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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   33216 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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The simplest explanation in my eyes is:

  1. Male feminists, being feminists, tend to hang around with female feminists.

  2. Female feminists are more likely to make sexual misconduct accusations at any given level of sexual pestiness than are non-feminist women.

It’s Simpson’s Paradox all the way down.

I agree with this assessment. Sex pests in other milieus tend to be suppressed or handled more orderly. For groups with religious ties there's the associated shame in sex-pesting which incentivises burying it. More secularly minded groups may be satisfied with letting it run its course through the courts. It's only with the combination of celebrity and feminism that it gets boosted to the stratosphere. Feminists want to signal their purity by loudly rejecting the pests (and receive feminist kudos for doing so), and media figures like Gaiman tend to lean left and consequently are more likely to pest within the feminist circles.

Am I more likely to make sexual misconduct accusations at any given level of sexual pestiness? That’s news to me. What evidence do you have that maintains that belief? And what is a “non-feminist” woman, according to you?

“non-feminist” woman

A biological woman, since there is no other kind of woman, who does not propagate an anti-men narrative or attempt to benefit from such a narrative.

Well, I don’t propagate an anti-men narrative, so does that make me a non-feminist woman?

Assuming that you are a woman in the first place and that what you said is true, yes, that's what I just said, isn't it?

But I have doubts about those assumptions. You already identified as a feminist, so please do lay out what constitutes the core tenets of this feminism for you. I suspect we will find many elements that are plainly aiming to put men at a disadvantage.

Core tenets of feminism for me: “equality between men and women in all aspects of life”. That’s it. I take a situation, I ask myself, “is this promoting equality between men and women”, and if it’s not then it’s not feminist and if it is then it’s feminism.

Strange that an ideology of equality would be named after just one of the two parties it purports to equalize. Anyways.

Can you go into more detail on what you mean by equality? Purely equal treatment before the law? Equal outcomes by specific metrics? A complete eradication of the concept of differences between the sexes? Men and women already have the vote, so I guess that's not what you mean.

Equal outcomes by specific metrics is not equality that’s equity. I don’t know how to elaborate other than “women should have the same political, economic, and social rights as men”. Pure equal treatment before the law? Sure. A complete eradication of the differences between the sexes? I don’t think that’s possible lol, male reproductive health and female reproductive health are radically different to start.

Where exactly does your society not grant equal rights to men and women, then?

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And what is a “non-feminist” woman, according to you?

I am a woman who is not a feminist. I will not adopt an amorphous philosophical label that means different things to different people, and I find that many currently-popular strands of feminist philosophy poorly model social reality.

Yes, I have directly benefited from work by first-wave feminists. I have been paid for my work on the same level as my male colleagues. I vote, and while my vote counts for little except in very local elections, many politicians take women's issues into account, so I benefit from women having a vote.

I have also benefited directly from work by second-wave feminists. They pushed for increasing percent of women in various well-paid professions. I participated in well-financed programs geared to attract women into mathematics, then I benefited from graduate programs trying to increase female representation among their grad students, then I benefited from math departments trying to increase female representation among their full-time faculty.

Benefiting isn't the same as buying into the underlying philosophies, though. I gladly take equality of opportunity and equality under civil law, that I buy into. I question everything else, including the push expanding female representation in various professions that I personally benefited from. As for the third-wave feminist strands, I have yet to find one that I am willing to adopt.

So let me toss a question back at you: what specific currently-not-widely-adopted feminist philosophy do you find helpful in modeling social interactions?

I don’t split things into the “first wave” “second wave” “third wave”thing. To me, feminism is feminism; a social movement that advocates for equality between men and women in all aspects of life. Anything else is…not feminism. So, to answer your question I’d say none, because I don’t believe there’s a “currently-not-widely-adopted feminist philosophy”.

The statement "equality between men and women in all aspects of life" has lots of hidden assumptions, which feminist philosophers have interpreted in radically different and contradictory ways. Let's take a specific case and clarify what such equality would mean to you.

Incarceration: Which best describes your advocacy of equality: (A) the length of a person's sentence should be independent of one's gender, or (B) the penal system should be set up such that the burden of incarceration falls equally on men and women? Version A is "equality of opportunity", version B is "equality of outcome". The US penal system falls short on both versions of equality: women get much shorter sentences for similar crimes, and females make up just a bit over 7% of all prisoners in US.

So in this specific case (an important "aspect of life"), which kind of equality do you advocate for?

Uh, A? Equality of outcome isn’t equality that’s equity, and the definition doesn’t include that. If women are getting shorter sentences for similar crimes because of their gender, that’s sexist and very much so not feminist to me.

Don't you find it interesting that essentially every prominent feminist activist has campaigned in favour of shorter prison sentences (no sentences at all, in some cases) for women regardless of the crime? I mean, seriously, please point me in the direction of a prominent feminist activist or academic demanding harsher sentences for female murderers.

