Why shouldn't I hate feminists?

[Naive1000]

[To start off with I'm an egalitarian, so I do believe in equality before the rush of hate comes at me.]

While I do not hate any specific feminist or the goal of the feminist movement, I do hate feminists as a group. I had many bad experiences with feminists when I was in college, though I did nothing to garner the enmity I faced. I have social anxiety (back then too), so I think I was just an easy male target. It made my college life less the pleasant and I left before getting my degree partially because of the atmosphere that existed for me there.

Still, I try to let bygones be bygones. But, every time I think the movement has become less misandrous I run into things like this: Radical Feminism Enters the 21st Century. The article in itself is disturbing, but the responses are down right disgusting. Why should or would men want to join a movement that pretty much thinks of us as less than human. Here are just a few quotes:

The *magic number* to bring the males under control is ~30% of the population

Females don’t have to kill baby boys. Just not nurture them. Females are forced to *birth* baby boys, but beyond that a female’s physical actions are her own.

Males will die without the constant infusion of female energy that they get from our wombs and from our lives. They are perfectly welcome to take the male infants from the hands of the midwife, and what they do with it from that point is *their* decision.

Females need to not be emotionally and intellectually invested in a male future.

Men oppress us, so it’s no good getting annoyed at women for raising boys, although I certainly agree that lowering the male population is important, and I’ll never forget those two midwives who killed every boy baby for decades to prevent the warring between the tribes.That is a hopeful, positive story.

Even if we killed off 90% of men, the majority of women left over would do their best to keep the oppressive system. I’d dare say we’d have to kill off all the women too and leave the little girls and radfems to create the utopia.

it occurs to me that a female ob/gyn that was willing to perform sex-selective abortions on male fetuses would be giving a gift to the next generation, and preventing the future generation of girls and women being eaten alive.

as vliet suggested, i think a biological solution would be a radical solution. such as dispatching male babies at birth.

One thing that also keeps me from feminism is that I never hear them speak out about these people claiming to be feminists or denouncing their views. If this is their movement they can keep it.

So tell me, why should I support feminism at all, and where are the feminists willing to stand against radicals like these?

 

[bit_pattern]

One thing that also keeps me from feminism is that I never hear them speak out about these people claiming to be feminists or denouncing their views. If this is their movement they can keep it.

Have you ever looked for such criticisms? Where do you expect you should have heard them?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_feminism#Criticisms

 

[slingblade]

[To start off with I'm an egalitarian, so I do believe in equality before the rush of hate comes at me.]

While I do not hate any specific feminist or the goal of the feminist movement, I do hate feminists as a group. I had many bad experiences with feminists when I was in college, though I did nothing to garner the enmity I faced. I have social anxiety (back then too), so I think I was just an easy male target. It made my college life less the pleasant and I left before getting my degree partially because of the atmosphere that existed for me there.

Still, I try to let bygones be bygones. But, every time I think the movement has become less misandrous I run into things like this: Radical Feminism Enters the 21st Century. The article in itself is disturbing, but the responses are down right disgusting. Why should or would men want to join a movement that pretty much thinks of us as less than human. Here are just a few quotes:

The people (I assume women?) who made those comments sound seriously unhinged to me. Or trolling.

One thing that also keeps me from feminism is that I never hear them speak out about these people claiming to be feminists or denouncing their views. If this is their movement they can keep it.

I can't denounce what I don't hear or read, and I certainly have never read anything like those comments. Having done so, I hereby denounce them.

You realize that feminism isn't usually promoted as "the movement to kill all men," right?

So tell me, why should I support feminism at all, and where are the feminists willing to stand against radicals like these?

That's not "feminism." That's psychopathic hatred. Why would anyone rational support that?

Look...just because you can find a few nutbars in any given cause, it doesn't render the entire cause moot. After all, we're even now discussing how nice it is for six-year-olds to give or receive handjobs. Do those comments render the issue of child sexual abuse a moot point?

Taking such horrendous extremes and attempting to mainstream them as a legitimate part of an issue is disingenuous at best.

Also, I'm not a feminist. I got reamed for even suggesting I might be, once, and I was compared to the women you've quoted, even though all I've ever advocated for was equal rights and equal pay. I'm so horrible. But I'm sure not a feminist. Not even a little bit.

