feminism from an angry male perspective

[murkrow]

Okay here's something I wrote some months back trying to capture some of the struggles I've had with feminist/rape-culture ideas, particularly how being a man can make it difficult to understand and also gives you a really uphill battle when it comes to discussing the stuff with women.

This piece is designed to provoke responses, there's a lot of questionable definitions of feminism that arise in it and I don't fully agree with it myself, also it's a bit outdated as an expression of my stance (there's a lot of stuff I didn't really talk enough about like the natural propensity to rape). Anyway I'm going to put it here because obviously some men could use a bit of an example for just how their ideas may be way missing the mark.

warning it's pretty long and if you're ignorant of basic philosophical principles it'll probably be nonsense.

I'm the sort of person who reacts violently and defensively to alien dogma. Or at least that’s how I’d like to describe it. I actually tend to deal rather cool-headedly with familiar ideas I disagree with, it’s new ideas and new uses of words I’ve only learned colloquially that really tend to set me off. Even as recently as the last two years there have been many conversations I wish I could take back; times where I lashed out at what felt like an attack, or even worse, times where I criticized more relevantly educated people for what I perceived as philosophical ignorance. I'm going to focus right now on my developing understanding of gender issues and feminism; a field in which I am still very much a novice but so much better off than I was a year or so ago.
In my late teens and early 20s I considered myself a relatively enlightened man in the realm of gender relations. My personal definition of feminism was "The project of integrating feminine elements into society". The over-sexualization of women was the issue most obvious to me. The sexual values of society seemed to me inextricably destructive. Being a scarce resource, sexually attractive women were systematically managed by the “masculine” elite. The girls were kept stupid because teaching them anything was counter productive for a man trying to acquire them. I shouldn't say teaching them anything, the real trick was to teach them superficially important things that would cause them to evaluate the teacher as better than the competition. It's not that all the girls were unaware of their own ignorance, but that they didn't have the tools necessary to critically evaluate the specially tailored men/products that were coming at them from all directions. They might have wanted to improve themselves, but there wasn't even a way for them to connect with an idea of what an improved self might be. I guess in some ways the internet has helped with that problem, though I think trendy dogma is probably just as shallow, and how effectively well grounded ideas translate into tumblr fame is for you to judge.
Anyway you can see that my stance on "feminism" was spiteful, jealous, and incredibly self serving, but nonetheless it was enough to satisfy me that I was progressive.
So when I was confronted with the idea of “rape culture” (the idea that I was responsible for the continuation of female subjugation simply by my sexual objectification of women, because of the effects of that objectification on its subjects) which bunched me together with the men whom I saw as the beneficiaries of society, whose negative opinion of me I had considered vindication from their (unknowingly our) sins, I was immediately defensive and arrogantly dismissive. I wasn’t able to move my consideration from myself to the women. All I could focus on was my inalienable right to feel attracted to exposed tits and contoured asses. I still don’t think I’ll be able to overcome that entitlement this decade, and won’t even set its removal as a goal yet. However, I have since been brought around to (presumably only) some of the utopian and pragmatic (both selfish) benefits of suppressing those urges. The utopian benefits being the disempowerment of machismo and the pragmatic benefits being a more direct connection with my social objects.
Now in the interest of the inclusivity which will guide this entire project, I will have to explain briefly in which ways I am now aware that my old perspective was flawed. It’s not that I think it isn’t true, but that I failed to push deeper to find the actual disease my perceived systems were symptomatic of. I may not have squarely put the blame on women, however by leaving the cause of their condition up to the sheer mechanics of their social interactions with sexually predatory men I might as well have. I thought that women needed only to assert themselves more powerfully as agents of change, and be more courageous in their pursuit of self interest. I did not consider the form that their identity as women had taken, and the incongruity of that identity with what I was demanding of them. Really, I was putting the blame on women and women only because my empathy to male sexual desire caused me to totally ignore the possibility of male abstinence from predatory behavior as a plausible option. In my mind the male side of the relationship was a matter of nature while the female was a matter of free agency. To an extent, I still believe this; I still chastise my girlfriend for inadequate respect for the crafty, single minded, manipulative tactics of men she encounters, who treat her with a systematic approach. I still think women should exercise judgment on how they dress themselves in public. An exploration of culpability in these sort of situations deserves its own place, so I’ll leave it alone for now. These sort of things should be understood only as survival tips in the hazardous world we inhabit, not as solutions to the problem.