You can be as prescriptivist as you like, but at the end of the day you have to look at the facts on the ground, how the term is actually being used and how the people who describe themselves as such are behaving. This game of "my extremely specific stipulative definition of feminism is the only true and valid one, if you criticise anything associated with feminism that doesn't fall under that stipulative definition then you're arguing in bad faith" is really just a kind of navel-gazing, and it was old hat in 2014:

I point out something I don’t like about feminism, then everyone tells me in the comments that no feminist would ever do that and it’s a dirty rotten straw man. And then I link to two thousand five hundred examples of feminists doing exactly that, and then everyone in the comments No-True-Scotsmans me by saying that that doesn’t count and those people aren’t representative of feminists. And then I find two thousand five hundred more examples of the most prominent and well-respected feminists around saying exactly the same thing, and then my commenters tell me that they don’t count either and the only true feminist lives in the Platonic Realm and expresses herself through patterns of dewdrops on the leaves in autumn and everything she says is unspeakably kind and beautiful and any time I try to make a point about feminism using examples from anyone other than her I am a dirty rotten motivated-arguer trying to weak-man the movement for my personal gain.

Would you advocate for extending the sentences for female felons, then? Would you further advocate for undoing the "separate-but-equal" penal system of having separate women's prisons?

On a meta note: I realize that you have gotten a lot of responses from questioning your assumptions about feminism. Some people thrive on such attention, while others may feel overwhelmed. In case you feel more like the latter, let me assure you that I will not take it personally if you decide to stop responding to my particular line of inquiry, and neither will anyone else.

If you're aiming for a productive discussion with someone whose perspective is significantly different from yours, one useful technique is to taboo the words at the center of disagreement. Since "feminism" means so many different things to different people--even if we look at the main schools of feminist philosophy, of which some do indeed center equity--we can drop the term "feminism" and focus on specifically what you mean by it.

You and I did that.

Once we the specific ideal that you are defending ("equality between men and women in all aspects of life"), we have gotten somewhere further by establishing that you definitely "equality of opportunity", and not "equality of outcome".
Good, we are further along towards reaching common ground, since I also would rather live in a society where my opportunities are not constrained by my reproductive organs.

But I also realize that, if we are to consider "all aspects of life", we must also consider what "equality of opportunity" would mean in the negative aspects of life. Thus I ask for the two of us to focus on incarceration, a truly negative burden that our society places on a small but substantial portion of our population, where the differences between the treatment that men and women get are particularly stark. Examining what "equality of opportunity" means to you in this specific situation will help clarify the nuances that you allow "equality" to have, and also your commitment to the principle of equality (as opposed to whatever-benefits-women principle), since in this case men are very much the losers.

So if you are up for continuing this discussion, I will happily go down this rabbit hole with you.

I would advocate for extending the sentences for female felons to match the rate of male felons. There is not much a reason to do so otherwise than the sexist notion that women are incapable of being as conscious of their actions as men. I would not further advocate for undoing the "separate-but-equal" penal system of having separate women's prisons because I don't think incarcerating polar body types is a good idea. I suppose if there was a system that properly vetted an incarcarated person's weight to match their cellmate similar to wrestling I would support it, otherwise, putting someone obviously heavier than someone else inside a room is a recipe for wasting the prison guard's time.

I don't mind continuing I just have to move from my phone to my computer because I do a majority of this on my tiny little phone screen while squatting in the shower like a toad to pass the time until I can get out so I've got about as much bandwidth as that medium allows. I don't mind the questions; people are just curious and it's not every day a bonafide thoroughbred blue blood liberal feminist technically-nonbinary Democrat comes around here. I'm sure I represent the boogeyman they've always wanted to debate as much as they represent the boogeyman that haunts my nightmares lol.

See I think "feminism" means so many different things to people who don't want to be feminist but sure don't want to deal with the consequences of it. Same of Christianity; there are lots and lots and lots of people who are not Christians who try to convince others and themselves they are because, well, otherwise they would be in moral trouble. Imo it's the duty of actual Christians to remind everyone what constitutes, and more importantly, what doesn't constitute that; otherwise words and meanings are lost to manipulation and then nobody knows what the hell they're talking about.

Roundabouting to incarceration; I do not support unequal sentences for women or men. Let's jump together Mr. Rabbit.

Thanks for your willingness to continue our discussion, and also for being a good sport about other people here pushing back! It's also fine to reply when you're good-and-ready, this is more like chess-by-mail than a real-time conversation, which has the advantage that one can stop, think, and look stuff up.

Let's examine the extend-female-sentencing idea: what conditions would you allow to take into account, to ensure that both a male and a female convicted of the same crime receive the same sentence? The penalties for most felonies have room for judicial discretion. Judges tend to consider questions like: "How likely is this person to break the law in a major way, once they get out?"

This goes to the root of the question: why are we incarcerating people, anyway? The modern consensus is that the goal is to reduce crime, and that the judicial system of incarceration does it through deterrence and incapacitation.

Do you agree with the idea that those who are unlikely to re-offend should spend less time in prison than those who are likely to re-offend?

