Feminism does not promote equality, help stop the misinformation.

DavidByron · 2013-03-18T16:52:29+00:00

Polling data suggests most people agree with this. Huge majorities of men and women support sex equality, but few people call themselves feminists (20-25% of women). Obviously they dont see thmem as the same thing.

FatManBeatYou · 2013-03-18T18:58:16+00:00

Feminists don't want equallity, they want power. Or that's what I say on the matter.

Dawknight · 2013-03-18T20:04:35+00:00

Equality has been achieved in most developped countries

FTFY

Here's the problem... If I was a feminist, I would concentrate my efforts on other countries where feminism can still be relevent.

bikemaul · 2013-03-18T17:10:18+00:00

I agree with your basic premise but equality has been achieved already? Youve got to be kidding. Its better than it was but come on.

lyingdouche · 2013-03-18T21:49:00+00:00

because equality has been achieved already

This is obviously not true or this subreddit wouldn't exist.

WickedIcon · 2013-03-19T14:18:45+00:00

Okay, ELI5 time: feminism is a very old and (correspondingly) very diverse movement, with lots of different permutations and schools of thought. However, it can be divided into three major eras, with their own goals and ideas.

The first era is known as first-wave feminism. When you were taught about Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, etc in school, those were the first wave feminists. Their biggest goals were for women to have the right to own property and for women to have the right to vote, which they succeeded in. As a result of this, first-wave feminism stopped being a thing.

In the early 60s, second-wave feminism became a thing. Second-wave feminists are responsible for rape crisis centers, battered women's shelters, the Equal Pay Act, and legal recognition that rape within a marriage can happen. However, one of the big flaws of second-wave feminism is that it was exclusive, rather than inclusive; the fact that female-on-male and male-on-male rape and abuse is minimized compared to male-on-female (for one example) is their fault, as they viewed gender equality as a battle between men and women rather than something that should involve both. A lot of women who are frankly awful people in general (like Cathy Brennan, for instance) latched on to this aspect of it and created the stereotype that all feminists are bra-burning, hairy, man-castrating Amazons. Second-wave feminism MOSTLY died in the early 80s, due to the fact that they achieved most of their goals, but there are still a few holdouts.

Recently, third-wave feminism became a thing. Third-wave feminism is mostly concerned with three things: firstly, they want to fix the things that second-wave feminism caused problems with. Third-wave feminists want to unfuck divorce and custody laws, re-legitimize accusations of rape made by men, and things along those lines every bit as much as MRAs do. Secondly, they want to make things better for transgendered people (another point where they differ from second-wavers, but not one where second-wavers had influence in the first place, thank Christ). Thirdly, they want to end "rape culture;" this does not mean that all men are constantly raping people, it means that we don't take rape seriously enough when it should be treated similarly to, say, attempted murder or kidnapping. For an example of rape culture, look at how CNN's response to the Steubenville rape case was to lament the end of the players' football careers rather than to condemn their crime, and look at how many people tried to play it off as "not so bad."

Third-wave feminists are the ones being talked about in almost all modern contexts, and definitely the ones being talked about if they're being described as "for equality." They still call themselves feminists, however, because they take ideas from first and second wave feminist thinkers.

Hopefully this won't get downvoted to oblivion and will clear some things up.

tl;dr: there's more than one kind of feminist, OP's post is kinda like someone saying Dr. Pepper is shitty in response to another person saying Coke is awesome. They share surface similarities, but past those it's kind of a non sequitur.

e: Holy shit, two upvotes and only one downvote. That was really, really unexpected.

rightsbot · 2013-03-18T14:58:17+00:00

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prabeast · 2013-03-19T00:17:38+00:00

I don't like the term 'feminist' or 'feminism' because of the cultural connotations it has. And it's no surprise most women, generally, do not like this term either because of the sensation that it provides more rights for women to the point of superseding equality.

