First of all, I’d like to sincerely thank each and every one of you for posting your comments and views about what feminism is and what it means to you. Since I posed the question, I figured I’d post a scaled down version of what I’ve decided to do for my poster.
All in all, I think it came out pretty well and I’m somewhat satisfied with it. But, feel free to let me know what you think. I’m highly open to critique of it (both positive and negative). So, take a look, and please, don’t be shy
p.s. Please keep in mind it looks extremely different when its scaled down (it’s a 30x40 vertical poster) as it does when it’s large and mounted on foamcore
But in most of these cases, most of the public seems to be able to separate the movement from the extremists. The feminist lunatic fringe seems to have been most successful in discrediting the movement.
How often have you heard a pro-life person saying “I no longer consider myself pro-life”? (You may hear a formerly pro-life person saying that, of course!)
Women who say, “I"m not a feminist but…” I sure expect all the rights they fought for, I sure expect equal pay for equal work, daycare, birth control, freedom from rape, rape shield laws if I do get raped, protection from domestic violence…and I want it all without having to compromise my Good Non-threatening Girl Cheerleader really piss me off. Somebody fought to get you those rights.
Ignorance about feminism is common. Pandering to it is inexcuseable.
Not really, margin. The patriarchy built the civilisation in which you now live – tamed the landscape, ploughed the fields, laid the roads, built the houses, pioneered a zillion and one technological advances and gave you water, power and sewerage on tap – and yet you feel no shame in decrying its manifest and innumerable injustices. Therefore merely being the inheritor of some set of advantages is not, I deduce, grounds for even showing gratitude towards the providers of the same, still less aligning yourself with them.
I wrote two very general statements on what I think feminism is. One: That men and women should be equal. However, equality has varying degrees. If I were to ask for strict equality I would be asking to use the same bathroom, to have men wear skirts, to have women and men in the same jails, etc. And obviously that’s unworkable. Maybe a few hundred years in the future, but certainly not next year.
I think you’re right that feminists want the good and not the bad. In my Law and Social Science class we studied the difference between the genders in the death penalty. Turns out that if white women are the victims, their murderers are far more likely to be given the death penalty. I think that’s unfair, I think it should be equal.
However, feminists look at how women are treated – lower salaries, more housework, more childcare, etc., and they think that we’ve been given the short end of the stick. They want to give the women the good stuff – the money, the time, the social status – in order to raise us to the level of the men. If feminists said, “Women should not be treated well in these areas,” then they would be pushing us down instead of lifting us up.
Malacandra, you aren’t saying that the good things in our civilization are ONLY due to men’s efforts? Are you serious about that?
Oh, those ungrateful women, lolling about while men toiled. They did all that by themselves with no help from women. How shameful.
It just cracks me up when men demand of women, well, where were you when we were doing that crap? Well, we were keeping your house, having your kids and dying in childbirth. We were working in sweatshops or walking the streets after some nice guy raped us and 'ruined our character." We were working in the fields or feeding or fucking the guys who did so, because by the laws passed by those nice gentlemen we weren’t entitled to do any other jobs that didn’t fit the female stereotypes men had of us.
Yep, it’s just a bowl of roses being female. All we had to do was sit around eating bonbons while decent honest guys labored in the fields for our ungrateful feminazi asses.
Gee, another reason to be a feminist: the idea that because some man is ignorant of what womens’ lives were really like, they didn’t exist.
Hi, Elysian. I actually focussed on a raft of good things which I think it is plausible to claim are due disproportionately to men’s efforts, and I’m roughly as serious as margin was in attributing the list of women’s rights that she reeled off as solely the fruits of feminism. Do you deny that male-dominated society was responsible for all of these?
Well said. Equally I don’t seem to see feminists arguing for an equal right for women to spend their working lives hip-deep in sewers, for an equal share of deaths in industrial accidents in place of the roughly 19:1 existing imbalance, for an equal share of the casualties among female firefighters, and so on.
Don’t be absurd. “The patriarchy” didn’t build those things, people did.
You could just as well say that racism, slavery, despotism, feudalism, superstition, 99% illiteracy rates, or poor hygiene built civilization. :rolleyes:
Uh, Malacandra? I just came back from Iraq. I spent the past year doing exactly the kind of shit you’re claiming feminists aren’t fighting for, plus getting shot at. And what do I see? Men fighting for the right to exclud me from recognition for combat because I don’t have a dick.
