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Author | Topic: what is feminism? | |||||||||||||||||||
macaroniandcheese  Suspended Member (Idle past 3948 days) Posts: 4258 Joined: |
i'm sorry. you'll have to repeat that last bit in english.
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Chiroptera Inactive Member |
The sentence structure is a bit awkward, yes, but it is passable English. But then, I am a native speaker of English.
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One_Charred_Wing Member (Idle past 6176 days) Posts: 690 From: USA West Coast Joined: |
crapcycle writes: Your protestations achieve nothing, your behaviour is consistently biggotted, and you remain racist scum. And you still need to get a life
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One_Charred_Wing Member (Idle past 6176 days) Posts: 690 From: USA West Coast Joined: |
Right when I got on the internet just now I got an advertisement for life insurance. It showed how much money you could get depending on your age and your gender. If you're a woman you get about 10% less life insurance than if you are a man according to the advertisement.
That's just plain wrong and I support anyone who wants to put a stop to something like that. Wanna feel God? Step onto the wrestling mat and you'd be crazy to deny the uplifting spirit. http://www.BadPreacher.5u.com (incomplete, but look anyway!)
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arachnophilia Member (Idle past 1364 days) Posts: 9069 From: god's waiting room Joined: |
Is this based on any sort of survey? it's based on hearing a number of opinions within the feminist community, and the courses i have taken.
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arachnophilia Member (Idle past 1364 days) Posts: 9069 From: god's waiting room Joined: |
Right when I got on the internet just now I got an advertisement for life insurance. It showed how much money you could get depending on your age and your gender. If you're a woman you get about 10% less life insurance than if you are a man according to the advertisement. That's just plain wrong and I support anyone who wants to put a stop to something like that. is there a reason for is it? and is it somehow more acceptable that male adolescents pay about 1.5x the amount of car insurance that female adolescents do? studies show that women drivers tend to drive more safely, and the rates are adjusted according to the statistics. is it possible that 10% difference accounts for the fact the women tend to live longer than men?
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arachnophilia Member (Idle past 1364 days) Posts: 9069 From: god's waiting room Joined: |
Sure. And on the odd occassion, you'll find someone waxing lyrical about the mysticism of the moon. But thats exactly why I raise the question - why is it legitimate to criticise feminism en bloc in a manner which would not be legitimate in any other sphere? It seems to me that much of this criticism is misogynistic; it is the application of collective punishment. All feminist arguments must be dismissed because of a few nutters who have arrogated to themselves the term feminist. i never said all feminist arguments must be dismissed. you're reading something that isn't there. and i'm not a misogynist. probably the opposite -- i don't seem to have any male friends at the moment. my point is that although there are a lot of people that CALL themselves feminists, the movement as a whole is tending in another direction than women's rights. listen, i could call myself a creationist here and get away with it. i personally believe that god created the heavens and the earth. but read my arguments on this board - i certainly sounds in favor of evolution, don't i? yet i can call myself a creationist because i fit the technicality of the title.
I say thats an appeal to the irrational female stereotype. no, that's a valid argument. take a class in it, you'll understand. they're not there to fix things, they're there to poke holes in stuff. therefor, there is no pleasing them, as a whole.
But I disagree with you that there is a great deal of problematising; that is only to argue your own conclusion. If someone argues that practice X is symptomatic of oppression, you need to engage with their analysis, not just dismiss it as creating problems were none exist. you misunderstood. i'm not making up this "problematize" word. we must have used in class a hundred times. it's not creating poblems where none exist (although that IS my play on the word), it's pointing out inequalities, personal biases, and oppression where they may not be so obvious, an -- as you put it -- using the individual example as a bat to beat the whole area with. (see the francis bacon example)
The English language is not some objectively external phenomenon over which we have no control; it is a tool at our disposal. arguable, but i'll agree.
Your argument is prima facie contradictory: first you acnkowledge that by default we use "him" to refer to "her", but then object to the use of "it" because it denies female gender identity. Well, so does the generic use of "he"; so this offers no solution and no objection to a proposed solution. um, no, i was citing the feminist position. i should have made that more clear. i do not object to using "it." it's a perfectly acceptable solution: it dehumanizes everyone equally. it's entirely not my fault that we think of "it" as being non-human (such as an infant) as a society. since the language is a tool at our disposal, let's change that.
