#good feminism

[mk-wizard]

Feminism didn’t ruin anything especially not marriage. If a marriage does end thanks to feminism, then it was most likely a bad marriage anyway. And when I say this, I mean it could have been either way bad. Either the man was a dirtbag of a husband in which the woman was right to leave or the woman was too narcissistic to be a wife in which she did the man a favour by leaving him.

In other words, feminism doesn’t ruin marriages. It ends toxic marriages you don’t want anyway. If anything, wanting to be equal partners in a marriage isn’t a feminism thing. It’s a common sense thing for any healthy romantic relationship. Feminism merely reminds us and encourages us to enforce that. And when I say “us” I mean anyone of any gender.

[lets-do-something]

Feminism is good and needed but...

In my opinion feminism is one of the most needed ways to fight against discrimination of this time. But, there are some points that people, expecialy women, think that what they are doing is considered Feminism, but it is not. 

1- A man can also be feminist, it is not because he’s not considered a female and haven’t passed by many of things that woman have passed by that he can’t stand for women.

2- Not all man are considered trash, don’t generalize the whole mans by one individual. 

3- Do not use feminism as a way to only try to get what you want. You don’t need to get discounts on the entry of clubs and the price goes high on man so you can feel well treated; Don’t think that you don’t have the need to pay your own things just because you are a women, feminism is about getting independent from man, not to use as an excuse; Feminism is all to fight to equality between both women and man, not to put women priveliged!

4- If you are a women, stand for trans-womens, they are women too and they need to be heard/ treat as that!!

5- Man can too be sexually harassed in the streets and many of man, in their life time, had been druged in a bar against his will but many of them don’t report that to the police, so that’s why the number of cases are too lower than the women cases. So don't say that a guy holding an empty cup in the air, so it can try to get free drinks, is joking with women that are sexual harassed because that same man, probably drunk, can also be druged and harassed. So before you take a picture to insult, try to call him to the right point of the story by saying that that is dangerous.

6- Feminism is a fight to equality, so as an equal individual, you can’t say that man can’t be talk about just because they are man. You are not talking about equality but womem privileged.

[alixofagnia]

So, I heard about the EKR (Emo Kylo Ren) Twitter scandal and

because the STAR WARS WOMAN can and always will take care of herself

and where SHE loves, SHE will love freely

thank you very fucking much

[izaya-is-life]

*stares out window at heavily overcast sky, a blanket draped over my shoulders, and a melancholy look* “When will Pitch get a season 2?”

[willworkforadam]

so i know im pretty late to the game but i just started supergirl and i’m LOVING IT

[rainyfrenchtown]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXOserQIQuE)

Women and Money

[deconstru-cted]

Whenever I hear someone use the term "feminazi" in a serious context I immediately decide that I'm not going to waste my time on them

[generalchelseamayhem]

Who Stole Feminism? Chapter One: Women Under Siege.

Part 1 of 12.

I recently had something... a watchamacallit... that thing where you... you know...

... an anniversary. That’s it.

Because our mutual alignment on the majority of social justice issues is what both keeps us together and separates us from an awful lot of other couples on campus, I picked out “Who Stole Feminism?” as the anniversary present that @judging-arguments-by-their-merit was insisting that she must buy me, no getting out of it.

But I had more in mind for this book than simply enjoying it. I wanted to take a very critical eye to what could (I don’t know about ‘should’) be perceived as “my side of the argument” and see if it holds up as much as I think it does.

So that is what I’m going to do now. Or rather, that’s what I’m going to do over the course of perhaps several months, with one post for each chapter.

There can be absolutely no mistakes, cut corners, or terrible props when it comes to the incredibly exact art of divination magic. Buy your crystal balls from the top-of-the-line brands; this is one area in which ALDI simply will not do. Make sure you mix your fireworks just right, all too often the mysterious haze that permeates the tent your clients enter are all bang and relatively little substance, so that they hardly interfere with the currents of time at all. And if you MUST invest in a heavy yet obviously fake foreign accent, it’s more worth your while to actually learn the language. Above all, however, you need to cite your sources. And that’s one thing that I think Christina Hoff Sommers does well.

For the record, I don’t quite know whether she intended to have this book be a prediction of the future, but many of the examples she provides of counterintuitive and counterproductive feminist behaviour are examples that I have seen imitated, almost word-for-word, within the past two years.

As you would expect from the title, this chapter deals with the narrative within feminism of perpetual female victimhood. Many of the examples and quotes already sound familiar. “The women at the Heilbrun Conference are the New Feminists: articulate, prone to self-dramatization, and chronically offended” (p.21) Christina says of one of the many conferences she cites as a source for her concern. Even more unsettling is the use of this chronic offense to compare things which are trivial at best to serious crimes such as rape, as in “watching the second public hanging of a woman ... resembles lynching in times not long past. One is lynched and raped as a member of a sexually subordinated group.” (p.25) Christina calls these comparisons “debatable”; personally I would not blame the reader for not understanding what really happened. To wit, the woman in question was not raped, and nor was she hanged. Neither Christina Hoff Sommers, nor Catherine MacKinnon whom she was quoting, actually explain what did happen, but not being familiar with the historical event Sommers is studying, I am given to believe that the woman was in fact cross-examined in a court of law. This trend continues with prominent feminists taking offense to cat-calling, as the word “Mama” serves to strip one feminist of all their own sense of personhood (p.26), where another feminist facing similar torture is “petrified by the gaze of the Other” (p.27), and a third one, though not cat-called, is offended by depictions of naked women in museums, since by her own testimony, male artists painting or sculpting the female form are in fact appropriating it, or worse, claiming possession of it (p.27).