"Fighting for their share of workplace industrial accidents' or whatever. Huh. Because men have been fighting for that for ages. "Please please please please please let me get injured and killed or disfigured! Please!"
Do you have a cite for any of this crap you’re spewing–about how history is all male goodness and women just lolled about—or will you just keep repeating the same old stuff because the cites you’ve got are all right wing propaganda?
I was in combat, and because of my gender I don’t get to wear a specific badge that tells people instnatly that I’ve been in combat. By law, I’m not supposed to be in combat. Funny thing is, the enemy doesn’t abide by that. I’m sure Malacandra would cite that law as proof that women don’t fight and don’t deserve recognition for it, and in fact probably run screaming away from the necessity of it.
First off, can you give me an example of this average stereotypical man-hating “feminazi”? Mary Daly is the best one I can think of, from what little of her writings I’ve read (and even she’s not as bad sa your stereotype suggests), and she’s hardly average or mainstream feminist. Can you explain how Gloria Steinem, bell hooks, or Naomi Wolf, probably the three biggest names in feminism, fit into your average?
Second, the word “human” applies to Mary Daly, as does the word “anti-racist.” Does that mean that you consider yourself neither human nor anti-racist?
The common thread you’re missing is that both you and Mary Daly want to see women’s choices be better than they’ve been before. That’s the common thread that can result in labeling both of you as feminists. If Daly takes it too far, and tries to deny men the choices they deserve, then a word like “misandronist” comes into play. That, I’d say, is not part of her feminism.
Perhaps this is a joke: what you just described is a textbook example of circular reasoning, and logic’s only requirement in this case is for you to reject such an argument.
I agree, but this is hardly a problem unique to feminism: just about any set of moral, political, religious, or ethical precepts becomes very difficult to define when you go about it ass-backward–that is, when you look at the people who claim the precept and define it based on their behavior.
Goethe said it best: “From the crooked timber of humanity nothing straight was ever made.” People are funky, quirky, contradictory, ornery. You’re not going to be able to come up with a straight definition based on folks’ behavior. Best you can do is come up with a working definition, and see to what extent a given individual or group falls within that definition.
Yes, there’s nothing to say that your definition of feminism as man-hater isn’t accurate: there’s no such thing as the Holy Dictionary that reveals the True Definitions of words. And if you’re content to talk to the Rush Limbaughs of the world, you’ll find that you’re understood well when using that definition. However, if you want to talk with folks who self-identify as feminists, you’d do well to understand what they mean when they use the term, and then decide whether they (and you!) adhere well to that definition.
Your analogy with Christianity is apt. When I talk with someone who self-identifies as Christian, I’ll try to figure out what they mean by that. If they mean “someone who’s nice to their neighbor,” and if I’m nice to my neighbor and they’re a jerkoff to theirs, then I’ll consider myself, by their definition, more Christian than them. If they mean, “Someone who thinks that Jesus had some good ideas, but not necessarily uniquely good ideas,” then I’ll consider both of us Christian. If they (like most self-identified Christians) mean, “Someone who believes that Jesus was YaHuWaHu’s Only Son, Who Came To Earth To Save Humanity From Our Sins,” then I’ll consider them to be Christian and myself not to be. Why quibble over definitions like that?
isam, while that poster is a lovely piece of art, I’m not at all sure you want to use it to represent feminism. It depicts a discarded and slightly charred bra, right? Snopes says it’s an urban legend, spawned by a backfired attempt at satire by a reporter for Ms. Magazine. Ever since, it’s been used as a derogatory stereotype of feminists: unless you’re trying to piss the feminists off, you may want to choose a different image.
You can’t claim that because it was a male-dominated society all things produced by that society are due disproportionately to men’s efforts. You think women didn’t work as hard as men? You don’t think women are working members of society? Even if it’s a man who swung the hammer, there’s a huge network of support people who make building the train tracks possible.
Feminists don’t argue that they want to get killed in workplace accidents. What they do argue for is the right to have these jobs. They want to be fire fighters, and policemen, and soldiers, and carpenters. Look at margin, she wanted to be a soldier. She isn’t acknowledged as taking part in the combat she fought. Look at me – I wanted to spend a summer topping trees. I was told, flatly, that I couldn’t because I was female. We don’t get hired for dangerous positions, so we can’t get killed. That statistic is misleading.