Having dependents, for example, correlates with a lower chance of re-offending. Would you allow for taking into consideration whether the felon has children or aging parents that depend on them before passing a sentence?

By the way, I appreciate the thought of sorting prisoners by weight class, kind of like how they do in wrestling. My niece and nephews wrestle, so I have been to a few competitions. I therefore notice how extremely rare it is for a female to win a match, when paired against a male, even though they are in the same category. (It does happen; we have some girls in the wrestling club with excellent technique.) I remain utterly unsurprised by this. I am healthy, physically fit, and have a black belt in a martial art, yet I am under no delusion that I could take an average 150-pound man.

I think you are being a little naive here. Not disingenuous, but you are presenting something of a straw man. You're basically making the Marie Shear argument: "Feminism is the radical notion that women are people."

Now to steelman this, I know what feminists would say is "Duh, we know anti-feminists don't think we're literally not human, we mean they don't treat us as people like themselves with agency and full equal rights." Which would be fair enough, but if you look around (even in a place like the Motte with no shortage of anti-feminists), you will find very few people who think women aren't "people." Yes, we do have a few posters who literally do think women are p-zombies or should be property, but they are a minority.

The people here who oppose feminism are mostly not tradcons who want to repeal the 19th (though there are some of those too). They are people who have grievances with feminism as it manifests today, particularly third wave or "intersectional" feminism. Such "currently-not-widely-adopted" feminist philosophies would be things like #BelieveWomen, which is a classic case of motte-and-bailey, the Motte being "take women's claims of being harassed or assaulted seriously and don't assume they're making it up," the bailey being "Believe any woman uncritically and never express doubt about a rape story," even if it doesn't pass the sniff test.

Intersectional feminism is what also brought us trans ideology, which got many previously feminist women terfed out. JK Rowling, unambiguously a committed feminist, is now called a fascist and worst by many modern feminists, simply because she doesn't agree that trans women are women.

I try to be sympathetic to feminist arguments, because I do in fact believe women are people, but very much of modern feminist writing seems to fall within the stereotype often described here of women wanting all the privileges, none of the responsibility. The memes are kind of mean, but they also aren't... wrong. (I note that the linked article makes an earnest argument that "AKSHUALLY the problem is when men flirt and it's unreciprocated!" Which entirely misses the point.) I think of people like Amanda Marcotte and Jessica Valente, who were vanguards of modern third wave feminism and are some of the most bad faith writers I've ever had the misfortune of once taking seriously. They are practically memes themselves, with zero self-awareness.

Saying "feminism is feminism" and you don't split it into "waves" is kind of like a Christian saying he doesn't split Christianity into denominations. Well, great, you can say "Christianity isn't a religion, it's a relationship with God" all you want, but it is, in fact, a religion, and people ostracize, cancel, and even kill each other over denominational differences. I don't know if I can think of examples of feminists literally killing each other over sectarian differences, but as JK Rowling would point out, they most certainly care about them even if you claim they don't exist.

Point of order: SJ intersectional feminism is generally considered to be fourth-wave feminism, not third-wave (fourth-wave feminism being basically defined as "social justice orthodox feminism", and the dividing line being social media mostly welding feminism/gay-rights/trans-rights/anti-racism into a single movement with consensus on a wide range of issues). I think you'll find a lot less opposition around here to (actual) third-wave feminism than to fourth-wave (though not by any means zero).

The most notable current third-wave feminist movement would be the gender-critical feminists/TERFs (who rejected being welded into the SJ coalition, and are thus not fourth-wave).

I don't know if I can think of examples of feminists literally killing each other over sectarian differences

The TERF/TIRF debate has come pretty damn close at times, which is hardly surprising given that the latter denomination contains a higher proportion of male testosterone-y people than probably any nominally feminist denomination in history.

Well, I don’t appreciate being insulted by being called naive. I heard a lot of that growing up in life, and through sheer statistics I’ve must’ve contemplated the declaration too many times to appreciate it anymore.

As an ex-Christian who went from Lutheran to Methodist to Baptist and then just plain Protestant, I don’t really split it into denominations either and consider it antithetical to the whole Christianity kaboodle. If people are ostracizing, cancelling and killing eachother over denominational differences I can’t imagine God would sanction such behavior since I can’t find it in the 10 Commandments. That a lot of Pharisees think they’re Christians, to me, doesn’t change the definition of being Christian. If God is real, I’m certain there is a great deal of people in for a violent awakening dancing to the tune of “Charlie’s Inferno” when they die.

In my opinion, when I look around the Motte, I actually see a majority in people who think women are not people. Thinking a woman is secretly happier being a stay at home mother and TV shows, newscasts, movies and teachers have convinced her to be miserable removes her agency and treats her own choices as math results, or that women are inherently less funny, less intelligent, less emotionally resilient than men because of their genes. The casual language around here about women is so very much not centered on speaking about them as if they are people capable of the same quality of thought as me in my opinion. In the same vein, if a bunch of misandrist and misogynistic people call themselves feminists, they’re wrong and hopefully will cringe at themselves with enough introspection.

