Why so much hatred for feminism?

[epepke]

What are being called the "whackjobs" used to be mainstream and dominant. They haven't been mainstream and dominant since about 1997, which is a good thing. (Except that Skepchick is trying to bring that back.) What is inaccurately called "second-wave" feminism self-destructed in the 90s because of this.

Now we have "third-wave" feminism which is pretty good so far (again, except for Skepchick who seem to want some of those 80s sensibilities to come back). Consider yourself fortunate for having become interested in feminism during a relatively good period.

However, caution is indicated. Like somebody said, those who do not learn from history are destined to run the sucker over and over again until they get it right.

I got interested in feminism during the 1980s, when the "whackjobs" were in the process of taking over. So I spent several years studying waves of feminism back to the invention of the printing press. What happened during the 1980s also happened during the 1920s and the 1870s and more times before. Genuinely liberating impulses got taken over by the opposite impulses. It could happen again.

Historically, it's happened because people ignored the whackjobs until it was too late. Were it not for this fact, we might have had decent sexual equality by the middle of the 20th century, so we wouldn't even have to have this discussion. We don't, and I think that's sad and a bad thing. If one is rational, then one has to be wary of feminists who want to destroy feminism (for a given definition of "feminism.")

In general terms, the problem is not unique to feminism. I'm pretty sure that Dwight D. Eisenhower and George W. Bush would disagree about practically everything. So, which of them speaks for conservatism? If you are rational, you can pick one and consider the other false.

Feminism is unique in one way, though. You can sort of pretend that there is no conflict. Part of this is due to the remnants of traditional sexism and chivalry, which can be used to gloss over stupid things that women say. It is a remnant of the time when women were not to be taken seriously, neither as doctors or scientists nor as demagogues and fatheads.

This is quite insidious and pops up in feminism again and again. The trump card is to declare that logic and reason themselves are patriarchal traps. Mary Daly did a lot of this, and Robin Morgan eventually discovered post-modernism as a ready-made set of rhetoric.

Of course, this differs not at all from the old "women are emotional" crap, but it seems to be appealing to feminists, and it is something to watch for. I hope that feminism won't get sucky and anti-feminist again, but the best way to make it happen is to dismiss the "whackjobs" as unimportant.

 

[A'isha]

Historically, it's happened because people ignored the whackjobs until it was too late. Were it not for this fact, we might have had decent sexual equality by the middle of the 20th century, so we wouldn't even have to have this discussion.

??

 

[KingMerv00]

Actually, I don't fully agree with that. The people with most money and power are mostly male, that is true, but that isn't quite the same. I find it ludicrous to claim that the male janitor who is now shoveling snow outside my window is somehow more powerful than the female shop clerk I bought my lunch from this morning.

Of course it is ludicrous to say that. I am not claiming that all men are better off than all women. Overlapping bell curves.

If you want to claim that the mostly male group that has a lot of money and power uses that money and power to favor men, go right ahead, but I'd need some evidence and a few examples of what that means in practice.

Just to be clear, I don't think it is a intentional decision by men and I don't think women play no part in the imbalance. I suppose I could point out obvious examples of misogyny but they are rare enough to say they aren't the primary cause (anymore). I'm doubley screwed by the fact that if I pointed out obvious examples, you would undeniably condemn them but would not define that condemnation as "feminism". That just leaves subtle problems...

To answer your question, I'll reverse the concept a bit. I said above, men are have a sizable majority in government, business, and in the media. You seem to agree. If women and men were granted equal opportunities at some unspecified point in the past, how do you explain for the male majority in those areas? Do you think women don't WANT to be politicians, billionaires, and writers?

 

[KingMerv00]

What are being called the "whackjobs" used to be mainstream and dominant. They haven't been mainstream and dominant since about 1997, which is a good thing. (Except that Skepchick is trying to bring that back.)

Dare I ask how they are trying to bring it back? If your answer rhymes with "shmelevatorgate", forget I asked. Don't want a massive derail.

 

[KingMerv00]

??

Seconded.

