Light Cleric
ElCee/LC/El Cid
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Can you elaborate on that last part?
Differing reactions to men & women getting abused
- Thread starter Narz
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Can you elaborate on that last part?
trader/warrior
Deity
It's still not quite clear what we are supposed to be listening to. Is it just a general request to get a better understanding of feminism and/or women? If so a good way to start would be to give us something to listen to in responding to points made in the discussion rather than telling people to be silent and stating they have never even imagined what it would be like to be a woman. This is in referral to Phrossacks post on page 3 that hardly contained an iota of anti-feminism or MRA rhetoric and could have led to an interesting discussion.
At least I get a sense from reading these recent feminism threads that for some reason the feminists seem strangely unwilling to respond to easily handled points and rather just seem to be name-calling and branding people "MRA's" when they haven't even said very much about their stances on feminism.
I used to call myself a feminist, I think that I still am a feminist but I certainly wouldn't label myself as one anymore. In the mainstream culture feminism has grabbed a bunch of extremist views and tied them so closely to feminist it's hard to be a feminist without holding them or at least having others assume you do.
In our society there are a lot of places where we still need to advance rights for women. Reproductive health is probably the most obvious, recent pushes by Republican legislators against abortion etc. are disgusting. And while the reality of pay discrimination is that it's much smaller than is often claimed, it's still a problem that needs to be fixed. In a very related note the lack of women in STEM fields is a problem etc. (Ironically modern feminists tend to be overtly hostile to STEM).
However a lot of the things feminists have attached themselves too recently are very difficult issues to make that case with. A very standard example is violence and stranger violence in particular.
In every single country in the world men are far more likely to be victims of stranger violence than women are. But we always see stranger violence presented as a women's issue, especially with this inane trope about the '#womenexperiance' of holding your keys in your knuckles at night and how men will never understand their far. When men are explicitly in far more danger of stranger violence than women are. Also in more danger of violence in general, but by a lower margin and not in every country.
That only serves to put in greater perspective the different social reactions to violence against women and men. Which is something that bothers me greatly both as a "lite"-feminist and as a man. So to say looking at how our justice system discriminates against men and our society prioritizes female victims of violence over male, makes you explicitly misogynistic is not just wrong but disgusting. It betrays you as failing to truly be a feminist and as being trapped in an us-vs-them mindset. This is the problem with viewing the world through a filter based on identity, you trap everyone in an identity you built for them and the only method of discourse you have left is to scream privilege at all the identities you've classified as beings enemies until they give in.
Or you know they don't...
I totally agree with all of this. I believe women's reproductive rights are something that should be fought for and support women's equality. I think equal pay is very complicated because there are sometimes explanations for it. Like female doctors are more often paid less but that's because women tend to go into specializations that pay less, like pediatrician over neurosurgery. I'm not saying there aren't times that it comes from sexism.
My main complaint with feminism is that, like you, I think a lot of the rhetoric is divisive with things like "check your privilege" and "mansplaining". It also too often focuses on trivial issues, like representation of women on TV, people using the term "bossy" or "strident", an advertisement is sexist, etc. I once read an article in which a woman had made a conceptual art video while knitting a (can't remember, scarf? blanket?) out of yarn that she had inserted into her vagina and this was supposedly a feminist statement. Actually, in the comments section a lot of feminists said it was stupid and passe, so that one went too far.
I read salon.com a lot and sometimes it reads like a parody of liberals. I say this as someone who is fairly liberal. It's like the fox news of liberals. I'm not conservative but I think the liberal side has BS too. They also seem incapable of seeing social issues outside of an entertainment/news media context.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Unkind.
Thank you, I didn't even understand that post until you responded to it.
In my defense, I was in the office printing off about 600 papers while reading it and it's very strenuous waiting by the printer wondering if it's every going to finish. I was thinking "listening to who?"
Graffito said:
Aboriginal non-violence in the 50s, 60s and 70s wasn't a tactical choice but a necessity borne out of the fact that white people took any provocation as an excuse to unleash violence on black bodies. In the 1910s and 1920s it was outright massacres (Conistsan, Bedford Downs and Forrest River). In the 1940s, beatings, mock executions and marching people across large distances in irons were used to try and break the peaceful Pilbara Strike. In the 50s and 60s white people were all for taking robust action against the Wavehill strikers. These robust measures included every kind of violence imaginable up to killing a bunch of the strikers as a lesson to the others. Why? Because violence was an accepted part of how you dealt with Aboriginals. Station owners toted buffalo hide whips as part of their day to day and thought nothing of letting lose with bird shot to show their displeasure. Policemen could rape young black girls in the 1940s and have nothing happen to them even when the girls white foster parents complained. In actual fact, criminal convictions against whites for any sort of violence against blacks were almost nonexistent before the 1970s. Even walking off was a crime punishable by incarceration...
Gori the Grey
The Poster
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Look, if feminist-inspired ideological critique is to be the only coin that can pass current, then let’s at least go all in. We won’t need to read terribly deep into our Kristeva and Irirgary to learn that one of the predominant features of patriarchy, indeed perhaps its hallmark, is that it is hierarchical and hierarchizing. Major, overtly political institutions long dominated by men, like the Church or the military, patently exhibit such hierarcical organization. But the more pernicious aspect of any dominant ideology lies in how it tacitly structures even the most mundane dimensions of social interaction. In the framing of a discussion, for example, patriarchy might manifest itself in the phallogocentric presupposition or insistence that there be a best, or even only one correct, viewpoint or perspective, and that all others must be aggressively silenced, discredited, or marginalized.
The only mode of discourse, then, that will serve to dismantle and supplant patriarchy is one that is multilateral and multivocal, plural, inviting, open, unclosed, i.e. that has no room for olnys
In short,
*written under erasure. Feminist(s) thought(s) are not monolithic, not a thought, but, under patriarchy, must present themselves as such or risk being discounted as not, properly, thought.
**as one doesn't in fact need feminist thought to know; simply conversing with women will generally drive this point home.
(My version of metatron's "new flag" observation.)
Borachio
Way past lunacy
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Well, that's all well and good; and high falutin' and all that.
But, in the end, people are just people.
Some days we think this, some days that. It really doesn't matter. In a hundred years (or so), all this will be fields (or is it forest?). Again.
Btw, who's this Patrick Archy everyone keeps talking about?
But, in the end, people are just people.
Some days we think this, some days that. It really doesn't matter. In a hundred years (or so), all this will be fields (or is it forest?). Again.
Btw, who's this Patrick Archy everyone keeps talking about?
Gori the Grey
The Poster
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You haven't been following this thread. You haven't been listening. With a name like Patrick, he's an oppressor.
classical_hero
In whom I trust
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
The position of women, people of colour and other subaltern groups in our society is comparable to that of peasant under feudalism.
A Good Post.
A Good Post.
classical_hero
In whom I trust
Only the elite had power and everyone else was underneath them. That does include people of "no colour", aka whites. Much of history was under the rule of Kings and that happened to be under Kings of all colours and underneath them were peoples of all colours.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
A Missed Point.
Senethro
Overlord
Suggested Amendment: Within living memory its been easily possible to get away with murder of minorities in some white dominated countries. Thats kinda peasanty.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
I agree, of course; I was simply playing on Classical Hero's poor choice of reference.
classical_hero
In whom I trust
You can point to any group at some point in history that has been repressed.
Perfection
The Great Head.
That's not exactly true. While elites exercised great powers over those under them, there was not equality among the oppressed. Poor white men as oppressed as they were often were in a position to oppress POC and women.
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