What Do You Think Of Feminism?

[Preety_India]

@Peter-Andre  thank you for championing women's cause. More men like you are needed. 

 

 

[Harikrishnan]

1 hour ago, Rilles said:

You have strong stances... but can you give an example why its naive? Is women workers rights naive? Voting rights? Protesting extreme beauty standards? I see these as good things. 

Many societies are slowly moving towards it. Voting rights are even common in 3rd world countries. Beauty standards are also getting changed. In India, Fair&lovely an old fairness cream has decided to remove its own brand name begining with fair. International brands are also doing same. Workers right is one area i am thinking more change is to be needed.  Does feminism have any role in this, yes. And all the negative things hear about feminism are not fault of feminist perspectives but of toxic people using it for there own agendas.

[Rilles]

24 minutes ago, Peter-Andre said:

I would consider myself a feminist. A lot of people, especially men, tend to just assume that we no longer need feminism because we've achieved gender equality and that feminism is now redundant. I think this is because men don't experience sexism to the same extent as women and tend to just assume that it doesn't exist, or barely exists. I obviously disagree with that. There are still a lot of issues in society relating to gender inequality that we need to overcome as a society.

Agreed, and just because one country is doing well and some people are becoming more conscious about the way they treat women doesnt mean the whole world is on board yet, theres a long way to go before old Stage Blue/Orange ideas are rooted out. 

[Rilles]

25 minutes ago, Harikrishnan said:

Many societies are slowly moving towards it. Voting rights are even common in 3rd world countries. Beauty standards are also getting changed. In India, Fair&lovely an old fairness cream has decided to remove its own brand name begining with fair. International brands are also doing same. Workers right is one area i am thinking more change is to be needed.  Does feminism have any role in this, yes. And all the negative things hear about feminism are not fault of feminist perspectives but of toxic people using it for there own agendas.

Nice!??

[Peter-Andre]

23 minutes ago, Preety_India said:

@Peter-Andre  thank you for championing women's cause. More men like you are needed. 

 

 

Actually, thank you! I remember reading some of your comments a few months ago in another thread about feminism. You made some really compelling arguments and pointed out how feminism is still relevant in the 21st century. Before that, I still agreed with the principles of feminism, such as gender equality, but I wasn't 100% convinced about the importance of feminism today, nor was I aware just how prevalent the issues of sexism and patriarchy still were. Over the past year or so I've spent quite a bit of time trying to educate myself about this stuff, and your comments on this forum have been of great help

[Preety_India]

 

@Peter-Andre  more than glad 

 

 

[Peter-Andre]

18 minutes ago, Rilles said:

Agreed, and just because one country is doing well and some people are becoming more conscious about the way they treat women doesnt mean the whole world is on board yet, theres a long way to go before old Stage Blue/Orange ideas are rooted out. 

I completely agree! We just have to keep pushing forward.

[SaaraSabina]

I think it’s yet another polarisation trick, as is so called “race” etc. It does not bring men and women closer. It was a easy way to get the women out of the house, another sex to tax and get the children right in their indoctrination camps as early as possible so that they could grow up to be good monetary slaves.  

[Rilles]

5 minutes ago, SaaraSabina said:

I think it’s yet another polarisation trick, as is so called “race” etc. 

The idea of woman was there way before feminism...

It does not bring men and women closer. It was a easy way to get the women out of the house, another sex to tax and get the children right in their indoctrination camps as early as possible so that they could grow up to be good monetary slaves.  

So youre saying it was a government ploy or something? 

 

[SaaraSabina]

8 minutes ago, Rilles said:

 

Have you ever heard of divide and conquer? Cui Bono? 

[Rilles]

3 minutes ago, SaaraSabina said:

Have you ever heard of divide and conquer? Cui Bono? 

Yes, but I've also heard of oppression and people getting tired of being stepped on constantly.  

[SaaraSabina]

1 minute ago, Rilles said:

Yes, but I've also heard of oppression and people getting tired of being stepped on constantly.  

Yes so the oppression and being stepped on happens to everyone in one way or another, that’s not a certain thing for females only and to make it even more simple- since we’re into dividing and categorising. What’s the smallest division possible? 
 

If you have a well developed moral compass you don’t feel the need to be or to do anything “bad” towards anyone. If a man is saying or doing something against a woman that doesn’t make it a male/female problem that makes it an individual with a bad behaviour problem. 

[Rilles]

11 minutes ago, SaaraSabina said:

Yes so the oppression and being stepped on happens to everyone in one way or another, that’s not a certain thing for females only and to make it even more simple- since we’re into dividing and categorising. What’s the smallest division possible? 
 

Yes, and we have categories for other types of oppression too, just shrugging off like "Shit happens to all of us" doesnt solve any issues. 

If you have a well developed moral compass you don’t feel the need to be or to do anything “bad” towards anyone. If a man is saying or doing something against a woman that doesn’t make it a male/female problem that makes it an individual with a bad behaviour problem.

If theres an entire culture that makes it okay to be "bad" then that is a systemic problem. For example, being macho easily leads to making sexual jokes that offend women, but its rarely frowned upon or taken seriously, well its starting to, atleast in my country. 

If everyone had a well developed moral compass we wouldnt even need to have this conversation. 

 

Edited July 12, 2020 by Rilles

[w4read]

@Rilles I think it's highly relevant still, but we have approached a phase where change has become much harder to achieve. At least in more developed countries as far as I know, there are laws protecting against pretty much all forms of discrimination. However, there are still discrimination, but it's now happening more on an unconcious level as opposed to before when it was much more obvious. Where as before you could point to different laws and say that this is obviously discrimination, the discrimation Is now based on gender biased perceptions that are much harder to spot and takes a lot of consideration and introspection in order to see what's actually going on. 

