Neither do you. Right now, there’s a certain amount of difficulty it takes for a woman to attend college, a certain amount it takes for a woman to become literate, and a certain amount it takes for a woman to have a professional career. You wre strong/talented/lucky enough to succeed in all three endeavors. As you move back in time, each of those sets of obstacles becomes VASTLY greater. How can you (a) confidently assert that you would have had the necessary what-have-you, and (b) not appreciate the fact that the obstacles are as low as they are now?
And how does any of that demean you or insult you? If I had been born to a poor family in subsaharan Africa, I would probably not know how to program in C++. So? Does that make me a worse person?
Wait. Let me get this straight. You think that universities, with hundreds of years of tradition of admitting only, only upper-class white males, would have admitted you based entirely on your merit? That they wouldn’t even have considered your gender and refused you on that basis alone? That you alone are responsible for women being admitted to universities and colleges? Honey, if feminists who came before you hadn’t fought tooth and nail to be admitted to college, you would not have attended. If they had not fought to be taught the same subjects as men, you would not have attended school past the twelfth grade, if you got that far. The likelihood of an institution tossing over hundreds – no, thousands of years of tradition (that tradition being patriarchy) because of one goddamn person is about as likely as spontaneous combustion a la Dickens.
Betty Broderick comes to mind. A jealous ex wife who hunted down her ex husband and new wife and shotgunned them; something of a feminist hero. Got a interview with Oprah. Also a movie, Her Final Fury.
As far as abuse goes, I recall an amusing recent controversy. The feminists got laws passed in various places requiring the police to arrest abuse victims whether or not the victim pressed charges, under the theory that the cops were letting those evil, evil men go. Instead, the result was a much higher number of women being arrested, because the cops tend to ignore woman on man violence, and the men seldom press charges ( and if they do, the judge will likely laugh at them ). At least from some of the feminists I saw quoted, their response was to claim that the men were beating and stabbing themselves to make women look bad.
More ‘women are disadvantaged victims’ nonsense. It’s no harder for a woman than it is for a man.
It had nothing to do with luck, and it certainly had nothing to do with gender.
I know myself better than you do. You’ll never be able to tell me what I couldn’t have done.
The ridiculousness of your statement is that you seem to be telling me ‘only other women could’ve done it, not you.’
I’ve never been good at sitting down, shutting up, and taking no for an answer. But because I don’t call myself a feminist, you think that’s what I do? That I wouldn’t have attended college but for someone else’s fighting? Fuck that.
Two movies. She was also the feature of A Woman Scorned: The Betty Broderick Story. At least one person commented that Dan Broderick got what was coming to him.
Oprah’s site leads off the story about her with this:
No, DianaG, I wasn’t born on third base. You don’t know a god damn thing about how I grew up and what it took for me to get where I am, but your smug fucking attitude about how wonderful feminists are won’t let you admit that.
You have absolutely no basis beyond a self-applied label to say that I would be incapable of doing something that others did. Maybe you know you couldn’t have, but being that defeatist doesn’t do me any good.
Just because you’d back down from that kind of a fight, and couldn’t accomplish anything without someone to smooth the road for you, doesn’t mean that I’m like you.
Actually, you don’t know anything about me, either. You don’t know that I wouldn’t have been on the forefront of the fight, if I needed to, and I’m not doubting that you would have. I’m merely pointing out that we didn’t have to. It’s been done for us.
The only difference between us is that I have the good sense and the grace to be thankful.
No. What the other poster was saying was that your ability to attend the college of your choosing is due to decades of hard graft and vociferous protestations of generations of feministsbefore you, each one building upon the achievements of their predecessors. No one woman could have smashed the patriarcial barriers to higher education. It took thousands of women, working in concert, to achieve that. Hence, had you the misfortune to have been born before them, in a time of overarching patriarchy, you would have spent your life popping out kids and washing up. No matter how damn smart and determined you were.
Incidentally, were I interested in thinking like you do, would I be better off making the incision through the temporal lobe, or just above the eyesocket?
Feminists certainly want to take credit for things that they didn’t accomplish.
And that’s what separates a follower from a leader.
