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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?
Uh, yes? I don't know what to tell you lol they don't work out, are skinnier than me, or the myriad of reasons why a person has poor grip strength.
My evidence for what? That women are not less funnier than men? That women are less intelligent? I'd say statistics. I don't find my father funnier than me, so unless I'm just wrong about humor because of my brain which I can't be because humor is a subjective trait, not an objective trait, my father is therefore not funnier than me. If it was wired in my brain to be less funnier than him, I'd find him hilarious, but I don't. Statistically, if I am experiencing that, somewhere out there another woman is too, which means there are >0 women who are funnier than men. Therefore you cannot say "women are less funny than men" when you literally have at the minimum two who are. You can say "some women are less funnier than men". Repeat that for every subjective aspect of a personality.
So, your contention because there is a non-zero number of funny women, and a non-zero number of non-funny men, we can’t draw any reliable conclusions about populations averages?
You would immediately recognize this as specious reasoning if applied to height. Suppose I said, “I once met a woman who was seven feet tall! That’s taller than I am! Therefore, we can’t say that men are taller than women.” You would understand that I’m failing to engage with what statistics and population averages mean. If I lined up a hundred men and a hundred women, I might end up with a handful of women who are taller than the average height of the men. The vast majority will not be, and I think you understand that. The existence of some overlap in the distributions due to outliers does not at all invalidate our ability to draw conclusions about the population as a whole.
Suppose you and I are at a bar, and I offer to make a bet with you: The next time a straight couple walks through the bar, which of them will be taller, the man or the woman? If you predict it correctly, I’ll give you $50, and if you predict incorrectly, you give me $50. Now, maybe you’d hesitate to take the bet, suspecting that I’ve rigged it in some way. (Maybe I have my friends, Short Shawn and Tall Tracy, standing by to enter once I give them the signal.) But assuming no foul play, you’d have to be very misguided to predict that the woman will be taller than the man. Population averages are what they are, and we have very reliable measurement data to demonstrate it.
My contention is that personality traits work this way as well, to at least some extent. If you ask me to predict whether the child of two people with a Ph.D is also very intelligent, as measured by an IQ test, the SAT, etc., the very easy money is on “Yes.” If you ask me whether I guess that your friend who gets in fistfights all the time is male or female, obviously I’m going to guess male, because that’s a personality trait infinitely more common among men than it is among women.
And if you asked me to predict whether your friend who is a theoretical physicist is male or female, I’m similarly going to guess male, because that too is an extremely heavily male profession, due to (among other factors) aggregate personality differences between men and women.
Telling me that you’re funnier than your dad gives me almost zero useful information about how funny men are on average. Sure, humor is subjective, but only to some extent: there is actually a measurable end result, which is “did I make somebody laugh”. If I had ten randomly-selected men and ten randomly-selected women enter a room and try to make each other laugh, my prediction is that the men would have significant more success than the women in achieving this goal. This is based not only on my own anecdotal experience, which is only marginally useful, but also in more reliable population-level data.
For example, British researchers Gil Greengross and Paul Silvia aggregated 28 studies on sex differences in humor, and found that 63% of men are funnier than the average woman. Now, this obviously does not mean that no women are funny! Nobody on earth has ever claimed this! Nor has anybody ever claimed that every man is funny! But, just like height, there is a bimodal distribution here, with men clustered on one end and women on the other.
Visual-spatial intelligence is also unequally-distributed between men and women. The number of men who are very good at mental math and at mentally rotating shapes is significantly higher than the number of women. This does not mean that no women are great at these things! I’m a man, and my spatial reasoning is certainly a relative weakness of mine; I have no doubt that there are many thousands of women better at it than I am! This does not in any way invalidate populations-level aggregate data.
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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."
