7 ms·

I generally agree with you but I disagree with your use of the term "the modern feminist movement." It is not a single, uniform set of things to which all adher

I generally agree with you but I disagree with your use of the term "the modern feminist movement." It is not a single, uniform set of things to which all adherents subscribe. To the contrary, "the modern feminist movement" is rife with in-fighting among factions of people who vehemently disagree with each other about what exactly it means to be "feminist" (not to mention their wildly different and sometimes conspicuously absent stated goals). A feminist who belongs to, say, the Beauvoir school of thought has a very different outlook on things than a lot of people who participate in the internet #MeToo movement, and the #MeToo "feminists" may fight vociferously with so-called "intersectional feminists." And so on.

rosser 8y ago
Any position premised on "feminists" — or any other group — being a monolithic entity one can hand-wave about as suits one's narratives should be immediately, and extremely, suspect.
- staticautomatic 8y ago
  I don't necessarily agree that it should be automatically treated with suspicion, but it does always warrant further inspection. One of the biggest problems with discussions about contemporary feminism is that it's often unclear who is being talked about when one talks about "feminists." Accordingly, vague invocations of "feminists" or "feminism" may not be deliberate but instead suffer merely from erroneously insufficient specificity.
  - rosser 8y ago
    > ...but it does always warrant further inspection. That's what I mean by suspicion: scrutiny, not dismissal. What, e.g., are the narratives in play, that enable someone to speak that casually, yet confidently, about a thing they're prima facie demonstrating a flawed understanding of?
  - beat 8y ago
    Alternately, the "erroneously insufficient specificity" might be quite deliberate, if not explicitly considered. Blanket attacks on "feminists" often have origins other than mere academic inquiry.
- tenaciousDaniel 8y ago
  So long as ^that premise is applied across the board, I agree. Since it follows that feminism is not merely the belief that women are equal to men.
  - rosser 8y ago
    Then you (the general "you") need to take that concern up with people who profess those positions, and not throw it in the face of everyone who professes feminism of any kind. I'm a "women are people too" feminist. I really have no interest in being your whipping boy regarding "man-hating bull-dykes" or whatever such bullshit. It's not accurate. It's not interesting. It's not even novel. And yet, near-enough every time this stuff comes up, someone expects me to defend a position I neither hold, nor agree with. Is it any wonder these kinds of stories get flagged off the front page?
  - staticautomatic 8y ago
    I think this would more accurately be phrased as "feminism may not merely be the belief that women are equal to men." In any event, "equal to" remains awfully vague.
belorn 8y ago
I agree but that's not how things normally work. When there is a fault on the "other" its a inherent systemic attribute of that group (and when it get nasty people use words like biological) and when there is a fault with "us" it is singular individuals that in no way represent the whole. I find The history of the different feminist factions to be very interesting and in particular I find the split between equality feminism and difference feminism to be one of the more significant event that illuminate much of the inconsistency of the movement that we see today. The older equality feminism view was that men and women are significant more alike than different and should thus be treated as identical androgynous humans, while difference feminism view men and women as different but deserving of equal power. The modern feminist factions are largely descendants of the difference feminism view so we get occasionally modern feminist that claim that women can not be sexist since men has more systemic power than women. It follows a kind of logic if one look at gender as uniform groups that wield power. Still all those factions exist and so do the older equality feminism even if its just a minority today. The sad thing is when infighting occur, the common suggestion is that the other side is automatically far-right for not agreeing. I would suggest that this is why "the modern feminist movement" is starting to see more like a uniform set than different factions.
- rosser 8y ago
  > the older equality feminism even if its just a minority today. [citation needed]
  - belorn 8y ago
    The narrative is as what I have read from a book, wikipedia, and published articles from the 1960-1970s, where much of this theory also goes under first-wave, second-wave, third-wave, fourth-wave and post-feminism definitions. The history is not exactly defined in stone by any measure so it could be wrong. When it comes to actually numbers I would like to think that most people would agree to view women and men as androgynous humans for all practical purposes unless it involves the sliver of domains where sex difference actually can be proven to have a large impact, and then being skeptical since most such finding that I have read get later reversed and attributed to culture and bias. I will assume you are one of those and thus give you an up vote.
headmelted 8y ago
Maybe people should choose better terminology to identify themselves then. Personally I'm a believer in equal rights regardless of gender, colour, beliefs or passion for collecting garden gnomes. The term "feminism" implies that it pertains specifically to female rights. Perhaps "social egalitarian" is a more apt description for someone wanting equal rights for all, to clarify any difference. Now, excuse me while I go and barricade myself into this hut in the woods before the pitchforks arrive.
- camel_Snake 8y ago
  I use to think this way myself - I'd like to explain how my thinking has changed (sans pitchforks) to the best of my ability. My understanding is that "feminism" doesn't imply more rights for females, but rather highlights where they believe inequalities lie. Same reason people have adopted the phrase "Intersectional Feminist" so as to draw attention to where equality (even among women) is lacking - to those of color or less economic privilege. Just like saying "Black Lives Matter" doesn't imply that African Americans lives matter more than others, you are using specific words to focus the application of a general idea (lives matter, equality is good, etc.) to a where you may think it is lacking.
  - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    There's a problem with this. Imagine you take group A, and you find every spot where they fall behind group B. And you manage, through whatever, means to rectify this. In the end you have not created equality, but almost certainly made group A vastly superior to group B, as you ignore the spots where group A was already ahead. To take things out of the abstract, consider 'women in STEM'. In college girls do not enroll in STEM with anywhere near the rate boys do. And this receives immense media attention and coverage. However, there has been a sharp and increasing imbalance in girls:boys in college enrollment as a whole. In 1979 they became the majority. And the share of that majority has constantly increased. We're starting to push towards girls outnumbering boys in college by 2:1. And some education is, in general, leagues ahead of none. Yet this receives next to no media attention. And when it's mentioned the person is immediately pegged as some sort of a bigot or extremist as the connotation implied by labels such as men's rights activists. And for what it's worth, I don't think there should be focus on this, but neither do I think there should be a focus on getting any gender/race/group/age or whatever into anything. I am an egalitarian and I think we should focus exclusively on providing equal opportunity so much as possible, but without pushing people into things. Norway is arguably the most gender-equal nation in this world, and one of their findings was when they directed girls towards fields girls did not regularly participate in, there was a mild but constant increase. Practically as soon as that push was relinquished, the numbers diminished to 'pre-push' times. On a smaller scale, like a good egalitarian I also pushed my wife into pursuing computer science over her previous interest in sociology during university. She excelled, as did I. Now years after that when we both have really our choice of whatever we want to do, she works with people -- and I work with code. I have no regrets bringing her into computer science, but it does make one wonder if it was truly the best decision. People are pliable enough that you can fit square pegs into round holes, but we also tend to be like sponges and after all that contorting that square peg contorted to fit into that round hole is eventually going to go back to being a square because that's what it wants to be. [1] - https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_303.10.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_303.10.a...