I can’t comment much on your opinion on transgenderism since I don’t think it’s an ideology. I certainly wouldn’t call JK Rowling a feminist since she thinks “femaleness resides in the sexed body”. I’m not a woman because I have titties and estrogen, I’m a woman because I identify with the Western cultural construct of a woman, and in elaboration, I don’t wear a skirt because it’s biologically wired in me to do it. Implying anything else removes my agency, which doesn’t treat me as a person, and therefore isn’t feminist.

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Thinking a woman is secretly happier being a stay at home mother and TV shows, newscasts, movies and teachers have convinced her to be miserable removes her agency and treats her own choices as math results

You're the one who thinks that any woman in a romantic relationship with a conservative or non-feminist man is secretly miserable and filled with self-loathing but isn't consciously aware of it. I've described this attitude as condescending before and I'm happy to do so again.

or that women are inherently less funny, less intelligent, less emotionally resilient than men because of their genes

I think men are (on average) inherently less physically flexible, empathetic and emotionally intelligent than women, and more prone to aggression and violence, because of our genes. Does that mean I don't think men are people?

Or could it possibly be the case that I think men and women have different, complementary strengths and weaknesses?

I’m not a woman because I have titties and estrogen, I’m a woman because I identify with the Western cultural construct of a woman

Out of curiosity, do you have a womb?

or that women are inherently less funny, less intelligent, less emotionally resilient than men because of their genes.

How is this the same as “not seeing women as people”? You’ve focused on three specific vectors along which men have an innate advantage on women; men are, on average, better at making women laugh than women are at making men laugh. When we’re talking about intelligence differences between the sexes, it’s not a simple as “men are more intelligent than women”; rather, men are more represented at both tails of the intelligence distribution. There are more highly-intelligent men than there are highly-intelligent women, which is what you seem to care a lot about; however, there are also far more very stupid men than there are very stupid women.

I could easily focus on vectors along which women outperform men. Women are more conscientious, more kind and empathetic, and better equipped to navigate egalitarian and heavily procedural social-professional environments. (And given evolutions in the culture and structure of the modern workplace, this is one reason why women are beginning to economically outpace men in most strata of the white-collar world.) It would be absurd to accuse me of “not thinking men are people” because I have acknowledged women as superior in these specific ways.

I do not believe I am any more kind or empathetic than my brothers, my father, my boyfriend, his friends, my male coworkers, my cousins, my uncles and my grandfather because of how I was born. I think thinking otherwise removes agency from all those people - that no matter how hard they try, they’re always going to be a little less than me - dehumanizes them and doesn’t treat them as a whole person with free will and the choice to be better.

We’ll have to agree to disagree on the whole “men are funnier than women and there are more smart men than women” thing.

"I do not believe that I am any taller than my friend from Japan because of how I was born. I think thinking otherwise removes agency from Japanese people - that no matter how hard they try, they're always going to be a little shorter than me - dehumanizes them and doesn't treat them as a whole person with free will and the choice to be better."

Maybe you believe that blank-slate thinking is "nicer" than recognising the genetic components of various physical and psychological traits. That doesn't mean that blank-slate thinking is true: that it makes more accurate predictions than the alternatives. I think you're getting confused on the is-ought distinction.

As an aside, I'm consistently baffled as to how blank-slatists did such a good job of marketing themselves like they're the ones who are promoting a kinder, more charitable worldview. I recognise that, genetics being what they are, some people are just smarter than other people through no fault of their own, and there's not really much they can do to change that, so they shouldn't feel bad about it. But blank-slatists would have us believe that, because there's supposedly no genetic component to intelligence, then if someone is bad at maths, the only possible explanation is that they're lazy. Which is both untrue and extremely unkind to a person who may well be driving themselves to distraction trying to understand algebra and just failing to get it for reasons entirely outside of their power to change.

I do not believe I am any more kind or empathetic than my brothers, my father, my boyfriend, his friends, my male coworkers, my cousins, my uncles and my grandfather because of how I was born.

Wait, does this only apply across gender lines? Do you agree that some people are more empathetic or kind than others on an individual level? If no then that's wild, please expand. If yes then why would you expect these variable traits to be equally distributed between groups that have wildly different hormonal profiles which cause behavioral differences in a very straightforward manner?

Are most, if not all, of the individuals you just brought up taller than you are? Do they have greater grip strength than you do? Assuming the answer is yes, do you believe it invalidates their agency? Do you think tall people just simply work harder at stretching their bones than shorter people do, and therefore the difference in height is a matter of agency?

Similarly, do you think it dehumanizes me to suggest that no matter how much effort and resources I dedicate to improving my appearance, I will never be as physically-attractive as Henry Cavill? That he simply has better baseline genetic potential than I do? Do you think that makes me less human than he is?

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Well, I don’t appreciate being insulted by being called naive

Well, the alternative is believing you're just being disingenuous, which is more insulting imo.

You seem to define a lot of things according to how you personally feel about them. JK Rowling definitely considers herself a feminist, and on every single issue except trans women, she is probably on the same page as you. Yet you feel comfortable asserting that she is not a feminist because you are a third wave postmodernist feminist.