You didn’t quote my third paragraph. Feminists won’t argue that we want women’s deaths to be valued as men’s deaths, because that would be devaluing women when women are already devalued. Feminists want to give things to women, not take them away. Don’t partially quote a line of argument and try to be misleading. Thanks.
Hmm. (checks forum.) Nope, it’s still Great Debates here. For a moment I thought we’d slipped into the Pit. I suppose there’s still time for that.
It’s nice to see, margin, that your debating style hasn’t altered greatly. You deliberately read my earlier post alluding to the achievements of patriarchal society as a claim that men had done all the work and women sat around idly doing nothing and yet couldn’t manage to be grateful for all that men had done for them. Sadly, that’s not actually what I said. The only point I was making was that deriving the benefits earned by a particular form of society or movement does not necessarily commit the recipient to unending gratitude to the benefactor. The rest was your own invention.
Personally I incline to the view that you would have been keeping house for yourself anyway, even had there been no men working their arses off to bring you one convenience after another; that you were giving birth to your own children rather than philanthropically bearing ours with no thought for your own ends; and that in the main most men were as deviod of rights as most women, and we could argue the toss as to who had the worst deal in terms of ways to die prematurely.
As to the list of rights now enjoyed by women, you unashamedly claim these as the fruits of feminism and feminism alone. A nod of the head in the direction of the patriarchy might not have been out of place, if only for promoting a moral and ethical system in which women’s cries for justice might be heard. Conceive of a society really dedicated to keeping women in their place (a book like Rogue of Gor might be a good place to start searching for an image of such a dystopia, even if Professor Lange’s prose style is execrable) and you can imagine what your chances might have been of ever winning any rights at all.
However, why worry? Your sneering dismissal of women who do not align themselves with the feminist movement as it is commonly understood to be as – well, whatever the sex-war equivalent of an Uncle Tom is; we don’t have cheerleaders this side of the pond, but I broadly understand what you’re getting at – along with your bitter, vituperative, snarling response to me, serves very well to illustrate that it doesn’t take an Andrea Dworkin to perpetuate the doubtless untrue picture of a feminist as a savage, shrill, shrieking harridan whom the interlocutor contradicts at his peril.
I’m sorry they wouldn’t give you a combat badge. It was none of my doing. Don’t take it out on me.
uglybeech, male-dominated society did what I said it did. To say “No it didn’t, people did” is like me saying “I’m not a sexist, I’m a computer programmmer”.
I don’t think that sexism or gender roles is the real problem here. It sounds like your husband is using his early childhood training as an excuse for inconsiderate behavior. An adult man is fully capable of overcoming gender role programming, especially since there is plenty of influences in our culture which counter the traditional roles. He just doesn’t want to.
IANAMC (marriage counselor) but methinks there are more serious issues afoot if your husband does not want to contribute to your partnership. Blaming it on gender roles is just a cop-out.
Cool. The point about what men did was tangential to the point about owing gratitude to a male-dominated society, but let’s run with it anyway. Without the man making the choice to go out and swing the hammer, accepting the danger and the rewards, the support network supports in vain. That same support network keeping the home fires burning would be keeping them burning just the same if there was no-one willing to clear the forests, lay the rails, build the dams, install the pipes, etc. What makes the big difference to the quality of life? The support network, or the go-getter at the business end?
Cool[sup]2[/sup]. Why couldn’t you go tree-topping? Because you were physically not up to the work, or because the dangers of the job aren’t societally acceptable if the risk is borne by women? Genuine question: I don’t mean to decry you, but you haven’t given me enough information. As to margin, part of me doesn’t want to drag her any further into this argument as she’s formally signed out of it pending a Pitting, which rather confirms my perceptions that she can’t debate civilly for three posts in a row; but it’s her own choice either not to participate further or to publicly recant on her flouncing out, and that’s her concern, not mine. I don’t have enough information as to what she was up to in Iraq; whether she was in a combat assignment, or some other uniform job that coincidentally entailed coming under fire at some point. I also don’t know whether men doing the exact same job as she did qualified for a combat badge, or not. If they did, then plainly margin deserves one too, and damn Uncle Sam for denying it her. If not, then she doesn’t, and damn her sense of entitlement.