What I am really trying to get at is how all of these social dynamics are going on within the framework of women as women and men as men. The very idea that women or men deserve certain rights will always be felt as aggression by the other side. Really though, no matter of legislation or education that is based in the sexual binary is going to solve the problem of dishonesty and objectification that permeates all human interaction, not only sexual interaction.
Okay enough of my own dogma, how has my understanding of feminism/gender really developed?
Being shown the instances of female suffering, being told over and over by women how uncomfortable, devalued, frustrated, attacked they felt along with any of the other emotional or physical traumas they endured; This had no effect on me. Sure, I might have felt bad for them briefly but life is suffering and I had suffered conditions I could have described similarly were I to express them hyperbolically. I harboured no small suspicion that the majority of these cases were exaggerated or attributable in part to a feminine tendency to thin skin. So, the fact that women were suffering didn’t prove to me that there was something inherently wrong with the concept of femininity. I imagined, if covertly, that women suffered intentionally, somehow enjoyably, as a way to deal with their laziness. Identifying with their suffering, enforcing on themselves the submissiveness of femininity as an excuse to defer the blame to others. “Submission was their lot as women, whatever should come of that submission, and of the domination it welcomed, was not their responsibility or fault.” More important to be guiltless than happy.
One stumbling block in my independent theorizing on the subject was the almost unanimous idealization of femininity practiced by women I interacted with. The problems of society were attributed to men and many women felt that the world would be a better place if only women were in charge. Furthermore, many women were VERY proud to be women (pride needs to be explored, is it a sensation of superiority? is it a healthy expression of identity?), and some identified so strongly with their womanhood that I could scarcely perceive any value or attribute they had (shown me) which could not be reduced to it. I am not sure exactly why I respected this instance of identification when I ridiculed and attacked similar examples like nationality. Whether I have education or unguided experience to thank for my ability to see through the superficial differentiations of race and homeland (superficial as in irrelevant to essential value, must redescribe essential value as personal pleasure utility), or if the mystique of these constructs is weaker than that of the feminine is unclear (weaker in the subject’s affection of/for it). One likely source of the sacredness femininity commanded was its association to life generation, and to my own mother (which is a good moment to consider the likely biological aspect, how can a human be inclined [socially or biologically] to treat someone and how do social/biological inclinations interact with one another? eg. can one be acting on a biological imperative to treat a person some way and be deciding which person they treat in such a way based on social condition?). Anyway, the result of all this (and other intellectual shortcomings) was that the idea of separating women from their beloved femininity never entered into my mind.
So all thanks to Judith Butler for opening my eyes to gender’s constructedness. Ironically, her verbose work (more honestly a few pages of it) put things in terms I could understand (lol). The wall that was keeping relativism out of gender was finally breached! Sweet nihilism poured in, suffocating the sacred garden of feminine virtues.
But this doesn’t mean a woman can’t essentially be any or all of the ways women have been characterized, only that if she truly is close to it then she is quite a singular creature.
So what’s changed? Instead of sacred characters being preyed upon and desecrated by disrespectful cretins, we’ve got people being conditioned to consider themselves as such. The feminine mystique is an illusion which describes itself into the role of sufferer, an affinity to the “natural” condition, the comfort and happiness that comes before destructive, selfish, male ambition.

