Pros and Cons about FEMINISM.

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Congratulations.

You're a feminist.

YAY

By the way, here is a link you're gonna like:WrongPlanet

I think you are indeed confused.

OK, you can't just talk about "Feminism" and expect us to nod our heads and know just what you mean. Feminism is NOT a useful term anymore, because it is far away from the suffragists of the eary 20th century and the bra burners of the 60's. So which issues, specifically, do you support and which do you think modern day 'feminists' are harping too much on? Abortion? The 'wage gap'? Government provided child care? Domestic violence? Custody laws? Educations methods of boys vs. girls in the classroom? Give me something to work with here, Confused Dude.

I support the good stuff about feminism and hate the bad stuff that they're doing to women.

I personally wish that almost every woman I know was not a victim of sexual abuse in some form or another, unfortunatly that is not my reality.
Sexual abuse is rampant...rape is a weapon of war used against women in cultures all over the world, the US is no different...I wish it were not true.

Most men in power hate women...I dont know why.

I wish gender meant nothing more than what organ is between our legs, but for some reason women are treated like they are nothing beyond their gentitals.

It was once said that the gun is not a phalus symbol, but the phalus has become a gun symbol.

I cant count on both hands how many times I have been sexually abused since I was 7 years old.
My experience is an all too common one

Yet we are told that we abuse our rights and demand a double standard of treament...even if we do...it is only fair since how many times the double standard has worked against us for milenia.

I dont understand how guys cry for equality when the tables are turned against them in rare occasions, but most rarely worry about the double standard when it is in their favor...which is most of the time.

When you are at work, do you demand to be paid the same as the women employees...I bet you havent even thought of that

It is entirely possible for a movement to do the wrong things in pursuit of a noble goal. Just because your heart is in the right place doesn't make everything you do right.


I don't debate abortion on the internet anymore, since everytime I do it degenerates into a nasty flamewar. But I will note that this particular issue has little to do with feminism. If you hold pro-life assumptions, you have a moral imperative to oppose it, if you have pro-choice assumptions, you have a moral imperative to support it, and for either side of the fence, feminism just doesn't have much to do with it.


This sounds very odd. I remember hearing something about a class-action Wal-Mart suit, is this what you're talking about?


There were sexist insults for Palin from feminists in the last election, and while I'm not a Palin fan, sexism from supposedly anti-sexist people really irks me.

Recently, the US Navy decided to eliminate the ban on women serving on submarines. I heard nothing from feminists prior to this calling for a change.

While I've heard a lot of noise from feminists about non-sexist pronouns, I have yet to hear of a reasonable proposal from them about how to go about it. Or even a consistent unreasonable proposal.

Modern feminism seems ineffective, excessively politically correct, and sometimes sexist. It is not ludicrous to point out that sort of thing and call for change.


This is the thing that irritates me more than anything else about modern feminists: they define feminist to mean 'anti-sexist', then they define feminist to mean 'member of our particular political movement', then they try to pretend that both definitions are the same thing. They are not the same thing. I am against sexism, but I don't approve of the way the modern feminist movement operates. They don't seem to get anything done, and they aren't feminist enough.

I'm sorry to hear that.


I don't buy this. The unfairness that existed in the distant past was not perpetrated by anyone still alive, or perpetrated on anyone still alive.

If our ancestors got it wrong, then we ought to get it right, not get it wrong in a different direction.


I don't know about any times when a double standard has been in my favor. Maybe it has been, and I just didn't notice.

I haven't had any problems with a double standard being against me, but if I had then I definitely would have noticed.

I agree that modern feminist are paper tigers compaired to the real feminists back in the day.
I think we need to step off the political correct bandwaggon and attack real issues that effect women
like lack of job equality
the staggering number of females that are victims of sexual abuse everywhere from 1-5 to 1-2 women are raped or molested in the US, due to the large number of those that dont report, the number is believed to be 1-2...every other woman has been violated sexually.
lack of politcal representation
and while abortion is not a strictly feminist stance, cutting access to low cost birth control, feminie health care, and preventivive care is indeed an attack on women who already make less than men do.
educational differences between girls and boys

I could care less if a postal delivery person is called a mail woman or a mail man, but I expect that mail women to be paid the same as that mail man and that she is not sexually harrased by her boss in order to keep her job.

I dont care if a male friend tells me a dirty joke...some of them are pretty funny.

