What does feminism mean to you and why do you support/oppose it?

dakru · 2017-05-06T18:40:17+00:00

I think there are two main ways that someone could define feminism:

A movement for gender equality that assumes that gender inequality is primarily a problem of the treatment and condition of women.
An advocacy movement for women.

I'm not a feminist because I've talked to feminists and read feminist material/literature and it's very clear to me that on the whole they see the world very differently from how I see it. I don't think that women are marginalized, oppressed, etc., or that we live in a patriarchy, or that misogyny is rampant. There exist valid challenges facing women but I don't think they overshadow the challenges facing men and in general I don't think that women are much worse off than men.

I categorically reject any definition of feminism where it's "just another word for gender equality". It's one approach to gender equality, and it's hardly infallible.

ThorLives · 2017-05-06T20:22:05+00:00

It means a lot of different things.

Ostensibly, feminism is about giving women the same rights/opportunities/treatment as men. Typically, this is the line trotted out both to attract women to feminism and attack people who aren't advocates of feminism ("You don't support feminism? It must be because you want to continue oppressing women.") There is some degree of truth to the "rights for women" formulation, but there's a lot more to feminist culture than this. For example:

Feminism tends to attract women who have a chip on their shoulder towards men. (In any group, the most active and loudest members will be people who have the emotional energy to push them to be activists - in most cases, that emotion will be anger.) Similarly, the MRA movement tends to attract men who have a chip on their shoulder against women. All groups end up being defined by the behavior of their members. Somehow, feminists think this is a one-way street - i.e. it's okay for them to define the mens-rights movement by the behavior of MRA men who behave badly, but when it comes to feminism, we're supposed to accept the boilerplate definition of feminism ("equal rights for women") rather than being turned off by bad behavior of women in the group.
All groups have a tendency to exaggerate their oppression and suffering. We can see this if we look at FOX News - where the narrative is "white Christian people" or "white Christian men" are oppressed. The same thing holds true of feminism - it is devoted to finding ways that women are oppressed, to the point of exaggerating the facts. This is one of the big things that turns me off about feminism - because I've researched some of these feminist claims, and I get angry when someone is telling me "facts" that end up not being true. It makes me angry that feminist activists are going around telling women things in an attempt to make them feel oppressed when those facts aren't true. It puts me in a position where I have to make a choice between: not talking about feminist claims (even when feminist women bring them up), trying to convince them that they're wrong (which doesn't usually work because they think everybody who knows what they're talking about agrees with her, which makes her think I'm ignorant and part of the problem, and makes her harbor negative opinions of me), or gritting my teeth and agreeing with her for keeping the peace. I can't in good conscience do #3.
Feminism supports a victim culture - this includes being unwilling to talk about men's problems (because if men have problems, too, it lowers the relative victimhood of women), and making claims that men must support feminism if they oppose the oppression of women. For example, a female friend of mine recently told me that it's men's obligation to support feminism because it's the obligation of privileged people to work towards ending oppression of oppressed people. By labeling men as "privileged" it makes them obligated to work on behalf of women. As such, feminists are dead-set against anything that might remove the "privileged" label that is placed on men - this entails downplaying male problems, and exaggerating male advantages.
Feminism often tries to pit everyone against white males. On many occasions, they'll construct some narrative where white males are on the "privileged" side of things, and everyone else (women, racial minorities) are on the other side. It feels like they're trying to get everyone to gang up against white males - as if we're the enemy. Nevermind the fact that white women are privileged over white males on a variety of measures (college attendance, treatment in criminal cases, etc). And in many cases, I see examples where white women believe they are disadvantaged, and it turns out that they are equally advantaged as white males when you look at the statistics (but I still find feminists misrepresenting the facts to try to make it seem like women are oppressed relative to men). Reminds me of the recent Dave Chappelle standup where he tells some feminist woman to "slow your roll" when she says that women were oppressed (by white men) just like how black people were oppressed. Similarly, it's annoying when white males, as a group, are blamed for getting Trump into office, but they don't seem to realize (or don't mention) that 53% of white women voted for Trump. Feminists work to "otherize" white males.