It sounds like he's saying there is an imbalance in power because feminism got too uppity. Even if he is right, he is blaming the victim. If people in charge at the time didn't like the radicals, the appropriate action is to ignore them, not stop progress entirely and then blame women for asking for equal rights in the first place.

 

[KingMerv00]

I've noticed in this thread very few people making an explicit distinction between liberal feminism and radical feminism. Do you all understand the differences?

Most of the people posting here appear to be liberal feminists. I think that is all to the good. And most of the caricatures people have mentioned are about radical feminists (or perceptions of them).

But I would like to accurately understand your perceptions of radical feminism, beyond off-the-cuff descriptions like "kook". Do the people in this thread genuinely think that radical feminist ideas stem from psychiatric illness and not simply a different (possibly erroneous, but not insane) perception of how society operates?

Kooks come in all kinds of flavors. Some want gendercide (Valarie Solanas). Some believe women are so oppressed that they can't consent (Andrea Dworkin). Some are bigots and say "all men are pigs".

 

[westprog]

Human history is the history of one group arbitrarily maintaining power over another. Whites passed power to whites and ignored blacks. Men passed power to men and ignored women. In America, Christians STILL pass power to christians and ignore atheists. Even if you think it's wrong, "silly" is a excessive. What's "silly" is the idea that this kind of behavior came to a screeching halt some time in the last 150 years.

Gender and racial oppression are and were very different things. Rich and powerful white men did not voluntarily transfer resources to poor black men. They did, however, ensure that their wives and daughters shared in their power and privilege. That is not to say that women were not oppressed - just that their oppression was of a completely different kind to race or class oppression. Slaves of the rich and powerful lived lives much like other slaves. Wives and daughters of the rich and powerful were safer, better fed and better housed, lived longer and had privilege not accorded to slaves, or indeed, poor white people.

That is not to say that women, in general, were not subordinated to men. It does mean that while any slave was inferior in status to any white man, and a lower class poor person would have to defer to someone richer, a rich white woman would certainly not be subordinate to a poor white man, or to a black slave. Her status, while derived from her husband, would still be very real.

There is a grain of truth in your statement. Money and power can be inherited across gender boundries. It helps level the playing field somewhat but it obviously isn't enough. Why is it men dominate "most wealthy" and CEO lists? If wealth and power were being equally inherited by both genders, shouldn't women be equally represented?


...
You ask who is MORE responsible for changing the status quo? That will vary from person to person but I admit the majority will say men because they currently have a near monopoly on government, executive business power, and are over represented in the media. Note, this doesn't mean men have a near monopoly on blame since social sexism can be just as damaging as "top down" sexism.

The error is not in saying that men hold the majority of positions of power. It's in considering men as a class entire of itself, separate from women, intent on holding power as a class. Poor, low status men do not have the power to transform society. They cannot make life more free for Hilary Clinton and Oprah. They do not exercise influence on powerful men by simply being of the same gender. The rich and powerful are far more likely to care about the well being of women close to them than for male strangers.

 

[KingMerv00]

...and this is exactly the kind of manipulative stuff I love: Feminists projecting a "stereotype" that does not exist in the first place.

In all fairness, anti-spinster attitudes have weakened a lot in the last 60 years or so. I only referred to it since truethat brought up the topic. Parents still bother the daughters for grandkids but sons get a lot of that too.

What stereotypes do you acknowledge? Men shouldn't cry? Women (especially famous women) need makeup to be pretty?

King Merv

- as you said:
Exactly. And your point of view is a manipulative "no true scotsman" fallacy. it also is manipulative for its "prove the negative" approach:

You want to start with this stupid canard that anyone who thinks like me is basing it on radical feminism, and try to put me in the position of proving the negative. No thanks. Anyone who takes that bait has already lost.

Radical feminism exists. I hate it too. My point is that I outlined my POV in the OP and asked why it is automatically associated with opinions which we both despise.

And the business about "for what it's worth"... it ain't worth 'nuthin. You have an agenda. It means nothing to me. The only interest I have is in spotting manipulative plays.