Second, its unlikely that any change would in practice rob anyone of their gender identity, as its embedded so often: geder-specific names, and titles, make it nearly impossible to talk about anyone without conveying their gender, even if using a generic pronoun. i agree. i think the few cases where we use "him" to a refer to a group that could include a "her" or two is not hurting anyone. in fact, i wouldn't have a problem with using "her" as the gender neutral pronoun. it's just a freaking word.
Third, the allegation that this is a "mangling" of the language is contestable. As I understand it, the deliberate and formal adoption of the MALE specific pronoun as the generic pronoun only occurred in the C18th, 1783 IIRC. Certainly, if you read English Napoleonic-era naval dipsatches, as I have done, they DO use the plural pronoun for the generic pronoun; there is a good case to be made that the use of the male pronoun is in fact "mangling the language". alright, that's fine too. just get my english professor to shut up about it next time i use it in a paper.
Thus, the allegation that feminism "problematises" issues that do not exist, and propose "silly" solutions like changing the language, is falsified: because the Feminist position is only to reverse a change to an older form of English which, they argue, is eliminates some of the misogyny in the current version. yeah, except this wasn't an argument i just made up.
And as THAT shows, the argument is much more solidly based than just "problematising" an issue by people who can "never be pleased". And both of those arguments seem to be an appeal to an implicit irrationality of feminism. yeah, except the word they used themselves was "problematizing." and yes, post-modern feminism is implicitly irrational. not because it has anything to do with women, but because it's post-modern. i have not found a shred of logic in anything dubbed post-modern. again, i have no problems with old feminism, with women, or equality and women's rights. i have probelms with the post-modern academics.
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arachnophilia Member (Idle past 1364 days) Posts: 9069 From: god's waiting room Joined: |
I even noted proporn feminist authors who I like (I think I did in this thread as well), and contrasted them with those that were antiporn. The quote was pulled from a post where I was specifically talking about antiporn feminist critiques of porn and so had not felt the need to say antiporn every time I said feminist. In that thread I also set out, and as you seem to agree, that feminism is not unified into any one thing. Indeed, it includes opposition groups. In the future, remember that Contracycle is an industrial size quote miner i see. ok then, point taken.
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Chiroptera Inactive Member |
Post deleted. It added nothing to the discussion.
This message has been edited by Chiroptera, 09-25-2004 05:42 PM
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nator Member (Idle past 2190 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: See, I don't get why you are saying that, since the kind of feminism you describe isn't anything like what I have ever identified as women's rights/political social activist movement feminism. So, what is your evidence that the political feminist activist women's rights movement is being overshadowed or surplanted by the academic literary criticism feminism? I mean, who are these people who are taking over?
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nator Member (Idle past 2190 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
OK, I'll write it with better syntax.
What I am trying to tell you is that, even if these people exist, and they decide that they are the "true face of feminism" among themselves in their own little rarified world, nobody, including me, cares what they think but them. You an arach took a women's studies class. The people who taught it were academic feminists who deal in literary and social criticism at the philosophical level. Those people, who mainly write for each other in their insular academic world and have little effect upon the social activist or political arenas, have somehow convinced you both that their obscure views represent "real" feminism. They have also convinced both of you that their views are the "mainstream", prominent views among all feminists, and that the political and social activist, equal rights-style of feminism is dead or all but gone. Just because those people told you this doesn't make it true. Where is the evidence that their views are making any inroads into the hearts and minds of the general populace, especially those who believe in gender equality?
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macaroniandcheese  Suspended Member (Idle past 3948 days) Posts: 4258 Joined: |
you want evidence that people care about this stuff besides them? i didn't take a women's studies class. i took an ecology class called environment and society. we studied all forms of ecology. as part of this, we studied feminine ecology. then i took a human geography class. again. we studied the feminine. i took a rhetoric class. we studied feminism. all along i've heard the same things... and it's not about what you think it's about.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1487 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
you want evidence that people care about this stuff besides them? So, your evidence that these attitudes persist outside the academic world stems entirely from your experiences within the academic world? How does that make sense?
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macaroniandcheese  Suspended Member (Idle past 3948 days) Posts: 4258 Joined: |
i meant that someone outside of that particular academic circle. genius.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1487 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
i meant that someone outside of that particular academic circle. That's not the question at hand, though. Why did you respond at all if you weren't addressing the question at hand?
genius. Hey, I'm not the one answering questions that nobody asked.
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