Delighted. You make part of the point I addressed in the previous paragraph. Despite the inability of women to get into hazardous occupations, feminists are no more prone than anyone else to bring about a change in opinions to the point where women dying in the line of work are as unremarkable as men so dying. I’m well aware that feminists want to give things to women, not take them away. Wouldn’t you have a beef with someone whose idea of equality consisted in addressing only the areas in which one side is short-changed?
Concerning misleading statistics, there are some who argue that as long as women aren’t bringing home $1 for every $1 earned by men, this is evidence of sexism in society, and the imbalance will only truly have been remedied when it really is dollar-for-dollar equivalence. Am I not as entitled to say that, as long as more men are dying at work than women, this is also evidence of sexism – and it won’t have been remedied until about half as many men are dying as now, and about ten times as many women?
Since the thread title was “What does feminism mean to you?” and not “Feminism – objectively good or objectively bad?”, I hope my views have provided helpful data.
as a “way of being” for our species, patriarchy may have been a functional adaptation to crisis situations. In much the same way that even advocates of egalitarian democracy accept rigid hierarchy as a better way of running a military, and accept the necessity of having a military at least until we eliminate the causes of war, I’m willing to provisionally accept the notion that patriarchy, with its hierarchies and emphasis on power and control and its concentration of decision-making authority and so forth, may have been a useful & possibly even necessary response to scarcity.
I am not a professional archeologist or anthropologist, but the history of patriarchy seems to be the history of our species as centrally agrarian. While we don’t have records showing how we lived as hunter-gatherers 11,000 years ago, there seems sufficient evidence from what cultural studies we do have to indicate that we probably didn’t have to work very hard, coercion and hierarchy were not an important part of social structure, and neither male supremacy nor obsessive controls on sex or reproduction were much in evidence.
As we’ve again created a social structure that allows us to focus far less energy on mere survival, we’ve moved away from the rigid control structures and towards structures that depend more and more on voluntary cooperation between equal participants.
Meanwhile, crediting patriarchy with the various accomplishments of the last 10 millennia is as silly as crediting totalitarian monarchy for most of them. It’s hardly a valid or useful argument against democracy or feminism, and as a rhetorical device makes the person attempting to use it look kind of stupid.
I no longer say I’m pro-gun control because too many people assume it means I’m anti gun. I stopped saying I was Christian, originally because I didn’t want to be associated with the narrow minded Christians (and eventually became a UU who has no belief in the diefication of Christ).
I, however, stubbornly refuse to turn over the feminist label to the extremists - or those who want feminists to appear extremists. I think Rush Limbaugh, et al. have done more to make the fringe mainstream as Mary Daly ever did.
It’s also rather silly to conceptualize patriarchy as “the guys went out and did all the hard and dangerous work while women stayed home reaping the benefits”.
The home as we know it is a relatively recent invention, and so is the out-of-home place of employement — households were traditionally larger places chock full of people, with local industry going on, and both men and women worked there.
If you want to understand patriarchy, start with “control of reproduction”, and after a few moments to think about how you’d go about doing that, consider that how it was in fact accomlished was via “control of sex” via “control of women”, and “control of who could marry and when”.
I suspect much of the motivation for those who say, “I support equal rights but I am not a feminist” lies in the desire to pick and choose what causes they wish to support.
It is pretty silly to argue that “feminism is responsible for rape shield laws, therefore you have to support equal pay legislation” or the like. Yet it is not uncommon.
Feminism has achieved a number of laudatory goals. They currently want some others, which are not necessarily as obviously worthwhile, and want to achieve those goals in ways that are also not beyond debate. The trouble comes, it seems to me, when people want to debate the goals and the ways.
I don’t want to characterize all feminists as wishing to enforce a groupthink, but there are enough of them to give people pause before they buy into what feminism means today.
What I would like Feminism to be: A movement to balance our culture with a Feminine ideal in order to address the distortions of having mainly Masculine models. Each of us contain feminine and masculine qualities. A healthy society, as well as a healthy person, has a proper balance of the two. This isn’t a “Patriarchy is evil” pov - but rather that the feminine has been buried and needs to re-emerge. This Feminism is actually Humanism - being whole.
What Feminism actually is: Another special interest seeking protected class status with the typical array of activists who feed off the cause. In order to justify the protected class status, it must promote the idea that men are evil oppressors. It is now more or less a fringe movement as most women don’t buy into the “man-hating” agenda.
