4 ms·

Your guidelines look good, but how do you define "sexist" and "racist"? Third-wave, post-modern feminists believe in a neat, well-defined hierarchy of sexes an

Your guidelines look good, but how do you define "sexist" and "racist"? Third-wave, post-modern feminists believe in a neat, well-defined hierarchy of sexes and races; regardless of the specifics of a given case, members of a "lower" group can by definition never be sexist or racist to a member of a "higher" group. Is that your interpretation?

lclarkmichalek 14y ago
Source for your claim about third wave feminists? Considering that you're talking about a massive number of people when you say that, you're probably wrong. The third wave was more just a shift towards a more general awareness of the issues that women face, and the fact that things such as gender are not as binary as the second wave may have presumed. It's also odd that you think the third wave promotes a well-defined hierarchy of sexes and races when a lot of what it is about is recognising that many people fall outside of society's definitions of gender and sexual identity. But as ever, I imagine much of this is just a semantic argument wrt your definition of third wave postmodern feminists. As for the Django leadership's definition of sexism and racism? Something tells me they don't have a crazy proportion of people with the beliefs you described, so they'll probably stick with the standard "discrimination/prejudice against a gender/race/ethnicity/group/etc"
- Joeboy 14y ago
  From the FAQ of the Feminism 101 site to which newcomers to the "feminisms" subreddit are directed: > feminists reject the notion that women can be sexist towards men because women lack the institutional power that men have. I understand this to be the standard reasoning among contemporary feminists, and the same reasoning is widely applied wrt racism.
  - dalke 14y ago
    Your understanding is incorrect. As several other comments in that thread point out, "This is a viewpoint of some feminists, but it is far from consensus, and the first three users of the word “sexism” appear to have disagreed with the writer" and "By claiming the term ‘sexism’ exclusively for acts against women, aren’t we disenfranchising the men who also suffer?." There's even the complaint that the given definition is inappropriate for a Feminism 101 definition, saying "If I had no prior knowledge of feminist theory or the contentions that really _abound_ in the rather amorphous field of feminist theory, I would take what has been presented here as established fact rather than a specific argument and one of many hypotheses on the matter of “what sexism is.”" I just this evening read a few chapters of the excellent "A Law of Her Own: The Reasonable Woman As a Measure of Man", by Caroline A. Forell, Donna Meredith Matthews. I think you'll agree with me that it's written with a feminist voice. Page 72 starts its discussion on female-on-male harassment in the workplace. They give the example of Richard Williams v. Runyon where Williams' supervisor, Clora Grant, was the alleged harasser. The court decided that it wasn't harassment. I read the court decision, and I agree with the authors of "A Law of Her Own" - the court was wrong and it was clearly harassment. Which means I easily found an example of feminist legal scholarship which was using the same definitional premise you quoted as applying to all feminists. I assert that it's much more likely that that quote is wrong than that Forell and Matthews do not understand feminism. BTW, the interpretation of Title VII has changed since 1995. That's why now there can be a decision like: > DETROIT – LensCrafters, a major eyewear company, will pay $192,500 to settle a female-on-male sexual harassment lawsuit filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the agency announced today. The EEOC had charged that LensCrafters subjected a male employee to a sexually hostile work environment at its Saginaw, Mich., retail location. > According to the EEOC’s suit (Civil Action No. 1:09-CV-12694, filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan), LensCrafters violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by subjecting a male lab technician to sexual harassment and failing to address his complaints that a female co-worker was abusing him. The EEOC said the harassment included the female employee touching the male and making inappropriate comments about his appearance. In its suit, the EEOC charged that LensCrafters fostered the hostile climate by disregarding the male technician’s complaints because he was a man.
    - Joeboy 14y ago
      It's certainly the case that many feminists do not apply the reasoning in the FAQ. I should have been clearer that by "contemporary feminists" I meant "adherents to more recent feminist thought" rather than "feminists who are currently alive" ("third-wave feminists" was the context of the conversation). The relevance is that one of the words in the draft Django code of conduct means significantly different things to different people, which is undoubtedly true, although I'm not particularly lobbying to change it.
      - dalke 14y ago
        Being "nice" and being "professional" also mean significantly different things to different people, so it's not like that's the only word.
        Joeboy 14y ago
        I don't think people would disagree about the definitions of those words. Edit: and, to be honest, I don't care that much. It is a fact that a significant number of feminists hold that sexism can only be directed by men towards women. That is really all I wanted to say. I don't particularly want to argue about whether they're right, or what implications this has.
        dalke 14y ago
        Fair enough. Most of my recent readings have been in the founding of civil rights law in the 1960s, so pre-second wave(?). Problem is, I can't make that fit into the 1st/2nd/3rd wave view. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-wave_feminism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-wave_feminism says the movement started in the early 1960s, and that first wave ended when women were enfranchised in the early 1900s. But the Civil Rights act of 1963 had decades of work behind it. The National Woman's Party, which was the militant branch of the Suffrage Movement, started pushing for the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923 and "the Republican Party endorsed the ERA in its 1940 platform, and the Democratic Party followed suit in 1944." (Quoting from http://www.jofreeman.com/lawandpolicy/titlevii.htm http://www.jofreeman.com/lawandpolicy/titlevii.htm ). The Equal Pay Act also has its roots in the 1800s. It feels then like 40 years of work towards gender equality in the workplace - including the inroads made during WWII by seeing that women can definitely hold jobs in industry - are ignored by the three-wave view of history, and that the successes of that ignored era are claimed solely as 2nd wave victories. In any case, that's neither here nor there. It's idle musing that I wrote down so it's easier to come to mind next time I talk with someone who can tell me about the history of feminism.

