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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:
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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.
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?
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Out of curiosity, do you have a womb?
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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.
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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?
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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?
Yes, they are taller. I have no idea what their grip strength is but I'd hazard 50/50 have more strength than mine. I don't think it invalidates their agency because I don't think the physical differences between the sexes has anything to do with a person's ability to be funny, or intelligent, or the myriad of other aspects of a personality. So no, I don't think tall people work harder at stretching their bones lol.
I think you're dehumanzing yourself by boxing yourself into a rigid view of attractive, I guess? So what if he has better baseline genetic potential if I think, and therefore others think, that his chin and neck are too thick to be a 10, much less a 9? That doesn't make you any less capable of reaching the objective level of attractiveness you want than him.
This is statistically extremely unlikely. On average, men have roughly twice the grip strength of women. Do you have some reason to believe that all of the men in your life are so far below the male median in grip strength that only 50% of them have higher grip strength than you do?
The problem here is that you’re not engaging at all with any of the relevant knowledge we have about how genetics and heredity affect personality. The brain is a physical organ, same as any of the others in your body. Of course it is more operationally- and computationally-complex than your gallbladder; that does not make it exempt from being a product of physical processes mediated by the output of your genes. You apparently acknowledge that there are fundamental genetic processes which cause men to grow penises and produce motile gametes, and you appear also to acknowledge that the same basic genetic processes lead men to achieve significantly higher height on average than women do.
Why, then, do you refuse to acknowledge that these processes also act upon the physical architecture of the brain? You seem to have adopted as an article of faith the proposition that individual humans have 100% agency to develop each and every aspect of their personalities, shorn of any probability distributions produced by heritable traits. A pure tabula rasa view of human potential. But where is your evidence for this view?
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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.
... 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.
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.
I just feel like if I said something along the lines of “I think you’re being obtuse/pedantic/ignorant/childish/naive about this topic” to someone on here I’d be justifiably moderated, so it’s tough to feel like I’m getting dealt a lot of “you’re a troll, you don’t really believe these things”. But, as I said, the moderation on this site is not for me. I don’t want to bring it up a lot.
I’d retort to Mr. TERF that if gender roles are social construct as we agree they are, then there’s nothing wrong with a Western socially-construct man decided he wants to be a Western socially-constructed woman, because it’s all arbitrary in the end. A trans woman wants to identify with the Western social constructs that define a woman, how is that different from a Hindu deciding to be a Muslim? I technically consider myself to be non-binary because I don’t believe in gender. But, I’m also very comfortable with the aspects that make me a Western socially-constructed woman so much that I’m okay calling myself one despite not really believing in it. I admit I might be sounding a little confusing. I struggle sometimes to find an appropriate way to explain my opinion on gender since I consider the whole thing arbitrary and think everyone is actually a non-binary meat computer with either titties or balls.
There's a difference between "I think you're being naive" (there are a lot of ways to say "You're wrong" and most of them are allowable) and "You're a troll" (which I just modded someone for saying!).
As @FCfromSSC said, framing is very important here. If you are upset at being called naive, well, noted, but no, I would not normally mod someone for calling another poster naive. To me, that does not register as an insult like "stupid" or "liar" or "troll."
Okay, are we having the trans debate again? What if Mr. TERF says gender roles are socially constructed, but penises, vaginas, upper body strength and size are not? And therefore people with penises should not compete against people with vaginas in competitive sports, or be housed with them in prison, and sex crimes committed by people with penises should not be statistically grouped with sex crimes committed by people with vaginas such that we see headlines like "Woman convicted of raping toddler" when the "woman" in question is a person with a penis? Because that is the TERF argument in a nutshell. Not "Men shouldn't be allowed to wear dresses and call themselves she/her."
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One of the ways I've survived so long here is to learn to frame statements like this as explicitly subjective.
Compare: "No one could possibly believe something as stupid as [X]"
"I don't understand how someone could possibly believe this. What's the chain of logic?"
Boiled down, these statements have roughly equivalent semantic content, but the connotation is entirely different, and the likely range of responses is very different. I'm not close to perfect, but I try not to depart from this model unless I'm fully prepared to bury my opposite in citations.
There is a way of writing that encourages real conversation, and there is a way of writing that discourages it. We are trying, very imperfectly, to encourage the former and discourage the latter.
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