Johanna, thanks for your correction. I had a feminist high school teacher who taught the Gaia theory as fact, and I wasn’t aware of its history and origins.
You just got through saying in your last post that the idea was to identify a problem area.
In the post before that you had agreed that the name excluded people.
I also contend that using “feminism” to mean “equal rights for everyone” minimizes other inequities. Why does the gender neutral concept of equal rights need to have a very specific gender-based name? Think about it.
I am making the outrageous statement that if we want to talk about equal rights for everyone, then we should use a word that is accurate and does not exclude people.
AHunter3, just my luck to be an atheist as well as a feminist 
But that’s a good comparison. I guess feminists and atheists will need to be more visible (and probably take a lot of crap) before we get an accurate reputation.
I am a feminist. I believe that there should be equality for everyone under the law. What term would you use to means this if not feminist? Secular Humanist? Don’t you know they eat little children for breakfast and are a scourge worse than Satan or feminists? I shan’t stop using a perfectly good term when there is no good alternative and complaints that it implies that wanting to be equal is an exclusively feminine trait just make me smile and think of all those who claim that words like chairman, policeman, fireman, and man hours are neutral enough and any feminist who whines about them is just being silly.
Now, the people who call them feminists who I have a problem with are those who would insist, that aside from some fairly minor physical differences, there are no differences between women and men, so transsexuals are just deluded victims of the patriarchy who need to just suck it up and live with what they were born with.
Also, the term liberal feminist lacks somewhat in that one of the best practitioner of it who I knew was not a liberal. I worked at a bank that eliminated the job title of secretary, made all people write their own letters and make their own copies etc. It was the job of IT to make letter writing and other computer tasks straightforward and uniform processes that anyone could understand. It worked amazingly well. Those who decided that they would foist that kind of work off on women with the same job title as they had, or god help them, some other job title, were instructed very firmly by HR that that kind of shirking was not going to be tolerated. The person that instituted the policies would not have accepted the title liberal and did not support liberal politicians or liberal causes in general.
No I didn’t.
No it doesn’t.
I did. Once more, with feeling: if your immediate need is to draw attention to an area of life where equality is lacking, you’re generaly going to want a term and a concept that specifically identifies that area of life, and the population that is disenfranchised there.
Also:
Liberal feminists, as a general rule, support equality between the races. The perspective that they have on racism, however, is not (generally) in their eyes a feminist perspective. They have a feminist perspective on sexism. On racism, they have, perhaps, a pan-Africanist perspective (having read books outlining that theory), or perhaps just a plain-vanilla liberal anti-racist / racial-equality perspective. So when it comes to inequality between people, they are only going to use the term (and the concepts) of feminism when the inequality has to do with sexism.
Radical feminist, on the other hand… they also pretty much universally support equality between the races, but their perspective on racism is a feminist perspective, because they believe that the subjugation of women under patriarchy explains how and why racism exists. They believe all power-over relationships between people, regardless of the form it takes, originally stemmed from the root patriarchal inequality. So for them, they do use the terms and concepts of feminism to speak of equality, but that makes sense given their take on the whole situation.
Socialist feminists, to bring in a third flavor… once again will support equality between the races, but their perspective on racism is that it is a class issue, in the marxist sense of bourgeois property-ownership, i.e., ownership of the means of production. And so is sexual inequality for them — they believe racism, sexism, and every other form of oppression and inequality is just another form of class struggle.
Unless you can point to a post in this thread about social inequalities between the kitty cats and the puppy dogs, I think all the terms used to discuss equality and inequality rather obviously do not exclude people.
lee:
The term “liberal” in the phrase liberal feminism refers to the old classic use of the term “liberal”, which emphasized lack of barriers to equal participation in civil life rather than having anything to do with income redistribution. The board member Liberal, formerly Libertarian, has explained this in depth, especially if you look for the post in which he explained his change of screen-name.
