I’m a cis male and I believe in the importance of feminism, but I hesitate to call myself a feminist because it seems like there is a presumption of understanding women’s experiences as if I was part of the Me Too movement. In some binary sense given how hateful and shitty men can be I’m absolutely a feminist, but I wouldn’t declare myself to be one. What is your standpoint?
I did until the gender wars intensified online. Now suddenly the word feminist conjures up images of wild misandrists.
I still believe in the core concepts, but now since all the big systemic fights have already been won its just Bill and Ted rules.
The big systemic fights have not been won, though.
Yeah but I’ve got absolutely no control over what goes on in subsaharan Africa or the middle East or wherever.
In the UK women are legally equal. There’s still a lot of social issues to work out, which the bill and Ted thing pretty well covers.
Legal recognition of equality still does not address lingering issues from historic inequalities. There is no place on Earth that is free of this historic impact, and active measures to address these inequalities are necessary to create a new level playing field by which legal equality can translate to actual, de facto equality. I include the UK in that.
I feel like we’re saying the same thing. Would you say these are social issues that could be addressed by being excellent to eachother?
How do you get people to be “excellent” to each other? Social programs addressing historic inequalities are the solution.
Like Scholarship programs and Mentorship programs and stuff like that?
Sure! Those are good steps. They aren’t complete, though, and that’s why work still has to be done beyond simply saying “men and women are equal legally, so there’s no more problems to be worked out.”
The only reason that the word “feminism” conjures up images of wild misandrists in your mind is due to a long running reactionary campaign to make that happen.
Stop letting fascists define the terms of debate.
Every movement has crazies, there doesn’t need to be a consipracy to discredit the movement for that to be true.
I mean there probably is a coordinated effort to discredit it, but there would be crazies either way.
That’s exactly my point. Billionaire funded reactionary media figures always point to the crazy ones and say they’re representative of the entire group. People need to stop falling for it.
True!