Feminism hasn't been about equality for going on thirty years. And even then, feminism NEVER ensured that men had equal rights to women because it was ASSUMED men already had every right. Today, when men are actually denied rights only women enjoy, feminism has no fucking interest in rectifying it.
Fuck the propaganda. Feminism is about one thing today: getting as much as it can for women, preferably at the expense of men.?
28 comments
I've always assumed one thing about whiners like this - they know , even if subconsciously, that there are still inequalities between men and women, because anyone with functioning brains can notice as much. They just enjoy benefiting from male privilege so much that they reject the facts and bend their perception of reality so they have an excuse to stay on top. Same with people who deny the existence of white privilege.
@AnonAtheist
Good old "equalism vs feminism as a term used by respectable people to quickly summarise their views on the matter" argument. Of the two at least equalism seems to be actually precisely defined, as in striving for the closest we can get to a perfect equality of opportunity for everyone regradless of their sex and so seems to be much more usable at this point.
Then again there is the issue of giving away the terms we once used for ourselves to violent authoritarians...
@Skide first paragraph is exactly what I believe. I consider myself both a feminist and an MRA, but at the sametime reject both mainstream feminism and mainstream MRA, as both are inherently sexist, having devolved into being about empowering one gender at the expence of the other, rather than actually adressing real gender issues and promoting equality. Equalist? Good name for it. Ummm, lost me at the second paragraph.
There definitely are issues that affect primarily or only men, mainly minority men (sexual orientation, race, religion, nationality, or a combination of those factors) However, these inequalities do not come from women or feminists- they come from other men.
Common complaints such as the male-only draft, family court biases, and the difficulties male victims of sexual or domestic violence have getting justice? Who is overwhelmingly in charge of the military, the judiciary, and the police force? Men.
It's ridiculous to lay the blame for these inequalities at the feet of the gender who is vastly underrepresented, particularly in positions of power, in the spheres that control said inequalities.
@#2036395 I'd say it's absurd to lay the blame at the feet of one gender period. We're all living in the same society, and thus we're all to blame to some degree or another. We're all in the same boat, sawing it in half will just sink it and drown everyone.
Nope. Not even close to true. Radfems, not level-headed feminists, act this way. This behavior's kinda similar to the sentiments expressed by you MRAs, actually. Thing is, there are far fewer radfems than MRAs. You're in the wrong, not us.
There's a problem with equalism and similar philosophies. Not the idea itself, but how it gets applied. Mainly that, once it gets organized, it's infested with middle class straight white men who trample all over everyone else because quality-of-life issues which primarily affect middle class straight white men are *so* much more important than life-or-death issues for more oppressed groups. And when they occasionally do turn attention outside their own little spheres, they tend to be astoundingly ignorant about issues which don't much affect them and largely refuse to listen to people who actually know what they're talking about.
Too often equalists unintentionally come down on the side of the oppressors, in part because it's not their group which is being oppressed by them.
In other words, you're most likely to be an "equalist" if you are in a relatively safe place but are unaware of how much worse things are for some people... and are unlikely to believe how much worse it can be because it's too far removed from your personal experiences. This is what feminists and some other civil rights groups mean by "having privilege".
I fucking hate that "privilage" shit. Just because someone's a white heterosexual cisgendered male automatically means they're not allowed to care about the rights of minorities or gender issues? That's total horseshit. I could understand it if I was some old money billionaire, but I'm not. I'm poor as shit. I don't have fucking privilage. I'm as disgusted by racism, sexism, and homophobia as anyone.
@AnonAtheist
The second one was hinting on the fact that a lot more normal folks used the term femininst back in the day and some would complain that the term has actually been taken over by the nasty bitches once called radfems.
The first paragraph is how I see the situation personally.
As you can see there are women waking up to the idea, this is also what my husband happens to believe and this is how we will teach our children to look at the situation.
@#2036448
Your arguemnt is far from universal, sometimes this effect happens, sometimes it doesn`t and even when it does, it is pretty much my favourite responsibility shuffling. With every philosophical or social movement you, the one person for whom these particular ideas are so important has the responsibility to police those who would do evil, present ignorance or act unempathically in their name. Your definition of a privledge again bounces off in my case, as it somehow always does, maybe privledge as you use it is simply an artificial and unnecessary social construct made strictly to addres your grievances at the expence of unknown folks by quite conviniently making them UNCAPABLE of empathy towards you by default.
Lets get this over with quickly and know that I very much disagree with the very idea and more than that will see people who reject other`s empathy and continue to act oblivious just to spite as the assholes and bitches they are, playing victim only works with people who hasn`t seen any actual oppresion nor have been subjected to it.
@AnonAtheist
On the one hand, there is definitely a certain amount of inherent privilege to being white, or male, or whatever. It's not even a conscious thing, more the end result of being part of a group that was numero uno in Western society for so long - a white guy is far less likely to live in a ghetto community than a black guy, he won't be targeted by racist cops the way a black man would be, so on so forth.