However, I agree with the 'textbook definition of feminism,' which is the promotion of women's rights to be equal to men. Just as all of us view MRAs as activism to promote men's right to be equal to those of women (in issues such as custody, fair trials, insurance costs, mental health support, etc.)

The feminist movement made a lot of sense when women did not have the right to vote, own land, or had systemic issues deterring them from employment -- these feminists simply wished to promote their status for equality. And as Dawknight states, the feminist movement is something that is still important in certain developing nations; I am fully behind these movements.

So, I generally agree with you. There should not be a title. My ex-girlfriend would get pissed at me that I didn't consider myself a feminist (She was a huge feminist, part of the student groups, etc.) And I firmly believe we don't need statuses. I also believe that we if we take the textbook definition, both men and women should be both feminists and MRAs, constantly advocating equality for both sides (but we must be both).

MsManifesto · 2013-03-19T02:36:53+00:00

A definition for feminism from Laura Lee Downs's book Writing Gender History (2010):

While Feminism is itself a contested word, and one whose meaning has, moreover, shifted over the course of the women's rights movement, one can nonetheless establish a broad definition of the term, one that embraces all who find women's subordinate status to be unjust, and who, furthermore, believe that there is nothing inevitable about this status: it is a product of human convention and can therefore be changed through human effort.

As we can see here, feminism is very much indeed focused on women (specifically, their subordinate status). It is not explicitly about making everyone equal, but rather making women equal to who is dominant in society by moving women out of their lived experiences as subordinate. I have found, however, that is it difficult for someone to reason that women deserve equal status without similarly reasoning that everyone deserves equal status, for the reasoning is virtually the same for any [disadvantaged] group ("disadvantaged" is bracketed here because this tends to be implicit in discourse, but explicit in internal reasoning. I describe this in more detail below).

I think that the bigger problem, that is, where power imbalance is perpetuated, comes from a failure to realize and acknowledge the various forms of inequality as experienced by most "other" members of society. Feminism had this problem during the second wave when its version of women's liberation was inadequate for women of color, because WOC resided in a different position in terms of power asymmetries than the prominent white feminists leading the movement. I think the same can be said in terms of Men's Rights and feminism, where feminism recognizing Men as the dominant group in society fail to acknowledge the ways that they are systemically disadvantaged as well. Another problem is that society is changing rapidly in terms of power distributions, and so feminism has not accounted fully for men's shift in terms of dominant status.

I generally resist the notion that feminism is a movement for everyone's equality, because the emphasis is on women (the contemporary academic version of feminism is trending toward Gender Studies, however, which I think is making great strides toward theorizing the lived experiences of all genders, including where these genders intersect with class, race, sexuality, and nation). We should then assert the same for Men's Rights, then, that it is a movement for men specifically. These movements (and all others like it) I think come together under the umbrella designation of humanism or human rights, however. I think the various movement focusing on different aspects is a good thing, so long as they unite for the common goal of humanism or human rights, and so long as they take the time to learn from one another in order to unite in this goal.

circuitology · 2013-03-19T04:23:57+00:00

Feminism has always been about women and not about men. They say it can be inclusive but it is pure rhetoric designed to help boost the numbers.

The issue is, there is a place for feminism in some parts of the world. No problem with that.

It's when I see feminists complaining about bullshit that isn't even true, or isn't even important, or saying that there needs to be change in womens' favour at the expense of mens' rights, in developed countries where women have the same or better opportunity as men already that I get pissed about it.

ptgrenville · 2013-03-18T23:48:56+00:00

I think the feminist movement and the men's right movement should both be called The Equality Movement

Title	Feminism does not promote equality, help stop the misinformation.
Author	mindwalker94
Upvotes	36
Comments	20
Date	March 18, 2013 2:57 PM UTC (13 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/mensrights/comments/1aiyoq/feminism-does-not-promote-equality-help-stop-the-/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/feminism-does-not-promote-equality-help-stop-the.1608460 https://theredarchive.com/post/1608460

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