Feminism, how do you think it affects society?

[Golden]

I just think like so many other movements in modern society, like the 99% and so on. It can be summed up with a hashtag. #FirstWorldProblems.


You'd have to be a bit of a dick to not want general gender equality. But modern feminism is pretty grating if you listen to it for more than 5 minutes. The fact most seem middle class and educated just makes it even more irritating as they are in the top 90% of privileged people on the planet. Many if not most places in the world have shocking women's rights issues. I wish they would go and fight the causes where they need to fought, instead of using internet blogs for writing streams of clichéd and whiney monologues about how oppressing it is to be an educated and financially comfortable woman living in western Europe or the US.

Also, men who feel threatened by empowered women need to get over it. empowered women DOES NOT equate to feminists.

[miamike]

I like women,



just sayin cause there seem to be a few here that just don't!

[fishscale]

So you acknowledge that Harriet Harman and the US constitution are completely unrelated?

So you acknowledge that Almonds grow on trees?

Wrong. That would be statism. The negative spin on this phrase is that it means that the person using it can never look past a person's politics. Like those clowns who say that because someone votes conservative or is a member of the republican party or believes in socialism, that there can never be any common ground because the person's politics defines them utterly.

But the phrase was coined to mean that personal problems are political problems, that is to say that a person living in poverty is the result of a political system that allows personal poverty as a norm.

It's wrong, but not in the way that you're claiming.

Imo, we're pretty much saying similar things on this matter, it's more an issue of semantics. When you say personal problems are political problems, e.g intimate relationships, our private lives and day to day beliefs then you are effectively saying that our private lives ARE matters of the state. Here's a quote on the matter

Possibly the most important legacy of [the] media coverage [of 1970's feminism] was its carving up of the women's movement into legitimate feminism and illegitimate feminism... Nearly every story and editorial about the women's movement acknowledged that women really did suffer from economic discrimination and approved of 'equal pay for equal work.'... Feminism, in this view, should only redraw the work-place, and this only slightly. Other regions of society, like a man's home, his marriage, his family, should be cordoned off from feminist surveyors. Yet for women like me, these issues were exactly the locus of the movement: we got it that the personal was indeed political... Critiques of marriage and the family were much too explosive, and hit too close to home, for male journalists to be comfortable analysing them... This reinforced the media's insistence that the personal was still the personal and should never be politicized.

Susan J. Douglas, Where the Girls Are

I'm of the opinion that when you start classing peoples personal lives and beliefs under the banner of "Politics" it's more along the lines of Totalitarianism than simple Statism.

They weren't content with just equality, they wanted to change how we live our lives, they wanted their view of how the world should be to be the "right" one, so to speak and if you look at how we've progressed as society since then, they largely succeeded in their endeavor (e.g the nuclear family has been almost eradicated, millions of households without a father, the portrayal of the oafish, fat, incapable man in media compared to the resourceful, intelligent, strong, independent woman who can do everything and more, she don't need no man etc etc) and it's even going a step further now and entering the video game industry, you might think Anita Sarkeesian is a simple "crank" but look at what she's trying to do and you'll see she's simply following in the footsteps of 2nd wave feminism, she's doing exactly what their motto proclaimed.

Provide a source for this claim.

Influential works cited as bases for "the personal is political" idea are C. Wright Mills' 1959 book The Sociological Imagination, which discusses the intersection of public issues and personal problems, and Claudia Jones' 1949 essay "An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women."

Another feminist sometimes said to have coined the phrase is Robin Morgan, who founded several feminist organizations and edited the anthology Sisterhood is Powerful, also published in 1970.

Copy pasted but they're basically the main sources of it, though, the actual phrase was never in C. Wright Mills book or Claudia Jones essay, the concept of it was written in them.

"This means ridding ourselves of the position which sometimes finds certain
progressives and Communists fighting on the economic and political issues
facing Negro people, but 'drawing the line' when it comes to social
intercourse or inter-marriage. To place the question as a 'personal' and
not a political matter, when such questions arise, is to be guilty of the
worst kind of Social-Democratic, bourgeois-liberal thinking as regards the
Negro question in American life; it is to be guilty of imbibing the
poisonous white-chauvinist 'theories' of a Bilbo or Rankin."

Male on female violence isn't a myth.

It wasn't my intention to say it was, what I meant is that the myth of stats like "1 in 3 women" originated there, the radicals used Erin Pizzeys DV shelters to push feminist lies and propaganda that there's a mass oppression going on in at the personal level in which husbands routinely beat their wives and that it's a common occurrence, when it wasn't, DV occurred, yes but feminists pushed it to a whole new level, they made it seem like every man out there was doing it as a hobby when in actuality statistically it was very very minimal, that's not to say victims of DV don't deserve all the help they can get.

What is true is that serious injury and death most often occur in female victims of domestic abuse because of the fact that men tend to be physically more powerful. All domestic violence should be dealt with severely but women face the greatest risk from it.

Where men use their fists, women use weapons. Men have been stabbed to death while they slept by their wives, we live in the 21st century, there's far more effective and easy methods to kill someone than using your bare hands. A gun is just as dangerous used by a man or woman.

Non-sequitur.

If you say so.

Plenty of cranks attract enough support from other cranks to be able to feel they have a popular message. Cranks like George Galloway or David Icke or Alex Jones. Alex Jones for goodness' sake! Massive following of utterly devoted morons and he's the crankiest crank to have ever cranked!

So yes, a crank calling for the murder of men and supported by a bunch of crank-watchers doesn't make her less of a crank.

I'd say Alex Jones has a decent amount of political power? He is crazy yes but I mean I'd wager there'd be much tighter gun control laws now if it wasn't for his Lobbying along with the NRA?