 

[Naive1000]

Have you ever looked for such criticisms? Where do you expect you should have heard them?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_feminism#Criticisms

I have looked and I'm talking now not ten or twenty years ago. Where are feminists groups speaking out against these type of feminists now? Also, I'm talking about groups not single individuals. As I said, I have nothing against individual feminists.

 

[Roger Ramjets]

You claim to be egalitarian, so why are you not speaking out about and denouncing the views of male chauvinists? Does silence signify consent?

But perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that you don't feel obliged to support feminism 'at all', since your avatar objectifies women...

 

[Puppycow]

I can't denounce what I don't hear or read, and I certainly have never read anything like those comments. Having done so, I hereby denounce them.

I don't think encountered anything like that either. It almost seems like a Poe.

In any case, this is not mainstream feminism.

Where did you go to college Naive1000?

 

[Tsukasa Buddha]

Maybe you met a bad bunch, because I've never met a feminist that wouldn't laugh at those goals.

I find it rather impractical to hate a group of individuals for a trait that not all of them share. In this case, that trait is being ******* nuts.

 

[Naive1000]

You claim to be egalitarian, so why are you not speaking out about and denouncing the views of male chauvinists? Does silence signify consent?

But perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that you don't feel obliged to support feminism 'at all', since your avatar objectifies women...

Actually, that's Ranma, from Ranma 1/2, and he's a boy . Though, I do find nothing wrong with either sex objectifying the other. It's a natural extension of our sexual biology. But, we should never treat the people we interact with as objects. Nice Ad Hominem though .

And yes, I do speak out about male chauvinists, be an jerk I'll say something. But, I don't run blogs and spout hate at other people. Point me at a site spouting hate about women I'll do the same as I did there (though my message was filtered, who would have thought). Also, feel free to post links about those being biased against females, we should all know who to speak out against. Fighting all gender bias and oppression is all of our responsibilities.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

You shouldn't hate feminists because the idiots you quoted are totally unrepresentative of feminism.

Also the argument that any group of people are morally responsible for what some other group of people does or says, unless the second lot are in a position of power over or responsibility for the first lot, is simply inane.

Interestingly, it's an argument beloved of the sort of morally and intellectually repugnant hatemongers who would have us hate all followers of Islam on the ridiculous basis that the mainstream Islamic community haven't criticised the nutty Islamic community enough. It's a general-purpose incitement to hatred that can be used to incite hatred for virtually any group of people, and hence rationalists should oppose both the argument and those who deploy it wherever they are found.

 

[Naive1000]

...[snip]... Where did you go to college Naive1000?

I went to USC in South Carolina, a Gamecock for those sports fans. It was a long time ago, in the early 90s.

 

[gumboot]

Assuming the sort of people you've illustrated here are actually typical of feminists (I find it unlikely that they are on average that radical unhinged from reality), perhaps you should be asking yourself if they're really worthy of the effort it would take you to actually hate them? I would be inclined to simply dismiss such people as unworthy of a reasonable human's attention.

To illustrate, take white supremacists or misogynists. I am both white and male, but I don't feel a need to speak out against either of these groups because I take it as a given that no sensible person is going to accept their views, and no one who even slightly knows me is going to think I support them. Perhaps "normal" feminists feel the same way about these man-hating wackjobs?

 

[Puppycow]

Interestingly, it's an argument beloved of the sort of morally and intellectually repugnant hatemongers who would have us hate all followers of Islam on the ridiculous basis that the mainstream Islamic community haven't criticised the nutty Islamic community enough. It's a general-purpose incitement to hatred that can be used to incite hatred for virtually any group of people, and hence rationalists should oppose both the argument and those who deploy it wherever they are found.

Yeah, people generally have lives to live and don't spend most of their time denouncing things they disagree with. I'm an atheist, but I don't spend a lot of time looking for the most radical violent fringe atheists out there so I can denounce them. If they come into my radar screen I will denounce them but I'm not going to go looking under every rock for them.

Furthermore, often they have in fact denounced the radicals. The people who complain about lack of denunciations just having bothered to find out.

Probably if we did some checking, we could find feminists who have denounced this kind of "radical feminism"

 

[H'ethetheth]

Wow. Killing billions of babies/fetuses to prevent wars killing them later on? Brilliant. A true "Endlösung der Männerfrage".

