Why shouldn't I hate feminists?

[ZirconBlue]

Personally, I prefer to hate individuals rather than nebulous groups.

 

[slingblade]

Btw, protip: women are normal people, and as people you will also find idiots and ******** among this group. Shocking, I know.

Who gave you permission to out me???

 

[Lamuella]

HA! I find it hilarious that a person can come on here and say I believe in god or ghosts or a thousand other things and people will break their backs trying to show how their premise is ridiculous, but not one person will try to show how feminism isn't misandrous.

You got the exact same reception that everyone gets when they come along and say "This is what I firmly believe, prove me wrong".

So, I guess that I'll have to prove that feminists are.

You mean... having to prove your own point?

THE HORROR.

@Lamuella: What's the purpose of your comment? If you have better things to do why even comment except to be condescending? Way to take the high road .

The purpose of my comment was to point out what a dreadful idea this thread was. Coming in with a single source and claiming it was representative of all feminists is as silly as coming in with a single source and claiming it is representative of all atheists, or christians, or republicans, or any other group

 

[Flo]

[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.

Let me start by saying that if you've addressed all the "feminists" you met during your college years the way you've started this thread, I'm not really surprised that you had bad experiences. I for one would have been severely tempted to crank my Wicked-Humor-O-Matic^TM to 11

As many here have already told you, equating some extremists to the whole of a movement isn't the most productive way to come up with a meaningful conversation.

That said, I've, unfortunately, met a few female enraged nutjobs of the kind you've quoted, and the two main reasons "mainstream" feminist don't spend more time denouncing them is that

1) they're so much on the fringe that they don't count at all in the grand scheme of things, or "all bark and no bite",
2) there's only 24 hours in a day, and it's better to devote them to try to actually achieve something, in opposition to wasting time deploring the existence of whackjobs.

 

[Foolmewunz]

I don't get it. (I know I seem to be saying that a lot around here of late, but I believe the comment as I use it is once again adequate to the situation.)

Just what would you expect to find at RadFemHub? Did you not get that Rad is for Radical and Fem is for Feminist. Do you not know what Radical Feminism is all about?

Would you be surprised that Stormfront has some vile anti-black and anti-Jewish commentary? Would that be justification to hate all white people? No, it'd be justification to hate the folks at Stormfront. If you hate the comments (or the commenters) on that blog, then identify who it is you're hating.... Radical Feminists/Feminist Separatists.

So, please don't actually bother going out and finding some more quotes to show that even more Radical Feminists have some batcrap crazy notions. Not for my sake, at least. I'm aware of that fact. Find me a quote from every feminist ON THE EARTH showing that each of them has hate-inspiring ideas, and I'll cede your right to hate feminists.

 

[epepke]

I don't usually address "should" issues, but some time ago I did a rather extensive study of feminism lasting several years, so I find it hard to stop. Assume everything has an IMO in it.

Basically, you should not hate modern feminists for exactly the same reasons that you should have hated "second wave" feminists back then.

There was a time, centered around the 1980s with a couple of tails about halfway into adjacent decades, when lunatic gender/"radical" feminists dominated the scene. Even worse, other feminists worked hard to facilitate/run interference for them. The trend was nearly universal. The very few feminists who spoke out in favor of equality (including Betty Friedan) were widely ridiculed, mocked, and in some instances the subject of bomb threats. During that time, there really was nothing sensible to do except hate them.

However, "second-wave" feminism self-destructed, pretty much, around the middle 1990s. I'm going to put the date during 1997, because that's about when the research on domestic violence became compelling to most researchers, and the reflexive feminist-inspired hostility dropped away. There followed a few years where hardly anybody would adopt the label of "feminist." Gradually, a new feminism has been growing, largely due to a younger generation who, I think, perceived how badly gender feminism had harmed their mothers' generation.

This is not simply my perception. There was a book that kept me sane during the inane gender hostility of the 1990s. It was published under the title (not the author's real choice) of The Myth of the Monstrous Male and Other Feminist Fables by John Gordon in 1983. I had not read it in many years, but I found a copy for 1 cent (plus shipping). Though snarky and academically stilted, I found this book right on (as we used to say) about the times. When I read it now, it seems mostly irrelevant.

So I wrote the author. He agrees completely. He is still teaching the same undergraduate "Battle of the Sexes" class that he was 30 years ago, and he has noticed a dramatic return to sanity and increase of a sense of humor in his students.