So am I just as off base as before, only updated to a further complexity of BS?

It seems like I have totally failed to satisfy my first characterization of feminism. I have avoided taking any of those feminine virtues into myself by characterizing them as false in their association to femininity. I’m totally ignoring whether those things are valuable and by doing that am only looking down at their champions, women! So my own need of liberation from gender coercion is now obvious.

Nihilistic deconstructive stoic hedonism. I am the pinnacle of masculinity in my shameless intellectual incarnation, and so far have only been able to acknowledge femininity as something that would be nice (theoretically) to generate in myself, but without any understanding of what that would be like. Was I conditioned this way?

So let’s define sympathy as a positive trait associated to femininity. I feel sympathy, I do, but I criticize the shit out of it in myself and others. Despite being a straight white male Canadian, I still feel that I have suffered. My suffering can’t be attributed to those designators, and I feel great jealousy for those who are allowed to suffer together by virtue of their suffering being caused by their race or gender. Now maybe it’s this feeling that I have never been able to share my suffering that has lead me to glorify the individual sufferer, and see suffering as an opportunity and source of individual strength. But I can’t help but see the group suffering behaviour as a temporary pain-killer. Totally warranted in some cases, totally avoiding the problem in others! Black Women for example, totally warranted, they will be Black Women their whole lives and unification can help them take ownership of that. Bullied ugly high school chicks turned isolationist punx... how the fuck is that going to get you to a place of self ownership?! Identification with a group that will coddle you and accept you more and more the more and more you learn to walk and talk like them... It’s fucked.

So being sympathetic, reaching out to the person in distress and trying to make them forget the pain by bringing them into your world (or changing their world to be more like yours) is not helping them. It becomes helping them once it’s a part of their reintroduction to themselves. Pulling them into your crusade is bullshit. But this isn’t pure “femininity” either because it’s got ambition.

I feel that I’ve come off track here. As you can see it’s hard to keep myself from attacking! And in attacking to say pretty ridiculous things.

Is it possible to perform masculine and feminine virtues simultaneously?

It’s all stuff that a human can do, and its success is always going to be a matter of opinion. Cold reasoning couldn’t be a masculine quality, it’s an act of repression and discipline. If we’re going to find any natural qualities peculiar to a sex then it’s going to be impulsive behaviours, not intentional ones. For example my impulse to strike out at others, not because they have done anything to hurt me or disregard me, but because I find their power insulting and demeaning to my own. Our sexual virtues can’t be anything but vices.

Which way is my male virtue denying me routes of personality? The fixation with individuality and personal power ends up ironic, in my measuring of myself I am always measuring against another man. I postulate an idea of excellence that’s individual, but am clinging to that idea against all reason and experience which shows me quite clearly that effectiveness is a matter of properly seizing the object; which is most often a social fabrication (sometimes it’s a physical one). My individual excellence couldn’t far exceed a well disciplined pragmatism, but has to find expression in so many other and external forms of excellence. To know myself is a truly pointless venture, I should only control myself.

The more masculine person, in effect, is the one whose self is given and unconsidered. He lives outside himself, does not doubt himself, concerns himself with his objects and satisfies himself in their language. He is what he does, and his personality can be abstracted from this only into what seem to be his natural aptitudes.

He’s selfish because he cares only for his personal gain, but he’s not self involved. He struggles to control the world and to overcome its resistance.

In contrast: a person whose self is always in question and who rejects the intrusion of the external world. The language they use is their own, they deal clumsily with the external world. He feels as an object; who is manipulated when his own substance is invoked, who belongs to the world physically and can be manipulated if understood and is too easily touched accidentally.

He’s selfish because he refuses to participate. He struggles to resist the world, to accept it into himself on his own terms.

Is the second man feminine? He isolates himself tries to discover his true self. He focuses on the genetic, the predescriptive.

Neither of these men are feminine. Active/passive is not male/female. The symbolic power of the masculine/feminine must be left in the realm of symbols, useful only as a linguistic tool for occult understandings that find their mark and utility far removed from prescriptive science. I won’t abandon these tools in my inner realm because I can’t forget them, but they’re totally meaningless externally. My feminine side will always be a male object, a contradiction the expression of which can only serve to confuse!

There’s no place for men in feminism except to support it. I’ve got to stop considering Feminism as something I can become part of and progress, because it’s really a matter of female empowerment. Because sexism describes and propagates women as ineffective, it’s the movement of developing and proving the ability of women. No matter how far a male goes in delineating the struggle of women or the complexities of their subjugation, his work will only prove more the powers of men! To call myself a feminist because I acknowledge sexism and attempt to remove it from myself and others seems inaccurate. At best I am opening doors for women to prove themselves, but a theoretical anti-sexism doesn’t change the reality of women’s behaviour in itself.

The scary thing about feminism is how it does so little to separate women from their identification as women. In many cases it enforces it.

I will continue to engage with feminist theory because it deals with so many very interesting topics. I will continue to battle my own prejudices about women and treat each as an individual totally capable of living unlike any others I have encountered. For the time being at least, I will not identify as a feminist.

 

[Chiharu]

I identify with feminists, but I prefer the term "gender equality" to "feminism". And I think men can play an active role in gender equality, and men suffer under the modern patriarchy as well, as it prevents them from expressing themselves emotionally, forming genuine emotional bonds, and breaking out of restrictive gender roles. Most feeler men experience this, as do more "effeminate" males. Moreover, rape culture is a men's issue as well, since it requires women to assume that all men are one low-cut shirt away from turning into rape machines at any given time.