Nope. Some people choose to go with the status quo because it is easier, and some choose to spend their entire lives swimming upstream and fighting for every inch of it. How far I ‘would’ve gotten’ is something I can’t tell you, but I do know that I wouldn’t be content to take the easy way and just go with the flow. That’s not how I am, nor how I ever was. For all your assumptions about what would’ve happened then, there are examples of those who didn’t just go with the flow, and they didn’t all label themselves ‘feminsits’.
If you think that my lack of application of that term to myself is an indicator of inabilty to fight for what I want, you’re sorely mistaken.
Perhaps you should ask Kim Gandy about that. She’s got a lot more experience being lobotomized than I do.
I am strongly skeptical that you’re a leader. One thing that separates a follower from a leader is charisma; and unless in person you’ve got some, it is inconceivable that folks would follow you.
It’s true that leaders can have a psychotic disregard for objectivity, and that leaders can specialize in making absurd demonizations of their political enemies, and that leaders can be absolutely uncognizant of historical trends. But the charisma thing’ll getcha every time.
When I see some drunken gal stripping and dancing around in public, I think “Looks like fun!” Sounds like you bring a whole lot of extra baggage to these things. Maybe you should listen to your little head more and your big head less. The little head is single-minded, but it’s honest.
I kinda agree with EC here. A girl flashing her breasts and dancing around doesn’t necessarily mean she’s not a straight-A law student getting drunk and haing fun - I think saying she has a “slut’s brain” is a pretty exaggerated thing to say about a person of whom you’ve seen five-ten seconds of their life. Surely, Charger, you’ve done things like that (maybe not that exactly, but similar) for fun? Did that one act characterise your entire life?
I think the problem modern feminist movement encounters is largely due to a shift in society’s common values. The modern civil rights movement runs into the same issue though to somewhat lesser degree.
The principle that people are entitled to the same rights and opportunities has largely been adopted as one of modern society’s common tenets. There is still work to be done in hammering out a lot of the nuts and bolts of exactly how society should be structured but there are very few who would not agree with the general principle.
Thus, there is a perception that since equality is already one of society’s values any modern feminist movement must be pushing for something above and beyond those values. From this, I think you get many young people who would not/do not identify themselves as advocates of feminism even though they hold the same values. Instead, they take it as a given that all people are entitled to the same rights and opportunities and identify themselves as humanists or just plain normal people and, coming from this perspective, they wonder why feminism focuses just on women’s issues.
Basically, I don’t think it’s a case of people rejecting the principles of feminism as much as a situation where society already agrees with the ‘moderate middle’ [the vast majority] and therefore, the definition of a feminist has shifted to the point where it indicates the extreme right wing of the movement.
Similarly, witness the common use of “Fundie” these days. There’s nothing inherent in the term fundamentalist to indicate ‘wack job’ but that’s pretty much what it means now.
Finally, I find it amusing that in the same thread where the OP ranted against women rejecting feminism we find aspersions cast on these women for dressing like whores or acting like sluts. Now, I imagine the posters may come back and explain that they are equally against men being promiscuous or wearing revealing clothing, and if that’s the case, no worries. Otherwise, it strikes me as a little silly to rail against women not taking on the label of feminist while simultaneously applying gender double-standards.
Actually, I thought this was part of the overreaching that lost the feminist movement the support of the mainstream. The ad was clearly a reference to consensual BDSM, which feminists got away with attacking. But then many feminists became anti-sex in general, including consensual sex between men and women, and that’s when they lost the support of the mainstream. If they’d been smart enough to draw the line at consensual vs. nonconsensual sex, I think they would have enjoyed a lot more support from the mainstream. As long as feminists were percieved about increasing sexual freedom and fairness in relations between the sexes, they had a good image. But then some feminists had to go negative on sexual issues and focus their atteion on how evil men were. Combined with the widespread (and to some extent, accurate) perception that the feminist movement had been co-opted by lesbians, they REALLY lost ground, and haven’t really recovered yet.