Feminism is not about *what *she does, but about *why *she does it. People who use the term pejoratively get those two mixed up. They insist that the symbolic significance of what a woman does is more important than the practical significance. These are the people who insist that being a wife and mother is antithetical to feminism, without concerning themselves to why the woman in question might have chosen that role.
The point of feminism is equality of choices, not equality of symbolic roles.
It wasn’t my intention to play the V card so early in my return to the Dope, but this is exactly the point I’ve always tried to make about the heroines in Paul Verhoeven’s (oh no he DIH-uhnt!) feminist films (Keetje Tippel, Flesh and Blood, Basic Instinct, Showgirls; as opposed to his scifi films,* Robocop, Total Recall, Starship Troopers, Hollow Man*). He delights in having his heroines engage in behavior that is traditionally considered non-feminist, but they always do it out of personal choice, in order to achieve personal empowerment. Focusing, again, not on *what *she does, but on *why *she does it. The pedestal feminists object, but in doing so they reject a woman’s right to make her own choices.
I had a similar epiphany with John Ford recently. I’ve always considered my greatest hurdle in fully accepting The Quiet Man to be what I interpreted as Ford’s undeniable misogyny in the way the John Wayne character treats the Maureen O’Hara character. But then I managed to get a copy of Seven Women, Ford’s final film. In Seven Women, Ford revisits, distills and clarifies all the great themes of his greatest films, but with a twist: the heroes are heroines, and the weaklings are men. This had the effect, like The Left Hand of Darkness, of reframing worn old gender issues in a fresh light, and it forever changed for me my estimation of Ford as a misogynist. In this new light, The Quiet Man becomes, for me, as much O’Hara’s story as it is Wayne’s; as much about her fight to make and be responsible for her own choices as her husband and brothers are.
Anyway, my point is that feminism, like oh so many things, is often (too often) reduced to the thinnest issues of surface and symbol, when, like *oh *so many things, there’s usually a lot more to it than that.
No?
You didn’t say:
I guess someone has been hacking into your account then. Try changing your password.
I’m sure you aren’t saying that because someone else does something you disagree with, that justifies you doing it too. That is known as the “tu quoque” fallacy.
Again, you just now said that the point of using a term referring to a specific gender is to draw attention to the population that is disenfranchised there. I’m not making this up, it is right in your post.
Using a term for a particular gender, in order to draw attention to that gender’s problems, as the term that means “equality for everyone” minimizes other inequities. The telling point is that you don’t just define it as “women’s rights”, you insist that your term encompasses ALL rights, but you also insist that it bears the name of your chosen gender.
Not all the terms. The term the thread is about: “feminism.” The one that bears the name of a gender, the one you said is designed to draw attention to that population, the one you resorted to “tu quoque” fallacies to defend, and the one which against all reason you insist means “equal rights for everyone” when that is both incongruous with its use and untrue.
I read that the opposite way: insisting that “feminist” is excluding men is about as stupid as insisting that “manhole” excludes women. If you’re going to insist on a more inclusive term than “feminist,” then I hope you’d have the consistancy to insist on “personhole,” as well. If you’re going to get into the whole, “language usage denotes unconscious prejudice” thing, you really have to go whole hog.
Bingo. The word “feminist” has come to have a very specific meaning. You can’t argue based on the meaning of the word’s ROOTS.
On the contrary, if there is anything certain about this issue it is precisely that the word “feminist” has not come to have a very specific meaning. Even among feminists there are a wide range of definitions.
I was referring to AHunter3’s argument that there are problems with using generic terms like “mankind”, “he”, etc. I doubt AHunter3 would be upset over the word “manhole.” Nor would he/she be inconsistent; your analogy is remarkably poor.
Uh, no, I’m calling you inconsistant. You’re the one complaing about the word “feminist,” right? I suspect that’s the point AHunter was trying to make, as well, but I wouldn’t want to speak for him.
My complaint is about the definition certain people give to “feminist,” and its actual use. Not with the word itself.
