I’m sure they are – feminists don’t claim to speak for every single woman. I find that very often, whether they are women or men, harsh critics of feminism don’t understand feminism.
But are they quite that patronising?
Saying “I’m a feminist” is like saying “I’m interested in politics.” It doesn’t, on its own, involve specific beliefs.
You’re right, which is why I was reluctant to call myself one. There are “man haters” out there. There are “all sex is rape” people out there. I’m not a fan of Dawkin’s response, (he shouldn’t have responded at all,) but Rebecca Watson’s story about getting asked to have coffee in some guy’s hotel room while she was in an elevator was a turn off for me. I can see where she’s coming from; it WAS late, they were the only two people in the elevator… I just think she could have said, “no”, and not have made a huge deal about it.
I’m a shy guy. I’ve NEVER catcalled a woman in my life. When I was younger and leaner, and had more hair, I was catcalled by women a few times… I do sort of miss those days. But I can TOTTALLY see why a woman, (or man,) would feel objectified by it. It’s not cool, and what does it really accomplish? It’s like sending out dick pictures to females - why do some men do that? I’ve never met one woman that enjoys getting dick pics.
People say I should be more assertive when talking to women. They WANT me to be that guy in an elevator asking a woman to come to my room. I’m a little torn on how I’m supposed to pursue women. That’s MY problem though.
What made me realize I was a feminist were the rational people on Straight Dope. I agree with most of the people on here that would consider themselves “feminists”. I was aware that not all feminists were irrational. It took me a while, but I don’t see how I could NOT label myself a feminist.
I care very deeply that all types of people are happy and comfortable.
Indeed.
“Feminist” is far too broad a term on its own to be meaningful or even useful.
No, objectification = empowerment in the hypocritical modern feminism.
I can’t explain it. I say women should respect their bodies and I’m anti-feminist apparently.
It’s all a joke quite frankly. People just like to whine and play the victim card.
That is the problem that I have with extreme feminists as well. I work in very industrial factory and most of the women there are more masculine than 90% of the males in the world will ever be. About half of them are tool-belt wearing lessbains and most of the others can stand up to any man just fine. I am near the top level there but that doesn’t seem to stop some of them. There is one young lady that has had an admitted crush on me for years yet she has an extremely aggressive personality and mouth and I always thought it was funny.
Just last night she got into a car accident that wasn’t that bad but made her car undrivable. She got to work only through a favor from a friend and then called me to tell me that I should take her home that night and she would give me a blow-job to return the favor. I politely declined but she was very serious as far as I can tell and she will be the next time as well. It is just a running joke but I am confident she is dead serious if I ever offered to take her up on it. Emotional Damage = 0.00%
Women are strange creatures when it comes to sex matters. There is a whole industry devoted to not only picking out those that aren’t embarrassed about their bodies, they are willing to make hundreds of thousands of sex videos but also putting them up for public display on the internet for free. I have never figured out the general pattern. It is impossible to tell what is empowering versus what is exploitation in the feminist rhetoric.
Some would say that all of it is exploitative and they need to be protected from it but that is exactly the mindset that led to Victorian England and Saudi Arabia today. If you start down the the intellectual road that believes that women have to be protected for their own benefit, you just made a major circular intellectual loop for oppression and ended up at the same spot you started with.
Nah…not really.
I think the problem stems from our society having it that traditionally men pursue women in matters dating/sex (to be sure some women pursue men but largely it is men doing the chasing).
This naturally leads to certain results:
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If the woman amenable to the guy trying to be with her she will respond nicely and give encouragement.
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If the woman is not interested in the guy he gets the cold shoulder.
Seems straightforward but things of course get more complex.
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Every guy figures he should get at least one shot so hits on the woman. Women of course get tired of guys constantly hitting on them. (NOTE: This is NOT an excuse for catcalling).
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Sometime perseverance is rewarded, sometimes it is annoying to the woman. Men rarely know which is which. Is she playing coy or just annoyed?
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Women regularly do their best to look nice but take exception if some guy leers at them (NOTE: This is NOT a case of “She had it coming” rape apology thing).
And so it goes…
Some women may take exception and say it should be obvious to men but honestly women rarely make it crystal clear to the guy. Sometimes because they are nice and don’t want to be mean, sometimes because they are playing games, sometimes because they are unsure themselves…take your pick. Of course there is no debate to be had if the woman makes it crystal clear and tells the guy to back the fuck off and of course some guys ignore even that. Those are the easy cases to assess.
Point is there are a LOT of gray areas in all of this. I can make lewd comments to my GF and it titillates her. If I said the same to a woman here she’d rightly be offended. There is a lot of room between those two positions that allow for a lot of different circumstances.
Professional athletes are also objectified, especially in sports like football.
Nicknames like “Megatron” are inherently de-humanizing and objectifying, likening an NFL player to a machine/robot, for instance.
Or, “Such-and-such an athlete is a BEAST!” “He’s over 200 yards rushing today! He’s just a MACHINE!”
Where are you people getting this idea from? In the vast majority of mammals it’s the male pursuing the female. It’s the same effect in our species, but some people want to believe that’s just due to traditional cultural gender roles. Why?
Because we are big brained humans and there is no particular reason it has to be this way for us. We keep doing it because that is how society has ordered itself, for better or worse.
