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Why shouldn't I hate feminists?

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

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...
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Since I already pre-emptively mocked this inane view in this thread, I don't need to do it again now. That's foresight.
 
Hi, I'm a feminist and a secular humanist. They are, in my mind, intertwined and in some cases interchangeable. I'm also a huge supporter of father's rights in areas of child custody, paternal leave, child care and abolishing gender roles that discourage fathers from bonding with their children. This is also falls under the heading of feminist/humanist.

I could pick some other label as so many have done - egalitarian, humanist, not-that-kind-of-feminist, etc - but many of my goals are specific to women and I support both of the traditional definitions:

1: the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes

2 : organized activity on behalf of women's rights and interests

(Please note that the first is philosophy and the second is activism)

Anyone who labels themselves part of a large group will be associated with the extremists in that group, even if the extremists are acting against the wishes of the group or harming the goals of that group. Muslims will be dubbed terrorists, Christians will be friends of the Westboro Baptist Church, Tea Partiers can't spell, and so forth.

I don't support the extremists and when it comes up, I denounce that which I find offensive. In an age of over-abundant information, that will never be enough. There will always be some weirdo I haven't gotten to yet. This is a fact of life which I dislike. However, it is not important enough to give up either my philosophy or my activism in order to fully disassociate myself.
 
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epepke said:
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.
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You might as well be talking about Canon Law. The fact that academics and theoreticians write books doesn't mean anybody has to read them. As far as I know, there was never a time in feminist history when "lunatics came to exert so much influence and became so powerful." In the 1980s and 1990s I had better things to do than to keep up with the current academic "scene."

Feminists are not followers organized under an umbrella organization whose leaders tell them how to think. The whole concept of liberation implies the freedom to educate oneself and think for oneself, using all available resources, not just esoteric ones. I doubt that most people who identify as feminists would even know what you're talking about.
 
Robrob said:
:rolleyes:
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Yeah, he musta deserved it, eh? No man is innocent, after all..when were the witch hunts? I wasn't there myself, but I still meet women who use them as an excuse to attack men.

Your next move, I think, is to challenge my masculinity.
 
jiggeryqua said:
Yeah, he musta deserved it, eh? No man is innocent, after all..when were the witch hunts? I wasn't there myself, but I still meet women who use them as an excuse to attack men.

Your next move, I think, is to challenge my masculinity.
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no, the next move is to point out that you're strawmanning and making up nonsense.
 
to add a post of a bit more substance, I'll just say that I was born to a feminist, married a feminist, and have many friends who self identify as feminists. Despite being moderately politically active on the left and moving in some fairly radically feminist circles, I've never encountered anyone in real life who held my being male against me.

Isn't it odd that the men who seem to encounter a lot of feminists who they think hate men, are the kind of men who aren't that fond of feminists to begin with? Could they be confusing "She really disliked men" with "she really disliked me"?
 
BenBurch said:
I have found that males who are unable to get laid at a formative age wind up in this particular misogynistic fantasy.
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A falsifying example: I was a "late bloomer" as the euphemism goes but I'm not a misogynist. I think you're right that sexual frustration leads some men to misogyny but it's not a simple cause/effect relationship.
 
In my experience, age of first sexual encounter isn't all that much to do with it, not enough to make any kind of a pattern, anyway.
 
Naive1000 said:
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 :).
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Here you go.
 
I wonder where the strange creature that is this thread's subject exists, now that Andrea Dworkin is dead. I have never met one. I have met many women who self identify as feminists, and as far as I can recall, what they meant was that they were particularly concerned with the rights and needs of women, and that they directed their social and political efforts toward that concern. Since women have been, and still are, discriminated against, denied certain advantages, and occasionally outright abused, it seems a reasonable area of concern. If that translates into a negative, I must confess I have not perceived it any more than I have perceived that UNICEF is an organization that hates adults or that the Ladies' Garment Worker's Union hates fishermen.

Why can you not favor something without hating something else?
 
I don't know the answers to most questions here, but as a woman, I will tell you a not so profound truth:

There really are women out there who will strive to make any man they can as miserable as hell, but couch it as feminism so they can better get away with it. I've no problem believing a young man could run into this and have it happen to the extent it starts to seem to him that all women are out to get him because he owns the Dreaded Fleshy Tube. They aren't the majority by any means, but they exist. And I pity the young man who runs into them, especially in pack mode.

Naive's an all right guy. I can't blame him if his perceptions have been skewed by past experience. It happens to most of us; pick a subject and draw blood.

Let him alone. Give him a chance to learn something without beating it into him.


Sorry, Naive! Mea culpa.
 
Naive1000, I know this thread became adversarial very quickly, as most any thread on this forum is want to do, but try not to take it personally. You're thinking and engaging, and obviously if you wanted to just remain hating feminists unchallenged you wouldn't have started this thread in the first place.

I too disagree with your assessment, although not completely. Most any group is less likely to criticize those members who are 'in group' than 'out group'. This tendency annoys me as well in feminism as I've seen it personally too often.

I too had issues with many feminist in college, although not because I was shy and an easy target. Indeed it was the opposite; I would speak out against poorly thought out or wrong assertions by feminists in class. We would argue, which to me most times just meant discussing with enthusiasm. Most times I would never get any 'backup' from the other feminists in class, male or female. They wouldn't denounce the people spouting off on how great the world was going to be when men were all gone. (Yes, they didn't say that this should be done, but that it was certain it would happen.) However, and this is a big point, there were a GREAT many times that after the other feminists had left, the others would come and agree with me, and even thank me for challenging the other people's view. These people were feminists as well, supporting my 'attack' of 'feminism'.

Although I'm a feminist technically, I have grown to dislike it's ironically sexist name. I understand your hatred of feminists groups, and although I disagree with it, I won't call it stupid. I will urge you to try to overcome that hatred which stems from the bad things that were directed at you. By hating them, you just alienate good people and give the feminazis (a fun term) a target to attack and proclaim, "See! This is why we are important!" Don't give them the satisfaction.
 
slingblade said:
I don't know the answers to most questions here, but as a woman, I will tell you a not so profound truth:

There really are women out there who will strive to make any man they can as miserable as hell, but couch it as feminism so they can better get away with it. I've no problem believing a young man could run into this and have it happen to the extent it starts to seem to him that all women are out to get him because he owns the Dreaded Fleshy Tube. They aren't the majority by any means, but they exist. And I pity the young man who runs into them, especially in pack mode.

Naive's an all right guy. I can't blame him if his perceptions have been skewed by past experience. It happens to most of us; pick a subject and draw blood.

Let him alone. Give him a chance to learn something without beating it into him.


Sorry, Naive! Mea culpa.
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We cross posted, but yeah, I agree. It's sad that people are so incredulous about women possibly being so negative. It happens and piling onto someone who was piled on before probably won't help!
 
To start off with I'm an egalitarian, so I do believe in equality before the rush of hate comes at me.
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This is only the first of many of your posts here exhibiting what seems to be the obvious reason why you were (or have imagined you were) treated this way. If over your lifetime women have constantly treated you in a certain way, you might want to consider what (or who) is the common denominator.
 
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