 

[21%]

Too bad the OP won't be around for a while to answer, since he raised some interesting points.

How I understand 'feminism' is that it is a reaction to the patriarchic society. Women have been 'oppressed' for a long time, so when you let go it's going to go the opposite direction for a little just to balance things out, like a rubber band, before returning to a neutral state.

I think feminism is necessary to challenge old beliefs and systems, and I welcome all the expected and unexpected effects of it as part of a whole, bigger process. Ultimately we should all be moving away from all sorts of genderism. I've always found that really mature people do not let gender define them. Their thoughts are not limited by what you must or must not, should or should not be or do simply because you are a man or a woman.

With the rise of individualism, I think this is the trend, and it is very fascinating and welcoming. It is going to be slow, but it is happening.

To specifically address the 'rape culture', I think there are many underlying issues regarding this. If we talk about real predatory rape, I think that has to do more with anger and power than sexual provocation, so the main issue is not about how a woman dresses. She can be all covered-up and still be raped. She can be ninety years old and still be raped. It is not about sexual attraction. I think the real animosity here was fueled by a sense of 'gender difference', which is men feeling that they are men, and regarding women as simply 'women'.

I think it all comes down to self-awareness and whether we believe ourselves to be better than our instincts. I have always found the phrase "Men can't help themselves" to be very demeaning, both to men and women. I think people need to learn to have some respect for themselves as individuals.

 

[Robopop]

Patriarchy is not a system of oppressing exclusively women because men are exploited and discriminated by their gender too, I hate when feminists compare white women's experiences with other truly oppressed groups(POC, gays, poor, african-american slavery ect) because it is not the same. Feminists come up with terms like benevolent sexism for female privilege but there is no equivalent with racism, class-ism, ect because those systems are more clearly asymmetrical in their oppression towards some groups and privilege towards other groups. Feminism is a spoiled upper middle class white women's complaint about being restrained to the domestic realm(black women were always working).

Ask some black men who are constantly being harassed and profiled by law enforcement and distrusted by white society whether they benefit from their gender, I bet they do because they have the highest unemployment rates, highest incarceration rates, highest high school dropout rates, lowest college attendance, highest rates of homicide victims, are profiled based on their race and gender by law enforcement, employers, ect, historical legacy of lynching, stereotyped as dangerous, aggressive, rapists, thugs, yeah that's some male privilege right there isn't it.

 

[Lark]

Patriarchy is not a system of oppressing exclusively women because men are exploited and discriminated by their gender too, I hate when feminists compare white women's experiences with other truly oppressed groups(POC, gays, poor, african-american slavery ect) because it is not the same. Feminists come up with terms like benevolent sexism for female privilege but there is no equivalent with racism, class-ism, ect because those systems are more clearly asymmetrical in their oppression towards some groups and privilege towards other groups. Feminism is a spoiled upper middle class white women's complaint about being restrained to the domestic realm(black women were always working).

Ask some black men who are constantly being harassed and profiled by law enforcement and distrusted by white society whether they benefit from their gender, I bet they do because they have the highest unemployment rates, highest incarceration rates, highest high school dropout rates, lowest college attendance, highest rates of homicide victims, are profiled based on their race and gender by law enforcement, employers, ect, historical legacy of lynching, stereotyped as dangerous, aggressive, rapists, thugs, yeah that's some male privilege right there isn't it.

Oh you reckon that feminism is less legitimate than gay rights campaigns?

 

[Coriolis]

I think feminism is necessary to challenge old beliefs and systems, and I welcome all the expected and unexpected effects of it as part of a whole, bigger process. Ultimately we should all be moving away from all sorts of genderism. I've always found that really mature people do not let gender define them. Their thoughts are not limited by what you must or must not, should or should not be or do simply because you are a man or a woman.

With the rise of individualism, I think this is the trend, and it is very fascinating and welcoming. It is going to be slow, but it is happening.

I would like a dollar for every time I have made a similar comment. Yes, there are differences that come from being male vs. female, but these are usually overshadowed by the many other ways in which we are all different. Stop the labelling and binning already, and see each person for the individual he/she is.

The scary thing about feminism is how it does so little to separate women from their identification as women. In many cases it enforces it.

Almost like telling people not to think of purple elephants.