So, I think that you should like modern feminists because they don't seem to be moving in that direction for the most part, at least not yet. OK, so they are not perfect. You can still find gender insanity, especially in the warrens of academia. The most alarming development recently has been the saga of Rebecca Watson and the Skepchicks, which is probably why I reacted so strongly. I remember how badly this hurt people back when Watson was, to quote Laurie Anderson, a candy bar in her father's back pocket.

Still, you should be encouraging toward modern feminists, if nothing else because the alternatives, proved by history, are much worse.

There are things to be cautious about.

You should be cautious about statements like you have seen in this thread. That what you speak of isn't feminism, or that it's a few bad apples, or some extremists, or whatever. The reason is that this is precisely the mechanism by which the lunatics came to exert so much influence and became so powerful. There was a kind of denial that these people were actually saying and doing what they were. Feminists refused to believe that women could be like that. They just assumed that because they had defined feminism as being in favor of equality, that this couldn't be happening. Yet it was, and they helped.

As a result of what functionally worked as denial, these lunatics had a clear path cut for them. I don't want this to happen again. Do you?

There is a chance that it might not happen again. Gender feminists relied on a strong streak of chivalry. I think there is less chivalry in the culture, probably resulting perversely from the actions of gender feminists, and that's a good thing. Still, it's a near thing. I haven't found a single wave of feminism (there have been WAY more than three, which is why I put "second wave" in quotes) that wasn't scuttled by conflicts between women in favor of gender equality and women who were against it but got feminist cred anyway.

As the guy said, those who do not understand history are doomed to run through the sucker again and again until they get it right.

 

[Travis]

Naive1000, I have yet to see you explicitly denounce the following movements and ideas:

• White nationalism
• Slavery
• Black nationalism
• Islamic Jihad
• Foot binding
• Ritual child sacrifice
• Snuff films
• Witch burning
• Stalinism
• The Great Leap Forward
• Baby seal clubbing
• Dog fighting
• Human medical experimentation

I thereby conclude you endorse all those ideas. And I will now denounce you as a genocidal monster.

 

[Travis]

Note: the preceding was a parody of the logic underlying this thread. Not an actual accusation of genocide.

 

[Delvo]

Seriously? All of the (people you've understood to be) feminists have advocated killing men? I find that hard to believe... It would also mean that you've never encountered a moderate, mainstream feminist.

Or, that he's not met one who could be easily identified as that.

since when did it become the standard that your movement must speak out against every individual bad thing done or said by someone claiming to be a member of that movement?

Since the movement in question became difficult or impossible for outsiders to define, and thus difficult or impossible for outsiders to identify the outliers/exceptions from.

To reuse an example from earlier in the thread, there are bloodthirsty mass-murder-obsessed people who call themselves Muslims and say that they have that attitude because that's what Islam is, and there are peaceful generous humanitarians who call themselves Muslims and say that they have that attitude because that's what Islam is. They can't both be telling it like it is. Judging whether Islam is a peaceful religion or a religion of cruelty and violence requires figuring out which group of people who claim to be Muslims are the REAL Muslims.

In the case of Islam, you can read the founding documents and see the blood dripping from them, and see that Mohammed was a warlord who used the religion as a tool of war and was always coming up with creative ways to torture and kill people which he repeatedly explicitly orders to be carried out against any and all non-Muslims. So the friendly Pakistani-American doctor who's involved in what he calls a "(Muslim) community center" just a few blocks from my home and expressed happiness about his daughter's recent marriage which happens to have been with a white non-Muslim guy, and doesn't want to torture me to death, isn't following what Mohammed taught, so he isn't living by Islam and isn't actually a Muslim. But this doesn't change the fact that he says he is, so although it settles the "question" for me, it doesn't end it.

However, feminism doesn't have that kind of resource for making such a determination. Some basis for determining what feminism really is without reference to founding documents which don't exist is required. If you define it as merely wanting women to be treated as well as men are, then practically everybody of both sexes is a feminist, whether or not they ever call themselves that or even think about the issue at all. If you define it by the actions and words of those who make a point of getting their feminism noticed and pushing an agenda of some sort with it, then the conclusion that it's really all about man-hating emerges from those people's own writings. Take, for example, Rebecca Watson's blog, which I found a link to in some thread around here about her elevator encounter. She doesn't advocate murdering all "males", but what she does say on the subject is routinely stuffed to overflowing with her obvious disdain for us, and in that, she is typical of people who frequently and loudly identify themselves as "feminists".

