Alas, that’s completely correct. Still, we’re ahead of where we were, even a measley 30 years ago.
(I think that, today, the Equal Rights Amendment would pass; in fact, I think people would wonder what the fuss was about.)
Opening doors: I forgot this one… I don’t mind if the person in front of me opens the door. I will do the same and open the door for him/her. One time I was reminded of the silly gophers cartoon (thank you sir, no you thank you), when my ex and I (both very courteous), opened doors to each other in short sucession. He did it first, then I thank, then I opened the next, he said thanks. And that’s how it should be.
It does annoy me when I’m walking in front of someone, but that person rushes past me in order to open a door for me. Be it a restaurant door or a car door. It is annoying because I don’t like someone rushing past me in order to do that, when I’m perfectly capable of opening the door and opening it for him. I dated someone for a little while who did this, and it was a big turnoff.
Paying for dates, I always offer, but many times it is not taken. Sometimes, I’m with someone who is somewhat equitable. If we go to the movies, he’ll pay for the entrance, but I’ll pay for the food, or each has to pay for their meals. Or if we eat somewhere and eat dessert in another restaurant, he’ll pay the main meal and I’ll pay the desserts. It is still less than half and half, but it is also, IMHO, just.
I also have another friend who, when we go out, we split the bill, even if my meal cost a bit more than his. I also find this fair.
I do think in a romantic/potential romance situation, it has to be decided. I always offer, but many times the guys pay, and I’m also not going to insist then, since I find that rude.
Kaio, I just remembered the time a guy tried to grab my attention so that I could, you know, pay attention to the previous guy I had ignored. I’m guessing they were buddies. I ignored the second as well and continued walking to the taxi stop. And I think I’ve told the story a couple of times of the guy who called me out, and the time I innocently paid notice, I then got a whole lot of talking from the guy, who wouldn’t leave me alone despite the fact I kept saying I was coming from the grocery store and I needed to go home and put my food away. What finally made the guy stop and not follow me was when I finally broke down and mentioned I had a boyfriend, a local boyfriend, even. I was, at the time, single. But it was then that he finally let go and stopped offering me a ride to go to my home ( 
).
Neutral-ish, there’s good porn and bad porn, although in my limited experience more bad than good.
Neutral-ish, it is an industry that still often preys on the desperate, male and female - but it’s certainly vastly preferable to the other kind.
Pro. Strongly pro. I don’t think AA goes far enough, I think it should be forced on CEOs too.
Sure. But not, IME, a very large percentage any more.
Certainly isn’t in my experience at all.
As in being insistent? Fuck that noise.
You were lucky with your Italian experience, then - most women I know say it extended beyond cat-calling to unwanted touches.
There’s also the technological version of cat-calling, I suppose: Facebook friend requests from men I’ve never met, will never meet, and have zero connection to me either through shared work / industry (or interests, hobbies, or anything at all) or shared FB friends. It’s not that often, but it’s not zero, either, and I’ve never gotten one from a women who didn’t have at least a tenuous prior connection. They usually don’t message me and explain why they sent the request, either. One guy just said that he “wanted to get to know me better” – except that he lived some 6000 miles away across an ocean, so I really have no idea what he was expecting.
RE: objectification – we distinguish between objectification and taking back our own sexual autonomy and empowerment. Context matters, a lot; and objectification is still a problem – it’s one of the things that paves the way for street harassment (and worse) for one, the assumption that a man has a right to me, my time, my attention, my body (as demonstrated by the gropers and grabbers), just because I exist; rather than acknowledging my autonomy as an independent actor who makes my own choices about those things. The two may look similar at times, but they are distinctly different. It can get murky to sort out at times, just because they do look similar, and context itself can shift in the blink of an eye. For example, Miley Cyrus herself may have been empowered making the video to “Wrecking Ball” – there’s no way I can know for sure, which is another reason why it gets murky – but the choice of imagery does cater to a very “male gaze” sensibility – that is, you can be naked as a visual metaphor for emotional vulnerability, which is a powerful and empowered image, but licking a sledgehammer just seems to be a metaphor for fellatio, and the narrative thus becomes about Him instead of Her. Which becomes problematic as it goes out in the world and becomes a part of the cultural landscape, feeding the idea that women are sexual objects for male consumption (or male ahem service), girls should adhere to that path, and boys expect it from girls.
Whew. This one ain’t easy, mainly because we’re in a transitional period between the time when objectification was the norm and women’s sexual empowerment is unheard of, to (hopefully) a time when the reverse is true. In the middle, where we are, we’re trying to make sense of it within the power structures that currently exist, trying to figure out ways of changing the power structure so that empowerment is the default rather than there being any confusion about what this looks like, pointing it out and talking a lot about it, and trying to create contexts of clear empowerment to counteract the mainstream cultural norm (still a norm, but slowly shifting) of objectification. It’s difficult because we should be able to express our sexuality in the same safety and freedom from judgment as men currently enjoy, but that’s not where we are right now, culturally, so it becomes really easy for that expression to be stripped of its context, which hijacks it back into the mainstream pile of objectification that gluts our media consumption and cultural experience.