I dont think compliments from less attactive males is sexual harrassment

However I do care about being treated as an individual first and a woman second.

I However expect men to open doors for me and pay for my dinner on a date Why? because once in a while I like the double standard to be in my favor...I dont think anything is wrong with that considering all I have suffered because I am female in a male dominated society.
It is one of the few benfits in our society to being woman and I gladly and graciously recieve it.

I dont hate men, even though after all I been through I dont think anyone who knows me would blame me for it.

I can care less about pronowns...the whole pronown thing is anoying however I do get slightly anoyed when people use the male pronown exlusively as if women dont enter into the equation of humanity. An occasional he/she would make me feel better, but in the big scheme of things, it doesnt really matter compaired to sexual abuse or unequal pay for the same job.

I dont think a woman is less of a woman for being a stay at home mom. That is a very hard job and stay at home moms are some of the most unrespected people in the US, next to those who collect welfare.
Even in feminist circles, the stay at home mom is crapped on by feminists...this is absurd

If yopu want to know in one word what I want as a woman....respect
nothing more, nothing less

I'm very wary, to say the least, of any self-proclaimed 'feminists.' For starters, the word itself is tainted - the dictionary definition is something like 'against sexism' but the word etymologically means 'in favor of women,' NOT 'in favor of equality' (somewhere like Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia or Congo there might be little difference in practice, but not in the West). This actually reflects how many self-proclaimed 'feminists' operate, for example:

-Italian 'feminists' were enraged when the retirement age for women was raised to be the same as that of men. Unless women make bigger pension contributions, I don't see why they should retire earlier solely for being women, particularly as women have a greater life expectancy.
-An acquaintance, involved in various 'women in field X' type of activities and so on, at one point complained, while waiting for some guy to come out of a bar, that ' a woman should never wait for a man.' A friend of mine asked her if that didn't conflict with her feminist principles, she replied that one's public image is one thing, how one behaves privately is another.
-I've yet to hear of feminists, in countries with mandatory military service that only recruits men (in other words, forced labor based on gender), demand that everyone should be required to serve.
-The existence of a Woman's Day (not Equality Day or Anti-Sexism Day) but not a Man's Day. Some time ago a girl demanded a present for it, I replied that I'd get her one when a Man's Day was set up and I got presents for it.
-That while much noise is made about the top rungs of the social ladder (the super rich, politicians) being mostly occupied by men, there is little mention of the dregs of society (the homeless, prison inmates) also being mostly men. Apparently, also among newly minted college grads in the US, females earn more than males on average, and most college students are female.

I have no problem with women in authority (one of the best bosses I've had was a woman), women colleagues, etc. The women in my family are definitely not the stay-at-home type - actually that's partly why I have little patience for modern self-proclaimed feminists. My grandmother went to college and so on, and this in a Third World country with a fairly macho culture, so I'm not terribly impressed with complaints of how hard life is for modern Western women.

Women's ownership of their person is perhaps the most unambiguously-feminist issue that exists.


Feminists making sexist comments?
Is that kind of like a "vegetarian" noming on a burger?


Probably because the majority of feminists oppose the military-industrial complex altogether,
although they do continuously speak out against the rampant rape and harassment female service members are normally subjected to in such hyper-masculine environment.
That's more academic than activist feminism. The vast majority of the millions around the world working to rectify gendered violence and oppression wouldn't know what you're talking about. The academic feminists you might be referring to probably don't offer a reasonable "proposal" because a. to observe our language is sexist and reinforces sexist, gendered norms is the job description, feminism denoting a philosophy, not a degree in linguistics, and b. there are so many examples of gender-neutral pronouns in other languages and even examples in older forms of English, that it's far from a hypothetical- it's a practice society refuses to adopt, simply.

I can agree, as far as activism in the first world on first world issues.
I have nothing but enormous awe and respect for feminists in developed countries and the third world who work tirelessly on issues concerning gender and sex. The millions of lives saved and people helped are hardly ineffectual.

What exactly does that mean, for example?

What mainstream feminist individual or organization has done or said something sexist, exactly?

It's a bit like Westerners complaining humanitarian organizations are a hate group for making them occasionally feel bad about the consequences of their consumption and complacency.
"Herp derp, someone dares question oppression! Quick, act offended!"

The dictionary defines it that way.

Since "feminists" are comprised of dozens of feminist schools of thought, hundreds if not thousands of organizations, and millions of individuals, that seems pretty silly to assert. Oh, I'm sorry. You weren't actually asserting that feminists throughout the world all share a hive mind, said hive mind being ignorant of the scale of their philosophy? Good one.