Personally, it bothers me, for example, that we are constantly told via the media that we need to work to get more women into STEM fields, but when I look at college graduation rates, women are almost 50% more likely to get a bachelor's degree than men. We're supposed to be concerned about women in STEM, but nobody cares about men going to college. What this says to me is that society cares about women's problems, while it doesn't care about men's. I believe that much of the help that women get for feminism comes directly out of a societal attitude that says that we should help women, and that helping women is more important than helping men. It's a form of gender inequality that favors women. Of course, this is useful for women and the feminist movement in general.

Some of the things that I find feminists lying or exaggerating about:

The wage gap. I can't tell you the number of times I've seen people make the claim that women get paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the exact same job as a man - which simply isn't true.
I had read an article a while back about the oppression of women in Brazil. In it, the author mentions that a woman is murdered every 2 hours in Brazil (or something like that), and went on to claim that this murder rate is indicative of misogyny in Brazil. Knowing that the male homicide-victimization rate is almost always higher than the female homicide-victimization rate in countries around the world, I looked it up and discovered that Brazilian men are victims of homicide 11x more often than Brazilian women. This made me question the whole thing. Why are we blaming misogyny when women are only 9% of all homicide victims? What homicide rate wouldn't be indicative of misogyny? 0%? Is the fact that 91% of homicide victims are men indicative of misandry?
There was a study done a while back which involved writing to college professors about mentorship (using the same text, but changing the student's name to indicate a particular gender or race). What the media reported was that white males were far more likely to get a response than any other group. What the statistics actually showed was that white women were equally likely to get a response as white men (and when you break it down by private versus public universities, black women/hispanic women/white women actually got higher response rates than white men! This suggests to me that public universities have a certain amount of pro-female bias while at the same time, women are told that they are being discriminated against). The media didn't mention any of this, of course, they just went with the narrative that "white men are privileged, everybody else has it tough". This leads to ridiculous claims by people that if life was a game, men are playing on "easy mode" or "tutorial mode" (Google: "Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is"), while everybody else has it moderately difficult or very difficult. (Again, with the exaggerated claim that men have it easy, while at the same time, pitting white men on one side against everyone else on the other.)

These kinds of misrepresentations always makes me question the narrative that women are as oppressed as they say they are. It also says to me that our media is biased in favor of women and women's issues (and I think a lot of that has to do with a lot of women working in the media, and promoting that narrative). At the same time, it seems like the group of people who are against the feminist narrative are conservatives like FOX News, who I consider to be a bunch of uneducated cave-men. Their arguments are usually so ignorant, I can't consider them allies, even on this issue.

Peter5930 · 2017-05-06T20:13:16+00:00

I often read things on Jezebel, r/twoxchromosomes, r/askwomen, keep up on drama going on with youtube feminists, notable events like the elevator incident with Richard Dawkins etc, and a huge amount of it is just not a world view that I find myself agreeing with. Campaigns to ban sex robots? Laci Green saying you should always believe the woman when she accuses someone of rape? Bat-shit insane stuff about all PIV being rape? Public shaming for dongle jokes? The fact that any feminist-oriented subreddit seems to inevitably be an ultra-moderated ban-happy echo chamber where discussion is actively stamped out (what the hell is invalidation; in my day that was just called expressing your own opinion. These days it gets your comment deleted and your account banned)? Colleges in the US seemingly having all their student policies set by the gender studies department and auto-expelling any man who's accused by a woman, even when the man is the rape victim? Trigger warnings absolutely everywhere, like everyone's too special and precious to have a little bit of god damn emotional resilience?

Those are my experiences with feminism, and it doesn't give me much sympathy for it. It makes me wonder what the hell these people are smoking and how they arrived at such a twisted and fucked up world view.

goatismycopilot · 2017-05-06T18:45:17+00:00

Feminism has started to take on a different meaning for me, now it means boring ass posts on PPD I don't want to read.

TheBlackQuill · 2017-05-06T18:52:23+00:00

I think feminism is a scheme by the government to gain more taxes for themselves. After all, why else would they support such a movement, for anything but for their own gain? And then, many women who jumped to the wagon and joining, thinking it is about gaining more freedom for women. I think they are puppets for the government, to further their own political agenda. It is an endless cycle, with government pandering to feminism and feminism thinking they get power, and government just use them to maintain their power. The thing is, we don't need feminism to succeed. Living in a anti PC country myself, I can tell you female entrepreneurs are rather common and encouraged. If you want females to have a high paying job, the only push that you require is from your parents, really. It is the only pressure that you need for women to gain a high paying jobs.