You mean... having to prove your own point?

THE HORROR.

Well, he didn't start the thread to advocate a point. He started it to ask for a differing one and listen. The fact that nobody has provided any actual support for an alternative (such as not merely claiming that most feminists aren't like he's described but showing some actual evidence or at least a that they're different from that) is... conspicuous.

 

[Lamuella]

yawn, a boring rant about evil muslims and elevatorgate.

*plonk*

 

[HansMustermann]

@HansMustermann: You claim I'm making the association fallacy but provide no proof.

Your own support for associating feminists with misandry in this thread has boiled down to

A) asserting the existence of some personal anecdotes that you won't even tell, and

B) some cherry picked quotes from a few posters in a random thread, (who are not authorities on the matter, and may or may not be feminists, and may or not be representative at all of feminism as a whole.)

That's a literal case of proof-by-example, a.k.a., Association Fallacy. You extrapolate from attributes of one or more examples, to a whole group, without showing anything more for it than the association to those people you quoted from.

Otherwise there is nothing to "prove" there. It fits the very definition of that fallacy.

I say that all feminists are misandrous and the label of radical is just in their specific philosophy on how they wish to deal with it. [Side Note: Many women post under male names to keep the creeps away. I'm pretty sure the poster self identified as female somewhere on the site. Also, they filter all posts: unless you claim to be a feminist or are a known feminist poster your message doesn't get through.]

... to which now you just add more unsupported postulates, plus another helping of not making much logical sense.

MOST IMPORTANTLY, if you claim that they filter the content of the posts to fit a certain view or philosophy, then it's by definition a Biased Sample. You're not seeing a random sample of posters or even feminists, you're seeing a sample already filtered to fit the views of whoever does that filtering. OF COURSE it will then show that particular bias.

You can't use that sample as representative of all feminists, if it's not in fact a random sample.

It's like looking in a moderated OpenBSD newsgroup and concluding that everyone who's into Open Source is specifically into OpenBSD, and nobody there ever even mentions Linux (much less Windows or MacOS) in any positive way, and nobody ever contradicts Theo de Raadt. Well, of course. That's what filtering does to it. It just shows what biases are behind the moderation, not a common denominator of a larger group.

Or like looking through the JREF forums after moderation and concluding that atheists almost never cuss. In reality it just reflects what things the moderators here deem acceptable and what not.

To show a bias in a larger group, and doubly so for a common trait of everyone, even statistically, you'll need a random sample, not something already filtered to be the exact bogeyman that serves your purposes.

But also:

- There is no such thing as filtering by being a feminist, any more than we can filter by who's a true atheist here, or anything. Short of being a mind-reader, how would that even work? Especially on a blog? How would you verify that those claiming to be feminists actually are feminists? What's to keep a random troll from just claiming to be one, if that's the deciding factor? Any real filtering ever will actually be based on content not on what groups does someone claim to belong to. People will allow messages whose actual text conforms to what they deem acceptable, not filter who the poster is.

- not knowing means not knowing, and it goes both ways. While some women use male names on the Internet, also some men use female names. And some have even been self confessed in The Reveal to having taken misandry up to eleven to make their persona more convincingly feminine. Ultimately if you don't know who someone is or what they are, it means just that: you don't know. You can't just assume they're exactly whatever confirms your own stereotypes.

- just being somehow sure does not equal having evidence. I can be sure that you're a yellow anthro cat based on your avatar, but that doesn't make it true.

- it's a red herring anyway. What I asked was not whether the Dave there is really a man or a woman, but how do you know he/she/it is a feminist (much less representative of feminism), especially when you're so eager to discount everyone here as just liking to argue and playing Devil's advocate? How do you know he/she/it is representative for feminism, as opposed to just some crazy guy/gal/whatever off his/her/its meds, or some random troll, or an unsuccessful Poe, or a sockpuppet, or a strawman sockpuppet, or whatever?

Because what it looks to me like, is classic selective confirmation in action: you're all too eager to ascribe belonging to a group, if they fit your negative stereotype of it, but all too eager to exclude someone from it, if they don't.

In logic terms, you can't confirm an "X=>Y" relationship, by just looking for whoever does/is/shows Y and just somehow "being sure" that whoever does, is an X, and whoever doesn't is a non-X. That turns it into circular logic, rather than support.