rosser 8y ago

Any position premised on "feminists" — or any other group — being a monolithic entity one can hand-wave about as suits one's narratives should be immediately, and extremely, suspect.

staticautomatic 8y ago
I don't necessarily agree that it should be automatically treated with suspicion, but it does always warrant further inspection. One of the biggest problems with discussions about contemporary feminism is that it's often unclear who is being talked about when one talks about "feminists." Accordingly, vague invocations of "feminists" or "feminism" may not be deliberate but instead suffer merely from erroneously insufficient specificity.
- rosser 8y ago
  > ...but it does always warrant further inspection. That's what I mean by suspicion: scrutiny, not dismissal. What, e.g., are the narratives in play, that enable someone to speak that casually, yet confidently, about a thing they're prima facie demonstrating a flawed understanding of?
- beat 8y ago
  Alternately, the "erroneously insufficient specificity" might be quite deliberate, if not explicitly considered. Blanket attacks on "feminists" often have origins other than mere academic inquiry.
tenaciousDaniel 8y ago
So long as ^that premise is applied across the board, I agree. Since it follows that feminism is not merely the belief that women are equal to men.
- rosser 8y ago
  Then you (the general "you") need to take that concern up with people who profess those positions, and not throw it in the face of everyone who professes feminism of any kind. I'm a "women are people too" feminist. I really have no interest in being your whipping boy regarding "man-hating bull-dykes" or whatever such bullshit. It's not accurate. It's not interesting. It's not even novel. And yet, near-enough every time this stuff comes up, someone expects me to defend a position I neither hold, nor agree with. Is it any wonder these kinds of stories get flagged off the front page?
- staticautomatic 8y ago
  I think this would more accurately be phrased as "feminism may not merely be the belief that women are equal to men." In any event, "equal to" remains awfully vague.