I think you are making my point for me. You think I'm out to trick and manipulate you but nothing but the label "feminism" says I am. You are judging me without actually addressing my views.

 

[truethat]

The error is not in saying that men hold the majority of positions of power. It's in considering men as a class entire of itself, separate from women, intent on holding power as a class. Poor, low status men do not have the power to transform society. They cannot make life more free for Hilary Clinton and Oprah. They do not exercise influence on powerful men by simply being of the same gender. The rich and powerful are far more likely to care about the well being of women close to them than for male strangers.

I think this is it in a nutshell.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Ok so you admit you were a working mom. Sorry working as a nurse is not a "traditional role" that I'm talking about. I'm talking about women who treat stay at home mothers as if they are A. Not working and B. Brain dead while scrubbing out toilets.

I had three kids and stayed home. And one of the things I learned how to do very well is cook. I can't tell you the number of "feminists" I've met who tell me they "don't cook" as if it's some badge of honor not to be able to do something.

Listen to yourself. You are denigrating a traditional female occupation because it isn't 'female' enough for you all the while complaining about people you think denigrated your own occupation.

If a woman doesn't cook and says so, that doesn't mean she is denigrating someone who does cook. A feminist would however, be concerned that despite the fact more women than men are expert cooks, most top paid chefs are men, and despite prominent figures like Julia Childs, children's books almost exclusively depicted men, not women in chef's hats and aprons. Maybe it isn't the feminists that are denigrating your role as a skilled cook.

(Just an FYI side note, in the novel I'm writing the tomboy protagonist loves to cook because she enjoys experimenting with new foods and ingredients. She also invents things to make her 'female' designated chores easier.)

As for having 3 kids and being a stay-at-home mom, it would be nice to have the income to be able to do that. Some of us are not so fortunate. OTOH, I am fortunate enough to have an occupation that provided the two of us a home, a middle class life, and enough money for my son's first 4 years of college with a little left over to give him a start living on his own. His father contributed very little and none of the assets I had when he left came from him (IE I owned the house before we met and he made no payments toward the mortgage).

I'm also proud to have contributed to changing the salary structure in the nursing profession allowing the market forces of supply and demand to finally impact nursing wages. Hospitals had been allowed to monopolize wages and they chose to keep wages (demand) low and accept the shortage of supply. In the mid eighties we began working for agencies instead and they acted as competition for hospital nurses for the first time. My wages went up 400% in the first year before stabilizing again.

Later I was involved in a court case where we, as independent contractors, had to prove nursing was an independent profession and we met the standard to be independent contractors. The legal issues are technical and not worth boring people with here, but essentially you could mow lawns and be an independent contractor but the Department of Labor and Industry in this state wasn't sure nursing qualified as an independent profession. The ignorant and very chauvinistic attitude was the staffing agency that sent me to a hospital to work somehow supervised my work. I, with a master's degree and certification in intensive care, supposedly had to be supervised by a high school educated manager in a staffing office. Why was that? It was because of the ignorant stereotypes people had of the nursing profession.

In the 1990s for the first time OSHA addressed infectious disease hazards on the job. A hazard that had affected mostly female workers had simply been left out when the worker safety act was passed and wasn't addressed for the next 15 years. The risk of contracting a fatal infection from a needle stick was dealt with by telling nurses to be more careful. If a worker was injured by a power saw, the law mandated a safety device be used with the equipment like a blade guard. Now we have mandated needle safety devices.

To come about, these changes took feminists making the public and ourselves aware of the discrimination. If you don't expect your profession to be covered by worker safety law you don't know there is a reason to speak up. If no one points out to you that all those chefs in all those kids books are men, you may not notice the effect it has on beliefs about women and women's roles and professions.

 

[KingMerv00]

Gender and racial oppression are and were very different things. Rich and powerful white men did not voluntarily transfer resources to poor black men. They did, however, ensure that their wives and daughters shared in their power and privilege. That is not to say that women were not oppressed - just that their oppression was of a completely different kind to race or class oppression. Slaves of the rich and powerful lived lives much like other slaves. Wives and daughters of the rich and powerful were safer, better fed and better housed, lived longer and had privilege not accorded to slaves, or indeed, poor white people.