My opinion is that you are in fact a woman because you have "titties and estrogen" and that woman is not purely a social construct. You can disagree, and maybe there is some way you could prove me wrong, though I doubt it. But it doesn't mean I cease to consider you a person.

Agree to disagree? I don’t think I’m giving the impression of being honest and sincere, I think I am being both lol. That you struggle to understand how I can sincerely have my beliefs is one thing, but saying at best I’m inexperienced and at worst I’m a liar, well, Idk what to say other than “think what you want” and “that’s not very nice”.

I highly doubt JK Rowling and I are on the same page about every single issue except trans women. She probably doesn’t agree gender roles are a social construct, since she’s a TERF. She also likes to deadname trans women on Twitter; digging into the myriad of opposing sub-issues in that would be too long.

To be clear, my statement regarding the fact that you are naive or insincere concerned specifically your claim that "feminism is feminism" and that you don't consider there to be divisions or different schools of thought within them. You may genuinely believe that, but it's so obvious that these divisions do exist (and that other feminists are very aware of them) that it just seems kind of silly to claim you are following the One True Feminism and everyone else is either also on the same team as youor they've got it wrong.

I highly doubt JK Rowling and I are on the same page about every single issue except trans women. She probably doesn’t agree gender roles are a social construct, since she’s a TERF.

... Have you ever actually talked to a TERF?

They very much do believe that gender roles are social constructs. That is their primary objection to men claiming to be women! They consider sex to be a biological reality, and gender roles to be social constructs, and from their point of view, trans women willingly adopt, play act and reify gender roles while claiming that they are based on some innate property. It's trans women who claim that wearing a skirt makes you a woman, and being a woman makes you want to wear a skirt.

She also likes to deadname trans women on Twitter

Even if this is true, while I'm perfectly willing to have the Rowling debate again, it's irrelevant to whether or not she's a feminist, unless you think being a bad person (according to your ethics) means someone can't be a feminist.

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I’m not sure feminists are more likely to report sexual misconduct, but I think using the specific words ‘rape’ or ‘sexual harassment’ is probably more associated with feminists- most conservative women would say ‘why can’t he take a hint/learn to leave me alone’ or ‘he took advantage of me’ or whatever, and the terminology difference probably makes a big difference in the level of formality the response has.

Am I more likely to make sexual misconduct accusations at any given level of sexual pestiness?

Of course. Unlike other women, you are aware of the patriarchy and rape culture and the myriad ways in which they threaten and coerce and pressure and nudge an entire sex into sex. Is it surprising that a strong perceptive woman unafraid to stand up for herself would run afoul of the meek sexual object role the patriarchy assigned to her?

I'm going to upvote all your posts so you get out of the filter already, I promise that's the only reason though.

It’s ok, I’ll forgive you this one time ;)

I suspect she'll drop back into it (if you even manage to get her out of it) due to all the downvotes she gets; AIUI it's (upvotes - downvotes) that determines whether you're filtered. There's a reason 80-90% of mod actions are approvals of SJer posts.

It's not 80%-90%, but yes, someone who is a consistently liberal poster will unfortunately stay in the new user filter because they get downvoted so much the system cannot distinguish between "someone with unpopular opinions" and "troll." We're actually working on a solution.

First two pages of the mod log have 40 approvals and 10 other actions (first four pages 81 approvals and 19 other actions), although I suppose a few of those approvals were of actual noobs and that might be above average. (Note that I'm counting a modpost and the ban (if any) accompanying it as separate actions here, because that's what the mod log does.)

A solution would be neat, both to help retention and to save you guys some time.

Am I more likely to make sexual misconduct accusations at any given level of sexual pestiness? That’s news to me.

One of Feminism's main pushes 2014-2020 was explicitly to make sexual misconduct allegations require less proof and to have more consequences, and to increase the rate of report generally while explicitly arguing that safeguards against false accusations must be systematically removed. Notable early examples included Atheism+, #ListenAndBelieve, Jackie's story, #TeamHarpies, We Need to Talk About Jian, along with too many smaller ones to name; on a policy level, we had the Title IX "Dear Colleague" letter implementing these as policies in the university system, and "affirmative consent" laws in California. This led to #MeToo, which culminated with the farce of the Kavanaugh accusations. This is a very abbreviated list, and this particular set of demands has been at least arguably the dominant one within Feminism over the last decade.

Maybe you are an atypical feminist, but to the degree that Feminism is a coherent category that can be analyzed, "dramatically lower threshold for sexual assault accusations" seems very clearly to be one of its most prominent characteristics.

And what is a “non-feminist” woman, according to you?

I would define it as a woman who does not identify with the presently-dominant ideological form of Feminism. This would describe my wife, sister and mother, as well as a number of other women in my life.

farce of the Kavanaugh accusations

I'm tempted to claim that the Kavanaugh accusations were the tragedy and E Jean Carroll's allegations against Trump were the farce.