belorn 8y ago

I agree but that's not how things normally work. When there is a fault on the "other" its a inherent systemic attribute of that group (and when it get nasty people use words like biological) and when there is a fault with "us" it is singular individuals that in no way represent the whole. I find The history of the different feminist factions to be very interesting and in particular I find the split between equality feminism and difference feminism to be one of the more significant event that illuminate much of the inconsistency of the movement that we see today. The older equality feminism view was that men and women are significant more alike than different and should thus be treated as identical androgynous humans, while difference feminism view men and women as different but deserving of equal power. The modern feminist factions are largely descendants of the difference feminism view so we get occasionally modern feminist that claim that women can not be sexist since men has more systemic power than women. It follows a kind of logic if one look at gender as uniform groups that wield power. Still all those factions exist and so do the older equality feminism even if its just a minority today. The sad thing is when infighting occur, the common suggestion is that the other side is automatically far-right for not agreeing. I would suggest that this is why "the modern feminist movement" is starting to see more like a uniform set than different factions.

rosser 8y ago
> the older equality feminism even if its just a minority today. [citation needed]
- belorn 8y ago
  The narrative is as what I have read from a book, wikipedia, and published articles from the 1960-1970s, where much of this theory also goes under first-wave, second-wave, third-wave, fourth-wave and post-feminism definitions. The history is not exactly defined in stone by any measure so it could be wrong. When it comes to actually numbers I would like to think that most people would agree to view women and men as androgynous humans for all practical purposes unless it involves the sliver of domains where sex difference actually can be proven to have a large impact, and then being skeptical since most such finding that I have read get later reversed and attributed to culture and bias. I will assume you are one of those and thus give you an up vote.

headmelted 8y ago

Maybe people should choose better terminology to identify themselves then. Personally I'm a believer in equal rights regardless of gender, colour, beliefs or passion for collecting garden gnomes. The term "feminism" implies that it pertains specifically to female rights. Perhaps "social egalitarian" is a more apt description for someone wanting equal rights for all, to clarify any difference. Now, excuse me while I go and barricade myself into this hut in the woods before the pitchforks arrive.

camel_Snake 8y ago
I use to think this way myself - I'd like to explain how my thinking has changed (sans pitchforks) to the best of my ability. My understanding is that "feminism" doesn't imply more rights for females, but rather highlights where they believe inequalities lie. Same reason people have adopted the phrase "Intersectional Feminist" so as to draw attention to where equality (even among women) is lacking - to those of color or less economic privilege. Just like saying "Black Lives Matter" doesn't imply that African Americans lives matter more than others, you are using specific words to focus the application of a general idea (lives matter, equality is good, etc.) to a where you may think it is lacking.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  There's a problem with this. Imagine you take group A, and you find every spot where they fall behind group B. And you manage, through whatever, means to rectify this. In the end you have not created equality, but almost certainly made group A vastly superior to group B, as you ignore the spots where group A was already ahead. To take things out of the abstract, consider 'women in STEM'. In college girls do not enroll in STEM with anywhere near the rate boys do. And this receives immense media attention and coverage. However, there has been a sharp and increasing imbalance in girls:boys in college enrollment as a whole. In 1979 they became the majority. And the share of that majority has constantly increased. We're starting to push towards girls outnumbering boys in college by 2:1. And some education is, in general, leagues ahead of none. Yet this receives next to no media attention. And when it's mentioned the person is immediately pegged as some sort of a bigot or extremist as the connotation implied by labels such as men's rights activists. And for what it's worth, I don't think there should be focus on this, but neither do I think there should be a focus on getting any gender/race/group/age or whatever into anything. I am an egalitarian and I think we should focus exclusively on providing equal opportunity so much as possible, but without pushing people into things. Norway is arguably the most gender-equal nation in this world, and one of their findings was when they directed girls towards fields girls did not regularly participate in, there was a mild but constant increase. Practically as soon as that push was relinquished, the numbers diminished to 'pre-push' times. On a smaller scale, like a good egalitarian I also pushed my wife into pursuing computer science over her previous interest in sociology during university. She excelled, as did I. Now years after that when we both have really our choice of whatever we want to do, she works with people -- and I work with code. I have no regrets bringing her into computer science, but it does make one wonder if it was truly the best decision. People are pliable enough that you can fit square pegs into round holes, but we also tend to be like sponges and after all that contorting that square peg contorted to fit into that round hole is eventually going to go back to being a square because that's what it wants to be. [1] - https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_303.10.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_303.10.a...