TooloudthrowAway420 · 2017-05-06T19:38:01+00:00

Making things as hard as possible for men while endlessly complaining about increasingly petty issues affecting women. And insisting you're fighting for equality the whole time.

TheBlackQuill · 2017-05-06T21:24:11+00:00

It's all about money.

Men are better at standing up for themselves then women. They were forming Unions, demanding decent wages, retirement pensions, and good benefits.

Women get in the workforce and agree to anything, companies use that opportunity to undermine the male worker. Now you have two workers per household with the same standard of living as one earner in the past.

Like the government gives fuckall about women in stem? Stem majors make to much money, and we can't have that now can we?

Atlas_B_Shruggin · 2017-05-06T19:16:19+00:00

for the life of me i cant understand why "feminism" is treated like an arcane, unknowable Hermetic secret. there have been three main waves of feminism, now possibbly a 4th, with different influences, goals, factions and famous figures. there are like 10k places on the internet where this is neatly laid out, 1st wave, second wave, third wave, etc. their writings, spokespeople, organs and primary figures are publically available for reading and scrutiny

a lot of people confuse "women seeking to serve the female imperative" with "feminism"

buartha · 2017-05-06T20:33:05+00:00

In terms of what it means to me personally, it's recognition that women as a class are more limited in terms of things like economic independence, due in large part to their role in reproduction and the expectations and responsibilities that come with that.

I also think that how they are socialised and how men are socialised to treat them plays a big role and that's absolutely worth study and consideration, but the kind of feminist thought I find most interesting deals with the effect that the biological realities of sex have on limiting opportunities and influencing the behaviour of men and women.

So my priorities would be things like abortion in my home nation (Northern Ireland/ Ireland,) more representation for women in clinical trials/ healthcare/ pharmacological research, maternity benefits and reproductive health education for young women from low income areas.

I've seen so many different takes on it that I'm honestly confused.

If you want something more general, I wrote a comment a while ago that sums up the differences that I perceive between liberal and radical feminism which might be helpful in terms of classifying what someone might mean when they say they're a feminist.

cxj · 2017-05-06T21:41:08+00:00

Feminism is an umbrella term for a wide variety of political and social movements advocating for women's interests, which they brand as "equality." There are 3-4 waves depending on who you talk to and various disagreeing sects such as sex positive vs sex negative feminists, TERFs, etc.

In reality, these movements are so diverse that the label feminist tells me very little about an individuals actual beliefs, so it's hard to say whether or not I support it or oppose it. Instead, I try to look at individual beliefs or policies themselves. For example, I oppose VAWA as it erodes due process for men, but support efforts to make abortion more accessible.

holyjesusitsahorse · 2017-05-07T01:03:41+00:00

It depends if we're talking about very specific forms of feminism, or the "feminism" that is literally just a word you say among certain groups of people, and to yourself, to show that you are a good, moral, person like them, and not one of the poorly-defined enemy to which we must be forever opposed.

Any sensible definition regarding a feminism that is in some way still politically active, is that it inherently implies a belief that women are unfairly disadvantaged as a result of their gender, and are at some point an oppressed class.

I reject that in principle and in practice - while there are certainly some issues that you'll face being born a woman, there are also many issues that you'll face being a man, and being continually externalised as "the problem" by upper-middle-class women with journalism degrees who somehow still think that they're victims because they're not happy with their lot in life is fairly galling for most normal men who don't have the opportunity to pull a fire alarm any time they feel sad.

YetAnotherCommenter · 2017-05-07T07:46:00+00:00

What does "feminism" mean to me?

Whilst I know the dictionary definitions, and that there are forms of dictionary-feminism which don't fit my characterization, when I say "feminism" I generally mean the institutionalized feminist movement or "official" feminism. The kind/s of feminism supported by lobby groups, influential on politicians, and promoted in gender studies courses.

Which means Radical Second Wave, Cultural and Third Wave Feminisms, effectively. And lobbying, cultural commentary and beliefs based upon these feminisms.

Now, I could go into a multi-post analysis of all of this but ultimately these ideas have created a movement that accuses men of collectively oppressing women.