Even if you want to set the threshold of tragedy at Blasey Ford, which I'd consider rather inflammatory, we went from tragedy to farce by Julie Swetnick.

“Sexual misconduct allegations requiring less proof”, “increasing the rate of reports” and “arguing that safeguards against false accusations must be systematically removed” all, to me, run afoul of the definition of feminism, which is “a social movement that advocates for equality between men and women in all aspects of life”, so that’s not feminist.

Well, except things are what they do, and feminists consistently advocate for these things, therefore they are feminist.

There’s nothing inherently Republican about driving a pickup truck. But, uh.

You can have ridiculous no true Scotsman definitions that exclude any bad behavior from your own side. They’re just wrong.

But uh what? I don’t think there’s something inherently Republican about driving a pickup truck.

As a feminist myself, I'd agree that that's not the type of stuff that I support as a feminist (in fact, I've spoken out against other feminists who espouse them). Unfortunately, feminists like you or me tend to be either rare or quiet (for me, personally, I chose to be the latter due to noticing that speaking out in the way you did in this comment tended to be met with extremely harsh abuse from other feminists), so I have to admit that comments like Quantumfreakonomics's or FCfromSSC's in this thread are entirely accurate when describing the general group of people who both call themselves feminists and who other people recognize as feminists. I've just had to learn to leave my ego at the door and not feel attacked when people talk about "feminists" supporting [thing I, as a feminist, oppose]. I think having relatively unpopular or at least less-loud (we could be a silent majority among feminists, and I actually suspect that that's the case!) perspective within a particular ideological group unfortunately tends to require this kind of thinking, and this forum in particular tends to have a high proportion of people with fairly idiosyncratic opinions that make them relatively unpopular or, again, less loud compared to the common, mainstream ones within any given ideology.

I think feminists “like” you and me are quite loud and common. They’re just not very reactionary and tend to be busy doing things instead of participating in online flame wars. That there are people on Twitter posting sexists takes and arguing that it’s not sexist and getting a bunch of other people angry doesn’t change the fact they aren’t feminists and it’s wrong to regard them as such. If they get together in a group and say they’re feminists their numbers sadly don’t change the definition. If that group makes noise and mainstream news outlets pay attention to it, that still makes them not feminist, and if some Congress people call them feminists that’s a lot of wrong Congressmen and a very wrong mainstream that is using the wrong word. It’s Pharisees all the way up and down, in my opinion.

They’re just not very reactionary and tend to be busy doing things instead of participating in online flame wars.

Well, besides online flame wars, these self-described "feminists" also tend to run actual policy and companies and write essays in mainstream publications and books. These are the people that the layman picture when they hear the word "feminist," even if they don't meet your or my personal standard for what constitutes a "feminist." And they are certainly far more influential in modern USA politics than feminists of your or my sort (though the recent election might be evidence that that is changing).

That there are people on Twitter posting sexists takes and arguing that it’s not sexist and getting a bunch of other people angry doesn’t change the fact they aren’t feminists and it’s wrong to regard them as such. If they get together in a group and say they’re feminists their numbers sadly don’t change the definition.

I disagree, but our disagreement here doesn't matter. God didn't hand us a tablet that says "the English word that starts with 'f,' ends with 't,' and has 'eminis' in between shall forever be defined as XYZ." If enough people use a word to mean something, and they all agree with how it's used, then people like you or me with unpopular definitions don't get to walk in and demand that they submit to our own idiosyncratic definition of the term.

In any case, again, this disagreement doesn't matter. You are free to believe in a prescriptive model of word definitions rather than a descriptive one. But what should be understood is that other people, including likely most on this website, see the word "feminist" as meaning something different from you, and they have zero problems communicating with each other this way. If this semantics issue is too much of a hump for you, I wonder if a mental trick of replacing "feminist" with a new made-up word "pheminist," where it's prescriptively defined as something like "person that people on TheMotte generally agree is being described when they use the word 'feminist.'" would be helpful. At the very least, that'd be a way to escape from feeling like you yourself are being scrutinized or discussed.

Gonna have to agree to disagree for sure. To me, by your logic Jesus should have submitted to the judgement of the Pharisees because a majority of people agreed with them, and yet we can all universally agree he was right to call them un-Christian and he was right to flip tables in the temple. God didn’t hand us the tablet, we wrote it ourselves. A bunch of sexists being sexists and calling themselves feminists is no different than a bunch of people thinking beating their children into submission is God-approved and Christian. That sexist people go into governmental work and try to enact sexist policies while calling it feminism still doesn’t make them feminists. And if people want to talk about sexism on this site and call it feminism that still doesn’t change the definition of it. “A person that people on TheMotte generally agree is being described when they use the word 'feminist’” would be, to me, a sexist.

To me, by your logic Jesus should have submitted to the judgement of the Pharisees because a majority of people agreed with them and yet we can all universally agree he was right to call them un-Christian and he was right to flip tables in the temple.

