board77

Ranger edit: This thread was split from Sharkey's thread available here. I left it in ToE because the original thread was here, but if anyone would rather have it moved to the Symposium we can certainly do that.

~Elsha~

EDIT 2: As per request, this thread has been moved to the Symposium.

-*E*

LalaithUrwen wrote:

halplm wrote:

certainly no idea in this instance... but men have plenty of their own stuff to deal with...

I love you, hal, but no you don't.

(I mean, you do, but you don't.)

Don't get offended. I'm not a guy hater or a feminist or anything. I love guys, as should be pretty evident from other things I've posted. But, in this case, men definitely come out ahead.




Lali

I pretty much agree with this post, but as an unapologetic feminist, I want to point out (1) that being a feminist doesn't preclude you from loving guys or make you a guy hater and (2) even if you were a feminist, it wouldn't preclude you from pointing out where men come out ahead, or undermine the validity of your observation. I'm not saying you were saying either of those things...exactly...but it seemed kind of strange to point out that you weren't a feminist, as though not being a feminist increased the validity of your observation that there is no male equivalent to the issue being discussed in this thread.

Humans not being perfect and feminists being humans, I think it's fair to imagine that a good number of feminists have certain biases, just like just about anybody who strongly believes in their own philosophy. That being the case, I think it's also fair to say the feminists are more likely to have anti-male biases. Perhaps a good analogy is to an oil company making statements about the environment - the possibility for bias would make the source a bit less trustworthy.

Or something.

An oil company has a vested financial interest in proclaiming, "The state of the environment is strong."

For the analogy to hold, a feminist would have to have a vested (emotional?) interest in proclaiming, "Women are disadvantaged relative to men" in ALL cases, rather than only the cases where it's actually true. I suppose some feminists may perceive their "cause" to be furthered by such proclamations. But that seems incompatible with mainstream feminism's goal of advancing gender equity. It seems to me that THAT goal is actually advanced by recognizing where men are advantaged relative to women, AND where women are advantaged relative to men. (e.g. I think that a sincere feminist should readily acknowledge that women are more likely to have an unfair advantage in family court, since the assumptions and biases underlying that advantage need to be destroyed for feminist aims to be realized.)

I'll be honest: it stings a bit to see women disavow ties to feminism, as though their opinion counts more for the disavowal. After all, women owe much of the (incomplete) equality we currently have to the feminist movement; in many venues, our opinions would be wholly discounted were it not for feminism.

BTW: as a lesbian feminist I am often afforded double man-hating points, and I am always bemused when informed of my putative hatred of men. I dislike men only when they take certain sexist actions (e.g. when I went running outside the other day in a full-body, form-fitting outfit, I got catcalled by numerous men, and I freely admit to disliking all of them - but those sorts of dislikes seem common even among heterosexual, non-feminist women.) Other than that, some of my best friends are men.

ETA Thread split?

At the risk of sending this to the Symposium: were it not for feminism, Lali, I can almost guarantee you wouldn't be online right now. What's more, you wouldn't even miss it, because it would never occur to you that you could have your anything resembling your own private life. Nothing against your hubby. It wouldn't have occurred to him either.

And you sure as hell wouldn't be online discussing aspects of your sex life.

I'm not saying you have to adhere to some particular stripe of current academic feminism to be suitably grateful, mind you. But a huge number of the things 99% of women in the US take for granted today are there because of the efforts of feminists over the past 50 years.


ETA--xposted with folks

Quote:

I suppose some feminists may perceive their "cause" to be furthered by such proclamations.

Of course there are!

Quote:

But that seems incompatible with mainstream feminism's goal of advancing gender equity.

And of course it is! But not all people are as reasonable and logical as you. And those that aren't have probably given others a bad name. Make me think of PETA, actually.

Quote:

Other than that, some of my best friends are men.

(Sorry for the thread hijack, Nienor.)

What yovi said.

Not interested in having a deeper discussion than that. It's not worth my brain cells at this point and time. Maybe later, though.

hal knew what I meant, and, if he didn't, he's free to ask me or PM me.


Lali

I was raised to believe that women were utterly equal to men, in every way, such that it still blindsides me when I come across something in which I am NOT equal.

It still astounds me when my husband spots something on top of the refrigerator, that I didn't even think to look for, because it's out of my range of vision. Yes, he is significantly taller than me.

He had trouble getting into a tight spot in the rafters of the attic this weekend, whereas I could sit comfortably and fix what needed fixing without the pain and stress he was going through. This amazed me. Yes, I'm smaller than him.