 

[Magic Poriferan]

I don't believe there inherently are masculine and feminine virtues, but I think society does a goo job of keeping a certain concept of them in the mainstream (though it evolves over time, the dichotomy itself never seems to go away).

It's been a century since first wave feminism really started scoring big, and there have been many different strains of feminism all along, so it's somewhat problematic to make claims about feminism. Still, generalizing based on the most predominant elements in feminism today, there a few things that I see as problematic.

I think feminism has made too little effort to change the stereotypical concept of men and masculinity. The ability of feminist goals to be achieved will depend in part on altering expectations of men as well as women. We hear about things like rape culture, but what's the response? The solution to everything is to empower women more. Empowering women moer should be done, but other things can be done and need to be done at the same time and come at no expense to the other aims. There should be as much focus on men being ability to take on allegedly feminine qualities as there is for women to take on allegedly masculine ones. Women breaking the mold alone will not result in victory.

Oddly, it seems to me that the focus on being able to claim allegedly masculine traits for themselves has lead some feminists to almost disdain feminie traits present in anyone, and as a result somewhat sets back feminism. As long as it feels like an abdication rather than an achievement for a man to be feminine, there must still be a stigma on society's concept of the female. But I look around, and it seems like I don't really see feminists fighting that stigma. Sometimes they seem to even encourage it. It's as though, at some point, the primary message of feminism became "you can become a man" instead of "women and men should not be confined to these traits." It became a matter of making men (unchanged) begrudingly respect women for successfully adopting traditionally masculine traits, and not a matter of actually undermining these assocations so that a man or a woman didn't have to be one or another to earn respect.

All told, it creates an awkward position for any man and even for particularly feminine women to play a constructive part in feminism these days.

 

[Robopop]

Oh you reckon that feminism is less legitimate than gay rights campaigns?

I think specific women's(and men's) issues are legitimate but feminist ideology is mostly pseudo-intellectual hogwash, it is the feminist interpretation and framing of sex, gender, privilege, and disadvantage that I find biased and limited. Feminism does not automatically equal women's rights and interests, many women recognize feminist ideology for the sham that it is.

 

[Lark]

I don't believe there inherently are masculine and feminine virtues, but I think society does a goo job of keeping a certain concept of them in the mainstream (though it evolves over time, the dichotomy itself never seems to go away).

It's been a century since first wave feminism really started scoring big, and there have been many different strains of feminism all along, so it's somewhat problematic to make claims about feminism. Still, generalizing based on the most predominant elements in feminism today, there a few things that I see as problematic.

I think feminism has made too little effort to change the stereotypical concept of men and masculinity. The ability of feminist goals to be achieved will depend in part on altering expectations of men as well as women. We hear about things like rape culture, but what's the response? The solution to everything is to empower women more. Empowering women moer should be done, but other things can be done and need to be done at the same time and come at no expense to the other aims. There should be as much focus on men being ability to take on allegedly feminine qualities as there is for women to take on allegedly masculine ones. Women breaking the mold alone will not result in victory.

Oddly, it seems to me that the focus on being able to claim allegedly masculine traits for themselves has lead some feminists to almost disdain feminie traits present in anyone, and as a result somewhat sets back feminism. As long as it feels like an abdication rather than an achievement for a man to be feminine, there must still be a stigma on society's concept of the female. But I look around, and it seems like I don't really see feminists fighting that stigma. Sometimes they seem to even encourage it. It's as though, at some point, the primary message of feminism became "you can become a man" instead of "women and men should not be confined to these traits." It became a matter of making men (unchanged) begrudingly respect women for successfully adopting traditionally masculine traits, and not a matter of actually undermining these assocations so that a man or a woman didn't have to be one or another to earn respect.

All told, it creates an awkward position for any man and even for particularly feminine women to play a constructive part in feminism these days.

Radical feminists wouldnt agree, they believe that the dichotomy is real and reinforce it, suggesting that there are male and female "identified" individuals and any woman who is "male identified" is a traitor, Thatcher or Rand would be male identified females.

It is a very black and white dichotomy with the valourous and villified seperated on the basis of sex but its interesting for how it conceptualises difference and I actually think its fine to do that, I think stereotypes are stupid, a lot of prejudices are and prejudiced judgement is often bad judgement but there's been a lot of interesting, even if you dont agree you surely can acknowledge it is worthy of consideration and thought, writing about prejudice, intuition and practical reasoning.

