Eh, it's just the same thing as everything else right now. Everybody that is a unstudied adherent of the movement, which is easy to be considering it's a damned good movement, has the internet and the really really stupid things that some people say are going to get spread around. Consider the crazyfemnutjobs the equivalent of the crazymranutjobs, then realize they can, and are sometimes inclined to, read each other's stuff to show their other halfarse informed friends how stupid and crazy people who don't agree with them are.
This pretty much hits the nail on the head. A problem is that unlettered people pick up on statements by scholars that, absent context, appear to be bombastic. The observers blow the statements out of proportion.
Another problem is that some feminists make statements that actually are bombastic.
In either case, some parties extrapolate the general from the particular and scream at the top of their longs that "feminists are doing this that or the other thing," when they should be accurately saying "
some feminists are doing this that or the other thing."
For example, I recently attended a lecture by Emily Nagoski, a sex health expert and researcher. Her new thesis is that the sex drive, understood as an individual survival instinct, doesn't exist, and that it would be a better model to view sexual arousal as being two separate but interrelated, things: physical arousal and emotional arousal.
Dr. Nagoski was not shy about presenting the consequence of this new thesis in a feminist light. She points out that adopted by society of her model on sexual arousal may have a significant effect upon how we view rape and other sexual assaults. To wit, once we have freed ourselves from thinking of sex as an individual survival drive our relationship with sexual violence changes because we would no longer see (most) people who violate our sexual mores as slaves to their physical drives and unable to help themselves.
The critic of Dr. Nagoski could readily take that and say "Feminists Think Sex Drive Doesn't Exist." That soundbite is flawed on a number of levels. For one, the speaker has, as the OP has, assumed that one woman speaks for all of feminism. For another, the statement that the sex drive doesn't exist full stop disregards the manner in which Nagoski has attempted to frame her model in light of drives being individual survival requirements.
Yeah I like that better
