Feminism: C or D?

For me feminism isn't an ideological impossibility that I must look to the academics to tell me about before I can vote for it, it's speaking up in my daily life and trying to make choices that support women and other people whose rights aren't respected, and questioning the gender/social/political/religious status quo.

This is very true. Even if I believed in some feminist utopia, I'd have to admit that it isn't very likely to happen during my lifetime, so trying to change little things in my everyday life, plus going to demonstrations and working with feminist organizations is the best I can do. I don't think anyone needs to devote her whole life to feminism to be a proper feminist, just recognizing the power structures around us and speaking up when you feel you should is enough. The fact that gender affects almost everything around us may feel overwhelming, but it also means resistance can be done everywhere. Sexism is much more about (often unnoticed) everyday practice than about some conspiracy of men.

some feminist utopia

sounds interesting....pls describe...

(Reason I ask is cos I relate to environmental issues better because the imagined outcome is less abstract to me...)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnJxqRLg9x0&feature=player_embedded

Video 90% otm!

On Twitter wars between feminists -- seems familiar.

Yet even as online feminism has proved itself a real force for change, many of the most avid digital feminists will tell you that it’s become toxic. Indeed, there’s a nascent genre of essays by people who feel emotionally savaged by their involvement in it—not because of sexist trolls, but because of the slashing righteousness of other feminists. On January 3, for example, Katherine Cross, a Puerto Rican trans woman working on a PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center, wrote about how often she hesitates to publish articles or blog posts out of fear of inadvertently stepping on an ideological land mine and bringing down the wrath of the online enforcers. “I fear being cast suddenly as one of the ‘bad guys’ for being insufficiently radical, too nuanced or too forgiving, or for simply writing something whose offensive dimensions would be unknown to me at the time of publication,” she wrote....

(T)here’s a norm that intention doesn’t matter—indeed, if you offend someone and then try to explain that you were misunderstood, this is seen as compounding the original injury. Again, there’s a significant insight here: people often behave in bigoted ways without meaning to, and their benign intention doesn’t make the prejudice less painful for those subjected to it. However, “that became a rule where you say intentions never matter; there is no added value to understanding the intentions of the speaker,” Cross says.

There are also rules, elaborated by white feminists, on how other white feminists should talk to women of color. For example, after Kendall’s #solidarityisforwhitewomen hashtag erupted last fall, Sarah Milstein, co-author of a guide to Twitter, published a piece on the Huffington Post titled “5 Ways White Feminists Can Address Our Own Racism.” At one point, Milstein argued that if a person of color says something that makes you uncomfortable, “assume your discomfort is telling you something about you, not about the other person.” After Rule No. 3, “Look for ways that you are racist, rather than ways to prove you’re not,” she confesses to her own racial crimes, including being “awkwardly too friendly” toward black people at parties.

http://www.thenation.com/article/178140/feminisms-toxic-twitter-wars

The left will always eat itself to some extent. Just gotta own it.

Morbius

Feminist Theory & "Women's Issues" Discussion Thread: All Gender Identities Are Encouraged To Participate

http://womenagainstfeminism.tumblr.com/

Discuss.

http://33.media.tumblr.com/faade5ac24ba94974ff7e3fc50942216/tumblr_nce677RTC71syitgfo1_500.jpg

I honestly don't even know where to start with these idiots.

i dont need feminism because:

--I dont understand what structural inequality is
--I am on the winning side of patriarchy (for now)
--sometimes men are nice to me?
--i have little to no historical consciousness

Yes.

https://twitter.com/NoToFeminism

ryan otm

http://40.media.tumblr.com/09198f29a631af61191f2397c4fff802/tumblr_na866cAJx61syitgfo1_500.jpg

This doesn't even make any sense. None of them do. Brb I need to go kill myself now.

That twitter account. Dying.

Anyway, women's rights battles are for those ppl too, whether they acknowledge it or not. Feminism has given them the opportunity to be in a position to say those things, to not experience or not perceive that they experience discrimination. That's okay. Odds are at some point in their lives they'll fall out of that protected status because of something, and their views may change.

maybe there is some site where you can pay people to hold up handwritten signs with nonsense of your choosing and all of these people have been hired by reddit

that's unusually optimistic of you nakh

I wonder if you asked Ms. Guns & Coffee there why her shirt happens to be pink what her answer would be.

I'm going to totally make an educated guess about this woman because of the fact she has SEVEN CHILDREN and looks to barely be on the other side of 30 — religious fundie tea partier.