But, on topic, I'm not sure how many feminists would actually agree with this. I hope not many.

 

[Naive1000]

You shouldn't hate feminists because the idiots you quoted are totally unrepresentative of feminism.

Also the argument that any group of people are morally responsible for what some other group of people does or says, unless the second lot are in a position of power over or responsibility for the first lot, is simply inane.

Interestingly, it's an argument beloved of the sort of morally and intellectually repugnant hatemongers who would have us hate all followers of Islam on the ridiculous basis that the mainstream Islamic community haven't criticised the nutty Islamic community enough. It's a general-purpose incitement to hatred that can be used to incite hatred for virtually any group of people, and hence rationalists should oppose both the argument and those who deploy it wherever they are found.

I'm not advocating hating feminists. I'm just saying from personal experience, when ever I run into groups or even individual feminists, who call themselves feminists, this is what they have been like. So, show me a group of feminists who actually care about equality and not just women. Who don't hate men. Who don't think we're all privileged. Who care when women oppress men, not just when men are the oppressors. Who believe in true equality, then I'll change my view. Cheers .

 

[HansMustermann]

As a rule of thumb, you can find a few nutcases holding an extremist version of anything. You know, just like rule 34 "if it exists, there will be porn about it" and 36, "if it exists, it will be someone's fetish", relevant rules of the internet also include

Rule 18: "If it can be labeled, it can be hated."

Rule 63: "For every given male character, there is a female version of that character"

Although the last one usually applies to fan art, I'd say it applies to trolls, bigots, whatever. No matter how sexist or deranged some guy's persona will be, you'll find some nutcase holding the distaff version of it.

Also be aware that a lot of the most extreme stuff you're reading in any medium is more likely to be fanboyism (which sadly includes a lot of girls too) or trolling, than anything rational. Especially fanboys (of both genders) seem to derive their self-worth and self from espousing the right set of beliefs and fitting in a group, so don't be surprised if when they want to outdo the Joneses, it will mean barking harder than the Joneses. Or AT the Joneses.

What baffles me more, though, is not that lunatic fringes exist, but that people would insist on taking them as representative for a whole larger blot on the ideology spectrum.

E.g., people basically insisting that if you're a leftie or even support some lone leftist point like universal healthcare, you can't possibly hold any more moderate opinion than sending everyone to Siberia, because surely Stalin and Mao spoke for every left-winger out there. Or at best are some "useful idiot" who doesn't realize that you ARE working for that majority of leftists that Mao and Stalin do speak for.

E.g., in this case, that if one can find a minority SOMEWHERE, no matter how far out of the mainstream and how almost nobody else ever heard of it, that has some extremist version of feminism, then verily that's what feminism as a whole MUST be about.

I mean, seriously, WTH? Painting a whole ideology in the colour of the most cherry-picked fringe, doesn't make one be in the middle, it makes one quite partisan against it. In fact, the "they won't stop until they oppress/kill/marginalize/drive out the rest of us!!!111eleventeen" implicit or explicit slippery slope argument is pretty much bigotry 101 these days. Every single group bigotted against X, can't say "yeah, let's oppress those frakking X and show them who's boss and who's sub-human" any more, because that went out of fashion at some point in the 20'th century. Nowadays they all paint their own group as under relentless and coordinated attack by those evil X. Whatever group X may be: blacks, mexicans, jews, women, etc.

Just like with "I'm not a racist, but <insert what's wrong with blacks or with anyone wanting to give them equal rights, and how it can't stop anywhere short of making blacks rule over whites>", or "I'm not an anti-semite, but <insert what's wrong with jews or with anyone wanting to give them equal rights, and how it can't possibly stop until the elders of Zion rule over us all>", it seems to me like when one has to go "I'm an egalitarian, but <same deal applied to women>", they're just saying they're not egalitarian after all.

 

[Naive1000]

I figured it would come, attacking my egalitarianism, so here are some nutty MRA guys I hate (MRAs Promote Terrorism):

So boys, we need to start burning down police stations and courthouses.

There will be some casualties in this war. Some killed, some wounded, some captured. Some of them will be theirs. Some of the casualties will be ours.

Now, nobody wants to get killed. But let us look at your life. You are broke after paying child support. She and the kids are not doing any better.

Violence against women and children is despicable as are those who perpetrate it. Why would anyone join these groups either? Show me one who supports equal rights instead of just men ... same thing goes.

