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Do you consider yourself a feminist? (A question for both women and men.)
louisev:
I may have been misleading in what I said. I cited Phyllis Schlafly and Sarah Palin as female leaders in providing negative examples and maintaining the subjugation of women. I don't blame men for what is an "equal opportunity" campaign to maintain traditional disproportionate sex roles.
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: louisev on March 14, 2009, 04:13:47 pm ---Looks like I'm the lone female dissenter here in the feminist question.
I am not a feminist because I do not believe in the rhetoric I have heard from feminist writers and intellectuals. I believe in equal rights for women, but I do not believe this is a feminist stance but rather a humane one. The risk that I see from the feminist intellectuals I have read is that there is a destructive component to feminism that sees men as inherently subjugating women, that society as a whole is geared toward subjugation and diminution. I simply don't believe that. I think that sex roles (I don't use the term "gender roles", gender to me is a grammatical term pressed into usage in recent times to mean sex) are taught, reinforced and advertised largely by women. Men mostly benefit from them. It is women who played the instrumental role in turning the clock back on the Equal Rights Amendment. It is women, women like Phyllis Schlafly and most recently, Sarah Palin, who believe that there is some strength in maintaining outmoded "traditions" which involve restricting access to family planning information and birth control, limiting and outlawing abortion. I do not believe that feminism addresses the fact that women, themselves, due to their own upbringing and their own determination to suppress progress and equal rights for women, particularly reproductive rights, are at the leading edge of the opposition to an equal society. The real culprit in solving the issues of inequality, to me, lie not in feminism, but in a freedom from religious intolerance and imposing outmoded and extreme religious ideals on society, and on women in particular.
--- End quote ---
Thanks for posting, Louise. I was hoping you would, because I think I saw you mention somewhere else recently that you're not a feminist, and I was curious about your reasons.
To me, anybody who believes in equal rights for women is by definition a feminist. That's the entire meaning of the term, for me. Now there are plenty of ideas some feminists hold which I don't share, but that doesn't keep me from continuing to define myself (or the women I disagree with, for that matter), as feminists.
For example, in the early '90s, the writer Katie Roiphe published The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism, which argued that feminists exaggerate the extent of female victimization. Roiphe is a feminist, but she favors a feminism that sees women as powerful and strong rather than women as victims. Of course the two aren't mutually exclusive, and I don't agree with everything Roiphe said, but I found her message refreshing and I tend to lean that way myself. The book was quite controversial at the time, though.
Another big area of contention within feminism is the conflict between feminists who see differences between men and women as inherent, vs. feminists who consider them mostly the result of cultural conditioning.
And yet another is the question of whether traditional women's interests and activities are undervalued because they actually hold less value (explaining why women were pushed into them), or does society just consider them less valuable because women do them? Marge_innavera and I got into this debate a few months ago with regard to beauty contests. Are beauty contests inherently more trivial than football?
Anyway, not to get too far off track, because I wanted to address the other part of Louise's post. Yes, I think it is definitely true that women are often the ones who teach and enforce traditional sex roles. Just as in cultures that practice female circumcision, it's usually mothers and grandmothers who encourage and perform it. Women, like men, grow up absorbing the biases and assumptions of their cultures, and many continue to support them even when those biases tend to benefit men. I think it's possible to work to change those biases without blaming them exclusively on men. When I use the term "the patriarchy," it's usually with a certain degree of irony.
brokeplex:
Oh, good heavens! What a waste of time!
Women have had full equality under the law with men for decades in the US and the West in general - this is a been-there done-that thing.
Feminist activists need to concentrate their political actions in Muslim / Sharia dominated nations, where women are still second class citizens.
But then maybe its just a whole lot easier and less risky to agitate in the US and the west, than concentrating on those areas that truly need to change their laws towards women.
So YES! I am a Saudi Feminist!
On Strike for Equal Rights in Saudi!
Front-Ranger:
I wish you were right, blokeplex, but sadly you are not. Discrimination against women is alive and growing even in the U.S. During the recent downturn, corporations have used "we need to remain competitive" as an excuse to weed out women, older employees, and minorities.
The pendulum has swung back too far the other way. The latest generation coming up, those who are turning 21 now, are unaware of the fight our sisters and mothers have fought. Too many of them aspire to be housewives and nothing more.
Also under siege are rights for poor women in the U.S. and worldwide. Child care and basic medical care are being cut right and left. There is a movement to turn public hospitals into religious-based hospitals so that poor women will be deprived of the special services they need.
I read an article in the Wall St Journal today praising the "underground economy" for giving poor women in countries like India better opportunities. So a woman who worked at a factory but lost her job now works at a makeshift roadside stand selling "medicinal wine." She makes $3 more per day than she did at the factory. She makes $10 per day. And this is a good thing???
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: brokeplex on March 14, 2009, 06:25:59 pm ---Oh, good heavens! What a waste of time!
--- End quote ---
Thanks, brokeplex, for illustrating so perfectly the importance of a strong feminist movement and for providing a reminder that women's progress is far from complete here.
--- Quote ---Women have had full equality under the law with men for decades in the US and the West in general
--- End quote ---
Once again, you are pretending to think that laws thoroughly control all behavior, attitudes, choices, human interaction and private activities. That is, I think you're pretending. You are pretending, right brokeplex? Surely you can't really believe it.
--- Quote ---Feminist activists need to concentrate their political actions in Muslim / Sharia dominated nations, where women are still second class citizens.
--- End quote ---
How odd! You phrase this as if you don't realize this is already being done, by Western feminists as well as feminists who grew up and/or live in in those places.
--- Quote ---But then maybe its just a whole lot easier and less risky to agitate in the US and the west, than concentrating on those areas that truly need to change their laws towards women.
--- End quote ---
You seem not to realize that being a feminist does not require one to "agitate" anywhere at all. Feminist and agitator are two different things, brokeplex. I'm a feminist, but frankly I'm not much of a political activist, let alone an "agitator."
You seem to see the word "feminist" as resembling "militant" or "activist" some other term that assumes an activity component. In fact, feminist is more like "Christian" or "agnostic" or "conservative" or "liberal" -- it's simply a description of one's beliefs.
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