Aren't women ever tired of being portrayed as "poor victims" by intersectional feminism?

thereslcjg2000 · 2020-04-07T14:26:09+00:00

Plenty of them are. My mom always highly resented that victimhood mindset. I think there are plenty of other women who are tired of it too, though many are afraid to speak out in fear of being called gender traitors and internalized misogynists. In particular, my understanding is that a lot of working class women don’t like being told they need to feel personally ruined by feminist-emphasized microagressions.

RedditConsciousness · 2020-04-07T15:58:07+00:00

I'd presume that the loudest voices do not represent the majority and that the whole range of reactions exists from those who welcome the portrayal to those who despise it.

GaborFrame · 2020-04-07T14:29:51+00:00

[permanently deleted]

MaybeNotMaybeYes · 2020-04-07T17:13:02+00:00

Intersectionalism is a scourge in general. It's a contrived term for "pity-contest" and to be able to disqualify or belittle the suffering of others

2020-04-07T17:47:20+00:00

Intersectional feminism is rejected by the vast majority of women. It is embraced by a tranche of white middle class media men and women who use it to signal to each other that they are part of an upper caste, a sort of Brahmin identity. But even they don’t believe any of that shite. Also they feel they need to ‘lie the the other way’ to offset a backlash to ‘progress’. A small hard core of tattooed nose ring wearing, pink haired crusty types are true believers but nobody gives a damn what they think.

It’s upsetting to me personally as a glass half full, lefty do gooder because in essence this ideology is authoritarian and will over time may result in a roll back of some great things that have been accomplished in the last 50 years. I believe a Democrat emphasis on shaming white men to pander to these cultish freaks got Trump elected for instance.

Its still a gas that the NYT will unflinching publish stuff that sounds like it was written by Joseph Mengele.

dtyler86 · 2020-04-07T16:12:06+00:00

Funny, my sisters and mother and step mother all calmly declare they’ve never been raped, they don’t get cat called, men have been creepy and drunk, sure, but they feel they’re advantaged. They’re all pretty, stepmom was a big time model, so that factors in. Guess when you’re heavy, androgynous and angry the world doesn’t always work in your favor; not surprising. Fat, ugly angry incels experience the same “bad luck”, is this a surprise to anyone?

MaybeNotMaybeYes · 2020-04-07T15:49:18+00:00

Feeling like a victim can be a very nice feeling--likely tickless something in the primate brain: alongside it also comes some social goods too; which is at least half of why certain people claim oppression, even falsely. But I have no doubt a good deal find it infantilizing and even demoralizing too. It is also worth nothing that 'popular' among women means that, like, something like 1/10 identify as feminists.

ThatQueerWerewolf · 2020-04-07T18:25:34+00:00

I know quite a few people of both genders who have victim complexes and play the oppression olympics all day every day. Here's my take:

Some people like victomhood because it gives them an excuse when they fail, and and an extra pat on the back when they succeed. When you're a victim normal things are harder for you than for everyone else, so you're a superhero for just getting out of bed and living an ordinary life.

In many social circles these days, victomhood also gives you a license to talk over other people. I'm sure you all know what I'm talking about. The more oppression points you have, the more important your opinion is. They like th attention. They like the sympathy. They like being able to tell other people to shut up just because of their gender, race, or sexuality. In a way, there is power in victomhood.

I think ultimately life is just really hard, so people jump at the chance to claim that life is hardest for them and easy for everybody else because they want sympathy and acknowledgement that life is hard and they feel like acknowledging that everybody has it rough for different reasons takes attention away from them.

FakeLaundry · 2020-04-07T18:57:22+00:00

Yes, we do.

SamHanes10 · 2020-04-07T23:59:42+00:00

There are plenty of good comments here about reasons women might embrace 'victimhood', and one that is particularly of interest to me is that it provides benefits to the women how do so. By acting as a victim, it is possible to 'game' society to get financial, professional and social benefits, and it is therefore no big surprise some people who can take advantage of this to benefit themselves will.

I think this leads us to another topic that is crucial important in society but very poorly addressed in left-wing politics in general. This is - the balance between cooperation and competition among individuals in society. left-wing ideals often emphasise cooperation, with rhetoric such as "we're all in this together" and collectivism as a core value. A major flaw that I see in left-wing ideas is their failure to recognise that despite this rhetoric, competition between individuals will continue to exist. In addition, competition is exacerbated when there is a greater differential between demand over supply (e.g. fewer jobs, money or material resources available and a larger number of people competing for these), or when there is simply more greed among the individuals.

