Men and feminism

I will settle for someone who would prefer to be called egalitarian but says they support feminism.
You take what allies you can.
It's much like supporting your gay friends when you're straight.
Just as long as they don't pull the card of "You should change the name of feminism." crap.

Yes, I do feel like Baraka Guru said, it does seem like a way of keeping feminism at arms length but I can't be all or nothing these days.

My grandfather had the weirdest attitude towards women in that sense.
There were the ones who stayed home and took care of the kids.
Then there were the ones who got out and organized, kicking ass and taking names like the rest of the guys.
He had a hard time with the women who tried to do both.
But he was 100% for the rights of women, voting, working, etc.
He just had a few major blind spots.
As men I think we all have those, myself included, and it takes time to work them out.

 

I don't like some aspects of feminism and some of my behavior and ideas about feminism itself would no doubt raise the ire of many other feminists. But I am a feminist.

I think because feminism has been at it for so long - with ups and downs, going in and out of vogue - and with such nebulous results (being that much of the measurable advancement that women have made in America is economic-based, rather than politically-based) that it has become a vague idea with no single end game. What does an America with an ERA look like? Probably not much different than it does now. Therefore, unless you're organized, you kind of go along figuring out what being a feminist means to you and you try to shape your own world in that way. I think a lot of women listen to feminists and share feminist writings (or writings about being female that seem to be called feminist whether they are or not) and so forth, but very few of us are activists. Like I said earlier, we live in a world full of hatred and injustice and feminism in America kind of has to take a back seat to a lot of people who might otherwise be activists for feminism.

What I've really seen on these threads at TFP that is so dismaying is the lack of curiosity for what it's like to be a female, how different females interpret feminism and why we respond to issues and situations in the way that we do without it becoming about the reader. I hope that's clear. There is a definite tendency to shut those conversations down and the site is less for it.

 

So, I am going to try to keep it brief and stick to what I hope is the point of this thread.

I have no interest in anything Arthur Chu says. If he said the sun was shining, I would probably check to be sure I'd brought an umbrella.

"Feminist man-haters" is a greatly over-used trope. I was brought up by a staunch second-wave feminist-- my mother is considered to be one of the mothers of modern Jewish feminist thought-- and I have encountered shoals of feminist women in my time. I could count on one hand and have several fingers left over the ones who seemed truly misanthropic (or maybe misadristic would be more precise). In both of the cases I can think of, the women in question were survivors of sexual abuse and rape, and passionate devotees of very radical schools of thought-- Andrea Dworkin, Ti-Grace Atkinson, et al.

Feminism is a very broad term: it includes dozens, if not hundreds of schools of thought, and lumps them all in together under the general rubric that they all favor equal rights for women and more egalitarianism in society. But that's maybe a little like lumping together everyone who has an opinion on society and economy that is not absolutely unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism and calling them all "socialists" or "communists." There are bound to be a lot of schools of thought, a lot of different ideas, in any philosophy, and this is especially true in philosophies that are critical across nearly every field of thought.

Are there, statistically, probably some real man-haters out there who take cheap shots at men or are verbally abusive to them, and do so under cover of feminism? Sure. It's a big world. There are millions of feminists. It would be statistically unlikely for there not to be any who are both excessively radical and assholes about it.

But it does an immense disservice to feminism to treat those few as if they were representative of the whole, or even the majority, of feminist thought. Most feminists are careful, critical thinkers, and whatever their ideas about methodology, their primary goal is generally not to take vengeance on men for past evils, or to mock all men or any large segment of masculine kind: it is to promote a society wherein everyone, male or female, is treated with decency and respect and equality, both in terms of courtesy, in terms of freedoms and civil liberties, and in terms of economic power. The details of their ideas about specific issues may vary immensely, but overall, the overwhelming majority of feminist women I have met are really good people, whose feminism is one facet of a larger agenda of promoting freedom and liberty for everyone.

And most feminist men I have met are the same. They are not gay, or "pussywhipped," or self-loathing, or whatnot. They are just as healthily masculine (whatever the hell that means) as the next guy. And I say this knowingly, because I am a feminist and proud of it.

I also have to confess that I grew up a nerd, or geek, or whatever you want to call it. I certainly faced some cruel treatment from some girls, but it had nothing to do with feminism. And, in fact, I suffered much more cruel treatment from other boys than I ever received from girls.