He actually did submit to the judgement of the Pharisees. Also, he didn't call them un-Christian, he called them un-jewish, and "we" certainly dont all universally agree with that assessment; I'd imagine the Jews here beg to differ, and the argument that Christianity is innately left-wing is a common one among our right-leaning atheists. There are a number of posters here whose ideology disagrees strongly with a plain reading of Jesus' teaching.

God didn’t hand us the tablet, we wrote it ourselves. A bunch of sexists being sexists and calling themselves feminists is no different than a bunch of people thinking beating their children into submission is God-approved and Christian.

If people don't agree on how to use labels, communication grinds to a halt. The Rationalists had a whole thing about this: tabooing words. Just pick a different word, even a random word, to denote that the concept's proper label is disputed, and move on to talking about the contents instead. Or if you insist on your label, just understand that you're pretty much the only one using it that way here, because you're one of a vanishing few using the word that way anywhere. So when people don't instinctively use the word the way you prefer, have a little charity.

A bunch of sexists being sexists and calling themselves feminists is no different than a bunch of people thinking beating their children into submission is God-approved and Christian.

...My parents tried to raise me in a God-approved fashion, and they definitely used spankings with a belt or a wooden spoon, particularly when I refused to submit. Would you say they "beat me into submission", and was their purported Christianity false?

The way you are using language is doomed. Assumptions, axioms, are necessary to think, let alone communicate. But you need to be conscious of the fact that the map is not the territory; axioms can be wrong, and if you're going to adopt them, you need to have a clear view as to why, and what they are costing you specifically. If you treat them as a brute fact of reality, then it becomes difficult to impossible to communicate with others who don't share them. Like above: I am now doubtful that you and I share a common understanding of "beating children" or of "Christianity".

I respond to you for the same reason I respond to most other people: I want to understand how you, an individual human, thinks. This is valuable to me because I want to understand and be understood by others. What else would the point of any of this be?

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In that case, it seems that TheMotte - and, honestly, most of America - is a place where they speak a different version of English from you, where "feminist" refers to a certain strand of "sexist." As such, when you see "feminist" being analyzed, it should be clear that it's not referring to the same thing you are when you use "feminist." As long as everyone involved can communicate to each other using words that each other recognize and agree on the meaning of, I don't see any problem.

God didn’t hand us the tablet, we wrote it ourselves.

I don't want to argue this, but I'm curious who is "we" here, though? In my own descriptive model of word definitions, the "we" would be referring to just the sum total of how people, throughout their everyday lives, make noises (and write scribbles on paper or screen, etc.) at each other by flapping their mouths in order to convey things to each other, through which the noises become associated with meanings. You seem to believe in some sort of authority that gets to override this sort of emergence of meaning through behavior, and I'm not sure who specifically that authority is.

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I wish more feminists were more like you, then. But I think it would be hard to argue that the things FC listed weren't advocated by feminists as feminism, and you were cleared out of the room.

I'm sympathetic to people like you who may have been boxed out by a wayward media machine - in much the same way I think many reasonable LGBTQ voices got boxed out by the strident 'blockers before 18' movement sucking all the oxygen out of the room. But I can't help but be suspicious that both groups suppressed their misgivings due to outgroup fear, the want to not be a 'bad ally', or were content to soak up the secondary benefits up until it looked like they might be drying up.

I think most feminists are like me, because a feminist promotes equality between men and women, the end. If a bunch of misandrist Pharisees wanna call themselves feminists, and some news outlets call them feminists, and outraged people call them feminists, I could care less than Jesus, and, like his Holy Word, the principle of feminism still stands.

Leaving aside that I think "equality between men and women" is a fairly empty balloon with a lot of details to be filled in - you must appreciate that the kind of feminism promoted in the meanstream are the materials we have to work with.

I respect your position on an interpersonal basis. But it doesn't really mean much outside of that. I think my disposition is still fairly liberal in the 90s/00s sense of the term. And I can fully see the argument that 'liberalism' today is far more authoritarian and fails to live up to its own namesake. But at a certain point, I am wasting everybody's time if I insist that wokescolds aren't 'liberal'.

Maybe that could change, and it will fold back on itself and meet me where I planted my feet a decade ago. I will have reclaimed 'liberalism'. But in the meantime, I'm not going to fight how the term is used in most conversations. I might put down an asterisk, but the conversation must proceed.

a feminist promotes equality between men and women, the end.

If that's the entirety of the definition, why aren't we calling them masculinists instead? It would be same difference.

I don’t know, I don’t make up the rules lol. The whole thing falls under egalitarianism of which feminism is a subset of it. I’m sure if you want to call yourself a “masculinist” you can, you just might have to re-explain the definition a lot.

A text that was popular when you were still in high school, so you might have not encountered it:

So what you're saying is that you, a commenter using a username on an internet forum are the true feminist, and the feminists actually responsible for changing the laws, writing the academic theory, teaching the courses, influencing the public policies, and the massive, well-funded feminist organizations with thousands and thousands of members all of whom call themselves feminists... they are not "real feminists".

That's not just "no true Scotsman". That's delusional self deception.