Another question: What (if you’re a feminist) is your view of “shared custody” (meaning each parent gets approximately 50% of the time with the children) after a divorce? More specifically, should that be the default position, rather than the “every other weekend” standard that’s currently the norm?
If you’re not a feminist, what is your take on feminists’ position on the issue?
To this feminist, shared custody sounds perfectly reasonable if both parents have relatively equal facility (and equal desire) to take care of the children.
Let’s see how many of the list I can knock out:
Porn: I’m fine with any porn involving consenting adults, no problem. I’d like to see safe and dignified working conditions for people, no matter what their profession. It seems to me that the porn industry has a ways to go, but it’s a big bad world and porn is hardly the worst industry
Legalized prostitution: I’m definitely pro-decriminilization. I’m theoretically okay with fully legal prostitution, but at the same time I’m not convinced I’ve seen a country with legalized prostitution that’s done a great job of keeping it safe, fair and voluntary.
Men paying on dates: I always try to split, but if the guy makes a big deal of it, I’m not going to fight him. I do try to make sure things balance out. My husband and I keep mostly separate finances, and we trade off treating each other.
Opening doors: Whatever, if it’s what you do for anyone that’s fine. If you are making it weird or a big show, well, that’s weird.
Revealing clothing: I am all for it! I’d prefer that it come from an inner sense of beauty and empowerment or whatever than some kind of external pressure, but that’s more about self-esteem and self-image than the clothing itself.
Custody: I don’t think there should be a single standard. Ideally, families figure out what works in their circumstances. I know quite a few single dads with sole custody, and yeah, it absolutely makes sense in their cases. I’d definitely like to see the last vestiges of the “tender years” docterine, where children were automatically awarded to the mother, end.
It’s OK if both parents can do it. I had a classmate in high school whose divorced parents did that, and it worked for her. Both lived relatively at the same distance from the school, and post-split, managed to obtain similar living arrangements that allowed them to do that. As she got older, though, the arrangement did change a bit, as she preferred to spent longer time with one parent or the other, depending on which she had less issues at the moment. And the parents were both able to accommodate her.
I will also point out that just because one parent has physical custody most of the time, does not mean the other parent has to be in the shadows or distant or uninvolved except on weekends. My half-sibs lived most of the time with their mom, but all adults around made sure that they spent significant time with their (our) parental side. My dad also would take them to the doctor, family reunions, after school activities, extracurricular things, sports, etc. whenever he could/their mom couldn’t/whatever was easiest. He also went to all school related/activity related event (graduations, ceremonies, dances, matches, etc.). Heck, they even met my maternal cousins and played with them before I was born! And since their mom babysat me after school, for a significant part of my childhood, he even saw them every single day, since he was usually the one to pick me up from her house.
Having looked up grievance politics, you’re not wrong*, but I’m not sure why you make that sound like a bad thing. Grievance politics is how we got the Magna Carta. It’s why we wrote the Declaration of Independence.
It just means “seeing something wrong and fighting against it in the political sphere.” And, yeah, feminists do that. As should everyone–it’s your democratic duty.
*For liberal definitions of “largely achieved,” of course.
EDIT: And, yes, I’m a feminist. What do I believe? What pretty much every decent person believes. There are three types of people out there: feminists, people who could call feminists but don’t call themselves such, and sexist jerks. As long as you aren’t sexist, and don’t just let sexism happen and ignore it, you’re a feminist. There is no unification of thought.
I guess I’ll briefly get into objectification–it’s not wrong. The problem is when it is done inappropriately. One such situation is when women are objectified in a situation where men would not be. Others just involve a lack of empathy for others and seeing them as human beings.
Objectification is a scale. You have “fully human” on one side, which really only applies to yourself, although your closest loved ones get close. You have those people that are just statistics on the other side. You can’t treat those statistics like people, or else you’d be mourning every human death. They are objects to you.
If you want to get technical, finding someone attractive is sexually objectifying them, since you are thinking about how they please you. In a relationship, the objectification is lower, but in porn or strip shows, it’s much higher. The problem arises when you over objectify, when you see the person in your office who should be at coworker level but instead see her at stripper level.
In colloquial terms, we will say “objectification” to only refer to one of these gross mismatches. But technically we do it all the time.
Yet this is not the usual feminist interpretation of this concept. (I think this leads to the problem of some feminists thinking porn is wrong.) That’s what I mean by saying there is no one thought on issues like this. I am still 100% a feminist.