Well, right. One's denotative, and one's straight from your imagination.

AMEN TO THAT. Things old school feminists would have started riots over are now mainstream views and entertainment.

So I suppose the black Civil Rights movement should have followed up their railing against racial oppression with "but don't worry, we don't hate white people, we just want them to stop lynching us"?
As women are the more oppressed sex, it makes perfect sense for a movement in advocacy of gender equality to call itself feminism.

Apparently, there's a whole group of people who eat fish and call themselves vegetarians!
What has that to do with the beliefs and lifestyle of *vegetarians*?
Not a damned thing.

Ah, so not a feminist. Relevance?

Probably because they don't think *anyone* should be forced to die for political and economic whims.
Remember, please, that it is not some group of top-ranking female officials who consider women less competent and capable in the military, but male.
Maybe feminists are too busy worrying about women *getting* killed (very often *by* militaries, state-run and otherwise)
to feel too bad that they are not required to become killers themselves.

Every day is Man's Day, in terms of who defines and controls the human condition.
I'm certain that men the world over suffer because they don't have a day celebrating it.

Whoa! Sick burn, dude.

Aw, that sucks.
Care to guess which sex is vastly over-represented in SEX SLAVERY, RAPE, AND GENDERED VIOLENCE?
How about single-parenting-in-poverty?
Sex-selective infanticide?

The observation that the holders of power and the arbiters of reality are almost exclusively male is not somehow negated by pointing out the existence of downtrodden men.

Cool story, bro. I'm so happy that more womenses have framed paper to decorate with.
But the people buying corporations, governments, and countries and achieving the highest academically are still male.

How very noble of you.

You have little patience for advocates of gender equality because the women in your family aren't of a certain type? Otay.

Probably because you laughably think equal legal rights (nowhere near achieved) mean actual equality.
You are not of a mental framework or educational/interest background to critically-analyze societal institutions such as religion, media, economics, and family,
and likely consider whatever to be on the books to be somehow-definitive of the actual culture in which people live.
Your grandmother being able to get a degree has very little to nothing do with the increasingly-disordered eating habits of women in the first world, or representations of women and men in popular media, or cultural hostility to women's reproductive freedom, or criticism of the medical field as androcentric, and so on and so forth, let alone a woman having acid thrown in her face for a strand of hair showing, or rape as a weapon of war, or brothels of sex slavery.

There is so much wrong with modern feminism... but I thought I'd chime in on the equality front. It wasn't perfect, but equality was more or less achieved in the 80s in most western countries. Women were free to pursue the careers of their choice, the legal system allowed them to enter almost any profession and society cheered them on. Come the early 90s feminists noticed that in the upper echelons of our society (think politicians, CEOs, great scientists) women were still vastly underrepresented (the radical female supremacists who headed the movement had expected women to completely dominate these realms given the chance).
They decided that this male dominance at the top was the result of a male lead conspiracy to keep women down. The mythical glass ceiling. "Discrimination" became the buzzword for the next two decades and beyond, feminists made an unholy pact with minority activists and lo, thus began the era of quotas. Companies, governments, universities were required to hire/accept a certain percentage of women and a certain percentage of minorities, else they face investigation and possible fines.
Skip forward to the present: every time a woman is promoted or holds a seat in government or is accepted onto a higher education course, there is a good chance she was chosen ahead of a man with equal or better qualifications. Men aren't unaware of this, and it has only worsened gender relations and sexism. The women who actually deserve those positions now have to work twice as hard to prove themselves than they would have done 30 years ago.

Equal opportunity does not require equal outcome. Ever. Anyone who believes this is foolish. The fact that men dominate the top 1% of society is not a conspiracy, it is the reality of our species. The most intelligent, most skillful, most driven humans are more likely to be male. Of course the rest of men are invisible to feminists, you don't hear them crying for 50% of miners to be women, 50% of waste disposal experts to be women, 50% of work-related deaths to be women. Equality my ass.

Actually, it does mean women can't hit men. Women who hit men are just as open to assualt and battery charges. The celebrity case of this was Tawny Kittaen, the model who writhes around on a car in Whitesnake videos. She was charged for hitting her husband, a professional baseball player.

I'd call her a murderer, and so would the police. Orchestrating a fatal "accident" is first degree murder.