Men and feminism

Cute but valid kickback.
If I'm saying that feminism isn't a monolith than I guess I can't complain when writers choose to use the worst possible stereotypes to represent the idea.
Luckily as Bodkin Van Horn pointed out there is much better work out there (thank you Josh Whedon et al)

Moving right along, and I get the feeling I'm going to be sorry I did this.
I think you pretty wrapped the entire argument up in the sentences based on why we can't agree.
Your definition of feminism will never be the same as mine.
You don't have the same roots or relationship to it as I do and for some reason can't take the steps that are necessary to see it from my side.
I agree with you that there are problems and people who are a blight on the name.
But I don't think they mean feminism is damaged in any way by their existence.
For every step forward there is constant push back, look for example at how they have managed to shut down Planned Parenthood clinics across the country.
On the list of names the right try to expunge from voter lists it is always traditionally black, Hispanic, and woman.

 

Shadowex gets to define feminism for this whole discussion as the collectivized writing of four women on the internet. Seems fair and reasonable.
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I was going to post a longer response, but I had to run it by Amanda Marcotte first, and she's busy stomping on the testicles of the sickly group of average, innocent men she keeps chained in her basement. I hope she responds before tomorrow, I really gotta post this.
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Even though most people don't read Jezebel, I think it's reasonable that we assume that it's the lodestone of Feminism.

 

Appending inbetweener posts ahead of the other half of the previous post, the ascii linebreak separates it:

When the most popular and widely acclaimed (within feminism) feminist writers embody that "stereotype" and more, and have such massive and deeply loyal fanbases that they can mount extroardinary campaigns of public influence and at times bullying is it really a stereotype anymore? Joss Whedon can write great women all he wants, it's not going to change what the most broadly and strongly supported feminists are saying and doing in the real world.

Trying to say Joss Whedon's fictive works are representative of feminism is like trying to say the West Wing is representative of the Democrats. It's simply not. It's what we wish it was maybe, but the real world is what matters here.

If you can't accept that I can see things from your side and still disagree with you that's another big problem. I can see your connection with feminism, I can understand exactly why it's so important to you to protect it as an identity. I just don't agree with you.

And if you don't think that these massively supported enormously powerful bigots are damaging feminism... I think you need to look outside the comfort of a feminist echo chamber. Less than 1/4 of even women identify as feminists because of how incredibly toxic the actions and words of the most widely supported and publicly acclaimed feminist writers have become. Even people who used to identify as feminist as abandoning ship en masse with the ever more deplorable conduct that goes not only unopposed but is zealously defended to the point of doxing and swatting people who dare speak out.

The fact that the Republicans are being corrupt backwards regressive shitheads doesn't have any bearing on that whatsoever, it just means that now more than ever we need something to stand agains them that isn't almost totally morally bankrupt, toxic, and hypocritical.

In order:

1. "four women on the internet" who happen to own some of the largest feminist websites on the internet and be the most widely and zealously supported feminist writers today, the preeminent voices of feminism dominating the conversation without any meaningful feminist opposition or criticism whatsoever.

2. That kinda backfires when you consider she's openly hateful to such a degree she'd probably actually do that if given a chance.

3. Jezebel is the single largest feminist website on the internet, its readership is massive. And some of those writers and their peers don't just write on Jezebel they also regularly write (or even work for) major mainstream publications with even larger audiences.

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Second half of my previous post follows this break
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This.

The only difference is that I think we have gotten that far and then some, and that the root of the problem is a combination of an affective death spiral (and its darker flipside) with structural flaws in feminism's ideological framework. These structural flaws are why it can't coexist with dissent and what's led to runaway extremism. To borrow feminist epistemology the problem is one of hermeneutical injustice, feminism as a whole lacks the capability of conceptualizing itself as ever being wrong in some way because of the orwellian redefining of concepts like sexism as unidirectional and rape as excluding male victims of female rapists. The nature of social justice as a positional good also means there will never not be some new outrage, boogeyman, or moral panic.