That is not to say that women, in general, were not subordinated to men. It does mean that while any slave was inferior in status to any white man, and a lower class poor person would have to defer to someone richer, a rich white woman would certainly not be subordinate to a poor white man, or to a black slave. Her status, while derived from her husband, would still be very real.

I absolutely agree. Racial and gender discrimination are very different in type and degree. That being said, racial discrimination was just an analogy and I think you overestimate how much status transfer there really is. Sure women were "taken care of" by their husbands but the idea of her obtaining independent wealth was absurd at the time. You were lashed to you husband whether he floated or sank.

The error is not in saying that men hold the majority of positions of power. It's in considering men as a class entire of itself, separate from women, intent on holding power as a class.

I've already said that most men don't "intend" to hold power away from women. But neverthless, they hold it and women do not. The question is how to fix that. They may or may transfer some of that status to their loved ones but the fact remains that women don't have primary control and in most cases must be content with trickle down benefits.

Poor, low status men do not have the power to transform society. They cannot make life more free for Hilary Clinton and Oprah. They do not exercise influence on powerful men by simply being of the same gender. The rich and powerful are far more likely to care about the well being of women close to them than for male strangers.

Agree, but the fact that there are other inequalities in the world don't negate anything I've said.

 

[GreyArea]

I was thinking that a fundamental problem with feminism for me is that they tend to treat "society" as controlled by white men in power.

Do you think that description is simply inaccurate, or is it too limiting in who it describes as the dominators? What is your understanding of how power works in our society? (And, I'm assuming that you are from the U.S., but maybe I shouldn't.)

They seem to ignore Cultural Hegemony as something that is controlled by everyone in society.

I'm unfamiliar with this idea. What do you mean by "Cultural Hegemony"? Is that from Gramsci?

One of the reasons I think Kooky Feminists started wigging out is because they seemed to think that all women wanted to be "Free" of some of the more mundane aspects of female life. Like cooking cleaning child rearing.

Do you have any authors in mind who are good examples of this attitude?

 

[truethat]

I absolutely agree. Racial and gender discrimination are very different in type and degree. That being said, I think you overestimate how much status transfer there really is. Sure women were "taken care of" by their husbands but the idea of her obtaining independent wealth was absurd at the time. You lashed to you husband whether he floated or sank.




I've already said that most men don't "intend" to hold power away from women. But neverthless, they hold it. They may or may transfer some of that status to their loved ones but the fact remains that women don't have primary control and that in most cases they must be content with trickle down benefits.

This is a total lie. This comes from pushing an agenda. What "men" hold power over women? It's just a blanket statement thrown out to justify some agenda. The agenda is that women need society to push more for their rights and equality.

I see for example that most men in society are automatically expected to get a job, pay the bills pay for everything. Divorced men are expected to pay maintenance on wives that don't work. Men are expected to pay maintenance on unwanted children because women don't want to have an abortion. There's a total economic set up in society that creates the hegemony that a man's job is to work.

So because they are expected to work, they often have more money. Then this is turned against them since we live in a capitalistic society. But many men I know have no time for personal development and interests and desires because they are working two jobs trying to pay for everything.

I actually feel a bit sorry for the pressures put on men, mostly because they are completely ignored in society.

 

[KingMerv00]

I think this is it in a nutshell.

Then my response is the same:

Agree, but the fact that there are other inequalities in the world don't negate anything I've said.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

...

I think you are making my point for me. You think I'm out to trick and manipulate you but nothing but the label "feminism" says I am. You are judging me without actually addressing my views.

The backlash against women who made demands for change was to frame the movement, including the label, feminist, as a very negative extremist movement. It has such a negative connotation, falsely deserved but nonetheless embedded, that I rarely call myself a feminist despite having a strong conviction for increasing women's rights.

