Feminism used to be an excellent movement. Suffrage, right of ownership, equal opportunity, etc. all these things which are remarkable and important were all achieved decades ago. These days feminism is all about mattress girls, rape culture, objectification, check-your-white-male-cis-heteronormative-privilege, patriarchy, fat acceptance, slut walks, fake statistics, and other worthless or disgusting nonsense. Ironically feminism today seems hellbent on reversing some of the previous gains with regard to having women become full and equal members of society and want to return them to some special protected and delicate class of citizens.
I am a feminist, and to me feminism is advocacy that people should be treated equally by society and by the law regardless of gender/sex.
Unequal treatment regarding fair pay and fair consideration for advancement by employers; sexual harassment; reproductive rights; media portrayals; and protection from violence (including sexual violence), just to name a few.
“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.”
― Rebecca West
Issues:
Political issues in the U.S.:
Control over my own body
Equal pay for equal work
Equal opportunity (though there is a good reason firefighters need to carry a lot of weight, and a woman or man who can’t do it shouldn’t be a firefighter)
Worldwide issues - women getting educated, having access to birth control, being able to drive and vote. FGM. Sati. Freedom to divorce. For me, these issues are the biggest ones right now. In the U.S. we need to make sure we don’t backslide. Some parts of the world need to make big strides yet.
Social issues -
Being treated with respect (this includes things like rape, street harassment, bad marriages). This is the second big priority for me now. I really don’t feel like I need more in legal protections (except those darn creeping abortion laws). I think this sort of respect towards women is still lacking culturally.
Feminism used to be equal rights for women; since that has been largely achieved it is mostly grievance politics and abortion.
Regards,
Shodan
I thank feminism for me being able to live my life without children and mostly without censure. I am not the weird aunt who can’t have children or whatever, I just made a different lifestyle choice.
I thank feminism for me being able to live in a LTR with a man who I am not married to and who is not the same race as me.
I thank feminism for the fact that if I did get pregnant, I could take care of it without having to birth the baby.
Equal opportunity is a good one, too. I work in a stereotypically female job, but I did get a degree in a STEM field and still want to work in that field.
Feminism has made it possible to say “No, I didn’t ask for it,” and have at least some people believe me.
Feminism has given me strong female characters in movies, video games, and books. It has removed this notion that females are somehow delicate flowers that can’t kick ass.
In the end, regardless of what the anti-feminists say, it’s all about choices. Just the choice to live my life as I like, without people stopping me because I am not empowered to do so!
Yep. It’s amazing so many women refuse to call themselves feminist.
Really? Even though men still on average make more than women for the same job?
I really like all the things the other feminists in this thread have said!
For me it’s mostly been about being able to live my life with the same rights and opportunities as my brother. I don’t have to do or be everything that he does or is, but I shall not get turned away from the opportunity.
So far we’ve done pretty well over the past 36 years. I rarely, if ever, feel like less of a person than my brother because of my gender. I played and watch sports, I wear pants, I take the Pill and don’t have kids, I vote like a motherfuck and I own a home. All of that stuff had to be specifically fought for by women who came before me. So - yay feminists!
To me, feminism is the recognition that we live in a patriarchy, and that that is not beneficial for anyone but the patriarchs. The end-goal would be replacing the patriarchy with an egalitarian system.
For me, the strongest influence has been feminist SF - Le Guin, Tiptree, Butler, Tepper, Cherryh and countless others.
Feminism is the belief that society involves unfair and unequal treatment of the sexes (specifically to the disadvantage of females), and should not.
This unpacks to two parts:
• The observation / conclusion that social treatment of people is different by sex
• The observation / conclusion that the different treatment is unnecessary and unfair, burdening females in particular
Radical feminism goes further and says that our social system is best understood in these terms, as a structure that arose from, and which perpetuates, sexual inequality. In other words, it centralizes the relationship between the sexes the same way that marxism / communist theory centralizes the relationships of labor and property.
Liberal feminism is a simple application of classical liberalism to the issue of sexual equality: there should be equality, equal treatment of the sexes in all laws and policies, but no further assumptions are made or built in about our social structure
Most of the other forms of feminism ascribe sexual inequalty to some other cause, so that it’s a symptom of some other social issue or consideration.
For some reason, this speaks to me as well.
Rigid gender roles and stereotypes have harmful effects on not just women, but men as well. For every girl who is pressured to define herself by how well she can keep a home, raise some kids, and please a husband, there is a boy who is told he must define himself by how much money he makes. Both identities are confining and can lead to disillusionment when they are unattainable or unsatisfying.
It is clear to me that our society will become imbalanced if it remains taboo for men to embrace traditionally female roles. If I had to critique feminism, it would be that it has expanded opportunities for women by making male-dominant activities and spaces more accessible to them, but not until recently, has it really done much in the other direction.