The question if we aren't at that point already though is where will that line be drawn? If the deliberate erasure of male rape victims and production of laws hostile to male DV victims wasn't enough, if a long history of repeated crime and violence to attack and shut down any attempts at helping men outside of feminism wasn't enough, if the massive and massively widespread support for blatantly toxic man-hating bile like Marcotte's textual effluvia wasn't enough, what is?

Feminism doesn't need to stop existing, it needs to stop being held in such high esteem as to be unquestionable, uncriticizable, and above reproach and it needs to stop operating on "feels > reals" and instead accept the validity of a knowable objective reality (ie cut out the intellectual cancer of postmodernism).

That will never happen top down though, it will only happen bottom up. Enough people need to begin to believe feminism can legitimately be disagreed with and even opposed without those people necessarily being "anti-feminist" misogynists. It needs to be legitimate for people to oppose feminism's theory, its methods, its conclusions, and its actions without their being irrevocably branded with the scarlet M.

When that happens Feminism will be forced to actually work and live up to its ideals instead of being left to rot of decadence as an unquestionable object of reverence and worship.

All of this is the exact same reason I hate that the Republicans being so absolutely hell-bent on grabbing the idiot ball with both hands. It's making the Democrats stupid because they don't have to try, and anyone who questions them on something gets slapped with "What are you a Republican?".

Misandry is not necessarily part of feminism in that feminism can exist without it... just like christianity can exist without witch-hunts and inquisitions IF you're willing to just let go of a whole lot of the official rulebook. What is necessarily going to happen is that when you put together something being caught in the affective death spiral and the structural flaws feminism has you're GOING to get extremism and hate. You can't have an ideology that produces shit like "Schrodinger's Rapist" AND says "it's not sexism when I do it" not have it inevitably lead to the production of hate, especially if anyone saying "no" to all of that gets branded a misogynist which further reinforces the cycle of hate.

That problem is why you get people like Marcotte, West, Valenti, Murphy, Sarkeesian/McIntosh, and their ilk. And why they receive an extraordinary depth and breadth of support from the larger whole of feminism to the point they can literally lie, cheat, steal, contradict themselves, and write blatant hate speech without any meaningful criticism or opposition whatsoever.

And before you suggest they're a "vocal minority" let me ask you this: if these people were a fringe like WBC where's the opposition? Where's the "rest" of feminism shouting them down the way Muslims shouted down the Charlie Hebdo shooters or christians bury the WBC in protestors?

Or to ask the truly hard questions: Where is the outrage over made-to-penetrate not being considered "rape" or other things more sickening still? If any researcher dared to publish that all women raped by men weren't rape victims because they "[chose] to engage in unwanted sexual intercourse" there would be thousands in the streets. If there were no shelters at all for every sexually trafficked girl in the US there would be a deafening public outcry. If women beaten by their husbands were more likely to be arrested than the people beating them, and in some places mandatorily arrested by law, there would probably be riots.

Perversions of public policy like this are not the work of fringe lunatics and ostracized but loud minorities like the WBC, they're the work of multi-million dollar lobbying organizations and massive coordinated activism.

Remember when you posted "Schrodingers Rapist"? Men raped by women are half of all rape victims (excluded from statistics due to feminist researcher Dr. Koss as per above), should we treat women like Schrodingers Rapists? "Schrodingers Rapist" is one of the most offensive, vile, regressive, sexist things I have ever read and considering I do research on sex offenses and the partisan gender gap that's seriously saying something. It's misandrist, and frankly it's misogynist as well given that it's essentially emotional and intellectual terrorism cowing women into a state of utterly unwarranted fear and distrust. (And again ironically we're back on topic for the thread because this abhorrent demonization and erasure by the very people claiming to fight against such things is the cruel reality of masculinity and maleness today.)