The failure of the left wing to recognise that competition continues to exist despite collectivist ideals has led to ability of individuals to exploit 'victimhood' to out-compete other individuals. Note that what the 'professional victims' do is that they point out how they are mistreated by society so that left-wing individuals in particular go out of their way to provide some compensation for this mistreatment. This desire to help 'victims' tends to be more left-wing than right-wing as it has its basis in collectivism - "we're all in this together". Thus, intersectional feminists and others are exploiting a loophole in this system of left-wing thought. (This is very cynical because it is very much a form of 'cheating' - it takes advantage of peoples good nature to derive personal benefit, but of course women would never do that, right? They are all wonderful! /s) Because the current left wing has no good means of closing this loophole, those that are most successful in exploiting this loophole have managed to become major voices in most left-wing movements (it's the easiest way to the top). This has also led to the rise of identity politics, whose proponents seeks to advance the ability of this individuals to game the system in this way.

In order for any society to prosper, cooperation and competition need to be balanced. The failure of the left wing to properly recognise the need to regulate competition, and instead just pretend it doesn't exist, has lead to corruption of most left-wing movements by corrupt individuals ('cheaters'). A system that is easily exploited is inherently unstable because there is no longer reason to play 'fair' when cheaters prosper, so everyone ends up cheating until the whole thing collapses. To be blunt, in my view the left wing is a dead-end until if finds a way of stopping these individuals from gaming the system. )

How can we do so? In my view this comes back to the overused 'equality-of-outcome' versus 'equality-of-opportunity' argument. While some claim that the left wing isn't really after 'equality-of-outcome', the reality is that the diagnostic measure used by the left to claim a lack of equality is a lack of 'equality-of-outcome'. For example, there are not enough women in sector X, therefore it must be that there is discrimination in the sector that we need to address. By using the outcome as the diagnostic measure, any intervention in favour of 'equality' here will always be aiming for 'equality-of-outcome' rather than 'equality-of-opportunity', despite any claims to the contrary.

Notice that using 'equality-of-outcome' as a here is big means by which 'victims' use to game the system. They point to outcome X, and use this to justify why they should be given various advantages. Alternatively, they may use a subjective measure of 'I felt mistreated' to argue for benefits for themselves. Note that they can do this whether or not they actually faced any objective disadvantage, so for corrupt individuals, all that matters is how willing and successful they are at exploiting the system.

The left-wing therefore needs completely reject 'equality-of-outcome' and various subjective measures. Instead, the left wing needs to use 'equality-of-opportunity', in the most objective way possible, to overcome this problem, advance itself and ultimately bring about a much fairer system. The point here is not to ensure everyone ends up being equal, but rather, to ensure everyone has an equal opportunity to compete in fair system. This helps to properly balance competition and cooperation.

What kind of objective implementations of 'equality-of-opportunity' are possible? Well, there are many I can think off from the top of my head. For example, 'blinding' of job applications is a good means of reducing selection panels focus on the demographics of the applicants (e.g. gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity). Although it is still possible that 'proxy measures' may still provide some residual favouritism towards applicants of certain demographics, the lack of direct focus on these demographics means that anyone of any demographic still has the opportunity to gain the right 'proxy measures' to compete. Another example is a focus on objective measures of disadvantage in awarding things such as scholarships, such as objective financial hardship, instead of identity-based measures (which panels are blinded against). Such scholarships should also be based on objective demonstration of ability, and could be increased in number. Thus, poor people of whatever demographic have a chance to advance themselves if they have the ability and drive to do so.

To ultimately goal here is for everyone to be able compete fairly under the same set of rules. Obviously, certain individuals will still try to cheat and game the system, but the goal here is to make this as hard as possible to do, and continue to be on the lookout for such cheats and change the system to stop them.

Strikester101 · 2020-04-07T15:39:23+00:00

So, you need to realize that there is a huge gap between MSM "feminists" and women.

All women want is to be treated equally and with respect (please, no one make this a debate on whether they are treated equally or not). MSM "feminists" interpret them differently and make these articles (https://out.reddit.com/t3_fvpkp2?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2020%2F04%2F02%2Fopinion%2Fcoronavirus-men-women.html&token=AQAAMayMXgvLrQnQgckUGGS5NVBOGcEskGl6sqfXfwc-WvKNOseY&app_name=mweb2x).

