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Why shouldn't I hate feminists?

slingblade said:
No.

What the hell, man. Seriously.
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Andrea Dworkin was an ideologically-driven total idiot.
Hence my comments.

If she had ever gotten into a position of political power she would have been dangerous.

Some quotes of hers:

Childbearing is glorified in part because women die from it.

Men are distinguished from women by their commitment to do violence rather than to be victimized by it.

Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but possession of, or ownership.

Only when manhood is dead - and it will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it - only then will we know what it is to be free.

Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine.

The common erotic project of destroying women makes it possible for men to unite into a brotherhood; this project is the only firm and trustworthy groundwork for cooperation among males and all male bonding is based on it.

Men know everything - all of them - all the time - no matter how stupid or inexperienced or arrogant or ignorant they are.

All personal, psychological, social, and institutionalized domination on this earth can be traced back to its source: the phallic identities of men.

I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig.

Under patriarchy, no woman is safe to live her life, or to love, or to mother children. Under patriarchy, every woman is a victim, past, present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman's daughter is a victim, past, present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman

By the time we are women, fear is as familiar to us as air; it is our element. We live in it, we inhale it, we exhale it, and most of the time we do not even notice it. Instead of "I am afraid," we say, "I don't want to," or "I don't know how," or "I can't."

There are many more crazy, hateful quotes of hers to be found out there.
It's a shame anyone paid any attention to her, because basic feminism (i.e. equality of rights to power and opportunity) is entirely correct.
 
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Lamuella said:
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"?
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That sounds about right to me.
 
One of the most valuable insights I gained in life was when I realized that jerks exist in all groups of people, even among groups I otherwise admire deeply. Why should it be different among feminists? In fact, I've met (and read articles by) many people who identify themselves as feminists, and only a rare few have proven to be jerks. Of course this can degenerate into a "True Scotswoman" argument, but I think very few feminists hold to the more radical quotes cited here. I've seen a 100 time more misogynistic comments in commentary sections on web blogs and new articles than I've ever seen anti-male comments.
 
Using Andrea Dworkin (or any individual) to define a group or philosophy isn't necessarily a good idea.
 
ZirconBlue said:
Personally, I prefer to hate individuals rather than nebulous groups.
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Hate tha playas, not the game?

bookitty said:
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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:thumbsup: Thank you for posting this amist the sturm and drang the OP apparently created.

bruto said:
I wonder where the strange creature that is this thread's subject exists, now that Andrea Dworkin is dead.
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Apparently they exist at RadFemHub. Did you happen to see some of the quotes from there?
 
Captain Obvious said:
Andrea Dworkin was an ideologically-driven total idiot.
Hence my comments.

If she had ever gotten into a position of political power she would have been dangerous.

Some quotes of hers:

[... snip ...]

Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but possession of, or ownership.

[... snip ...]

There are many more crazy, hateful quotes of hers to be found out there.
It's a shame anyone paid any attention to her, because basic feminism (i.e. equality of rights to power and opportunity) is entirely correct.
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While she was no doubt a deranged lunatic on the whole, I left that in because it helps if you put it into context of WHEN some women were getting ideas like that, and in what CONTEXT.

Traditionally marriage HAS meant getting absolute rights to bone the wife, whether she wants it or not. And I don't mean "traditional" as in "half a millennium ago", but in some places in the USA it continued to be ok until 1993, and in most of Europe even later. With the exception of Scandinavians who were actually among the first.

Marriage WAS a blank check to rape the wife whenever you want. We're talking millennia of it meaning literally what she says there.

Furthermore, we're talking a world-wide culture which was just coming out of the idea that the woman is some kind of prize to be given to some guy, whether she wants it or not.

We're talking even children's stories where the hero gets the girl as a prize, in some even though she explicitly doesn't want to. E.g., in the Grimm Brothers' "Six Soldiers Of Fortune", it's as explicit as it can get that the girl doesn't want the guy at all, and is doing everything from compete in some contest to get out of that, to try to murder the guy and his friends, but, damn, the guy was that good, and she gets given to him. With the implication that that's it, now she'll have to spread the legs.

Or a version of the Sleeping Beauty where the girl's "good" fortune is that a prince rapes her in her sleep and gets her pregnant.

Or kidnapping the heroine and threatening her life to make her accept marriage -- again, with the implication that she'll be raped ever after -- was even used for comedy effect. That was the actual threat there, not just the ring.

That's the kind of stories that we were even telling children, had cartoons for children about it, etc.

Really, to put it into context, imagine that there was some fictive group, let's call them Elbonian immigrants, for whom it was OK and part of their culture to mug a non-Elbonian guy now and then. In fact, for whom they could be given the right to mug someone for some service to the community, or even just by agreement with someone else. And grew up with stories where the great reward or rite of passage is to get to mug someone, and a religion where some condition makes it ok to mug a non-Elbonian. And where any case involving an Elbonian can only be tried by a jury made only of Elbonians, so good luck getting any redress.