For instance, you may not believe in making judgements yourself on the basis of prejudice but perhaps you should know and be prepared for the reality that others will, to believe otherwise is naive. I'll give you an example from here, I am not sectarian, at least not in any real down and dirty hateful, harmful or what I would consider violent sense, although I am not fool enough to believe that thinking that way affords me with any protection what so ever from places or people who are sectarian. I learned that the hard way in my teens, the real hard way and I properly feared for my safety when I "learned" that lesson.

So I think that there's a role for better understanding through realpolitik, in relation to sexism and sexual politics as much as anything else, any minority-majority or group political division.

I dont think there's anything shameful about being male or female, someones sex alone shouldnt afford unfair privileges and if it didnt I think there'd be less of a tendency towards the adoption of (or villification of) one or another set of traits and people could be themselves.

That said I think the best examples of feminism ARE those which engage in open competition, ie Amazons, for instance which will compete on the basis of strength with men.

 

[Lark]

I think specific women's(and men's) issues are legitimate but feminist ideology is mostly pseudo-intellectual hogwash, it is the feminist interpretation and framing of sex, gender, privilege, and disadvantage that I find biased and limited.

There's an irony involved in this you know because most of the criticism of feminism is possible because feminism provided the intellectual tools to do so.

I'm not sure that the ideology is hogwash anymore than a lot of other theories, there's a lot of ideology triumphing over rigorous scholarship.

 

[Magic Poriferan]

Radical feminists wouldnt agree, they believe that the dichotomy is real and reinforce it, suggesting that there are male and female "identified" individuals and any woman who is "male identified" is a traitor, Thatcher or Rand would be male identified females.

It is a very black and white dichotomy with the valourous and villified seperated on the basis of sex but its interesting for how it conceptualises difference and I actually think its fine to do that, I think stereotypes are stupid, a lot of prejudices are and prejudiced judgement is often bad judgement but there's been a lot of interesting, even if you dont agree you surely can acknowledge it is worthy of consideration and thought, writing about prejudice, intuition and practical reasoning.

For instance, you may not believe in making judgements yourself on the basis of prejudice but perhaps you should know and be prepared for the reality that others will, to believe otherwise is naive. I'll give you an example from here, I am not sectarian, at least not in any real down and dirty hateful, harmful or what I would consider violent sense, although I am not fool enough to believe that thinking that way affords me with any protection what so ever from places or people who are sectarian. I learned that the hard way in my teens, the real hard way and I properly feared for my safety when I "learned" that lesson.

So I think that there's a role for better understanding through realpolitik, in relation to sexism and sexual politics as much as anything else, any minority-majority or group political division.

I think radical feminists are too obscure and trivial in their impact for me to bothr considering. The concerns I raise reflect what I see of the more moderate sort who like to take some time out of their day to post on a feminist interest blog or something. It appears to me to have become a prevailing flaw in feminist thinking.

I dont think there's anything shameful about being male or female, someones sex alone shouldnt afford unfair privileges and if it didnt I think there'd be less of a tendency towards the adoption of (or villification of) one or another set of traits and people could be themselves.

That said I think the best examples of feminism ARE those which engage in open competition, ie Amazons, for instance which will compete on the basis of strength with men.

Why?

 

[Lark]

I think radical feminists are too obscure and trivial in their impact for me to bothr considering. The concerns I raise reflect what I see of the more moderate sort who like to take some time out of their day to post on a feminist interest blog or something. It appears to me to have become a prevailing flaw in feminist thinking.

I'm unsure what passes as radical in the US, although that said most of what exists in the US as feminism would be considered radical in contrast to what has been considered feminism in the UK or EU. I'm not considering radical feminism to be things like political lesbianism or the SCUM manifesto or anything so exclusive as that, Kate Millet's book Sexual Politics and her other books would be considered radical feminism as I define it. I think its relevent but maybe you dont.

Why?

You mean why is privilege a bad idea or why I think feminism such as the Amazons is a good idea?

 

[Robopop]

There's an irony involved in this you know because most of the criticism of feminism is possible because feminism provided the intellectual tools to do so.

I'm not sure that the ideology is hogwash anymore than a lot of other theories, there's a lot of ideology triumphing over rigorous scholarship.