As an example, we talk a lot about how STEM needs more women. Well, we also need to talk about the need for more male nurses, teachers, and social workers. These are important occupations that would benefit from more gender diversity. I know there is probably AA directed towards men to get them into these roles, but our public discourse is missing this side of things.
The issue with every “ism:”
starts out as “what can we do to* fix* the system”
turns into “what can* I* do to game the system.”
This is true, but also a little more complicated, because traditional female gender roles aren’t just troublesome because they are restrictive in terms of content. Female gender roles have closed women off from economic resources and made them rely on male family members for money, which in turn limits all kinds of other things beyond what they happen to be doing from 9-5.
Put this way, in a world where men can become doctors and only women can become nurses, both parties have an equivalent problem when it comes to how they spend their workday.
But only women have the problem that they are structurally barred from the freedom and security that a doctors income provides. Feeling happy and fulfilled is a part of the equation, but a lot of women are also hoping to avoid things like “how do I leave the man who beats me when I have no bank account?”
No doubt that this is a consequence of patriarchy. Women are cut off from power because it is concentrated in the hands of men.
All I’m saying is that if we really want an egalitarian society, we need to make it more socially acceptable for men to eschew high-status roles and fill niches that historically have been reserved for women. If a boy says he wants to be a teacher, that should be regarded as uncontroversial as the choice to be an astronaut or a lawyer, not criticized because it doesn’t fit with the “men must be ambitious and earn a bunch of money” narrative.
Very much agreed. The current situation is that women have more choices than they did and can pursue more professions, for example. But as women get involved in more professions, men face more competition for those roles. If men can’t choose to get involved in more professions as well, we end up just with a shortage in some roles (as women leave them and no men enter) and an overabundance of others (as women join and men stay).
We also get a bunch of men who are chronically unemployed or unsatistifed in their jobs, because they have limited their career options to stereotypically manly occupations. The “pink professions” should be on their radar, but I often get the sense that they aren’t.
When my boys were in high school, they had a project that involved talking to their parents and friends of their parents’ ages, to ask them what they thought their generation’s greatest achievement was. My answer was that we had worked unfailingly and untiringly to eliminate bias toward one human being by another, based only on his or her gender, skin color, ethnic origins, etc. Impressive as my parents’ generation was (it’s hard to compete with saving the world in WWII), it was common practice throughout their lives to judge other human being based on race, gender, ability, etc. Ours was the first generation to not only tsk tsk over it and say it wasn’t right, but to go out and work to change it.
To me, feminism is part of a greater movement to recognize the intrinsic importance of all people, regards of their externals. At nearly sixty, I experienced plenty of gender discrimination as a girl. All of the usuals - no you can’t play on the little league team, you’re a girl; don’t sign up for that AP science class, dear, you’re a girl; girls will never be astronauts, surgeons, prime ministers, army generals, etc. There were plenty of ‘nice’ jobs for secretaries, nurses and teachers, things a woman could do until she got married or after her kids were grown.
Unlike our mothers, girls like me refused to accept the status quo. We demanded equal education, equal voice in government, equal access to good jobs and decent wages. Some of these we achieved outright, while others are a work-in-progress. But the important thing is we moved ‘normal’, and by doing so, we changed lives.
I work in Human Resources and there are two reasons why. One, it’s a field where you can be a woman and still be taken seriously. We’ve come a long way from this profession being just a clearinghouse for forms to be filled out and sent on their way or filed. And second, it’s a bully pulpit from which to promote the cause of women’s equality. I can’t force my managers to hire a female candidate, but I can make sure they see a superior one in every group of resumes I give them to choose from. I’m in a position to make sure my female co-workers are treated properly and respectfully at all times. And I’m not alone. There are thousands and thousands of women just like me all over the world, smoothing the road and preparing to pass the torch to a new generation of women who will have a considerable leg up thanks to our groundwork. I’m intensely proud of that, of us, of myself for being a part of it.
That’s feminism to me. Never having to take a back seat to anyone just because you’re female.
Feminism is a fringe political movement designed to punish men by all means necessary. The usual tactics are lies and phony statistics.
Remember when feminists spread the lies that men were most likely to engage in domestic violence on Super Bowl Sunday? Nothing but lies.
Back in the 90’s, feminists made up a new term: Date Rape. They spread this lie throughout college campuses that there is this epidemic of women being ‘raped’ by men they knew. Many colleges had mandatory 'rape awareness ’ classes and other useless nonsense like Take Back The Night marches. While I’m certainly not pro rape, the date rape epidemic is simply a myth, allowing women to have power over men with the threat of false rape allegations.
It’s gotten even worse now. The lies continue, with the current lie stating that 25% of women will be raped at college. The Rolling Stone article helps show that there’s not a culture of rape at college, there’s nothing more than a culture of feminist lies.
I think this joins “I’m not racist, but” as a really bad way to start a sentence.