I am all for a more egalitarian approach to this but women (mostly) like it this way. Being the person who has to go ask the other person out frankly sucks. It’s hard. It’s scary. Given a choice I would MUCH rather have it that women need to ask me out. It is no surprise that women are not exactly falling over themselves for the chance to be the ones doing the chasing. They can but generally they don’t (hence “Turnabout” dances in high school as at least a little shot at this).
We can reason, and it’s useful tool for solving external problems, and for directing our baser instincts, but it can’t over-ride them, and replace them with something else. All evidence points to us being programmed to having the basic courting system as almost all the other mammals. With something like our law code; We can have equality. Sexually; If a woman, like typical women, is sexually indirect, and choosy in her mates, then there’s not anything you can do to change that. Trying to encourage her to act like a typical male would, in this area, is not going to work as well.
This is idealism. You wish things worked different, but they don’t. Can you imagine how much harder it would be for a woman, like the one I mentioned above, to do it?
Nonsense.
There is no unchangeable reason that it has to be men chasing women.
It is a societal construct and it is one open to change.
There is nothing written in stone about this at all.
Indeed some women do pursue men. World has not ended yet.
It may well be that our societal forms are the way they are because they are rooted in our more animalistic past but there is no reason we are beholden to it.
And yes, our big brains absolutely can override our baser instincts (think of a soldier throwing himself on a grenade to save his squad).
Yes it can. Much of modern human behavior is about overriding our “baser instincts”.
I see no evidence that this is the case. Many women act in this way – far more today than 100 years ago. I see no reason why this would be the “peak” for ‘sexual directness’ in women – in a hundred years, nearly everyone might be ‘sexually direct’.
It depends on the woman – it would be hard for some, and easy for others. Our behavior has changed, including in very “base” things like sexuality, sleep, food, and violence, drastically over the last few thousand years. It will probably continue to change.
“First, do no harm”. Depression is a great example of a disorder that we rushed in and tried to treat when we didn’t have ANY well supported theory of what caused it, and so we used all sorts of things (exorcisms, lobotomies, electroshock therapy . . .) to treat it that exacerbated the problem and caused untold pain and suffering.
There is a magic point where it becomes strong enough to base social policy on, and the untestable musings of evolutionary psychologists do not rise to this level.
Birth rates have risen, all over the world, over and over again, as having lots of children became beneficial (i.e, when people shifted to agriculture and land was plentiful) and dropped again when people shifted to situations where having them was more expensive (urbanization). With the EXCEPTION of China, this has happened, over and over again, without central control. This suggests that biological imperatives are pretty quickly overshadowed by cultural forces.
What specific social structures are you proposing we put in place so that we can “love women as they are?” How are we currently running society that you think is “contrary to science?”
That’s what I am trying to do: you seem to feel that it is a biological imperative that all men, on some level, feel a visceral disgust toward sexually active women and that that disgust is involuntary and immutable.
We both seem to agree that IF a man feels disgust toward a sexually active woman, than the act of viewing her as a sex object is inherently degrading.
You then seem to be extrapolating that since these two feelings–sexual attraction and disgust–are inevitable products of biology, we need to craft our social mores and norms around accomodating it. I assume this means by stressing chastity in women if they wish to avoid the extremes of degradation and accepting in men that feelings of intermingled disgust and sexual attraction toward women they see as potential sexual partners is normal and natural, not shameful. I think it also follows from your logic that since all women, even chaste ones, will inspire some feelings of sexual attraction in men, all men will look at all women with some element of disgust/contempt, as the contempt for the thing penetrated is, according to you, a biological imperative, and that women need to accept this as their lot.
Were you also going to mention that most mammals have a limited, defined fertile period? And those that don’t often have different patterns? What humans do is more relevant to this discussion than what “most mammals” do.
The Woodabe, who use male beauty pageants to allow women to pick out a temporary husband (who can then convert to a permanent one, if she chooses) may not think it’s so obvious. Neither will Cynthia, the undergrad planning to get laid tonight. Humans show a remarkable number of patterns, especially those who are not in agricultural societies.
Science isn’t just stuff you make up that sounds plausible. Indeed, that’s pretty much the opposite of science. If you are going to make a scientific claim, you need scientific evidence, not a just-so story.
We carry our animalistic past around with us; It’s called the reptilian brain. We are beholden to it.
I said override and replace. Certainly some people can make quick judgements and suppress their instincts when they have to, but you want everyone to reason their way around the dating scene, and not rely on instincts, when those instincts are what drives dating? Good luck convincing women of that.
I couldn’t bear to actually read this thread because after reading the title I assumed that the number of women responding would be extremely few, and it would once again be a bunch of men talking about women in relation to themselves, one of the most typical SD formats, rivaled in popularity only by atheists talking about belief and why they don’t understand it. So I tried to skim it, and it appears my fear was justified.
User names are often, even purposefully, gender-unspecific, but I am guessing many people here are more aware of the gender of posters than I am. So, men, how many people besides myself who have posted to this thread, do you imagine, are women? And if it is indeed very small considering the title was addressed to women specifically, why do you imagine that is?
Since I’ve already corrected this; I must have expressed myself poorly. Yes, you can override them.
Then you neglected to read my earlier post where I cited a website with plenty of papers supporting this viewpoint. What evidence do you have that it’s culture driving our sexuality when it comes to men pursuing women? I have definitely not seen evidence there.
The chemicals in our body that drive all these behaviors hasn’t changed. The effects of testosterone and estrogen haven’t changed, and each gender seems to have more of their respective chemical than the other. Why fight it?