I'm not accusing you of lying. I'm accusing you of using weasel-words. You can spot them easily. People will say "many" or "experts" or "scientists" without ever specifically indicating who they mean. You then quote from the wikipedia for the SCUM manifesto, including this telling line:

"Solanas was viewed as too mentally ill and too bound up with Warhol, according to Greer, "for her message to come across unperverted.""

More mainstream feminists considered Valerie Solanos to be a nutter.

It doesn't negate the fact she did enjoy support from people and groups, groups considered "feminist".

Not really. For every person in that article supporting SCUM there are three highlighting excessive issues with it.

I guess it depends on how we define many. The fact of the matter is, the SCUM manifesto did garner support and yes, from feminists.

Nobody believes that statistic with the exception of third wave feminists, and as we've established they believe a lot of silly notions.

Statistics like that were made popular by 2nd wave feminists.

That's making an unbelievable statistic even less believable.

You avoided the point/question etc.

Not really. I can see that you are hung up on the word, but it's responsible for great progress in society.

It's responsible for great regress as well. "Feminism" made its greatest gains and progress in society in the early 1900s, what came after is largely just cancer with a few specific spots of progress sprinkled around. Considering how feminism has been hijacked I'm simply not comfortable with it anymore, once upon a time it was indeed a movement made to promote the equality of women to men but that's a time long passed, now it's nothing more than a hate movement.

The problems with the family court are a result of over-correction of prior inequities. They need to be addressed specifically and not just hidden in a bunch of anti-feminist ranting.

The problem is, it's modern feminists who are against such things being addressed.

A voice for men is not exactly a reliable source.

True but I'm too lazy to write my own article on the matter.

Politics is a popularity contest. What are you doing to counter this?

Nothing.

A crank with an audience is still a crank.

Then you have to concede that a "crank" is capable of doing damage given enough of support and audience.

[fishscale]

Do.

Harriet Harman's equality act 2010, her use of statistics and propaganda against men/fathers.

Hillary Clinton promoting the circumcision of over 28 million men in Africa under the guise of "fighting AIDS". lolwat?

This is the same woman who said "Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat." - Hillary Clinton

Have a read of this too: http://www.policymic.com/articles/41...olitical-radar

clares that feminist activism trumps liberal politics, women's representation in government, and national wealth as the key factor in shaping public-policy attempts to destroy rape culture.

Ah, rape culture, seems like that 1 in 3 statistic is believed by more than you let on.

Second wave feminism was a fight for equality, or are you suggesting that men and women were legally and financially equal in 1961?

I'm not saying part of the fight wasn't for equality what I am saying is a bigger part of the fight was for dominance, control and shaping the world into how they believe it should be and they've gone about this in the most immoral ways possible, vilifying men at every possible corner, outright lying, false statistics, Trojan laws, propaganda and brainwashing.

This is where you're wrong, and this is probably the crux of the disagreement we're having. Feminism is not a hate group, because it isn't a group at all. It's an umbrella term encompassing innumerable groups and you are lumping women's rights groups in with misandrist feminazi cranks.

When both use the banner of feminism we have to find a way to distinguish between them. Feminism is too far gone to be considered anything positive anymore, imo. I'm not denying its origins were positive what I am saying is what it's became since is more than negative.

Look up Harriet Hall. She is a feminist who blazed a trail and broke ground in equal opportunities for women in the Air Force. Now tell me that she's in the same group as Valerie Solanos or even Germaine Greer.

I'd identity her as the complete opposite to a feminist, personally, while she does identify as a feminist she's also careful to point out "I am a feminist too, even though my brand of feminism may not meet your expectations of how a feminist should act. There are different roads to the same destination. Don’t disparage mine."

Which is my problem with feminism, some brands are supposedly "good" and the damaging ones which cause nothing but harm and problems are supposed to just be ignored despite the fact the damaging ones are the people pushing nasty agendas which harm society.

[rorymac]

A "cancer" eh? Tell me again how feminism is a "hate group (sic)".

You are legendary for using (sic)

[New England]

when you get high up in nearly any organization you'll find men calling the shots. i think we're better suited to lead. denying the natural differences (inequalities, if you want to call them that,) isn't, well, natural. it's a product of convention. and there are situations where a man has no business doing something a woman will do better.


if i owned a ditch digging company and was forced to keep a work force equal in women and men, and my competitors employed only men, i'd go out of business.

[squealpiggy]

when you get high up in nearly any organization you'll find men calling the shots. i think we're better suited to lead.

This is because women on average will take time out of their career to have children while men never seldom do. This makes for a smaller pool of women available to fill the very highest positions. The innate difference is childbearing, not some undefinable super-man-skills.

if i owned a ditch digging company and was forced to keep a work force equal in women and men, and my competitors employed only men, i'd go out of business.

I had no idea that there was such a vibrant ditch digging industry.

[Grand Champ]

My 2 cents..

I think the whole feminism movement from the beginning of the 30s up to the late 70s was absolutely great and much needed. It's still needed in every middle eastern and african countries.

That being said, it's an outdated model for places like scandinavian countries. And some of the puke they spit today simply scream "I NEED TO BE OFFENDED TO EXIST" & "I WANT SPECIAL TREATMENT" Here in the cold north I'm all for humanism and TRUE equality - NOT feminism that simply look out of the equality of one gender.

[squealpiggy]

One thing is for sure. If ever I think that feminism is no longer necessary I only need to look in this lounge at some of the comments about women to be assured that there is still a place for feminism in the world.

[siablo14]

One thing is for sure. If ever I think that feminism is no longer necessary I only need to look in this lounge at some of the comments about women to be assured that there is still a place for feminism in the world.

I always thought most of these posters were joking.