NEWS: Why Gender Matters

I'll inform my girlfriend of your opinion of her.

I'm pretty sure the feeling's mutual.

What does voting, holding property, being taken seriously as a *human* being, etc. have to do with feminisim, these are not feminist issues. To say that these women are dumb, is a dumb thing for you to say. These are human rights issues not feminist issues.

False dichotomy.

Yeah we're going in circles here.

You're right. I never thought of it that way.

The moment we all stop debating whether or not pregnant women should have the right to use as much meth as they want, women in the US will lose the right to vote.

Gee, why didn't I think of it that way before.

Gosh, I must be one of those poor dumb bitches who just don't get it.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go to work -- where I work in a highly-skilled high-level position in a male-dominated technical field, where I am the head of a mostly-male department, where I make more money than my boyfriend. Tonight when I get home, I might be too busy to reply because my boyfriend and I are going to go do laundry together and cook dinner together and wash the dishes together, and we planned on hanging curtains in our new house together.

But I'm sure I'll lose all that if I don't spend a lot of time today thinking about whether or not women in Central America have access to free abortions and thinking about the War on Women here in this country.

I can't believe I didn't see the connection between modern feminism and my life before.

FLAG.

And being able to be parodied by the Onion. They couldn't do that parody in 1977, could they?

Can someone translate this into something that isn't rectum-dislodged?

-TM

I think if any young woman exploring what the movement meant was to read Prof. Bitch's replies in this thread, then they could pretty much tick off the checklist.

Feminists are:
- supercilious
- judgmental
- overbearing
- unwilling to listen
- fixated on blaming others for everything bad ever said about feminists

...and on it goes.

Full disclosure: I've known some perfectly lovely feminists who are not the above things. I do know they exist. But there are lots who fit the above description who tend to spoil it for everyone else and give the movement a not-entirely-undeserved bad name. Which is seriously a shame.

Would you like to borrow a moving van for all that condescension, Bitch_PhD? This reply is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

And that would be a stupid conclusion. For the sake of argument, I'll concede that I, personally, am all of those things. But to assume that *one* woman (feminist) is representative of *all* women (feminists) is sexist.

In other words, if my bitchiness drives women away from feminism, it's because those women are operating with a sexist framework to start with. The only possible solution to the "if one woman/feminist is a bitch, they all must be" "problem" would be for all women/feminists to be exactly what everyone else wants them to be, which gets you right back to being sexist as hell.

That would be valid if you assume that there is only one feminist who meets those criteria. How many does it take before it's not stupid anymore?

No, no, no. no and no.

It's not all about you. For God's sake.

You're a symptom of an underlying problem. You're not the problem, you're just representative of it.

If feminists in large numbers are going to insist on talking down to women -- which happens, as has been seen in this thread, but what's in this thread is not the entirety of it! -- then women will react as they have been, by choosing to not identify with the feminist movement.

As the example of my girlfriend demonstrates, this does not mean they don't "act like feminists". It means they will resist the label because they associate the label with people who act objectionably.

This. Is. Not. Rocket. Science.

How is interpreting your argument sexist towards feminism as a whole?

-TM

Most serious feminist writing does not talk down to women. C'mon, guys, you're really making mountains out of very small molehills here.

Most women have no experience with "serious" feminist writing.

Mountains may be being made out of molehills, here, but it really seems like you're wearing massive blinders.

tl;dr

Edit: I read the article... just no the 17 pages of comments.

Most "serious feminist writing" is very dry, academic, and jargon-laden, making it as inaccessible to most women as any anthropology or sociology textbooks would be.

I am aware of this, having some experience with serious feminist writing myself. I personally don't find it inaccessible (rather dull, yes, but not inaccessible). I can certainly see how the vast majority of people would find it so.

Well, again, at some point people simply have to do their homework instead of looking for excuses not to.

And it really isn't true that most serious feminist writing is dry or dull. Adrienne Rich is not dull; Virginia Woolf is not dull; Friedan is not dull (though she is homophobic); Katha Pollitt is not dull; Susie Bright is not dull; Octavia Butler is not dull; Anne Sexton is not dull; Ariel Gore is not dull; Susan Faludi is not dull; Wendy Wasserstein is not dull.

Older feminist writing--Wollestonecraft, deBeauvoir, Barbauld, Elizabeth Montagu--is more difficult simply by virtue of age, and French feminist theory takes some sophisticated reading skills, but there is an absolute ton of stuff out there that is perfectly accessible.