The vast majority of women care for men and sympathise with their issues.

GaborFrame · 2020-04-07T15:52:10+00:00

Personally I think it appeals to two personality traits that are particularly strong in younger people: a wish to avoid personal responsibility where that's achievable, and a desire to simplify the social environment into an easy-to-process binary (a lot like we see in religious groups).

It's not universally the case of course, but I find in this age of what I think of as "internet feminism", there are a lot of predominantly younger people who like the idea of absolving themselves of their agency (usually subconsciously). And in an increasingly post-religious world, social groups construct their own rules on what is good and what is bad.

If intersectionalists can perpetuate their victimhood using identity markers, that makes their personal difficulties the results of somebody else's bigotry. This means they can both be protected from enduring some of the consequences of their own decisions by the people around them, and simultaneously denounce others as simply bad people.

To clarify, I'm not talking about blaming rape victims or anything like that where there's a genuine victim. I mean myths like the gender pay gap and the "pink tax", where people make decisions that affect their own monetary/social prosperity.

And I'm not advocating for religion either (I'm an atheist), but I do think religion used to provide a social/moral framework which is crumbling rapidly. In its absence, people are looking to replace the framework it provided, and feminists have decided it is the patriarchy which represents the greatest evil in the world. Other groups select other demons (e.g. socialists have chosen capitalism, capitalists chose communism), but the theory remains the same.

peanutbutterjams · 2020-04-07T20:46:49+00:00

No, because victimhood is social currency. The more of a victim you are, the more weight your perspective (or job / grant application) has. The more of a victim you are, the more deserving you are of public funds. The more of a victim you are, the more you can draw attention to yourself on social media.

It's not me who is disrespecting victims by saying this but they who have socially monetized victimhood for their own benefit who are disrespecting victims.

As for "survivors" instead of "victims of violence", it's because it makes it sound like men are likely to kill women at any point. That's it. That's the reason. "Survivors" also applies to victims of sexual violence, which can include many things that would not possibly kill a person, but they're survivors anyways.

I was bullied as a child to such an extreme fashion that I could have easily been killed but I'm a victim of bullying, not a survivor. I'll reserve that label for the people from whom the feminists appropriated the term: Holocaust survivors

SonnBaz · 2020-04-07T15:16:45+00:00

Ask that question to women.Not a male advocate group.

2020-05-01T14:26:15+00:00

Yes we are. I'm not a victim. Some people are. But distancing ourselves from men because they are "oppressing" us is never going to work.

5th_Law_of_Robotics · 2020-04-08T10:44:29+00:00

Many are that's why most women don't identify as feminists.

random_tripper_ · 2020-04-08T18:34:18+00:00

I dunno, I feel like you need to recognize you were a victim of society before you can set out to make a change in society. Although there is a difference between recognizing you were a victim, and having a victimhood complex where refuse to take responsibility of your life.

I can see how you'd see more of the second when interacting with most Feminists online, but I'd say most of them fall into the former when I've engaged with them in person. I'd say it's mostly a signaling problem because we see things online that are trying to educate people who haven't had the realization that they were ever a victim, so we run across a lot of messaging that says it's okay to be a victim and encouraging people recognize that pattern. I'd also say it applies pretty significantly to the MRA movement. Just look at /r/MensRights and there are a ton of posts about men being victims. Don't men get tired of being victims? I think the difference is that we have been hearing the Feminist victim message for longer, and so it feels played out. And that society is less willing to recognize men as victims.

I think the other important piece is that not everyone lives in the bubble we do, and so the message that women can be a victim of social pressures is still getting out to the world in some places. So they message keeps going out

2020-04-11T01:43:56+00:00

My zayde was a cis white man and has a worse life than me, a cis white woman.

wigsnatcher42 · 2020-04-10T00:25:10+00:00

Well this whole sub only exists because some men are resentful about not being able to be seen as victims.

Title	Aren't women ever tired of being portrayed as "poor victims" by intersectional feminism?
Author	GaborFrame
Upvotes	50
Comments	71
Date	April 7, 2020 2:08 PM UTC (6 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/fwl4ol/arent_women_ever_tired_of_being_portrayed_as_poor/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/arent-women-ever-tired-of-being-portrayed-as-poor.1063725 https://theredarchive.com/post/1063725

Comments