(And, BTW, anti-feminists are what made me actually pick a side between group one and group two in my previous post.)
My problem with the 50/50 custody is that its nice in theory, but its a pain in the butt for the kids - who shift between houses and bedrooms too often for their friends to find them. My kids’ friends with divorced parents miss out on a lot of social things, because calendar coordination slips and Dad has chosen to move ten miles outside the district, which is fine when he’ll drive you in and back on his day, and a pain in the back end when it comes time to assemble a group of not yet driving kids.
The other problem with 50/50 custody is that in every case I’ve known one parent (and it usually is the woman, but that isn’t a gender thing, its a whomever was primary parent pre-divorce thing) gets stuck with writing all the incidental checks, taking time off work for the orthodontist and buying the shoes. Somehow, the parent who wasn’t primary before isn’t trained to buy shoes, or make doctors appointments, or remember that there is a fee for tennis due to the school. But the child support model doesn’t factor that in for 50/50 custody. And generally, the parent who wasn’t primary doesn’t end up with 50/50 custody in reality - their life gets busy and they aren’t used to prioritizing kids. So its often a legal fiction that ends up giving the primary parent the short end of the stick.
As I said, as a feminist its great in theory. I’ve yet to see a practical application where 50/50 custody has turned out to be equal responsibility and where its been best for the kids. But my kids and their friends are teens - maybe it works better if started younger.
I’m against it, from a stability-for-the-kids rationale not any feminist reasoning. I think one parent (either one) should have primary custody in terms of the kids having one household (if divorced parents want to share a single household, this rationale falls away, of course)
I don’t see that as being “shared custody”; shared custody means that both parents are involved in decisions and in childrearing and that they work at it as a team. If each parent works on a different wavelength, if each change of household (or of parent in the household) means a complete upset of the rules, that’s not shared custody but Morse madness. It’s the same as the difference between having a parent who travels a lot but whose travel is part of the regular household routine or having a parent whose presence or absence changes that routine completely.
To me feminism is the idea that people of any sex and gender are equal and that people should be met with an open mind and evaluated by what they actually do, not by what you expect them to do based on one tiny little bit of information.
Porn: I’m fine with it so long as everybody involved understands what the game is (including the viewers), not fine with the exploitation it sometimes involves.
Same for prostitution.
Paying for dates. Eh, for starters I am from a “going out in groups, finding corners in couples” kind of culture, being on a date always felt weird. The notion that He must pay always, no matter what the actual economics involved, makes my eyes roll so far back they hurt. And don’t get me started on those speeches about “when I make it big you’ll be able to stop working and just raise our children” - what part of “I’m an engineer” didn’t you get, and why do you think that raising children and keeping house isn’t work?
Opening doors: my Dad was an old fashioned gentleman. He taught us that the rule of thumb to decide who opens the door is “whomever will make going through it easiest for everybody involved”; his response to “so what about ‘ladies first’?” was a very dry “that’s an excuse to check out your butts.”
Revealing clothing: depends on the situation. Y’all most likely don’t want to see my Grandma’s tummy. If you do, you’re either a geriatrician, an artist or a freak (Goya would have had material for half a dozen etchings with her…). In a factory? Nope. Standing on the seat in front of mine in a plane, with your moneymaker right above my head as you try to fit your too-big carry-on into place? Please no! Ballet dancers, cheerleaders, ice skating? Yes thank you!
Since equality is largely achieved, the grievances tend to sound increasingly petty or misguided. See a previous post about how men make more money than women for an example.
Regards,
Shodan
I am a feminist. As such, the dictionary’s definition of “feminism” works for me: a belief in the “political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.”
Interesting reading in this thread…especially how different the meaning of “feminism” is to those who call themselves a “feminist” as opposed to those who don’t.
Given its definition, I don’t understand why anybody, male or female, wouldn’t be a feminist…unless, of course, they prefer (read: need) a stacked deck.
I think it should be partially up to the children as soon as the children are old enough to voice an opinion, but there should not be a gender bias built into custody decisions.
The real problem here is deeper: marriage is not a feminist invention, nor is divorce. People who elect to become parents should ideally formulate a coparenting relationship and it should exist and thrive (or fail to thrive, I suppose) independent of whether or not those same individuals are in, or remain in, an ongoing sexual-romantic relationship. Coparenting relationships need not involve the biological parents or be exclusive to them or involve 2 and only 2 people, either, by the way.