As for AHunter3’s intentions, I guess we have to wait for him or her to explain, but:
Certainly does not sound like a statement that the generic use of words like “men”, “mankind”, and “he” is fine.
I can link you to many feminists arguing that using these words as generic is not fine.
I would not call them all stupid, but that is your perogative.
^ prerogative.
Only if you ignore the conditional clause at the beginning. “If a man were to feel excluded, then etc. etc.” If a man does not feel excluded by your connotation, then the legitimacy of complaints over the generics does not follow.
And no, I would not call any feminists who disagree stupid. Mostly because I like my testicles just fine where they are right now.
But I am not using “feminist” to mean “equality for everyone”. I’m using “feminist” to mean “equality for everyone instead of patriarchy”.
And no, it doesn’t minimize other inequities.
It doesn’t.
It doesn’t.
::sigh::
I’m probably going to open this thread tomorrow morning and be sorry I helped open this can of worms…
I’m under the impression that Faust is saying something along the lines of “You shouldn’t say ‘feminist’ when what you mean is ‘pro-equality’ which has nothing to do with being female any more than it has to do with being male”. And all my attempts to get Faust to acknowledge that this is a specific movement against a specific inequality and that that inequality has historically disenfranchised women, which is why the opposite, the empowerment of women, is called feminism, seem to go right by.
Problem is, whether Faust is capable of comprehending the issues on the relevant level or not, there really is a problem with the terms “feminism” and “feminist”. Not simple problems with straightforward solutions that I can recommend or anything, just nice messy annoyingly complicated ones.
The easiest place to start is with the question of whether or not males can be feminists. Some do say no, saying that males can be supporters of feminism, or can be “pro-feminist”, but cannot be feminists. Their reasoning is that patriarchy oppresses women. Individual males may be oppressed within patriarchy, but they are not oppressed as a consequence of being men, they are not oppressed as men.
The counter-position is that individual males are oppressed often within patriarchy and would not be oppressed if patriarchy were not in place, so those individual males are damn well oppressed as a consequence of patriarchy’s existence and therefore have a personal stake in wanting to see it gone. Furthermore, it isn’t like being a pro-free-speech member of the Bureau of Censorship or a pro-worker member of the corporate ruling class — one does not continue to be male as an act of privilege that one could lay aside and put down, as one could leave the Bureau of Censorship or desert the bourgeoisie and so on.
And certainly males can be earnestly and energetically in favor of women’s liberation, the end of patriarchy, the attainment of sexual equality. They can actively do things towards those ends. When a female person holds those political beliefs and opinions and actively participates in that manner, we call her a feminist, so how can feminism, of all things, not call someone by the same descriptive title if he is doing the same thing?
And so I thought, after putting in my undergraduate years as a male Women’s Studies major. And so I was treated and received by the majority of women in those classrooms, student and teacher alike (I was obviously not there to be hostile, I obviously “got it”, I was there to participate).
Then a very short time later I was in graduate school, and took the first high-profile Feminist Theory class taught for the Women’s Studies Graduate Certificate there, and for the first time found myself in stark and intense disagreement with what was being taught. The professor was teaching poststructuralist feminist theory as if it were the only kind of feminist theory that existed. I regard that stuff as counter-revolutionary, a betrayal of feminist intention and thought. (I’m not alone in that sentiment among feminist theory junkies, and wasn’t even entirely alone in that class, but I came from a much more student-centered undergrad campus than most of the other students and I was accustomed to speaking up and taking on professors if I disagreed with them).
And, umm, oooops, …even if you totally like the idea of guys in the Women’s Studies classroom (assuming they’re serious about it and really do “get it”), and also totally agree that poststructuralist feminist theory sucks and only exists because the real stuff would never be allowed in the graduate curriculum and was just a way of sneaking in some female content in the literature and arts fields — do you really want and accept a male telling the female professor and a classroom of otherwise female students that they are doing feminism wrong?
And yet… if not “feminist”, then I’d need a word of my own. For the previously given reasons. Anti-patriarchal activist or something.