Shifting gears... Virtually everyone I talk to that isn't loud-and-proud about hating men in the first place insists they've never met or even seen a feminist "like that" and don't know anyone "like that".

How is that possible? How is it that people like Marcotte, West, Valenti, Murphy, and others have so much money, so many fans, so much support if nobody is "like that"? How does a campaign of hate and bullying so vicious and so large it caused a grown man to break down in tears happen if these people either aren't real or are such a tiny minority? Where's it come from? Did RadFemHub buy a cloning vat or something? Are these thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people all living on some island with a teleporter, cloaking device, and broadband internet? Or is it more likely a combination of not being the intended target, blind spots, and wishful thinking?

But what if we assume you ARE right... isn't it an even more disturbing implication that people "like you" really ARE a majority but all of this still happens anyway? Isn't it much less damning to say that feminists like Karen DeCrow and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are simply outnumbered rather than to say they could overpower these hatemongers but choose not to?

Based on the past words of feminists like Karen DeCrow that good people are simply outnumbered inside a very dogmatic ideology that's been hijacked by bigots due to a structural flaw in the ideology's internal framework.

I think that's a lot more charitable than believing that good people exist in great numbers but aren't actually good people because they choose to allow these hatemongers to flourish unchallenged and even enable them by protecting their ability to use "feminism" as a vehicle for their toxicity and shield against reproach.

 

Four women who write on the internet encompass all of feminist thought. Don't ask what proportion of feminists actually read anything these women write or have ever heard of them (please don't ask!). These four women, out of millions and millions of people in the US, set the whole fucking agenda for feminism because why? Because feminists are stupid and can't think for themselves? How does this make sense? These four women get readers, and so they must set the agenda for feminism?
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Your whole narrative relies on a super ridiculous way of defining feminism, is what I'm saying.
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Apparently, the leaders of a movement are chosen via who has the most twitter followers.
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OMG! UUHUuhhuhuruuuhuhuugughru. Uruahghaaahagfa
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*Robotic Amanda Marcotte Voice*

Shadowex. Please stop. Your tireless efforts are truly damaging my ability to usher in a new utopia of shattered testicles and man tears. If you refuse to cease your valiant and effective critiques of MY FEMINISM, I will be forced to resort to more drastic measures, including blogging and or writing snarky tweets.

You. Have. Been. Warned.

 

This is what happens when academics spend too much time in their own particular echo chamber. They tend to focus (like all of us do) on what interests them and what feeds the needs of their research. Everything outside of that rarefied zone is irrelevant. NOTE: much of what passes for life and experience happens outside of those rarefied zones.

I spent enough time in school to see this happen time and again. Jargon, such as what is found in this following paragraph is indicative of this particular point of view. It explains volumes about where part of the larger disconnect between Shadowex and the rest of is happening.

 

I would argue that you heavily over estimate the influence of the many of the writers and websites you name (echo chamber indeed).
The real world as you call it doesn't really care or listen to them much at all.

As someone who is a serious politics geek and has been active in the scene, I can promise you that woman's issues tend to get short shrift even from the supposed allies.
The real world is still a good all boys club at the top levels.
There are all kinds of methods to keep woman out of the highest places or at least to keep their numbers to a minimum.

Perhaps the reason I have never got the feeling that you understood anything about where I was coming from is because you have never bothered to make that apparent.
I would love to know how my personal experiences of raising two daughters and being the son of a single mother would be in any way make being a feminist inconsequential.
And can we avoid using terms like death spiral and epistemology, please?
It's not that I'm stupid and don't understand the concepts, it's that they usually just stand in the way of having a real conversation.

As to Joss Whedon's characters, I'd have to say that writing characters who are better (or worse) than the people in the real world is what it's all about.
What a good writer tries to do is make the character some one who we can identify with and want to be like.
My daughters grew up wanting to be like Xena.
I know that nobody is going to screw with my kids.

