular basis, and female teachers were cheaper.)
I wonder what would have happened if 19th- and early 20th century education reformers had seriously analyzed the problems of boys and traditional classroom education from the ground up, rather than just addressing the symptoms of the discipline problem.
LinusK (and others who agree with him), here’s my question:
I agree that you have found some number of quotations from self-identified feminists which are troubling. Some are hateful, some are divisive, some are anti-male.
But my experience as a man living in a liberal part of the country (silicon valley), interacting with liberal women (such as my mother, my wife, my sister) who identify as feminists in no way leads me to believe that the type of extreme rhetoric you have been pointing out is at all representative of the way they actually live their day to day lives. I feel like this observation is in accord with observations and claims posted by many people in this thread, many of them women who identify as feminists.
So my mental model of feminism is that of the tens of millions of women in the US who identify as feminists, the vast vast VAST majority just live normal lives, raise kids, have husbands, have jobs. They believe that women should have the right to be CEOs and presidents. They do their best to make sure that if their daughters play with dolls instead of playing sports, it’s because that’s what the daughter actually wants to do. They oppose sexual harassment in the workplace. They do NOT pay much attention at all to the writings of random women who are associate professors at liberal arts colleges and make outrageous statements about men being obsolete, or all sex being rape, or what have you. They certainly do not think that such women speak for them or define feminism.
OK, so that’s what I think is true. I did say that I had a question for you, and it is twofold:
(1) Do you think my position is accurate? Why or why not? How might we test my position?
(2) Imagine for a second a world in which my view is accurate. In that world, is it fair or accurate or meaningful to level the types of criticism you’ve been leveling in this thread at feminism as a whole?
Just a few posts before this you took LinusK to task for exactly the same thing. “It probably slipped your mind to mention that. You probably just forgot. Not deceptive at all for you to not mention that. You probably just forgot.” But when you leave something out, and I call your attention to it, suddenly it’s my fault for not following the link.
No, that doesn’t fly around here.
I think you’re leaping to a conclusion there; that pointing out the disparity necessarily carries with it all the other attitudes you describe. It’s one thing to blame feminists for maliciously causing boys to fall behind, and quite another to wonder if they just haven’t fought to raise boys’ achievement with the same passion and vigor that they did for girls.
Posters here have complained, and rightly so, when folks like LinusK have quoted the most extreme feminists to tar the whole movement. That should go both ways; criticism of feminists shouldn’t be tarred with the views of its worst extremists, either.
I don’t agree with him, and I’ve tried to point out when I didn’t, but I’ll take a crack at it.
I think your position is entirely accurate and very well said. I’ve known self-identified feminists who are wonderful people, fair-minded, and great parents who care deeply about the well being of their daughters and sons.
And I’ll even go a step further and say that feminism as a whole has led to great advances and opened up opportunities for people who would have never had them before. Those are good things.
I think my criticism is fair, but please be clear about what my criticism actually is.
I think feminism, for all the good it has done, has a few blind spots. Things like portrayals of men in the media, single-gender institutions, educational achievement and expectations, that, while not entirely overlooked, just don’t generate the same calls for action that they did when they happened to girls. And I’m not even saying it’s deliberate; some of these things are subtle and hard to notice. But sometimes those subtle things can be important, or reveal things that we might not otherwise think about. They’re just blind spots. Heck, you’re all free to disagree with me about them, but it shouldn’t be this hard, or controversial, to point them out.
You’ve completely misstated what took place, and I don’t appreciate it.
**LinusK **posted the link in support of his argument. It was his cite, and his responsibility to summarize it accurately. I reviewed the cite, noticed that **LinusK **had mischaracterized it, and simply demonstrated that he hadn’t actually watched the debate at all, despite claiming to be “interested” in it.
When I used the phrase “It looks like you forgot…” I was simply pointing out that he hadn’t actually watched the debate at all, and I was calling attention to his behavior.
Let me be clear; it wasn’t my link, wasn’t my argument, wasn’t my responsibility to summarize the debate for you. So, one more time: if you want to know what was said at the debate, you need to go watch it. I have no responsibility to summarize it for you.
Since I didn’t find the debate particularly interesting, and have no particular desire to discuss it with you, once you’ve watched the debate, you’ll have to find someone else to discuss it with.
But let me say this for hopefully the final time; I have no responsibility to explain everything that happened in that debate to you. If you care, you can go watch it.
You posted this link in support of your argument. It was your cite, and your responsibility to summarize it accurately. I reviewed the cite, noticed that you had mischaracterized it, and simply demonstrated that you had left out significant portions of the analysis.