I am feminist. I believe in equal rights and equal treatment. I don’t believe there is or has been male supremacy or oppression of women to speak of, though.
I am feminist. I believe there’s historically been an oppression of women in law and culture and the feminist movement has mostly fixed that, which was righteous and good.
I am feminist. I believe there has been an oppression of women in law and culture which is only partially fixed and feminism is important and necessary because there’s so much more to be done.
I am feminist. I believe women are oppressed and men personally, their individual behavior as well as their participation as men in institutions that oppress women, are culprits and so yes, I blame men.
I am not feminist. I see a problem with the idea of equal rights and treatment of men and women so I’m against that.
I am not feminist. I do not believe there has been some kind of historical oppression of women so I don’t want to be associated with that idea.
I am not feminist. I do not believe there is any modern inequality of the sexes in any major sense so I don’t want to be associated with that claim.
I am not feminist. I do not believe men individually are to blame for the oppression of women so I don’t want to be associated with all that man-blaming
I’m a male who thinks that women have been royally screwed over in the past. But I had no part in that.
And I’ll freely admit that when I was a teenaged boy growing up in all-female households during the '80s I took the whole “All sex is rape” crap espoused by the likes of Andrea Dworkin too much to heart.
I used to describe myself as a feminist, but nowadays I couldn’t give the remotest flying f*ck about gender issues. Feminism is none of my business, and since it never offered me even the slightest possibility of validation I simply don’t care about it any more.
I do believe that women in general are treated differently than men, often times in an unfair way. I support an equal rights ammendment. I support equal pay laws. I think we’d be better off with more women in congress, in the senate, etc. I’m a strong supporter of women’s right to abortion and to contraceptives that should be paid for by insurance companies.
I also think that women’s greatest enemies are often other women.
I think we have different situations around the world, the best places for women are in the first world, however there are some serious problems in nations such as Japan, and a number of Latino nations, both at the personal level and also at the institutional level.
Yet this is only a small minority of the world, and in the vast majority women are treated very poorly and yet without any conscious thought, so this is very deep rooted.
Even in the US there is both religious and also institutional interference in the choices of women.
In a few countries the situation is very repressive, so my view is that at the very best, women face an unequal role, hence my view is the 4 is true for more places than not.
The way family courts operate in regards to custody and alimony seem tom e to do women no favours at all because these simply institutionalise discrimination of men in first world nations, and this sets back the cause of women, its as if its fine to discriminate against men, because this in turn reinforces the stereotypes of women’s roles.
On of my concerns at work is the lack of women as representatives of workers rights - I struggle to find women who are prepared to become Trade Union representatives, or even to represent their own rights This leads to personal cases where I find women are treated unfairly in ways that are often very different to the workforce as a whole.
I believe feminism is a ‘overcorrection’ for the evils that were inflicted against women (and non-dominant men) and is no better then the alpha male dominated society which is opposes. Though the balance is between the 2.
Peace
This goes into the whole incidental issue of whether or not feminism “tries to say men and women are identical unisex creatures and get rid of all traditional differences” etc.
I think probably there are built-in behavioral & mental differences between the sexes but
a) it’s hard to say exactly what the are because we can only observe them as they are manifested in a world of sharply gendered expectations and interpretations. and furthermore
b) those differences are mild differences in comparison with the degree of difference that lies among members of each sex. So instead of a binary black/white polarization you’ve got two populations that in various ways skew a bit more this way for females and that way for males, but with plenty of males exhibiting the characteristics associated with females and vice versa.
in light of all that, I believe one thing “feminist” means is casting out the obligatory sense of “to be a real woman / sexually viable woman, you HAVE TO BE {feminine end of some behavioral scale}”. And reciprocally “to be a real man / sexually viable man, you MUST BE {masculine end of scale}”. And I believe a great many people have been personally hurt and limited and unnecessarily constrained by those attitudes, so I mark it as very much a good thing that feminism has indicted those attitudes as unfair and unnecessary.