azurelunatic | Women, men, and labels

metafandom just exploded in feminism, so I wound up over at

commodorified's LJ again, to join in the discussion.

I think I'll quibble about semantics. Feminism is the fight for equal legal rights (and with them, responsibilities) for women, and the attendant social battle for the possibility of equal social position, especially where gender intersects with the business world.

Coming bundled with feminism are activists, who fight for said rights. Sometimes this includes militant radical activists. And when gender issues come up, sometimes this means militant radical activist misandrists. (Hooray for the lunatic fringe of any legitimate movement!)

I am not a fan of militant radical activist misandrists; they generally cause me to either back away slowly or run screaming. I'm none too fond of the domestic passive-aggressive misandrist either.

Feminism should be the positive side of the backlash against misogyny and rigid gender roles. Misandry is the shadow side. But all too often, people say "feminist" and mean "psychotic misandrist". It may be too late now, but please, please, please, separate the legal and social movement of equal rights (and responsibilities) from some of the (scary!) people in it.

Because of said scary people, there's been a backlash against the spectrum of psychotic militant radical activist misandrists. Hiding in that backlash are reactionary misogynists, who not only object to scary militant radical misandry, but also to women breaking free of the traditional societal mold and doing their own thing. (Okay, maybe not "hiding in" so much as "creating it as a front and trying to attract feminists who dislike misandry for deniability purposes", but same general effect.)

Objecting to misandrists is a legitimate position. I don't much care for misandrists, whether they come screaming for women's rights and acting up in public, or whether they're an aproned homemaker with five kids and nothing but loathing for her husband and all other men. I think that anyone with that much hatred for one of the two primary genders on this planet has more problems than I'm ever going to care to touch, let alone try to fix (unless I'm called to say or do something, which is another story).

I think that it's an excellent step for feminism that reactionary misogynists feel that they have to hide behind the objection to misandry. They're in retreat now, and looking more and more like the outdated fools they are every single day. They have no legitimate leg to stand on, so they're relying on stirring up confusion about where the lines between misandry and feminism actually lie. That kind of confusion can be dispelled by being crystal clear and pedantic about words, and calling a reactionary misogynist a reactionary misogynist when one sees one.

(Next up on the revolution front: once women have equal social as well as legal right to do whatever they please that any man can do, men are going to start the revolution to be accepted as homemakers. But that one will probably wait until the power imbalance corrects itself more, and maybe it will be a non-issue by then and we'll be on to the next big thing.

tygerr, you are as always very good about pointing out misandry when you see it and calling it for what it is; I wouldn't even be aware of it as an issue without you pointing things out.)

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The misandrists wouldn't be a problem, but that they're /loud/, and if you're a guy you become the focus of their attention.

People who are actually feminists don't stick in your memory, because they're normal people. Misandrists stick in your memory because they're bloody nutters and the weird is memorable.

So for your normal guy, the misandrist becomes the loud, memorable face of feminism, and when a bigoted friend talks about 'those feminists', your hypothetical non-bigoted guy puts the nut-job misandrist as a stand-in for 'feminist' and what the bigot says seems to stand up and not be the abhorrent statement it actually is. It's really easy to fall into this trap - especially if you've recently dealt with one of those nut-job man-hating 'feminists'.

Personally, I think that the misandrists are anti-feminist. From a pragmatic point of view, they damage the cause they claim to support, and from a philosophical point of view what they want is not equality and so could not be said to be feminism. These people are no different at all from the misogynists they hate so much. Both sides need to die in a fire.

Well-said.

My roommate supports spaying and neutering them and locking them in a room for 84 hours.

Any significance to three and a half days?

Other than by that time, they'll have likely killed each other, not that I know of.

I couldn't remember how many hours were in a week :)

Anyways, yes, by that time, they would have killed each other...

The quicker option is to make it an air-tight cupboard. You wouldn't have to wait 84 minutes, let alone 84 hours. :o)

The backlash isn't because of the scary people in the feminist movement. The backlash is because of the scary people in power.

If having scary people in your movement created a backlash, then there would be a HUGE public backlash against right-wing Fundamentalists, anti-choicers, Libertarians, and the NRA. And yet, not so much.