And yet, and yet… I can’t go around not crediting the movement from which my own ideas stem, either! That would be ripping off the female thinkers on whose shoulders I stand when I do my own theory-development. We all know there’s a rich history of men getting published and famous restating women’s ideas without crediting them, behaving as if they’d come up with them on their own.
As I said, no easy or obvious answers.
Yes it does. In a variety of ways.
I see that you continue to ignore your own words from previous posts, on the issue of excluding people. But I’ll drop that, because it isn’t the most important problem.
You can deny it all you want, but feminism minimizes other inequities, such as racial inequities. Gender differences are huge along racial lines. I read “Reviving Ophelia” for a class and the professor pointed out how it was biased towards upper middle class white girls. Since then I have realized how feminism in general is biased towards upper middle class white girls, minimizing the very different issues affecting females in different classes and races, and the definition you use is part of the way you are able to hide that fact.
The definition is also simply false. You would not say that someone isn’t a feminist because they believe that fit mothers should get custody of their children. Yet giving fit mothers custody is certainly not “equality for everyone.” And if you WOULD exclude someone from being a feminist because they believe fit mothers should get custody, then you are not using the word as it is commonly used.
Feminism is sort of the equivalent of being white. White people don’t really think about their race - they consider themself the “default.” Feminism considers itself the default as well. That is why some define feminism as equality for everyone. They don’t even see the problem with that. Transexuals, men, other races… none of these are best served by defining feminism as equality for all. Yet I realize that you can’t see that.
I only hope now to sort of plant a germ of an idea, so that somewhere down the line you realize that your definition of feminism minimizes other inequities and is biased towards certain groups, and that it would be better to just be honest and define it as “women’s rights supporter.” That day, I will be proud to call myself a feminist.
Your definition doesn’t say “empowerment of women”, or “anti-patriarchy”, or “movement against a specific inequality.”
Those would all be honest definitions. The definition I am against is the one that doesn’t say any of these things, but instead pretends to encompass other kinds of inequality, such as racial inequality, inequality that affects men, inequality that affects transexuals, etc. None of these groups are best served by having their cause gobbled up by the monolithic “feminism.”
Faust, I have problems understanding the direction of your arguments. Specifically, I don’t understand why you bring anti-racism into the debate.[ul][li]Has someone in this thread claimed that feminism is about fighting all kinds of discrimination, and you are countering that by showing that it doesn’t adress racism? (That’s the alternative I find most likely based on your posts, but I haven’t found anyone here holding the stance you seem to be arguing against.)[/li][li]Or are you arguing that the definition of the word “feminist” should cover people who fight against all kinds of discrimination, including racism?[/li][li]Or are you arguing that the feminist movements should do more to adress the specific problems that non-white women meet?[/li][li]Or are you arguing that the word “feminist” should or does only cover people who fight for more rights for women, and that we need to coin a new word for those who fight against all kinds of gender discrimination?[/li][li]Or are you arguing that the feminist movements do too little to fight discrimination against men?[/ul][/li]Me, I think the dictionary definition Johanna found is fine.
Feminism is, and should be, about equal rights regardless of gender. A feminist should fight discrimination against both men and women. To adress your specific example:
I would say that someone who is in favour of discriminating men in custody cases does not have a feminist stance in that area. (I wouldn’t presume to say that (s)he isn’t a feminist based only on that single example, just as I wouldn’t call anyone non-Christian based on a single stance contradicting one of the teachings of the carpenter from Nasaret.) If I understand you correctly, you are claiming that my use of “feminist” therefore is atypical. Do you have something to support your claim that the word “feminist” usually includes people who favour discrimination of men?
I will agree with you on one point: It would be useful today if we had a word for “someone who wants to fight gender discrimination” that had a more gender-neutral root. Actually, we have such a word in my language, but likestillingsforkjemper is rather bulky. The synonym feminist is easier to use, and thus much more common.