I'd agree with Mr. Terf that gender roles are socially constructed but the physical body is not. However, I don't think a person having a penis or vagina is a valid reason to stop them from competing against someone with a penis or vagina in competitive sports. I think what should stop them is weight classes, a principle I understand to already be understood in wrestling, and that has nothing to do with being a woman or man. I have met men the same weight class as myself or lower, and I have met woman with a weight class far above mine. I wouldn't want to compete with a clearly scrawny person or a clearly buff-as-all-hell person since the gap is so big the comparison in competition doesn't hold. And I don't think there's a problem housing them together for the same reason. Women beat the shit out of eachother in prison just as much as men do; house a buff woman with a scrawny man together and I'd see the same result if you reversed the weight class. If a prison houses two people who are clearly unequally matched in strength they're doing a pretty bad job with security and basic common sense.
I dunno, I see a whole lot more of "trans women are freaks in the head for being trans, trans women are clearly much uglier being trans and therefore must hate themselves, trans women are just horny men who want to peep at women pissing in the bathroom, trans women want to convince your kid they're trans to mutilate themselves because deep down they're insecure, xyz" than "trans women are unfairly advantaged in sports and trans women pose a safety threat to their fellow inmates".
Untrue. One data point: in the period 2001-18, 1,251 male prisoners were murdered in US prisons, while the equivalent figure for female prisoners was 7. Based on the size of the US prison population in 2022, that works out at 104.29 murders/100k population among male prisoners, 7.59 murders/100k population among female prisoners. A male American inmate is nearly 14 times more likely to be murdered in prison than a female inmate. This shouldn't come as a surprise given what proportion of the male prison population is serving time for violent offenses vs. what proportion of the female, or the obvious differences in aggression and propensity to violence between the sexes, or the obvious differences in physical strength between the sexes (which are only minimally explicable by differences in body mass).
Even if it was true, there's the obvious fact that female people cannot forcibly penetrate other female people, impregnate them and/or infect them with STDs: only male people (regardless of how they "identify") can do that. I would have thought this would have been an obvious point of concern for a self-identified feminist but apparently not.
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Sorry, that's a non-starter. For example, look at this website. When I filter to look at only male people, the top of the list is John Haack, who weighs 192 lb and whose combined lift is 2,232 lb. When I filter to show only female people, the first person of approximately Haack's weight is Crystal Tate at 196 lb, and whose combined lift is 1,540 lb. There are no female people on this list who have lifted more than 2,000 lb, or indeed more than 1,800 lb.
If you think the differences in male and female strength, speed and stamina are entirely explicable by reference to weight class, I just... I'm sorry. You're wrong. I sincerely think I would have better luck arguing with a flat Earther than someone who seriously thinks that male and female people are just as strong and fast as each other. Maybe I could understand how you arrived at that erroneous conclusion if you were literally blind.
If we sorted athletes by weight class and ignored sex entirely, no female athlete would win a gold medal in the Olympics ever again, except maybe in gymnastics. Probably no female athletes would even qualify for the Olympics outside of gymnastic events either.
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https://boysvswomen.com/
Like, I'm sorry, if you want to insist men and women are exactly the same except for plumbing, I probably can't convince you otherwise, but the evidence is overwhelming that this is not the case. A man will almost always absolutely dominate a woman in the same weight class in every sport, if they have even remotely comparable levels of training.
For this I don't have a quick link to dispute the assertion, but I am extremely doubtful of this and wonder if you have any evidence besides that one episode of Orange is the New Black? I have read enough stories recently of convicted male sex offenders who conveniently announced their new gender identity and desire to be housed in a women's facility (frequently taking absolutely no steps to "transition" beyond maybe wearing a wig), as well as trans women who have assaulted female inmates in prison, that I think there are pretty good reasons not to incarcerate penis-havers with women, even if some of them might be sincere about their gender identification. I hate to use that word again, but you seem shockingly naive to just take at face value a convicted rapist's assertion that he's now a woman house him with women please?
You might be surprised just how much you'd have to skew that scenario to give the woman even odds. Like, yes, if he's a sickly 98-pound weakling who's never thrown a punch in his life up against 200-pound Berthilda the Gang-Banger, sure, she might be able to whup him. But otherwise? Not likely.
This is probably true, but the fact that many people are motivated primarily by disgust or moral condemnation does not make the very real physical concerns invalid.
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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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