Listen, if you want to call yourself a feminist, I don't care. I've been investigating feminism for more than 9 years now, and people like you used to piss me off, because to my mind all you were doing was providing cover and ballast for the powerful political and academic feminists you claim are just jerks. And believe me, they ARE jerks. If you knew half of what I know about the things they've done under the banner of feminism, maybe you'd stop calling yourself one.

But I want you to know. You don't matter. You're not the director of the Feminist Majority Foundation and editor of Ms. Magazine, Katherine Spillar, who said of domestic violence: "Well, that's just a clean-up word for wife-beating," and went on to add that regarding male victims of dating violence, "we know it's not girls beating up boys, it's boys beating up girls."

You're not Jan Reimer, former mayor of Edmonton and long-time head of Alberta's Network of Women's Shelters, who just a few years ago refused to appear on a TV program discussing male victims of domestic violence, because for her to even show up and discuss it would lend legitimacy to the idea that they exist.

You're not Mary P Koss, who describes male victims of female rapists in her academic papers as being not rape victims because they were "ambivalent about their sexual desires" (if you don't know what that means, it's that they actually wanted it), and then went on to define them out of the definition of rape in the CDC's research because it's inappropriate to consider what happened to them rape.

You're not the National Organization for Women, and its associated legal foundations, who lobbied to replace the gender neutral federal Family Violence Prevention and Services Act of 1984 with the obscenely gendered Violence Against Women Act of 1994. The passing of that law cut male victims out of support services and legal assistance in more than 60 passages, just because they were male.

You're not the Florida chapter of the NOW, who successfully lobbied to have Governor Rick Scott veto not one, but two alimony reform bills in the last ten years, bills that had passed both houses with overwhelming bipartisan support, and were supported by more than 70% of the electorate.

You're not the feminist group in Maryland who convinced every female member of the House on both sides of the aisle to walk off the floor when a shared parenting bill came up for a vote, meaning the quorum could not be met and the bill died then and there.

You're not the feminists in Canada agitating to remove sexual assault from the normal criminal courts, into quasi-criminal courts of equity where the burden of proof would be lowered, the defendant could be compelled to testify, discovery would go both ways, and defendants would not be entitled to a public defender.

You're not Professor Elizabeth Sheehy, who wrote a book advocating that women not only have the right to murder their husbands without fear of prosecution if they make a claim of abuse, but that they have the moral responsibility to murder their husbands.

You're not the feminist legal scholars and advocates who successfully changed rape laws such that a woman's history of making multiple false allegations of rape can be excluded from evidence at trial because it's "part of her sexual history."

You're not the feminists who splattered the media with the false claim that putting your penis in a passed-out woman's mouth is "not a crime" in Oklahoma, because the prosecutor was incompetent and charged the defendant under an inappropriate statute (forcible sodomy) and the higher court refused to expand the definition of that statute beyond its intended scope when there was already a perfectly good one (sexual battery) already there. You're not the idiot feminists lying to the public and potentially putting women in Oklahoma at risk by telling potential offenders there's a "legal" way to rape them.

And you're none of the hundreds or thousands of feminist scholars, writers, thinkers, researchers, teachers and philosophers who constructed and propagate the body of bunkum theories upon which all of these atrocities are based.

You're the true feminist. Some random person on the internet.

That a bunch of people are wrong about feminism and a bunch of other people agree with them does not change the definition of a feminist or feminism for me nor does it make them less wrong. I don’t pay those people mind, because they’re not talking about feminism. If I knew half of what you know about the things non-feminists done under the banner of feminism, which I do, because I was once a self-described anti-feminist MAGA Republican who agreed with everything you just reposted, I still wouldn’t calling myself one any more than Jesus would rescind his message because a bunch of hypocritical Pharisees told him they knew God better than he did.

Has the real communism have ever been tried?

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For a more recent example, if lower-stakes, I'll point to Julia Serano. She was, for quite a long period of time, the go-to example in the ratsphere of a Real Feminist who Cared About Everyone. And then it turned out that her work about not dismissing the perspectives of other people was really about not "dismissing perspectives/experiences of marginalized groups".

Why is the post you're replying to "Filtered"?

Argh.

Because there's a "new user filter" baked into the codebase that we can't remove, and it auto-filters posters who haven't gotten above a certain threshold of cumulative upvotes, and because other then a very small greyed-out icon, the only way for mods to see which posts are filtered is to check a separate page.

@justawoman has been posting here for years, why would she get caught by the new user filter?

It’s the leftist plot to cancel me, they’re coming for my progressive card lol.

Because it's not a "new user filter" it's a net-upvote filter. The mods have no tools for whitelisting a specific poster, though it is possible to give it to them.

That's... odd. I've never had issues seeing her posts.

People have issues seeing my posts?? How am I supposed to get those sweet sweet downvotes now D:

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When a post gets filtered, moderators can manually approve them on a per-post basis, which they get to sooner or later. The only way you can notice there's something off, is when a moderator responds to someone who's filtered, before approving their post, which happens occasionally.

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