Do feminist like men?

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If you are going to take that stance, you could say all legal sentences are a mere formality because plenty of people rationalize crimes of all kinds.
Legal sentences are not formalities. They are punishment when people break the law and they apply to everyone.

Anybody who has lived through the experiences I had would know that my words are not false. Just sayin'.

I have a feeling your past isnt too far off from mine only you werent molested by a guy correct?

I am not saying they are false. I am just saying people's opinions aren't always accurate and a crime is a crime regardless of who commits it.

EDIT- This was a dup post. A pocket post made from my Android. Disrgard this.

It's not usually the feminists who joke about the boy who 'got lucky' with his teacher, though; it's the people who think that men are raging sex-beasts who will have sex whenever and wherever it's available, and that the onus is thus on women to control male sexuality. They basically treat a teacher who has sex with a boy as a whore who gave out a freebie, rather than as a pedophile.

I wouldn't say hating men is an essential part of being a feminist, although some feminists may hate men since they believe that men have been programmed to believe that they wish to dominate the female sex and feminism as an ideology provides them with a way of expressing such beliefs. One can believe in female oppression (which I do personally) considering the lack of female activity in politics, science and economics and yet believe that this is because of the way society is organized not because of men in general. That is how I see it anyway.

Umm - try true equality (Christina Hoff-Sommers), through female supremacy (Greer/Steinem), through to wanting us dead (Krista Femitheist/Solanas).

Last edited by alcockell on 08 Dec 2014, 6:24 am, edited 1 time in total.

Speaking as an Aspie male who was sexually abused by girls when I was chronologically 13 - but back in 1984, before AS was known about (I was one of the first ever diagnosed)... I was silenced by my assailants threatening to cry rape, my tutor (self-ID'd as a radical feminist) blamed me, told me to keep quiet or he'd possibly involve the police to have me done as the perp... when I was the victim.

All through this, I weathered the "ALL MEN ARE RAPISTS" message from Dworkin through the culture.

Hello cognitive dissonance, my entire sexual development derailed, and traumatic eating.

Almost killed myself - and seriously contemplated killing myself at the time. Also fantasised about shooting up the school i was at...

And if society had stayed egalitarian while i healed - I might have stood a chance.. but it seems to have gone really fascist, to the point that it seems as though Radical Gender Feminism wants me dead... (if I were to understand Gloria Steinem right)

There are some feminists who are actually cruel toward women who are naturally a little scrawnier than average. It's a feminist thing to say "I have CURVES, and that's NATURAL, not the ANOREXIC BARBIE DOLL!" The thing is, if you are below what they think is a "natural" BMI and are female, then you are "anorexic" and "unhealthy" and somehow a sell-out, regardless of whether or not you have an adrenal disorder and have to struggle to put on weight.

But that's a little bit of a different issue, I suppose.

No, not all feminists are "man-hating," but there is unfortunately a subculture, among feminists, that regards men as pretty much irrelevant and somehow inherently evil or something. They are pretty brazenly more of a hate-group than anything, and they hide behind the fact that women are oppressed.

But really, most feminists today, as far as I can tell, are just interested in public education and ending rape, and they really just want to reach out to people and try to counsel them on the importance of consent and being "sex-positive." As opposed to being man-hating in general, they think that many men have been cheated of a more noble expression of their sexuality by the ideology that women are somehow "things to be had," which really undermines the deeper emotional connection that can be had between trusting equals.

One person I would point to as a positive example of a feminist is Laci Green:

https://www.youtube.com/user/lacigreen

Far from being a "feminazi," she just loves people in general. I don't agree with her on all counts, but I do on most, especially the ideas relating to consent and things like that. It's some fairly straightforward, unpretentious stuff. It's targeted at people in late adolescence, really, but it's actually accessible to anyone.

But no, being feminist doesn't mean hating men. In fact, you probably are a feminist: you don't have to be a woman to be a feminist, and many men who don't call themselves feminists have some very feminist ideas, such as holding to the idea that it's great for women to be sexually empowered. Some guys see those really powerful, assertive girls in anime, and they have little hearts floating around their heads. Are you one of those? Okay, that's actually vaguely feminist. Without even thinking about it, you're espousing a feminist ideal by just finding an assertive, gender atypical woman to be attractive, rather than intimidating, but there are also other ways you could express feminist sentiments, even involuntarily by your internalized notions of how it's appropriate for men to behave toward women. Feminism is something that we can all be a part of.