I think we'd be marching on them with torches and pitchforks, and want every single one of them out of the country NOW.

Well, that's largely the kind of thing that got a FEW of the second wave feminists so pissed off. Sure, it doesn't make some stuff right, but I can also see where they're coming from and what gave them those ideas.

And while some of those ideas ain't right, someone had to scream bloody murder for that culture to change. Sure, some went overboard, some even way overboard, but I think it's inevitable when the situation is THAT bad.
 
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Naive1000 said:
So tell me, why should I support feminism at all, and where are the feminists willing to stand against radicals like these?
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Oppressed people often have a well-developed sense of graveyard humor.

Andrea Dworkin was great. She was one of the first people to speak out on the prevalence and institutionalization of incest, child sexual abuse, male violence and rape. RIP.
 
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HansMustermann said:
So, yes, it's easy to look back and try to paint a bunch of feminists as loons for saying it was that bad.
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Fortunately, that isn't at all what I'm saying. I don't think that they were loons for saying that things were bad.

I find them loons for taking a turn that was, to my way of thinking, profoundly anti-feminist and even misogynistic. That period turned feminism back, and it may even have cost us the ERA. I could list a bunch of reasons for why I think this way, but there's not much of a point if there's a presumption that the only possible reason to say this is denial of the problem.

Rather the opposite. The main reason that I bothered studying feminism was because I recognize the existence of sexism and am strongly in favor of making it go away. So when, as happened in the 1980s, a bunch of people co-opt what was formerly (and, I think is now) progressive and make it regressive.
 
epepke said:
Fortunately, that isn't at all what I'm saying. I don't think that they were loons for saying that things were bad.

I find them loons for taking a turn that was, to my way of thinking, profoundly anti-feminist and even misogynistic. That period turned feminism back, and it may even have cost us the ERA. I could list a bunch of reasons for why I think this way, but there's not much of a point if there's a presumption that the only possible reason to say this is denial of the problem.

Rather the opposite. The main reason that I bothered studying feminism was because I recognize the existence of sexism and am strongly in favor of making it go away. So when, as happened in the 1980s, a bunch of people co-opt what was formerly (and, I think is now) progressive and make it regressive.
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Second wave feminism was an exploration of the philosophy. Just like philosophy majors sitting around trying to out-Socrates each other, it got a little weird there for a while. Once you get to the far edges of any idea, you're just waiting to see the bats. (apologies to Hunter S. Thompson)

Finding the edges are how human beings form an idea of the middle. That doesn't mean that the extremes are completely wrong, just that they're extreme and have very little real-world application.
 
epepke said:
Fortunately, that isn't at all what I'm saying. I don't think that they were loons for saying that things were bad.

I find them loons for taking a turn that was, to my way of thinking, profoundly anti-feminist and even misogynistic. That period turned feminism back, and it may even have cost us the ERA. I could list a bunch of reasons for why I think this way, but there's not much of a point if there's a presumption that the only possible reason to say this is denial of the problem.

Rather the opposite. The main reason that I bothered studying feminism was because I recognize the existence of sexism and am strongly in favor of making it go away. So when, as happened in the 1980s, a bunch of people co-opt what was formerly (and, I think is now) progressive and make it regressive.
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To some extent I can see where you're coming from, but also where they're coming from. Not that it's right or progressive, mind you. Just that I can understand where they're coming from.

Let's put it like this, if group X had oppressed group Y for millennia, when it blows over, you expect some overreation and some wanting to see heads on pikes. You don't expect the slaves to go "can I have another 10 ft of chain on my leash please? I promise I'll still be good. Or maybe only 5 ft if 10 ft is too much to ask? kthxbye." You expect to see a wall of pitchforks and torches and some wanting to see blood.

Or at least that's how it worked with guys, anyway. If someone annoyed us, we've nailed them to pieces of wood or threw molotov cocktails.

To put things in perspective, the anti-communist uprising in Hungary saw people lynched or have their communist papers shoved down their throat (quite literally) for even cooperating with those who restricted economic freedoms... actually much less drastically than what women had for most of recorded history at that point.

Heck, in Albania in the '90s people assaulted military bases just for losing their money in a hare-brained Ponzi scheme.

Mind you, I'm not saying it's right to want some heads to roll, and I don't actually want them to start killing men or anything. I'm just saying that that's what we humans usually do when centuries of oppression blow over. We start lining people against a wall, even if only for catharsis sake. We don't want to be balanced and progressive. That the worst that feminism has ever produced is just some women only writing some books fantasizing about a world without the ones who had given themselves rights over the women, heh, I really admire that kind of restraint. Kudos and all that. Is all I'm saying ;)
 
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slingblade said:
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.
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Note that there is no corresponding term for men, e.g. "Masculinist", other than male chauvinist, and were there one it would have about the same disdain as male chauvinist. In a country where collective punishment is law of the land, with racial and gender preferences, it became acceptable to have militant man-haters pushing their agenda with not even much of a pretense of equality as their objective.
 
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