Ultimately, my problem with feminism is that whilst it CLAIMS to oppose traditional gender roles, it actually doesn't. Its cafeteria traditionalism. They want traditionalism when it works for them, to retain all the privileges women enjoyed under so-called-patriarchy. They only want to abolish the obligations patriarchy placed upon women; they usually want to retain or even increase the responsibilities men were faced with.

This is why I am an anti-feminist (using the definition of 'feminism' I proposed above). I actually am against the gender system. Feminism just wants to make the gender system more comfortable for women, and is more than happy making it less comfortable for men in order to do that. I, on the other hand, want to get rid of the system entirely.

theiamsamurai · 2017-05-07T16:02:46+00:00

I oppose feminism because it's not about equality, but about female supremacy. The minority of feminists who actually care about equality and egalitarianism doesn't offset the majority who don't.

Call yourself egalitarian instead of feminists, and actually advocate for both genders' issues, and I'll be on board. Not token shit like "I'm fighting against patriarchy so that will help men who get beaten by their wives and can''t call the cops for help without being arrested". Yeah, that will happen so fast while you preferentially help women and reinforce the "men = perpetrators, women = victims" narrative.

prodigy2throw · 2017-05-06T18:43:21+00:00

Wanting all privilege and no responsibly

fetchyminx · 2017-05-06T19:10:30+00:00

Stop posting about feminism it's so boring now

Princeso_Bubblegum · 2017-05-06T21:36:09+00:00

Feminism is the belief in Patriarchy, which is a hierarchical system which has women as lesser, and to oppose this.

I would say that Patriarchy exists in an economic form for sure with the wage gap from a Marxist perspective.

5th_Law_of_Robotics · 2017-05-07T02:53:53+00:00

Feminism is lobbying for women.

So I'm against it because women are already privileged over men.

sadomasochrist · 2017-05-06T18:42:10+00:00

Old feminist : We'd like the opportunity to achieve as much as men.

New age median feminist : I am oblivious to my innumerable privileges, am unwilling to accept the downsides of being a man and want you to feed my delusions.

New age rad feminist : I am entitled to the unlimited and want anyone that is opposed to my unlimited desires to be either put into a reeducation camp or to be imprisoned and sentenced to death.

Not hard to understand why it's garbage.

I mean honestly, where is there still room for intergender growth?

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breakfasttopiates · 2017-05-06T20:57:15+00:00

Feminism is quite simply the female natural instinct politicized and attached to the most effective form of authoritarian control which would be Marxist dialectics and conflict theory. The haves and the have nots world view, which is actually also just a feminine interpretation of the world but forced through the logical/rational filter of the minds of men such as Marx and Engels

[deleted] · 2017-05-06T22:11:33+00:00

Feminism is both an equality movement and an advocacy group for women.

wuboo · 2017-05-06T22:36:19+00:00

There isn't a hard line definition.

incellington · 2017-05-07T09:00:11+00:00

"I have it hard, its societys fault, I want others to change and not me"

Any variation of this disgusts me.

[deleted] · 2017-05-07T12:06:58+00:00

Because women are my equals in spirit, a soul is a soul is a soul...

But as a non-vagina person, I could wreck anyone with one. And because I play wearing kid gloves with them, I don't respect them as I do other men. Feminism is saying that I should, but I know better.

LeaderOfGamergate · 2017-05-07T13:14:43+00:00

A female supremacy movement that seeks to grant power to women and take away power from men. Its pro-degeneracy and against traditional values. I am entirely against it.

DarkLord0chinChin · 2017-05-07T14:24:28+00:00

Feminists hate men and I hate feminists

legitshitonly · 2017-05-07T16:19:56+00:00

A distorted and hastily concluded view on what equality actually means

I am indifferent basically. Just taking it all in

Drippyskippy · 2017-05-07T17:17:07+00:00

What is the difference between feminism and melanoma?

Title	What does feminism mean to you and why do you support/oppose it?
Author	mwarg
Upvotes	4
Comments	142
Date	May 6, 2017 6:29 PM UTC (9 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/PurplePillDebate
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/PurplePillDebate/comments/69mq48/what_does_feminism_mean_to_you_and_why_do_you/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/PurplePillDebate/what-does-feminism-mean-to-you-and-why-do-you.268324 https://theredarchive.com/post/268324

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