I cannot deny that there may be ugly things out there, maybe even being said under cover of feminism: this is the internet, you can find anything here. But I am extraordinarily skeptical of the idea that there is any large-scale pervasive problem of feminists abusing men. I can't help wondering myself if-- as I have very often seen-- much of this hysteria of "angry feminists" can be traced back to guys who got trash-talked or slapped down by girls because they-- the guys-- were acting like ginormous douchebags. I have seen far, far more of this than I have of hysterical, angry, man-hating feminists.

I am just as distrustful of these "angry man-hating feminist" screeds as I am of screeds that blame all Muslims for terrorism, or all Christians for the Westboro Baptist Church or suchlike, or all Africans for Ebola. Anything that presents examples of radical behavior and presents it as normative for a giant swath of different communities, beliefs, ideologies, etc., and suggests that that whole assemblage of philosophies or communities should be considered accountable in some way for the actions of those few who do wrong using radical forms of that philosophy or behave irresponsibly as members of that community. It is crass generalization, simplification, vilification, and it is never productive.

 

Not going after Rogue here because we've had out Kumbaya moment but this is more for the people who insist that feminism is bad and egalitarianism is the only way to go.
It's like the people who want to replace 'Black lives matter' with 'All lives matter'.

The way I was raised was that feminism was egalitarian.
It meant that woman were supposed to have equal rights with men, that they could choose to do what they wanted and vice versa.
It meant that people would be free from the forced roles that had been handed down by the past generations and allow people to live as they wanted.
Which meant that if a woman wanted to be house wife that was fine but if a man wanted to stay home with the kids that was good too.
There would be no stigma involved in either choice and all of that was the ideal of feminism.

That was what I grew up believing that was what feminism meant which is why I find the people who say that feminism means woman should be in charge is totally disingenuous.
And yes, I know there are woman who have preached a perverted version of feminism that looks nothing like what I'm talking about but I'd say that the images come more from the Rush Limbaughs of this world than anyplace else.

 

Thank you all for this absolutely interesting conversation.

(I am being genuine)

 

I don't see the need in getting worked up over something like this. This is, as the article says, a small ultra-orthodox paper.

Why waste the effort on trying to change a group that are so orthodox in their thinking. They are outliers.

There are more important things to strive against.

 

Did somebody forget Golda Meir?

 

I meant the Israeli paper.

 

It's also a "good all boys club" at the bottom levels too and they outnumber the men at the top by something like four full orders of magnitude. Since no theory can be both itself and its opposite the correlation is clearly spurious. You can't claim that the men at the top count but the far far greater number of men at the bottom don't.

Now what DOES pass the test is class. Rich people are at the top levels, poor people are at the bottom levels, and gender varies depending on where along that scale you are.

As for the level of influence these people have I've already posted in this thread alone multiple examples of their extroardinary influence over state, federal, and institutional policy... influence so profound that even when nearly 30 of our nations preeminent legal scholars condemn something publicly they still get steamrolled. Influence so great that entire studies have been done on that influence and of itself (with regard to IPV victims), and the harms ith as caused.

To deny these people's influence is as much a rejection of the facts as to deny the influence of oil lobbyists on congress.

These links if anything support the point you're trying to argue against. They're either examples of runaway extremism and toxicity, or examples of non-criticism that does not meaningfully challenge feminism. Two people arguing over who's the true feminist isn't critique, it's ideological in-fighting. Nobody here is meaningfully saying that feminism is wrong, they're not challenging the circular and unfalsifiable nature of patriarchy, they're not saying that we don't live in a rape culture because the facts simply do not support its existence, they're not saying that feminism's assertion of gendered violence is wrong because the facts show men are equally victimized by women.

And yet you yourself have repeatedly asserted feminism IS monolith when it's convenient for it to be so. Feminism isn't monolith when criticism needs to be deflected, but it IS monolith when it's time to condemn someone for making that criticism because "feminism is equality".

If feminism is not monolith then "feminism" can't be asserted to be monolithically some positive moral imperative or ideal like "equal rights for women" or "gender equality". And since a non-monolith can't be a monolithic concept like that something which opposes the non-monolith (or parts thereof) can't be attacked as opposing that monolithic positive moral imperative or ideal.