I remember, because I wrote an article about the irony of the situation. While marital rape laws didn’t get on the books in most states until the late 80s (I think Arizona was the last to pass one in 1997) and because BDSM didn’t get off the list of mental disorders until the late 80s, it created a weird situation in many states. Up until the late 80s, if the cops broke into your home for some reason and found you having sex with your bound and gagged spouse, the best thing for you to do legally would be to pretend you were raping him/her, because marital rape wasn’t illegal, but you could be put in a mental instutitution against your will for practicing consensual bondage.
catsix- OK we get get it.
You’re strong and assertive. No-one can do anything to you that you don’t want. No one should do anything for you, because you don’t need their help. You can get everything you desire or dream simply by the sheer force of your will and your strong personality. You’re not a victim. You have no limits. Your gender has never been a disadvantage to you. You won’t be victimised because you aren’t a victim. You don’t need external help because you are your own best therapist. You hold down a good job and have a nice house because you’re so together.
Every other woman who can’t say the same is whiny and weak and needs to pull herself together and get over it. We should stop blaming men for our own faults, stop seeking help from outside sources, and just get on with living in the world as it is and not as we want it to be. catsix, I just don’t believe the crap you spout about other women, and I certainly don’t believe the crap you spout about yourself.
Well, except that you’re not being logical, because you’re just baldly assuming that the shortage of females in senior management positions is down to sexism, whereas there are at least two plausible alternative explanations:
The bell-curve thing: males occupy more extreme positions than women do, at both the “good” and “bad” ends. Men, as a gender, exhibit more of the qualities that result in extreme failure and extreme success. There is no more need to invoke a “glass ceiling” for keeping women out of the top posts than there is to invoke a “glass floor” for keeping women out of prison.
The career-breaks thing: getting to the absolute top requires more committment, dedication, and obsessive devotion to the job than most men are prepared to give, let alone women; women, as a sex, don’t throw up enough individuals who want it badly enough to get there.
Some argue that gender equality must imply not only equality of opportunity but equality of outcome; as though mixed-sex tennis were to become the norm, but with men obliged to defend the doubles court and be allowed no second serve, and women given a game start per set… these conditions to be adjusted until women were winning 50% of the time, whereupon we would call the game “fair”. But then, I wouldn’t expect to get into a tennis match in which my opponent was penalised to make up for the fact that I am fat, unfit, short-sighted, and can’t play tennis, and if I did, I would know very well that it wasn’t “fair”.
I agree that for every actual man-hating lesbian feminist that may actually exist, 1,000 or more are conjured up by Rush Limbaugh and his ilk. Social conservatives have consistently tried to tar the whole feminist movement with that brush, and sadly enough, I think they’ve succeeded to some extent. But the brutal truth is, feminists just plain old asked for it in the 80s, when Dworkin and MacKinnon were widely admired among feminists, when porn was made into a big issue by feminists, and when all men were portrayed as unconvicted rapists by some feminists, and when NOW elected an out lesbian as its president. For a while there, it seemed like every time Rush Limbaugh and friends said “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition” it was the feminists themselves who were handing it to them.
Now, it’s possible that I’m just wrong about this, but one of my cousins is a radical feminist lesbian living in Berkeley, and I know both her and her wife well enough to know that neither is a man-hater. And in fact I attended their lesbian wedding and met many of their queer friends, all of whom were as nice as could be to me (a guy), not to mention both of their fathers, her brother-in-law, etc. And if radical lesbian feminists in Berkeley aren’t man-haters, who is?
So while there may be some people who do fulfill the stereotype, I think that the vast majority of feminists, past and present, are NOTHING AT ALL like the shrill caricature that is being painted of them.
Oh, and Catsix, I disagree with just about everything you’ve said, but in particular you seem to be completely dodging one issue, which is whether you should thank past feminists for the fact that you can go to college. And your contention that you shouldn’t is baffling to me. You succeeded in college because (a) you were smart and hardworking, and (b) women are allowed (even encouraged!) to go to college these days. If (b) were not true, it would take a pretty preposterous amount of (a) for you to have succeeded. Thus, your success is due to BOTH your own talent and hard work and the changes that have been wrought in society in the past 150 years or so, largely by feminists. Tell me where I’m wrong…
[/QUOTE]