 

[KoihimeNakamura]

Look for super extreme groups; find them easily enough.

 

[HansMustermann]

@Naive1000:
Yes, but in one case you obviously see it's just a despicable extremist fringe group, while in the other case it becomes somehow representative of everyone ever who thought women could use a little more rights. Then everyone on that side is apparently an extremist.

I mean, it gets as low as quoting some random trolls in the replies as somehow the position of feminism, never mind that not only they don't speak for every feminist, they don't even speak for the author of the article. I mean, for example, the one advocating that 30% males are enough not only isn't the author of the article, nor claiming to speak even for radical feminism as such, but is actually a guy, judging by the name. You don't know who he is, whether he's just nuts or trolling, or whether it's really a very unskilled Poe, but you have no problem taking him as speaking for all feminists.

And I don't mean just because he's a guy, but because he's Anonymous Random Internet Poster #1234567, rather than someone whose credentials you know and can extrapolate to a group of adherents. We're not talking "professor of women's studies X" or "established feminist author Y" or anything similar that would support an extrapolation, but it's one random person in a forum. For all everyone knows, he could be some crazy person off their medication, or a troll, or whatever. How do you know that he speaks for feminists as a group, or that he even knows enough of feminism to formulate a view that's consistent with it? How do you know it's not just like taking a random proponent of, say, the electric universe as representative of physics or physicists?

But, anyway, I'm sorry, that's still not anything even resembling actual egalitarianism. It's just how prejudice works these days.

 

[gumboot]

What baffles me more, though, is not that lunatic fringes exist, but that people would insist on taking them as representative for a whole larger blot on the ideology spectrum.

E.g., people basically insisting that if you're a leftie or even support some lone leftist point like universal healthcare, you can't possibly hold any more moderate opinion than sending everyone to Siberia, because surely Stalin and Mao spoke for every left-winger out there. Or at best are some "useful idiot" who doesn't realize that you ARE working for that majority of leftists that Mao and Stalin do speak for.

This is what I like to call the "forced perspective" of politics. Put simply, it's my theory that the more extreme a person's own views are, the more difficulty they have in distinguishing between extreme and moderate views that are on the opposite side to them.

For example, a moderate "left-winger" can comfortably distinguish between a moderate and extremist "right-winger" because the difference between the two "right-wing" positions is actually greater than the difference between their position and that of the moderate "right-winger". But as you move further out along the "left-wing" spectrum these two positions become much closer together relative to your own position. Eventually if you're an extreme enough wack-job a moderate and extreme "right-wing" position will appear indistinguishable because you're so far removed from either position that the difference between the two "right-wing" positions is insignificant by comparison.

By the same token, if you're a total wack-job someone who is slightly more wack-jobish than you is going to seem "way extreme" to you, but to a moderate your two positions are so close together - relative to their own distance from both of you - that you both appear equally crazy.

The same seems to be true of any major socio-political issue.

So the general guide is that if other people are accusing you of being a wackjob but you don't think you are there's two likely reasons:

1. You are a wackjob, it's just there's even bigger wackjobs than you
2. The person accusing you of being a wackjob is a wackjob and can't tell the difference between an opposing wackjob and moderate

Now the problem is, because of the inherent nature of how political forced perspective works, it's impossible for you to tell which is the correct situation. The reason for this is because it requires you to know the accusor's position first, but if you're a wackjob yourself you can't tell if their position is moderate or extreme.

Thus the only viable way to test your position is to find some independent 3rd party who is able to determine your relative positions. This is difficult, of course, partly because if you're a wackjob you're more likely to hang around with other wackjobs and a reasonable person will seem extremist to you.

When it comes to politics a good guide is actually to look at mainstream politicians. At the risk of causing a riot, in most western countries we don't elect extremists to government. Right or left, our governments are almost always moderate.

If you find yourself incapable of distinguishing between a right/left wing elected politician and a right/left wing extremist, it's a warning sign that you yourself are probably an extremist.

 

[HansMustermann]

@gumboot:
Well, I'm not sure I'd even take it that far. Some people don't need to be extremists to paint everyone who's not with them as against them. I think some people just like their us-vs-them demarcations too much, and there MUST be something uniformly wrong with the "them".

Basically, fanboyism, as I was saying...