There are two key problems with this:

1. An overwhelming majority of violent crime victims are men, not women. Objectively women should consider themselves much safer than men when out in public. Even if the feminist position that women should be fearful (to varying extreme degrees) were taken for granted by their own logic men should be more terrified to be out in public than women.

2. "Stranger Danger" is almost a myth, virtually all rapes are committed by people the victim already trusts.

By hard facts the idea that women should be constantly in fear of rape or violent crime while out at night is utterly ungrounded in reality. The question everyone should be asking is why feminists are so universally dedicated to keeping women as afraid as possible. The answer is the same reason women's magazines keep women as unconfident in their body as possible and Ye Olde Churche historically kept people as afraid of going to hell as possible.

This actually deserves its own seperate response for two reasons. Firstly because men are not a borg-like collective that "hurts itself", that logic actually meets Nussbaum's criteria for objectification. The second major reason is because it actually IS a result of a biased criminal justice system. The difference in the likelihood of conviction for the same crime between men and women is bigger than the difference between whites and blacks, it's that profound.

To give some eye opening figures there was a short period of time after mandatory arrest laws for domestic violence started cropping up but before "primary aggressor" polices/laws were crafted. During this short period arrests for female perpetrators skyrocketed by 446%, arrests for men went up by a mere 37%. After "primary aggressor" policies were made though things flipped around because suddenly the police were forced to arrest males even if they're the ones who called for help. Guess who was primarily behind "primary aggressor" laws.

Women deserve better than the emotional terrorism of a toxic ideology that controls them through fear and disempowers them with its rhetoric. Women deserve to know they are not only safer than they have ever been but safer than almost any comparable man ever will be.

And yet there's almost no meaningful feminist opposition to these people or their toxicity, even when they're busy steamrolling our nation's most authoritative legal scholars with policies and demands openly referred to as "madness".

Or lets play a short game called "Feminist, MRA, Klansman, Suffragette, Civil Rights author". I'm going to give you some quotes and you tell me which of those groups they're from:

"Almost like the lifting of a fog when the morning sun bursts forth was the change in spirit in the city today after... justice [was] meted out"

"The word of the accuser is held to be true, which means that ‘the rule of law [is] reversed, and instead of proving the accused to be guilty, the [accused] must prove himself innocent’."

"[stories of rape] gripped the... imagination far out of proportion to their statistical significance’"

"[rapists deserve to have their lives made] publicly, endlessly awful, unrelentingly humiliating, without prospect of absolution"

"[perhaps rapists] do need to see their lives reduced to ash"

"This [accusation of rape], once fairly started on the wings of rumour, no matter by whom or in what manner originated, whether well or ill-founded, whether true or false, is certain to raise a mob."

"[anti-rape hysteria is a] guise of chivalric protection... actually demean[ing] women and reinforc[ing] the myth of female vulnerability"

"Society places the burden of proof on the victims during a time when [they] should feel protected"

"the very thought of a... woman being forced to go into the publicity of a court and there detail her awful wrongs in the presence of the [person] who had inflicted [them]"

"She described [cross examination] as feeling as if she had been assaulted all over again."

"spar[ing] the female victim the humiliation of having to appear in court to testify before her alleged assailant..."

"Even if there had been a guilty verdict... she would still have found the cross-examination humiliating and needlessly gruelling."

"‘rape and rumours of rape [are] folk pornography...’"

This is a motte and bailey thing. Right now you're talking about feminism as if it were nothing but a belief in equality (the motte), but the thing is feminism is so very much more than that including a great deal of things which very much need to be opposed (the bailey). That's why it's gotten so out of hand today that even the people in charge of the Association of Title IX Administrators are supporting "anti-feminist" lawsuits.

What you just described is actually pretty much the textbook application on this subject:

Egalitarianism is not a means to undermine feminism any more than environmentalism is a means to "destroy america" because the failure mode of egalitarianism completely taking over for feminism is still gender equality. The difference is that Egalitarianism has no Bailey of "patriarchy" "privilege" "rape culture" and the entire constellation of toxicity coming from modern feminist activism.

As I asked before: How is it possible that these people are the majority and yet so many things occured which never should have if that were the case?

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 come there's virtually no outrage over the total erasure of half of all rape victims? 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?