The problems come with the way Tumblr and its laughable excuses for social justice activists have basically transformed "privileged" into a term of abuse. You're completely right when you say Tumblr tends to disregard what you say and treat you as inferior and unworthy of attention just because of your social privilege - I know because I use the damn place. I just saw a great example of this, in fact - someone was saying asexuals aren't a privileged group (because of course they're obsessed with policing who can and can't be privileged, rather than viewing it as a matter of context), and their comment on it was, to paraphrase, "don't generalise or insult asexuals the way you would if you were venting about privileged groups ". That... that's not right. That's not social justice, it's a revenge fantasy.
@Uilleam 1. I do live in the ghetto. 2. Being privileged means belonging to the top 1% of the rich, a group which I don't even come close to belonging to. 3. Black people aren't the only ones the police shot in cold blood. 4. If you're disgusted by that privilage shit on tumblr, then why parrot it back.
@Uilleam
Oh but that is a good old actually defined privledge, one which should be applied individually to people depending on many factors, including ethnicity and gender but also financial or social status or even your mental and physical faculties.
@Pharaoh Bastethotep
I`ll be honest with you, I`ve seen the term thrown here and there over the internets as well as a few times in real life situations(although people were drinking at the time). To me it seems as descriptively closest designation to present the simplified basis of my views on the matter. In the end though it is still a label, so a simplification, used best as a quick reference on where one stands within the broader spectrum of an issue.
If the designation "feminist" no longer performs the function of informing the broader tribe of my views, instead making me seem as if I stand for something diffrent, then I have to switch it so that it becomes informing once again.
ps. A social justice warrior no more vaules nor enjoys our diffrences than a stalinist would his working class.
@AnonAtheist
I'll be honest, the reason I'm so sick of Tumblr isn't because I don't believe in what they're preaching, it's in the way they've taken concepts that are very real and warrant sensible discussion, warped the definitions and barred anyone who isn't in a constant triggered tizzy from partaking in the ensuing discourse. It hurts to see the things you believe in abused that way, and the ensuing bad rap your beliefs end up with among morons.
"Privilege" is indeed a matter of context. Thing is, given how America was still a racially segregated country that gave whites an intentional advantage within the lifetimes of many people alive right now, that's going to leave a residue over society as a whole. Thus, of all the privileges, white privilege is among the ones with the greatest number of relevant contexts.
@ AnonAtheist
All "privilege" means in the context people on Tumblr (those who aren't abusing it to mean "anyone who doesn't agree with what I say") use it is- someone with a characteristic that would make their life comparably more difficult for them if they didn't have it.
"Privilege" does not mean, and has never meant, that a straight, white, cis man can't have a shitty life or things they've had to overcome. It simply means that if everything were the same in that guy's life, but one of those characteristics were changed, they'd have it even harder.
Imagine all the difficulties you face in your life. Now add having to deal with racism on top of those. Or sexism. Or homophobia. The fact you don't have to deal with any of those on top of all the issues you *do* have to deal with in your life is what "privilege" is.
@#2036642
Now keep adding ad infinitum because you can. This is what these identity politics do: They focus on the disadvantages and lamenting them in the most ceremonial way possible instead of trying to find a way out of them for those afflicted. Also they are more often than not used to create a falsified image of your discutant based on their perceived privledge or lack thereof.
If you want to compare people`s struggles in a given situation, we need to do it as individuals for it to be meaningful anyway. These isn`t even a single universal societal concept over which we could discuss privledges as defined in any meaningful way. White privledge might be a defined thing for US but it isn`t so for many european countries, same with almost every one of them even my condition, by all means a biological rather than cultural one would be "weighted" very diffrently over here and in america or scandinavia.
It's all realitive. Say you have two people, one a straight white man, the other a gay woman of color. Which one's privileged? Most would assume the straight white man. But what if the gay woman of color was a millionare, and the straight white man lived off of welfare? Who's privileged then?
@AnonAtheist
Properly defined, it depends on exactly what form of privilege you're looking for. Based solely on race, Poor White Dude still has some white privilege to his name, for instance, even if it won't exactly put him on equal footing with Gay Black Lady. Gay Black Lady is, however, the most privileged overall, because money and social standing are king when it comes to overall privilege level.
@Uilleam
Now however we could add, that our black millionaire is also sadly crippled for life, say from the waist down(while our white dude swims, runs and jumps like a good unmodified vanila) and suddenly for many people the privledge prongs might become reversed yet again as many in turn value full bodily functionality even higher.
Privledge, the game for all ages!
...and then you could reverse it again, by pointing out that our able bodied straight white dude helps out at his local homeless shelter, while our disabled black lesbian millionaire made her money investing in the arms industry, big tabacco, child labor, toxic waste dumping, etc. The point is privledge is realitive, and must be examined on a case by case basis, rather than making blanket statements like "white privledge" or "male privledge" and applying it to people you don't even know.
@AnonAtheist, Skide
Yeah, like I said, it's very much a contextual thing. "White privilege" is a concept you shouldn't really use unless the discussion explicitly focuses on race or racial tension, obsessive intersectionality be damned.
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