I'm a feminist*, and a man, and I don't hate myself. So it's not categorically true that feminists hate men.

I haven't always been a feminist. I had a case worker for a couple years, whom I grew very close to and considered a friend, who was very thoroughly liberal feminist. My conversations with her on feminism set back my capacity to view it in a positive light several years; while she understood her liberal feminism very well, she had little understanding of how the dynamics of social class, age, institutional authority, and (dis)ability intersect with the gender dynamic.

So (in the context of conversations re: feminism) she saw me simply as a privileged white man, while I saw her as a tyrant-in-waiting, waiving high the flag of a single axis-of-oppression wherein she was unfavorably positioned, while shouting down the cries of those with respect to whom she was quite favorably placed upon a multitude of other axes-of-oppression if she happened to be unfavorably-placed with respect to them upon the one axis of gender.

This is why we need a formal, rigorously-defined theory of social-intersectional topology.

There's also the fact that cis-women, as a category, necessarily lack lived experience of the process of inculcation into the male gender role. This presents a major impediment to the conveyance of feminist theory to people who were inculcated in the male gender role (cis-men and trans-women) insofar as feminist theory is primarily authored by cis-women. The continually-improving inclusion of trans* perspectives in feminism is improving this (and I suspect that this is precisely what those old-guard feminists who still hatefully seek to exclude trans* perspectives truly fear most).

But the perhaps more-demographically-salient point is, this is why we need more male feminists.

* By the transitive property of identity. I'm an anarchist; all anarchists are feminists; thus I am a feminist. In this context I understand 'feminist' to mean "One opposed to social hierarchies predicated upon gender." This is functionally equivalent to what most people mean by the word 'feminism' (I think) but it's only a one-way equivalence, i.e. it's not necessarily the case that any given feminist would agree with the above understanding of what 'feminism' means.

There are several various strains of feminism. Some of those are genuinely all about gender equality. Some of those are virulent, seething, man-hating tribes who think enslaving and killing men isn't going far enough. Even radical feminists predominantly from the second feminist wave distance themselves from these women and new words are invented to describe them. I mean, there are all kinds. You can't really pigeon-hole feminism.

I've described myself as an Anti-Feminist™ feminist. I believe that equality has to do with a) the fact that we are ALL human beings, gender notwithstanding, and b) if women really are being reduced to a sub-class by society and lack opportunities, then by all means let's fix the problem. I do NOT think ANYONE deserves special privilege or accommodation based on gender besides the obvious: firing a married woman for being pregnant/having a baby is about the lowest form of scum-sucking I can imagine and I don't think current laws go far enough in discouraging this practice. But do I OWE you, or are you ENTITLED to better pay JUST BECAUSE you're a woman? Absolutely not. If you deliver quality and performance and exceed standards at your level consistently, you get the same promotion and pay raise as the next human being, EOS. If you're a slacker, you don't get raises and promotions. Slack enough and you're looking for a new job. Period.

There has recently been a move amongst some feminists to stop talking about 'pro-choice' and start talking about 'reproductive justice,' which argues for the ability to raise one's chosen offspring in safe and healthy environments, as well as being able to choose when and if to have children. Along the same lines, as feminism becomes more intersectional the word 'feminism' becomes more and more anachronistic.

Yes and no. The problem as I see it is that feminist theory attempts to be both a specific theory of "gender struggle" and a general theory of "social struggle"; the anachronism obtains only in the latter case.

"Post-feminism"?

That sounds like a good idea actually. The ability to choose not to have children when one doesn't want to is also good for the disability rights movement because people would be more likely to make that decision based on whether they could feel that they could manage children and whether or not they have support systems in place to help them. Think for example, mildly autistic people deciding whether or not to have children. That's opposed to the current status quo where society generally thinks that there is something wrong with people who don't want children, especially when they are married.