The theme of sisterhood is strongly on display in this chapter, as Christina Hoff Sommers notes a general trend towards “sisterhood” and collectivism as an antidote to perceived societal oppression. She analyzes why this thinking is bad, why it goes against the original wishes of the very first forms of feminist activism (since “it is worth remembering that Seneca Falls was organized by both men and women and that men actively participated in it and were welcomed” (p.35)), and most intriguingly, what happens when the sense of in-group bias goes too far. This latter phenomenon forms the basis of what I believe later became today’s Intersectional Feminism. Sommers says “at past conferences, oppressed women had accused other women of oppressing them. Participants met in groups defined by their grievances and healing needs:  Jewish women, Jewish lesbians, Asian-American women, African-American women, old women, disabled women, fat women, women whose sexuality is in transition. None of the groups proved stable. The fat group polarized into gay and straight factions, and the Jewish women discovered they were deeply divided” (p.29-30) When they do manage to come to an agreement, the status quo that Sommers depicts is each caucus accusing the rest of the conference of marginalizing them: “She reported that ten years ago, the organization ‘almost came apart over outcries by our lesbian sisters that we had failed to adequately listen to their voices.’ Five years ago, sisters in the Jewish caucus had wept at their own ‘sense of invisibility.’ Three years later the Disability caucus threatened to quit, and the following year the women of colour walked out.” (p.29) I can’t help wondering if those women might not have something to say to the classic Oppression Olympian of Tumblr, to whom the idea of being a disabled trans WOC is the very pinnacle of people who need to be the most listened to.

Equally on display is Sommers’ polite yet firm scorn for those particular conferences which are noticeably equivalent to what we would today call “safe spaces”. Two separate occasions stand out in this regard: one conference where the speaker was unable to show up precisely on time. To keep their spirits up, on two occasions the women held hands and sang the kind of song which would only avoid making outside observers cringe if they were sung around a roaring campfire with plenty of alcohol or other mind-altering substances to hand. Sommers records the lyrics to both; the second and more embarrassing is sung “We are sisters in a circle/ We are sisters in a struggle/ Sisters one and all/ We are colours of the rainbow/ Sisters one and all.” (p.31) To cap off this experience, a fellow feminist approached Sommers during the conference and told her that Sommers was making her feel uncomfortable just by being there. (p.32)

But perhaps the most alarming combination of the three concepts of sisterhood, safe spaces, and chronic offense, is the conference wherein a white man began talking about feminism. Of all the parallels with the modern day that this chapter has evoked, this phenomenon may actually have lessened over time. If you find yourself marvelling at current male exclusion from feminist spaces, and wonder how it could possibly be worse, Christina Hoff Sommers provides three startling quotes, in chronological order and ascending order of severity: “My deep belief is that men cannot be feminists. They have no place in woman-centred spheres. Raphael is a womb envier and a feminist wannabe -a poseur in our midst.” (p.37) “I did not come to a workshop to hear that.” (p.37) “I thought there would be only women; I was not expecting this sort of -- difference” (p.38)

Whether Sommers intends to compare these feminists with white supremacists or not, the latter comment is particularly reminiscent.

So, how does it hold up as a critical examination of feminism?

I will give Sommers this, first and foremost: She is excellent at building a comprehensive picture, if not of all feminism, then at least the problem area. Given that this chapter explores specifically the problem with the feminist perception of victimhood, each conference and each recording of feminist rhetoric can be more or less seamlessly related to one another, particularly section on the origins of feminism. One can easily wonder how the original Seneca Falls feminists, who accepted all genders, made actionable goals, and swiftly affected change (see the case of Hester Vaughan) would appreciate a legacy consisting in part of the behaviour highlighted by Sommers. To wit, that each caucus of different feminists would be obviously competing to claim the title of the most oppressed (not, in fact, the least oppressed, which could arguably claim is the path to equality), that feminists should be finding increasingly trivial things to be upset by on a personal level, which they then turn into a political statement, and that feminism should have become, in the eyes of some, an exclusive club which purports to fight for equality, but that paradoxically, not everyone is allowed into.

One could argue at a stretch that the entire chapter has been an exercise in anecdotal evidence. Though Sommers draws examples of this kind of rhetoric from such prominent feminists as Marilyn French, Catherine MacKinnon, and Gloria Steinem, as well as more than a dozen university professors besides, it is true that the bulk of her evidence for this phenomenon comes from recording feminist conferences, and then only conferences which Sommers has personally attended, hence the anecdotes. However, this does little to detract from her point. She is not arguing that this constitutes a widespread trend in feminism, in fact her argument is that these feminists represent a loud factional minority, that part of their own problem is that they do not represent all feminists. In fact, it might be said, the criticism of argument from anecdotal evidence applies to the gender feminists instead.