You're right about there being a lot of hogwash in academia, the social constructionist side of feminism veers to far on the nurture side and the gender essentialist feminism veers to far on the nature side. Most feminist though accept a social constructionist sociological perspective, it's funny how some feminists totally reject evolutionary psychology based solely on it's social implications.

 

[Magic Poriferan]

You mean why is privilege a bad idea or why I think feminism such as the Amazons is a good idea?

Why do you advocate women competing with men on strength?

Most feminist though accept a social constructionist sociological perspective, it's funny how some feminists totally reject evolutionary psychology based solely on it's social implications.

Yes, it's pretty sad to take that path when it's so easy to reject evolutionary psychology for the fact that it's a pile of rubbish.

 

[Lark]

You're right about there being a lot of hogwash in academia, the social constructionist side of feminism veers to far on the nurture side and the gender essentialist feminism veers to far on the nature side. Most feminist though accept a social constructionist sociological perspective, it's funny how some feminists totally reject evolutionary psychology based solely on it's social implications.

I think a lot of damage has been done by social constructionism and bad sociology to be honest. There probably was some seriously good intent in the originating of those theories but in my experience there's definitely a lot of pseudo-intellectualism among the audiences absorbing and spreading them now.

A lot of the theories like that can only be properly understood in reference to the contexts they arose in response to, properly understood I think A LOT of it arose as a result of, or in response to, what I continue to think of as the left/opposition/alternative, often refered to as "critical", camp's historic "loss of nerve" in the face of evidence and desperate struggle to remain relevent.

Because it was discovered that universal or objective conclusions or insights were/are notoriously difficult there was a rush to embrace uncritically relativism, diversity, disparity, all those other jargon ridden hall marks and its done a lot of harm.

 

[Lark]

Why do you advocate women competing with men on strength?

Its my view of egalitarianism generally, I think that people should claim equality where it exists in fact, strength's only one example.

Yes, it's pretty sad to take that path when it's so easy to reject evolutionary psychology for the fact that it's a pile of rubbish.

You're very congent in your criticism of evolutionary psychology there.

 

[Magic Poriferan]

Its my view of egalitarianism generally, I think that people should claim equality where it exists in fact, strength's only one example.

In some kind of reverse universe, what would it look like for a man to compete to claim femininity?

You're very congent in your criticism of evolutionary psychology there.

I can and have extensively described my issues with evolutionary psychology.

 

[Robopop]

I think feminism has made too little effort to change the stereotypical concept of men and masculinity. The ability of feminist goals to be achieved will depend in part on altering expectations of men as well as women. We hear about things like rape culture, but what's the response? The solution to everything is to empower women more. Empowering women moer should be done, but other things can be done and need to be done at the same time and come at no expense to the other aims. There should be as much focus on men being ability to take on allegedly feminine qualities as there is for women to take on allegedly masculine ones. Women breaking the mold alone will not result in victory.

Women have historically had more limited agency in the public realm(to varying degrees of course) but to truly change that we have to not only focus on men's expectations of women(sexual objectification) but also focus on women's expectations of men as well. Women have a fundamental influence on the motivations of men but feminist ironically objectify women by down playing their responsibility in perpetuating gender roles on men while overemphasizing the almost supernatural mind control men have on women's thoughts and motivations.

 

[Lark]

In some kind of reverse universe, what would it look like for a man to compete to claim femininity?

Why do you need a reverse universe? There are domains or competencies in which women are believed to have the edge, men can compete on that if they are interested.

Or people could be themselves. Of all the feminisms the iFeminists or Individual Feminists are among the ones I think most legitimate too.

My point about feminism, or any of the so called "liberation ideologies", is that there needs to be some correlate or relationship between equality as an abstract theory and equality in fact, do you understand? Otherwise for the either historically or presently dominant group and subordinate group equality will most likely be an imposition resisted or concession given, both of which are going to disatisfactory to each.

I can and have extensively described my issues with evolutionary psychology.

Oh OK. I havent read that.

 

[Lark]

Women have historically had more limited agency in the public realm(to varying degrees of course) but to truly change that we have to not only focus on men's expectations of women(sexual objectification) but also focus on women's expectations of men as well. Women have a fundamental influence on the motivations of men but feminist ironically objectify women by down playing their responsibility in perpetuating gender roles on men while overemphasizing the almost supernatural mind control men have on women's thoughts and motivations.

WAIT! WHAT?!

If there's some super secret trick to getting them to do what you want its about time someone catched me up already.