lclarkmichalek 14y ago

Source for your claim about third wave feminists? Considering that you're talking about a massive number of people when you say that, you're probably wrong. The third wave was more just a shift towards a more general awareness of the issues that women face, and the fact that things such as gender are not as binary as the second wave may have presumed. It's also odd that you think the third wave promotes a well-defined hierarchy of sexes and races when a lot of what it is about is recognising that many people fall outside of society's definitions of gender and sexual identity. But as ever, I imagine much of this is just a semantic argument wrt your definition of third wave postmodern feminists. As for the Django leadership's definition of sexism and racism? Something tells me they don't have a crazy proportion of people with the beliefs you described, so they'll probably stick with the standard "discrimination/prejudice against a gender/race/ethnicity/group/etc"

Joeboy 14y ago
From the FAQ of the Feminism 101 site to which newcomers to the "feminisms" subreddit are directed: > feminists reject the notion that women can be sexist towards men because women lack the institutional power that men have. I understand this to be the standard reasoning among contemporary feminists, and the same reasoning is widely applied wrt racism.
- dalke 14y ago
  Your understanding is incorrect. As several other comments in that thread point out, "This is a viewpoint of some feminists, but it is far from consensus, and the first three users of the word “sexism” appear to have disagreed with the writer" and "By claiming the term ‘sexism’ exclusively for acts against women, aren’t we disenfranchising the men who also suffer?." There's even the complaint that the given definition is inappropriate for a Feminism 101 definition, saying "If I had no prior knowledge of feminist theory or the contentions that really _abound_ in the rather amorphous field of feminist theory, I would take what has been presented here as established fact rather than a specific argument and one of many hypotheses on the matter of “what sexism is.”" I just this evening read a few chapters of the excellent "A Law of Her Own: The Reasonable Woman As a Measure of Man", by Caroline A. Forell, Donna Meredith Matthews. I think you'll agree with me that it's written with a feminist voice. Page 72 starts its discussion on female-on-male harassment in the workplace. They give the example of Richard Williams v. Runyon where Williams' supervisor, Clora Grant, was the alleged harasser. The court decided that it wasn't harassment. I read the court decision, and I agree with the authors of "A Law of Her Own" - the court was wrong and it was clearly harassment. Which means I easily found an example of feminist legal scholarship which was using the same definitional premise you quoted as applying to all feminists. I assert that it's much more likely that that quote is wrong than that Forell and Matthews do not understand feminism. BTW, the interpretation of Title VII has changed since 1995. That's why now there can be a decision like: > DETROIT – LensCrafters, a major eyewear company, will pay $192,500 to settle a female-on-male sexual harassment lawsuit filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the agency announced today. The EEOC had charged that LensCrafters subjected a male employee to a sexually hostile work environment at its Saginaw, Mich., retail location. > According to the EEOC’s suit (Civil Action No. 1:09-CV-12694, filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan), LensCrafters violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by subjecting a male lab technician to sexual harassment and failing to address his complaints that a female co-worker was abusing him. The EEOC said the harassment included the female employee touching the male and making inappropriate comments about his appearance. In its suit, the EEOC charged that LensCrafters fostered the hostile climate by disregarding the male technician’s complaints because he was a man.
  - Joeboy 14y ago
    It's certainly the case that many feminists do not apply the reasoning in the FAQ. I should have been clearer that by "contemporary feminists" I meant "adherents to more recent feminist thought" rather than "feminists who are currently alive" ("third-wave feminists" was the context of the conversation). The relevance is that one of the words in the draft Django code of conduct means significantly different things to different people, which is undoubtedly true, although I'm not particularly lobbying to change it.
    - dalke 14y ago
      Being "nice" and being "professional" also mean significantly different things to different people, so it's not like that's the only word.
      - Joeboy 14y ago
        I don't think people would disagree about the definitions of those words. Edit: and, to be honest, I don't care that much. It is a fact that a significant number of feminists hold that sexism can only be directed by men towards women. That is really all I wanted to say. I don't particularly want to argue about whether they're right, or what implications this has.
        dalke 14y ago
        Fair enough. Most of my recent readings have been in the founding of civil rights law in the 1960s, so pre-second wave(?). Problem is, I can't make that fit into the 1st/2nd/3rd wave view. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-wave_feminism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-wave_feminism says the movement started in the early 1960s, and that first wave ended when women were enfranchised in the early 1900s. But the Civil Rights act of 1963 had decades of work behind it. The National Woman's Party, which was the militant branch of the Suffrage Movement, started pushing for the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923 and "the Republican Party endorsed the ERA in its 1940 platform, and the Democratic Party followed suit in 1944." (Quoting from http://www.jofreeman.com/lawandpolicy/titlevii.htm http://www.jofreeman.com/lawandpolicy/titlevii.htm ). The Equal Pay Act also has its roots in the 1800s. It feels then like 40 years of work towards gender equality in the workplace - including the inroads made during WWII by seeing that women can definitely hold jobs in industry - are ignored by the three-wave view of history, and that the successes of that ignored era are claimed solely as 2nd wave victories. In any case, that's neither here nor there. It's idle musing that I wrote down so it's easier to come to mind next time I talk with someone who can tell me about the history of feminism.