 

[GreyArea]

Let's establish what you mean by radical.

As I understand it, liberal feminists want to take away barriers that prevent women from accessing and benefiting from existing social structures and institutions, without greatly changing or replacing those institutions. Think of voting rights, being elected to government office, workplace protections, fighting glass ceilings, etcetera.

Radical feminists, as I understand it, want to replace the institutions with ones that are not based on domination. They see this as more-completely accomplishing the goal of freeing women (as well as everyone else). They also seem to be more open about talking about "patriarchy", as something that lives beyond specific laws or individual actions, than the liberal feminists do, but I could be wrong about that.

According to this essay of definitions, radical feminism was short-lived, which doesn't seem accurate to me. But the article also describes some of the numerous kinds of feminism, not just liberals and radicals, so I recommend it anyway.

 

[A'isha]

This is a total lie. This comes from pushing an agenda. What "men" hold power over women? It's just a blanket statement thrown out to justify some agenda. The agenda is that women need society to push more for their rights and equality.

I see for example that most men in society are automatically expected to get a job, pay the bills pay for everything. Divorced men are expected to pay maintenance on wives that don't work. Men are expected to pay maintenance on unwanted children because women don't want to have an abortion. There's a total economic set up in society that creates the hegemony that a man's job is to work.

So because they are expected to work, they often have more money. Then this is turned against them since we live in a capitalistic society. But many men I know have no time for personal development and interests and desires because they are working two jobs trying to pay for everything.

I actually feel a bit sorry for the pressures put on men, mostly because they are completely ignored in society.

So why isn't there a social movement of men on the same scale as feminism, demanding that more women enter the workforce and more men get to stay at home and be housekeepers and child caretakers?

 

[KingMerv00]

This is a total lie. This comes from pushing an agenda. What "men" hold power over women? It's just a blanket statement thrown out to justify some agenda. The agenda is that women need society to push more for their rights and equality.

You keep using "agenda" as a slur. Whatever.

I've already said "what men". Government, business, and the media is almost exclusively controlled by men. I don't think men get together and plot how to suppress women. Women can and do suffer harm because people abuse their power but the bigger issue at hand is that women don't have power to begin with. Even if we lived in a world where a primarily male government treated women in an perfectly fair manner, it would still be unfair because not having control is harm in and of itself.

I see for example that most men in society are automatically expected to get a job, pay the bills pay for everything. Divorced men are expected to pay maintenance on wives that don't work. There's a total economic set up in society that creates the hegemony that a man's job is to work.

So because they are expected to work, they often have more money. Then this is turned against them since we live in a capitalistic society. But many men I know have no time for personal development and interests and desires because they are working two jobs trying to pay for everything.

I actually feel a bit sorry for the pressures put on men, mostly because they are completely ignored in society.

This is where I don't think you understand my position because we already agree. Read the OP. When I say I want to remove gender roles, I mean I want to rectify that kind of discrimination as well.

 

[truethat]

You keep using "agenda" as a slur. Whatever.

I've already said "what men". Government, business, and the media is almost exclusively controlled by men. I don't think men get together and plot how to suppress women. Women can and do suffer harm because people abuse their power but the bigger is at hand is that women don't have power to begin with. Even if we lived in a perfectly world where a primarily male government were treated women fairly, it would still be unfair because not having control is harm in and of itself.



This is where I don't think you understand my position because we already agree. Read the OP. When I say I want to remove gender roles, I mean I want to rectify that kind of discrimination as well.

King Merv. You want to know why people don't like feminists. Because they did just exactly what you did. You made a statement and didn't back it up at all. This is a skeptics site. We're going to ask you to back up your statements.

When confronted your response is akin to "Oh come on! You all know it's true!"

Being "employed" doesn't mean "employees" control things. Ok and so who are these "men" that control everything.

 

[GreyArea]

KingMerv00,

Are you familiar with the author bell hooks? Several years ago, I read her book Feminism Is for Everybody. I recommend it; you might like it.

There was a review of this small volume on its tenth anniversary here at Ms. Magazine's blog.