I could go on and on, but my point is that having been raised "feminist", I'm not strident about it, nor do I see any reason to look for ways in which women are disadvantaged compared to men. I don't have a vested interest in pointing out inequalities, because my brain is already set to a default of "everybody's equal". It takes a bit of doing for me to accept that there are differences in abilities, and we should take advantage of them instead of pretending that everyone is equal.

The only issue that strikes me as massively unfair is the pelvic prolapse thing. It's appalling that my insides keep threatening to come out of an opening that men don't even have! That's SO unfair. The only thing close to the same with men is a hernia- and that's a quick and relatively easy and effective fix. The pelvic prolapse issue is SO appalling that even though a lot of women get it, they don't talk about it, and there still isn't a good repair for it.

Biological inequalities are the only ones that really bug me, but I wouldn't wish this sort of malfunction on anyone. It's a definite design flaw, though.

*************************************
You know, I used to think that it was awful that life was so unfair.

Then I thought, "Wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair? And all the
terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them?"

So now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.

Marcus Cole, year 2260, Babylon 5

...

Being the same and being equal are two different things. Equality in this context is a legal and social construct: it means there are limits on what can be taken into account when deciding how people should be treated in the public sphere. It does NOT mean those limits exclude everything --that would mean attempting to be the same, and no one here supports that.

yeah...this ain't mathematical equality...

For anybody who says they aren't a feminist, one of my favorite essays:

Yes, You Are.

It occurs to me, reading some of that essay's responses, that the term is entirely misnamed to coincide with the dctionary definition. Belief in gender equality should have a gender neutral name. It would be equally absurd to say that the fight for gender equality is called masculism.

A fair point, I suppose, and also a lesson in the odd ways of language.

Is there any material here that would prevent a move out to the Symposium?

Anyone?

Nothing except the potential of having to explain where this thread-from-nowhere came from.

It Came From T O E

...

I don’t think it was historically unreasonable to call the fight for gender equality “feminism,” because it was women who faced the bulk of government-sanctioned and private sector discrimination. It was women who were denied access to the vote; admission to institutions of higher education; access to the courts (women traditionally had to have their husband or father sue on their behalf); ability to serve in political office; equality in relationships, and autonomy in deciding to enter them; and so on. Today, it is women whose right to make reproductive decisions is threatened. It is women who remain underrepresented at the highest levels of business, academia, and government. It is (almost exclusively) women who must fear sexual violence simply for walking down the street late at night. It is (even more almost exclusively) women who must fear physical or sexual violence from abusive spouses, partners, or boyfriends. It is (disproportionately) women who experience sexual harassment from male colleagues and supervisors. It is women who are undercompensated for equal work - and whose right to challenge that undercompensation has been severely compromised this year by the Supreme Court.

Some people use the word “equalist” to suggest that they support equality between the sexes, but I believe the continued use of the term “feminism” is appropriate, both out of historical respect for the feminists who devoted their lives to securing for women the measure of equality that we enjoy, and out of a recognition that the legal and practical disadvantages of our patriarchal society fall primarily to women.

To use the word “feminism” is not to deny that some advantages accrue disproportionately to women. I pointed out family court as one example yesterday. hal correctly points out that some forms of government assistance are more accessible to women. One particularly egregious example, in my view, is that there are far more homeless shelters, churches, and other organizations catering to the neediest women, than there are organizations open to men. There is no doubt in my mind that this plays, in some measure, into the higher rate of homelessness among men. So there are three examples of many. I don’t believe that using the term “feminism” means denying these disparities, but they pale in comparison to the sheer magnitude of discrimination against women.

The tone of this thread in places suggests that feminists who call attention to discrimination against women must take some pleasure from it. I can’t speak for other feminists, but I think it would be ideal not to have any inequities to point to. I for one would love to have female Presidential role models; anywhere resembling equitable representation of women in the federal judiciary (particularly the Supreme Court); a sizable number of successful businesswomen in corporate boardrooms; an intact constitutional guarantee of reproductive autonomy; low or nonexistent domestic violence numbers; rape as nothing more than a historical curiosity; unquestioned equal pay for equal work in all fields; an absence of unsolicited sexual conduct in the workplace...it’s not as though the absence of these things gives feminists some pleasure, so we can now complain about them.

And as the - hmm, osgiliatrix who led to this thread - I have no objection to moving it to the Symposium.

Wouldn't you find something...disconcerting...about the similar, parallel movement being called blackism?

Do you find the term "gay rights movement" inappropriate because it mentions only gay people and says nothing about straight people?