"Women Against Feminism" was much more pro-women in the old days of Women's Lib - those women didn't argue that women were weak and inferior. Just that they didn't need liberating, OR women's domestic role should be celebrated etc. this new breed is so submissive - anti-empowerment!

oh right, guns and coffee, that makes sense.

coffee gun pow pow pow

those poses are redolent of the mid 2000s 419 scammer counterscams where people were tricked into holding up pieces of paper with humiliating written messages

http://img71.photobucket.com/albums/v215/lowbridge/gloria.jpg

this racially dubious internet subculture was mostly based in the uk so if you gis 419 scammer you see a lot of west african and sometimes south asian people holding up signs saying 'twat' and 'wanker' and so forth

since then it has become a staple of 'progressive' movements the world over yet they always remind me of 419 baiting

Don't know where to put this, now I'm putting it here. Feminism vary classic imo.

Just finished Living Dolls - The Return of Sexism by Natasha Walter, and highly recommend it.

The first part of the book deals with the sexism of popular, sexualised images of women in contemporary culture and features interviews with, amongst others, "glamour models", editors of "lads' magazines", former lap-dancers, young women who feel excluded from society for distancing themselves from these images. It makes a convincing case that the sexualised representation of women is harmful for gender equality. These are not necessarily controversial points - although some of them may be dismissed by sex-positive feminists - but Walter's journalistic approach makes for an emotionally engaging read.

The second part of the book deals with biological determinism. It's very well argued and feels extremely relevant - basically it debunks a lot of the legitimacy from biology/evolutionary psychology etc. that sustains popular sexist discourse in the media. Walter's approach is again journalistic. After documenting the way biological determinism works in popular media Walter looks up the sources and finds that there is no documentation that testosterone, oxytocin etc. contributes to stereotypical male/female behavior, and that research into male/female cognition has yet to find significant differences between the sexes - points that are supported through interviews with biologists, psychologists, linguists etc. While it may not come as a surprise that biological determinism is bullshit, Walter's book is full of great examples of exactly how these myths arise, how they're supported by popular media etc. Pretty handy to know the scientific fallacies in studies about female/male spatial cognition next time someone suggests that women can't read maps bcz that's just in the genes lulz.

Anyway, I'd like to reread and memorize a lot of the points - but instead I'll look up some of the interesting books recommended by Walter throughout Living Dolls: Brain Gender by Melissa Hines, The Myth of Mars and Venus by Deborah Cameron and Myths of Gender by Anne Fausto-Sterling.

lol very* classic

what does ilx think of this woman's opinion?

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/why-are-young-feminists-so-clueless-about-sex/article26950887/

uh oh!

The only context to discuss anything from Margaret Wente is to understand that she in Canada's leading anti-science, anti-environment, populist troll.

even looks like Katie Hopkins

not that on this of all threads a woman should be judged on her appearance

"It’s hard to take anybody seriously when she’s droning on about oppression, colonialism and imperialism, especially when she’s uptalking."
-Margaret Wente

Wente's been caught plagiarising others so frequently that now she just repeats herself. Trots out a column lecturing us about hook-up culture etc every couple of months. Usually name-checks Gloria Steinmen then asks what went wrong with feminism, then explains why young people are so unhappy. We got this last when Trainwreck came out. This old lunatic needs to retire.

read as far as http://www.theglobeandm...

i need to know what the nutcases are talking about. you know, keep your friends closer, enemies closer type of thing.

peggy is out of control, though. was wondering if what she was talking about was even a dialogue feminists were having these days, but she seems out of the loop.

Dumb article, but I have to admit I had a similar reaction at least to the opening of the NYMag piece in question -- wasted sex is more likely than not to be bad and perhaps an anecdote about it is not the best setup for an article about how gender power imbalance results in bad consensual sex.

What is the origin of all these "No, Women Can't Have it All" pieces that pop up ad infinitum? Was there once a piece that said "Women Can Have it All?" The first time I remember this coming up at all was in the context of some mainstream news magazine cover asking "Can Women Have it All?" already kind of challenging the idea, and I want to say it was at least 15-18 years ago that I remember seeing that.

"Women Can Have it All?"

there's a book iirc

that was supposed to read "Can Women Have it All?" obvs. It just feels like people are beating a dead cliché at this point, so to speak.

1982
https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fbackstorywriting.files.wordpress.com%2F2012%2F08%2Fhaving-it-all.jpg&f=1

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/magazine/the-complicated-origins-of-having-it-all.html

huh, well that p much explains it, thx