 

And, yeah, I am done here. Congratulations on dominating a conversation you know fuck-all about and apparently have no interest in learning about. Hate is so much more fun. I know the type.

 

Sorry? Who is chasing people away?

That's right. It's the obstinate ass who isn't interested in dialogue, just diatribe.

We can all see it. The only one who can't, is the one who is actually chasing people away.

 

See, here's where you and I differ on substance. I went and looked up Schroedinger's Rapist, and I strongly disagree with your characterization of it. It seems almost unremarkable to me, and not even particularly connected to feminism.

There are ways in which men and women are not similarly situated, and are not perfect mirror images of each other. Rape of women by men is not the exact same kind of problem as rape of men by women.

I entirely agree with you when you point out that men are frequently victims of domestic violence, and that society gives those guys very short shrift. People who live together are mutually vulnerable in ways that either party can abuse, regardless of genders.

But outside that intimate context, the picture is different.

It would be wildly unreasonable for me (taller and larger than more than 90% of men, let alone women) to fear being assaulted by a woman when I'm out alone at night. Fear of every ordinary female stranger would be evidence of mental illness on my part.

Sure, she might be a martial artist, or armed, but realistically the chances of her launching an unprovoked attack on a stranger are negligible. One in a million? Probably less than that.

But the reverse is not the case. Yes, as I am constantly pointing out (see my sigquote), rates of violent crime are falling and are lower now than they have been in decades. Rape in particular is in sharp decline, and the often-repeated one-in-four or one-in-six numbers for women rape survivors are gigantic exaggerations. But the danger has not disappeared, and it's entirely reasonable for a woman alone to be uneasy about male strangers.

What portion of American men have been (justly) convicted of assault that physically injured another person? We could say 1%, but it's probably more. One percent would be about 1.5 million men.

The proportion of women with a similar credential is barely worth mentioning, and that's not just an artifact of a biased criminal justice system. In the last 25 years, women have been arrested, convicted, and imprisoned in historically unprecedented numbers, and even so, the number of assaulters is tiny -- particularly if you exclude intimate partner assaults.

(Hell, I spent some time doing research in a women's prison, and I never felt the slightest bit threatened by any of the inmates. I would not feel so confident walking around a men's prison alone.)

The sheer number of provably violent men is so large that a woman is at orders of magnitude greater risk alone on a subway platform from unknown men, than I would be from unknown women.

Hence, I have always seen it as my responsibility to avoid making women strangers feel threatened by me, even when it costs me some small inconvenience. I can cross the street or wait for the next elevator.

I often see in women's faces and body language that they are anxious. Given how completely safe I am in that situation, it is not for me to say that their fears are unfounded, that their risk tolerance is set too low.

 

Thank you. This is something that anyone who is paying attention already knows: social theories are constantly subjected to internal and external criticism. I followed Marcotte on twitter for a while and pretty regularly saw other feminists criticize her work. The idea that there is one true feminism and that feminism is defined by four people is ridiculous. Shadowex is doing some sort of projected-no-true-scotsman thing.

Shadowex, I'm going to blow your mind: It is common for someone to read something, disagree with it, but say nothing. Even if the four women you mentioned were "staggeringly" popular, that still wouldn't be evidence that they speak for any significant proportion of feminists. And while that is sinking in, consider this: even if only feminists read jezebel and they all agreed fervently with everything ever posted on jezebel, that still is an insignificant number or people ->

Via google and a calculator:
Jezebel gets 1.5 million unique viewers a month. The US population is ~320,000,000, and 20% of these people self-identify as feminists. That's 64,000,000 feminists. There are 64 million feminists in the US, and at most only 1.5 million (2.3%) read Jezebel. And you want us to agree with you that Jezebel represents feminism. Really? A website that's only viewed by less than 3% of the members of a particular group defines how that entire group thinks?

 

I think that if you support women having the right to vote, you are in some way a feminist.