For example, If you take the example of female leaders, it will be much harder for them to do a good job as leaders because the workers tend to respect male leaders more. So, as a female leader, if you are too dominant your employees will react negatively, while if it was a man that they respected more then the same leadership style would be okay. In others words, there is an expectation of women as leaders to not be too authoritative, but at the same time not too compassionate either. Which in many cases makes it almost impossible to please everyone and someone will most likely not be happy with their leadership style. Whereas a man in the same position could get a natural authority straight away and have more slack in his choice of style while still be considered a good leader.

The same in conversations where men in many instances have a tendency to talk over women, implying that they have something more important to say, but often not conscious about it themselves. ( The same also goes for other forms of "mansplaining")

I also think that the #meetoo is a good movement that puts focus on what is, and probably is always going to be to some extent, a concern that we have to live with. But I think that focusing on it and deliberately working against sexual assault and harrassment is something we will always need to do and that will reduce the number of crimes in the long term. 

So, all in all I think feminism is a good movement. There are some extreme of course that I notice have hijacked the term so that other people have stopped identifying themselves as feminists, and started using other words like "egalitarian" and so on to underline the fact that they are for equal rights and nothing else. But I think that if people call themselves feminists and fight for equal rights, then thats good enough. Don't let those crazy extremist hijack a good and history loaded term.

 

 

[Peter-Andre]

@w4read I agree with pretty much everything you wrote, but I would like to add that it's not just the fault of a few extremists that the label has gotten a bad reputation. Anti-feminists will almost deliberately cherry-pick these particular "feminists" and use them to intentionally smear the entire movement. I see this a lot from people on the right, and unfortunately they've largely succeeded in worsening feminism's reputation.

[w4read]

@Peter-Andre Absolutely. But I also think that the extremists have a tendency to be much louder than the rest, so it's probably a combination of cherry picking and the "extremists" being more visible. I actually lean more towards these types of misrepresentations happening unconciously more than deliberately.

[Preety_India]

 

@Peter-Andre  sorry this name box doesn't go away. 

 

There is a tendency to dethrone feminism. One way to do this is to pick a toxic woman who uses feminist policy and then frame the entire movement as bad and abusive to intentionally break down the movement. 

And direct hate towards feminists on purpose so that other women are discouraged from joining the movement because they would feel that they could get branded the same way. 

And constantly keep parroting the same example to disavow the movement. 

This reminds me of how the right wing will defend action against protestors by calling all protestors as rioters when it's clear that only few are rioters and rest are peaceful protestors. 

But right wing media will purposely focus only on burning buildings and rioters and not on peaceful protestors. 

This is an example of classic cognitive dissonance. You want to create a picture you wanna see because another picture will challenge your beliefs which you don't like. 

The interesting part that amuses me is when right wing is very quick to point out that "all cops are not bad apples", "all men are not abusers" "all are not racists" but when it comes to feminism, they want all feminists to be labelled as bad and toxic.. 

They can't apply the same logic to protestors or feminists. 

Funny how that works. 

Also the other popular way of defeating women is to say "you're playing victim" victim card. 

Feminists are not playing victim. They want victims to be heard, they want justice for them. 

By the same logic of the right wing, the phrase social justice warrior has earned a bad reputation 

 

The problem is severe when you're a real victim but the other party says you're playing victim 

It's hard for feminists already. It's harder when society lacks empathy. 

But then again you have to think why feminism exists in the first place. Because society lacked empathy. 

 

Edited July 13, 2020 by Preety_India

[Peter-Andre]

5 minutes ago, Preety_India said:

The interesting part that amuses me is when right wing is very quick to point out that "all cops are not bad apples", "all men are not abusers" "all are not racists" but when it comes to feminism, they want all feminists to be labelled as bad and toxic.. 

They can't apply the same logic to protestors or feminists.

Leo has talked about this before. People have a much more nuanced view of themselves and their allies than they do their perceived foes. In the case of right-wingers, it serves their agenda to simplify feminism and reduce it down to just the extremists. That way it's easier to demonize and harder to take seriously, so they won't have their beliefs challenged by it. Part of the reason why this tactic is so common is because of how sneaky it is. Most people don't even realize that they are doing this.

[Peter-Andre]

25 minutes ago, w4read said:

Absolutely. But I also think that the extremists have a tendency to be much louder than the rest, so it's probably a combination of cherry picking and the "extremists" being more visible. I actually lean more towards these types of misrepresentations happening unconciously more than deliberately.

Sure, the extremists of any movement will always be over-represented in the media and general discourse because they stand out from the rest. I also agree that people who focus too much on these extremists are usually not doing so consciously.

[Preety_India]

@Peter-Andre  exactly. 

Most people foolishly buy into this rhetoric and don't see the tactic behind it . I call it the misinformation propoganda machine. Mpm. I have noticed a lot of this on YouTube and media and it took me 3 years of following right wing media on YouTube to finally realize that all they spew out is garbage which the youth is voraciously feeding into without seeing the consequences of such radicalization. 

That's when I coined the term misinformation propaganda machine to describe these sort of people and factions that earn money by provoking people on purpose against Liberalism. 

In essence it's actually very easy to make a person racist. Just use survival propaganda. 

On the other hand, it's tougher to let a person give up racism. 

Because as humans we are engineered for survival so it's easy to go overboard with survival agenda. 

Also this is very close minded survival. 

If you want to go meta on survival and see the big picture you will realize that greater survival of the species is only possible through unity and harmony between different parts of the species like race and gender and not by divisive politics. 

Otherwise the division will cause mayhem and destruction of all, not just one.