- And especially the strawman sockpuppet category should not be underestimated. A lot of people post ridiculous versions of opposing viewpoints under a pseudonym, just because they're something easy to demolish without looking like a blatant strawman. I wouldn't be surprised if half the answers in that kind of topic comes exactly from people trying to have an even more over-the-top quote to tar and feather those darned feminists with, even if they have to post it themselves.

 

[Dave Rogers]

Note: the preceding was a parody of the logic underlying this thread. Not an actual accusation of genocide.

So you're not a scientologist, then?

Dave

 

[Humes fork]

Let's see here... one feminist has proposed a specific male tax. Another has authored the SCUM Manifesto. Yet another (a darling of PZ Myers) thinks that the presumption of innocence shouldn't apply in sexual assault cases. There are strong feminist voices in favor of affirmative action for corporate boards.

I'm very strongly in favor of equality between the genders. But feminist, no, I wouldn't call myself a feminist under gun threat.

 

[Captain Obvious]

If you hate feminists they'll be even less likely to wash the damned dishes.

 

[Travis]

Shoot I went to an actual Hippy college and never encountered a feminist there that would support those ideas.

 

[Lamuella]

Let's see here... one feminist has proposed a specific male tax. Another has authored the SCUM Manifesto. Yet another (a darling of PZ Myers) thinks that the presumption of innocence shouldn't apply in sexual assault cases. There are strong feminist voices in favor of affirmative action for corporate boards.

I'm very strongly in favor of equality between the genders. But feminist, no, I wouldn't call myself a feminist under gun threat.

oh come on. You're using Valerie Solanas as the standard to judge all feminists? More to the point, you're using something Valerie Solanas wrote 44 years ago as the standard to judge all feminists?

 

[MarkCorrigan]

 

[slingblade]

If you hate feminists they'll be even less likely to wash the damned dishes.

Yeah, but we'll probably still make you a sammich.

 

[HansMustermann]

@epepke:
While it's easy to demonize second wave feminism, and God knows some people made it their life mission to cherrypick and extrapolate to that end, let's not forget that:

- the Equal Rights Amendment STILL hasn't been ratified by all states

- it wasn't until 1976 that ANY state had any marital rape laws, with the last state removing a spousal exception as late as 1993. (Note that I'm not pointing fingers at the USA only. Other places were even slower.) Even more egregiously, in some states the exemption even extended to separated or divorced couples. So basically if you once consented, you could be raped for the rest of your life, even if you had divorced the guy already. Still, as late as 1999 a bunch of states still considered it a much lesser offense.

- it wasn't until 1975 and Taylor v. Louisiana that made it illegal to exclude women from juries. And if it's not clear why that's a problem, you only have to look at Hoyt v. Florida which made it officially ok, for what the underlying problem was: trying women defendants by all male juries.

- it wasn't until also 1975 that the precedent even existed that a woman can use force in self-defense against a rapist

- rape really used to be a lot more prevalent. It's easy to make it sound like those darned feminists were exaggerating about rape, but actual data shows that the reported incidence rate which is now 0.4 per 1000 people, was as high as 2.4 in 1980, i.e., some 6 times higher. The chances of a woman being raped over her lifetime, considering under-reporting rape and the fact that NOW we have about 1 in 6 who have been raped, back then were approaching near certainty for crying out loud. Can you see why a lot of them saw their whole sex as a victim pool? Can you understand that when the likes of Susan Brownmiller were going on about the ubiquity of rape, it actually WAS nearly ubiquitous?

On less rape-y topics,

- it wasn't until 1970 that it was ruled illegal to give different job titles to men than to women, as a way to bypass the legal requirements for equal pay

- it wasn't until 1973 that anyone ruled it illegal to just specify you want only a certain gender in "help wanted" ads

- it wasn't until 1973 that there were ANY shelters for battered spouses. Leaving many women with the only choice to either go back to the abuser or go sleep under a bridge, basically

Etc.

So, yes, it's easy to look back and try to paint a bunch of feminists as loons for saying it was that bad. But actually it really WAS very bad. Whether one author or another overstated it, it's inevitable to some extent, but it really used to be very bad to be a woman nevertheless.

 

[BenBurch]

...
@BenBurch: Never heard of Veronica Vera, I look into it.

...

When you do, tell her I said "Hi!"