What I Learned as a Woman at a Men's Rights Conference • Hacker News Board

Re: What I Learned as a Woman at a Men's Rights Conference

#21

Post by pdabbadabba » Thu, Jul 03, 2014, 1:54 AM UTC

wiejfjiwioef wrote: post #18

pdabbadabba wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next time I see a "radical feminist" posting on HN I'll be sure to give him or her a piece of my mind. Also, you'll need to do better than an article from, of all places, avoiceformen.com that merely assumes the existence of a feminist institution that you can be kicked out of and blames it for a man's suicide. I'm certainly not aware of any such institution and I'm a feminist! Perhaps my membership card has just bee…

There are many feminists institutions, that guy got kicked out from FEMEN Sweden. Others got kicked out from campus groups or web forums. If you want go to MRA forum and just ask. Perhaps you have no membership card because you never applied anywhere. But some people are more involved.

Ah ha. There are, of course, organizations that identify themselves as feminist. And yes, you can get kicked out of them, I suppose. But this is not at all the same thing as getting kicked out of "feminism," as you have been alleging to have been the case.

This is more than a mere semantic distinction since any arbitrary feminist group can have whatever arbitrary rule or prejudices it likes without those views' being imputable to all feminists. I certainly don't accept that FEMEN Sweden speaks for all (or even many) feminists or that being kicked out of FEMEN means you can't be or aren't a feminist.

Re: What I Learned as a Woman at a Men's Rights Conference

#22

Post by pdabbadabba » Thu, Jul 03, 2014, 7:16 PM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #20

pdabbadabba wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a feminist, I find this surprising. (Though it is true in this uninteresting sense: feminists think that women are systematically discriminated against so, of course, advancing justice and equality will advance the interests of women.) I suspect the issue is that we have different perceptions of what "justice and equality" requires. It would be nice, though, to hear some specifics about what mainstream feminists y…

I don't begrudge feminists for favoring the interests of women anymore than I begrudge a union for favoring the interests of its members. There are just some cases where injustice and inequality are to the detriment of men, and feminists are unsympathetic to those cases. Which I again don't begrudge them for. Realistically, I don't believe anyone can speak for everyone. Politics isn't about imposing an ideology on so…

That's an interesting view, but I strongly disagree.

I don't consider myself a feminist just because I want to advantage women. That would be pretty dumb, since I am a man. I consider myself a feminist precisely because I am interested in advancing justice and fairness, an endeavor that, given our history, requires particular focus on the situation of women. I would certainly not support a proposal that I knew to disadvantage men and advantage women unfairly. And I would hope that those who are more focused on men's rights would do the same. I frankly don't think that we will get very far if we take the adversarial approach that you describe, at least in part because women, for historical reasons, will inevitably be disadvantaged in that sort of process. In other words, the approach you describe -- if it is to be fair -- assumes that all parties arrive at the political barraging table with equal power. But that is very far from the case.

It may well be true that there are feminists out there (presumably women) who, like you, see themselves as engaged in a self-interested struggle against the opposite sex. But, speaking for my feminist friends, I don't think that is true of many, let along most of them.

Re: What I Learned as a Woman at a Men's Rights Conference

#23

Post by philwelch » Thu, Jul 03, 2014, 8:50 PM UTC

pdabbadabba wrote: post #22

philwelch wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't begrudge feminists for favoring the interests of women anymore than I begrudge a union for favoring the interests of its members. There are just some cases where injustice and inequality are to the detriment of men, and feminists are unsympathetic to those cases. Which I again don't begrudge them for. Realistically, I don't believe anyone can speak for everyone. Politics isn't about imposing an ideology on so…

That's an interesting view, but I strongly disagree. I don't consider myself a feminist just because I want to advantage women. That would be pretty dumb, since I am a man. I consider myself a feminist precisely because I am interested in advancing justice and fairness, an endeavor that, given our history, requires particular focus on the situation of women. I would certainly not support a proposal that I knew to dis…

Feminists might be under the illusion that they favor equality and justice, but in practice they only focus on inequalities and injustices that they perceive women to suffer from. And that's fine. But they will never address (and often deny the existence of) inequalities and injustices that men suffer from.

I'm a pragmatist. Ideologies never work. Ideologues are either hypocrites or worse. People whose entire worldview is based on the idea that women are uniformly and universally oppressed by men are never going to achieve gender equality on their own. Even a reasonable and moderate feminist like yourself won't go out of their way to help men even when that's the just and equal thing to do--or at least not as much as they will women. I don't mean that as a slight, but it's just a manifestation of bias. The way to prevent bias isn't to just trust some ideology or movement to be free of it; it's to openly acknowledge biases and vested interests and work in the spirit of mutual benefit.