Someone started a thread on this that was kind of nonsensical so I thought I'd start a real one.
How do you feel about feminism? Are you for it, opposed or some other opinion? Maybe this has been talked about before but I was hoping to get some kind of vote.
I will provide my opinion. I have always been a person who believed strongly in equality. I have always been a supporter of women's progression and success in the workplace. I've been the same way with my kids. Those who know me IRL would attest to my actions which back up these words. I have always thought that discrimination in the workplace on anything other than performance is dysfunctional. I have always thought you should raise girls with an eye towards inspiring them to reach for the stars.
This all being said, when the word "feminism" comes up, I find myself having a strongly negative emotional reaction. I think it's a word that many people interpret differently and that many women appear blind towards the destructive factions involved. This is going to sound bad but when I think of the word, I think of some crazy bitch with a chip on her shoulder talking about misogyny, mansplaining, gaslighting, the patriarchy or some other drivel. I think about all the highly accomplished women in the world that don't feel the need to say they had to work twice as hard to get where they did and why the ones who aren't accomplishing things and complain in this way don't make something of themselves rather than provide excuses as to why they aren't able to. I don't think I would have noticed or cared about this if I hadn't been targeted by some women who have had a chip on their shoulder over the years or seen others targeted unfairly - characterized negatively because of they are white or male or made some money or express their opinions in a confident way. What bothers me the most has been those that silently watched behind the scenes, doing nothing while privately encouraging the crazy bitches that have attacked men unfairly or even been abusive towards them. I'm not sure I would have even have believed these things would happen if I hadn't experienced it firsthand because I am perhaps too much of an idealist. There is the small proportion of spoiled millennials that feel the world owes them a living and resent those who are in power - perhaps providing some convenient excuse as to why they are disadvantaged when maybe they should get off their ass and do something productive. Then there are those that lack the willpower, tenacity, grit or emotional intelligence to progress - all the while blaming their failings on someone else.
I wonder if women in general realize just how negative of a meaning this word has to a lot of men. I might be an aberration but I'm completely turned off. I wonder if women in general think it matters that people like me, who would otherwise be supporters, have been turned off for good by the dysfunctional extremists that many unwitting women appear to support.
I'm only one person. Maybe my experience is an aberration.
Didnt read the OP until now.
Got to say H that you're coming off as far more of a conservative hardliner than I'd have thought, sorry to hear about some of your experiences and hope its not an on going thing.
The word doesnt hold any of the trigger nature you've described there for me, although I think its interesting that you describe that because I think its what's happened with other words too, liberal, socialist, conservative, green, and I think its a negative development personally that this is the case. There's plenty of crazy to go around and you dont need to look too far to discover someone whose injury or circumstances or whatever have led to them nailing their colours to the mast as a (fill in the gap) and the very mention of a (fill in the gap) gets them hot headed.
As an antidote of a kind to this I'd recommend Andrew Vincent's modern political ideologies, I read it in the second edition I think, its maybe in the third or fourth edition, I dont know how much its changed but the earlier editions are cheaper than a coffee, that guy was able to write the fairest and best piece of political writing I've ever found. Seriously. It encouraged me to read all sides of any argument and consider points of view which were not my own, I know there's been other books that reinforced that thinking, maybe Mill's On Liberty, but its the principle one.
The thing about online culture and offline culture and how they interact, I think, has been entirely negative, there's a dose of books on that, Virtually You, The Shallows, Untangling the Web, all sit by my bed in my to be read pile at this very moment, none of them have much good to say, and I know they arent even the full story and probably pale in comparison to my own experience even, though I've been doggedly pursuing online discussion since the early days of bulletin boards and super moderated forums, charted the rise of console user input to the web and how that has changed things (majorly) and transposed the norms of "gaming" to every single interaction, including, unfortunately, "winner takes all", trolling, cyberbullying all that dross. In part its to do with the age groups involved.
Though there's a lot of other variables too, ones which can be pretty troubling to think about, people who cant take their perspectives out into the world take them online, sometimes that's the victims of crimes or other anti-social behaviour and unfortunately those individuals are easily enlisted in one cause or another by virtual recruiters, its not exactly the stories of online grooming by terrorists that you hear about but its a paler version of the same thing if you ask me. Most of the people involved are easy targets, largely because its unexpected.
I'm not sure about the millenial thing, I think this is something different in countries like the US to the rest of the world, maybe I'm fooling myself there but I read books like Generation Me and think about the people I do meet online and it seems pretty different from the picture of listless, apathetic and lazy people thinking the world owes them a living. That's a generational thing and an eternal refrain if you ask me. When I was 17 that was Generation X you were talking about not millenials and the script was the same.
In the UK millenials are going to have to work until about eighty to pay for other peoples pensions, with a shrinking pool of available jobs, generally in a service sector, which expects a great deal of servility as opposed to service (this is something really different to the US, I was amazed when I travelled there and contrasted it), they will have less benefits, less of a health service, less available housing (public or private) to rent, forget buying, they will probably have to pay to use ATMs, pay to look up their bank accounts online, pay to withdraw money, pay to deposit money and accept costs and charges for late payments which are greater or non-existent at present (thanks brexit).
That's all on top of continuing austerity budgetting by successive conservative governments meaning wages for public sector workers are repressed, jobs are cut or public services are not hiring, sometimes they are the main employer of graduates (like in NI they are) and a lot of other micro-industries or economies are dependent on those workers as consumers, so in turn the private sector isnt hiring either or at povery wages. Its a grim picture and resolving to become more optimistic about it doesnt change a lot.