Blaming feminists...even the freaky ones...for anti-feminist sentiment is blaming them the propaganda job that has been done on them.

Point taken.

I have to agree. The scary people you cite are far more prevalent- and yet occasion far fewer objections- than "scary feminists."

It's worth noting that they're not more prevalent everywhere. Right-wing Fundamentalists are not in power in the UK (and, as an example, the political party currently ahead in the polls in this week's Scottish Parliament elections might lose largely because they took half a million pounds from a known extremist fundie businessman - if that's not a major objection, I don't know what is).

And obviously there's no NRA here, since we banned private ownership of all handguns and other firearms are greatly restricted.

...actually thinking about it, at least in the circles I travel in much of the time, there's not just an objection to the scary ones, there's an objection to the scary ones and their whole ilk. The segments that are outcrying are just far smaller and have not so big a market share.

Jack Thompson is one of the ones who stands out in my mind as being absolutely batshit-crazy with a huge gamer-public backlash. He's the guy to whom Penny Arcade infamously sent flowers, if I recall correctly.

I once had a very long argument with a bunch of radicals of a particular stripe about whether a man could be a feminist. (They wanted to make up some other term specifically for men.)

Didn't get anywhere. Although I did stop reading that message board.

Probably the best decision. I think men can be feminists. It's certainly a different perspective, and sometimes that's needed for a reality check.

Misandrism isn't the only dark side of feminism. Too often feminism (like any other ism that involves making statements about right and wrong, but I have to deal with it more often with feminism and I'm not allowed to argue) becomes a front for "everyone should do what I say." People say that anything they don't like is just a product of the male-dominated society, and women who do it are being total tools and oppressing the speaker thereby.

That's not unique to feminism, but for some reason, it seems to be generally accepted WRT feminism. It seems to me that the dark side of postmodernism (which is closely tied to feminism at least in academic circles) is it involves some serious ability to tell people they're being total tools if they don't do what you want. Now many people have told me this is a severe abuse of postmodernism, but it seems to be a commonly accepted way of thinking in academia.

But I am tired of being told that if I like X, or do Y or if I do not vocally object to Z, I am oppressing the speaker's right to not have to ever be exposed to people who are different from the speaker. And I am tired of the fact that the majority of feminists in academia do nothing to discourage people from doing this (and usually do it themselves), no matter what branch of the feminist movement they subscribe to.

I think that feminism will be stuck in a bad and generally hated place until the various factions of people who write the literature and talk about the theory give up on the idea that there is some correct way for women to behave. As long as large branches of feminist theory are about restricting what women are allowed to do (usually in mutually exclusive ways - for every thing a person can do, there's a branch of feminism that believes not doing it is degrading to women and a branch of feminism that believes doing it is degrading to women) feminism can't really move forward.

Is it dreadfully wrong to be amused that certain elements of feminism are essentially saying that instead of the patriarchy ruling j00, feminism should rule j00?

It's amusing. Also disturbing, but amusing.

Thankee for the hat-tip! *blush*

But there's a danger in trusting me. Just as there's a danger in trusting certain elements of feminism. Sometimes the sexism we see is real, out there in the world, and actually damaging to people and/or society. Sometimes, though, we're projecting our own fears/prejudices/damage into our not-entirely-objectively-true vision of the world.

I'm no more immune to that than any other loud special-interest activist. (I'm just, y'know, RIGHT more often! *g,d,r*)

I take most of your commentary on advertising portrayal of men with a nice sprinkle of salt, because advertising has crappy stereotypes of everyone going on.

But issuing blanket statements about specific Nasty Evil Behaviors of All Men, and then being forced to weasel back when called on it that actually it wasn't all men, because you are in possession of the equipment and you're not part of the stereotype but really since you don't conform to the stereotype you should be considered an honorary woman, you know, you're one of the GOOD men, it's all those OTHER men that we mean ... yeah, that's sexism. Though I think a lot of the female sexism against men is reactive.

Women, men, and labels

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Still sore from college

Re: Still sore from college

Re: Still sore from college

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