Why, in sum, is there absolutely no meaningful mainstream feminist opposition to so many extraordinarily horrible things being done in the name of feminism that have very real and very ugly consequences (like CSEC's complete lack of facilities for half of all sexually trafficked children).

Perversions of public policy like these 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. This stuff doesn't happen without serious money and numbers backing it, and without a lack of any real opposition to have politicians concerned about the consequences.

There's two logical beliefs here. Either you're right and the "bad" feminists really are such a tiny minority that almost nobody seems to have met one, but they STILL somehow manage to run the show... or the "good" feminists are the ones that are outnumbered and outgunned.

If we assume you're right that means that even though all of these horrible things COULD have been prevented they weren't, people chose to allow them to happen. If we assume I'm right it means they wanted to stop these things from happening but couldn't.

In case you missed it from all the shuffling I'm going to refer back to Slatestar's Essay on this. Your experience getting bullied mostly by boys really doesn't have anything to do with the fact feminism is, today, so hell bent on nerdshaming that the "fedora" phenomenon is getting studied and published in major journals.

Then as a skeptic you should be appreciative of the staggering wealth of empirical evidence supporting that idea, much of which I've repeatedly presented on this forum only to have it dismissed either as a "minority" or "no true feminist" if I post one example or "gish galloping" and similar if I post many examples (catch-22).

I think the "hysteria" (ironic term) is more directly traceable to the truly awful shit some of the most widely supported feminist writers are saying and the even worse (often criminal, sometimes violent) things feminist activists are doing... and then compounded by the fact those people get applauded and defended rather than stared at with shock and disgust.

Some muslim extremists shoot up Charlie Hebdo and the muslim world is so outraged Palestinian and Israeli protestors start bearhugging each other and marching together in solidarity. Muslim extremists try to attack coptics and local muslims literally act as human shields to protect them. Feminists commit felonies to shut down suicide prevention efforts and sing "cry me a river" to mock victims and families and... no feminists defending the victims, many defending the ringleader. Feminists start a long and public campaign to defund, bankrupt, and shut down a nation's only men's shelter and... no feminists defending it, feminists working to play the victim for people even bringing this up, and the founder was eventually abused so much he was driven to commit suicide.

Combine that with the previously mentioned total lack of any mainstream or meaningful feminist opposition to the very profound real world harm caused by other feminists in the name of feminism (Looking at VAWA/Primary Aggressor, koss erasing male rape victims, CSEC's need for shelters for boys, etc) and you have not a crass generalization but a legitimate problem.

 

Maybe there isn't obvious feminist opposition to Jezebel because 97% of feminists don't read Jezebel.

 

Already addressed that "point".

 

Not really, but whatever.

 

Feminists everywhere should be so happy that we have someone to take on the burdensome task of interpreting our every thought, word and motivation. And in such tireless detail. It's almost like I don't have to live my life at all.

When does the part come when all the dudes bow down and cater to my every whim? It's actually starting to sound appealing to me now. Particularly considering the fact that they're already so frightened of me.

But only the bearded ones. Fuck those fedora guys.

 

I'll stick to the section where you bobbed and weaved around my comments, pretty much hating myself the entire time I do it.

I actually agree with you on the matter of class.
The fact is the people who the super money (the 1%) usually get it the old fashioned way, they inherit it.
Oddly enough that money seems to go more to men than to woman.
The handful of woman who do inherit are largely invested in maintaining the status quo (Walmart).
These are the people who are doing their level best to make the rules and control the glass ceiling.

I notice you us the words "30 of our countries preeminent legal scholars" and how they got steamrolled a number of times in your post.
I really don't mean to be 'that guy', but from the links you posted in previous threads if the people you are referring to are the scholars referenced there I'd say preeminent is stretching things a bit.
But then I tend to think of Clarence Darrow, Thurgood Marshall, or Ruth Bader Ginsburg when the word preeminent is used.

You often talk about the case of the man who tried to set up the shelter for men and later committed suicide.
To be honest, even as well informed as I am, I'd never heard about the case until recently well after it was over.
It breaks my heart that it happened, that he felt that was his only way out and that his dream was shot down by what seems like a mix of stupid people and lack of funding.
I will happily say anybody who harassed him was a complete scumbag.
But I will not say that his death was feminism's fault.