Feminism doesn’t have a unified position on porn. Historically it came pretty close to one in the era beginning in the late 1970s and extending through the end of the 80s, and that view was that sexual objectification is a social problem for women, that pornography is the quintessential epitome of sexual objectification of women and furthermore eroticizes subject-object sexual dynamics (Dworkin: “Man fucks woman. Subject verb object”) and therefore, yeah, it’s bad news. But let’s unpack that a bit…
• The problems with pornography do not come from the fact that sex is depicted in an explicit manner;
• they do not come from the fact that women’s bodies are on visible display, although to the extent that only the women in porn are presented for titillating visual consumption, without equal presentation of men for the visual enjoyment of those who like to view male bodies, that’s a concern, and also to the extent that the material is tailored for male consumption / for the male gaze (if that is indeed something identifiable, which itself is up for debate) and not equally available for women as the consumers thereof, that can be a concern
• pornography can be viewed as a component of women’s problematic situation in patriarchy without concluding that laws rendering it illegal are a good idea; from the start, there were feminist women concerned that anti-porn laws would be used to restrict informational content about sexuality and about women and women’s bodies, and indeed they have been used that way
• The problems with pornography are almost impossible to identify except in the larger context of identifying the power differential between men and women, the ways in which sex is intertwined with that (both in the sense that power invades sexuality and sexual expression and in the parallel sense that power inequalities are themselves eroticized for both sexes). In other words, the issues that feminists have with pornography might not apply to explicit and deliberately-arousing depictions of sex in a hypothetical non-patriarchal world, hence are not intrinsic to what you may think of as porn but instead are context-dependent.
• The problems with pornography are also not very distinguishable from the larger issue of sexual depictions of women in other ways. Calendars of women in shorts and bandanna top posting next to a paint can to sell Sherwin-Williams or Bear interior latex paint. Photos of young women straddling both a Harley and the judiciously placed camera for the cover of Cycle World magazine. Etc. Here again, the issues that feminists have with such depictions (sexual objectification) are so wound up in the larger context of inequality that it would be wrong to assume that all feminists with those objections would resent sexual objectification in a hypothetical non-patriarchal context (intrinsically wrong) as well as in this context (where women are the objectified ones).
• I myself am male and I come at it from the other side of the room. For male people, it is our appetite that is emphasized; I consider it dehumanizing to both sexes to polarize sexual appetite and object and invest all appetite in the male and the state of being desired in the female.
In general, as prostitution tends to exist, simply legalizing it would be a bad idea. Some feminists would prefer instead to change police policy to arrest people who pay for sex rather than arresting those who charge for sex. Legalizing prostitution could simply deepen the institutionalization of women’s sexual oppression within prostitition, rescuing the customers and the people who are exploiting the prostitutes from legal fallout without improving prostitutes’ situation.
If it could be legalized with sufficient protection against infringements on self-determination, that would get more support. Most feminists do not support laws designed to protect women from making “wrong decisions”. But economic considerations play a big part here: women should not be in a situation where the only form of employment available to them is working as a prostitute. Or where none of the other opportunities are sufficiently lucrative to be practical.
Useful until there is parity, after which point it should not be needed. Women are not a minority so they should be expected to be represented in equal numbers, roughly speaking, wherever you look. Where not, there may be a need for affirmative action, among other ameliorative interventions.
Yes, see above. Not that it’s intrinsically wrong but that to the extent that ONLY women are presented as “sex” for the consumption of others (for the consumption of men, basically) it contributes massively to subject-object polarized sexual dynamics which are a problem.
Mary Daly is an outlier, although not unique within feminism. More typically, you find these attitudes, not all necessarily bundled together:
• Marriage is not a feminist institution and is not good for women or other living things. It’s a sexually possessive monogamous arrangment with its roots in property considerations and inheritance laws, and it isn’t conducive to ideal self-fulfilling relationships.
• Right now, if not forever and ever, the sexes are not equal, feminism is not yet a finished success story, hence for women to pursue their sexual and romantic relationships with men is to invest a lot of their energies and loyalties with men. Sleeping with the enemy. There are alternatives, so choosing this one is something feminist women should question.
• See prior notes about how, under patriarchy, sex as we know it and learn about it is shaped by the power imbalances. Those power imbalances themselves are eroticized for both men and women. (Catherine MacKinnon: “…Our subordination is eroticized in and as female; in fact, we get off on it to a degree, if no-where near as much as men do. This is our stake in this system that is not in our interest, our stake in this system that is killing us.”) Feminists with this viewpoint do not see “heterosexuality” as just meaning “male bodied people having sex with female bodied people”; they see it as an institution, where the sex roles are polarized, where the power differential is eroticized in a sort of BDSM power inequality kind of way, and therefore, yeah, bad news for women.
Every feminist I know believes there should be parity in all such things. One man opening one door for one woman does not constitute a sufficient cause for upbraiding him for sexist behavior, but if on the first date a guy seems overly insistent about opening the door and paying for the date, it’s not a good sign if what you hope for is an egalitarian relationship if you see what I mean.
I see it all the time and it ranges from “Hey looking good” hollered out the window to an unknown woman walking on the sidewalk to aggregate intimidating behavior by many men towards one woman like in this photo.