However, nothing is perfect, and this book is no exception. If it were perfect, there would be no point in doing this to begin with.

Unfortunately, the heavy reliance on conferences means that Christina Hoff Sommers’ powers of citation are lacking compared to the preface, which was able to show at least a number of scientific studies and news reports, even if only to later prove that the scientific studies were all outright fabrications. The conference between Russian and American feminists was recorded by a translator, but unfortunately there is no other citation or recording of many of the worst examples of rhetoric from this chapter, from anyone other than Sommers herself. If you want to prove that it really happened, you have only an eyewitness account to go on. The cynic within me suggests that perhaps this is why men’s rights activists are encouraged to always be recording.

But there is another problem too; Sommers’ greatest defence against the anecdotal fallacy is also this chapter’s biggest failing. That is, she fails to adequately demonstrate that she is dealing with a minority of feminists. When she said in the preface that these feminists “lack a grassroots constituency” (p.18), it is a very convincing argument with little in the way of actual evidence to back it up. There is no statistic for this, no survey which asks the question “Are you a sensible feminist or a crazy one?” All that has been proven is that these gender feminists exist, not that any significant backlash or silent majority of some kind exists as a counterpoint to them. Christina Hoff Sommers almost seems to acknowledge this herself, since by her account, only after seeing the Russian feminists challenging the American gender feminists’ narrative of maleness being inherently evil (i.e. p.40, “white male morality”) does she express hope that future conferences might follow suit.

I hope that Sommers may be able to demonstrate the existence of feminism’s silent majority who disagree with its then-and-current radicalization. If she cannot, then a large and important part of her argument - that feminism is not irredeemable - will fall apart as she continues the book. It could turn the book from a wake-up call into an admission of defeat.

-GCM.

[toofulloflove]

So today I was talking to my roommate about women struggles and how sometimes women of power were stepped on by men before making a name for themselves, specially in older times. I spoke about how their body or looks are used because in the real world men with brains are the ones listened to.  My point was that we have to acknowledge this fact that unfortunately women do not get to the top as easily as men, specially in the film industry. And she decided to ignore this fact, she did not want to talk about it. For me this was like ignoring these women’s struggles, what they have gone through to put their name high on the top. Ignoring their sacrifices that they have made to pave the way for other women. 

[sexceptionul]

No problem,I don't like to see other women not have the resources they need available to them! I know Planned Parenthood does income based and free stuff but there are also independent clinics. I wish you the best in whatever happens!!! :)

You’re the best! If anything happens I think I’m going to try a Planned Parenthood first, but there aren’t any immediately around me so I’ll need to find a way. My fiance and I decided that if it ends up we are pregnant, we’re going to be bringing me down to Virginia to further discuss and take care of the situation, so hopefully there are some more options down there than here. 

Thank you so so much, I appreciate it a ton. I hope you’re having a great evening!!!

[equivatronic]

I can’t tell you how bad I feel for Christina Hoff Sommers and other feminists like her. To be one of the few rational voices left in a movement where sensationalism and misinformation are the new mainstream.

Feminists like her who actually live up to the feminist definition while using facts and logic to base their stances on issues rather then believing anything as long as it was said by a feminist. 

And what does she and other critical feminists get for it? Rape and death threats, they get slandered by feminist journals, they get treated like pariahs by their own movement, and the media wont give them a voice because the public cares more about the narrative then the facts.

They deserve way better.

[musingsbymarcus]

[goodfeminist-blog]

Hi

Hi my name is Jess and I'm currently a junior Social Work major in a college somewhere that I don't feel comfortable telling you yet. I made this because I have too many feelings about issues of social justice and I've exhausted my list of interested friends. My URL is a nod towards my rejection of the whole good feminist/ bad feminist dichotomy. Let's not start quantifying and qualifying our worthiness within the feminist community, we get enough of that already. But more on that later, I look forward to a beautiful life together.

[generalchelseamayhem]

Georgetown University is trying to get footage of Christina Hoff Sommers’ lecture edited or taken down

because protesters who went to a public lecture taped their own mouths shut, and yelled over the speaker, apparently didn’t consent to be filmed.

Smells like a coverup to me. They got caught being totally unreasonable in a public forum, so now they’re trying to destroy the evidence. In fact, as judging-arguments-by-their-merit just pointed out, “protests are about raising awareness about something they find problematic. As such, they should want the video to be seen by everyone.” And I think she’s right, and this only proves that the protest was not about making any bold or powerful statement, it was about shutting Christina Hoff Sommers up. And I don’t doubt that editing the video will further that goal as well. Any number of reasonable points Sommers made in the video could be edited out because she was responding to people who want to be edited out, just for example.

If anyone is good with videos could make mirrors of the relevant video, found here, before the edit happens, that would be great.

If I’ve learned one thing as an MRA, it’s that “always be recording” is nowhere NEAR the overstatement that it looks like. And people need to know that this is how Christina was reacted to.