Apparently this is an unpopular opinion among feminists. If feminism is about equality for everyone, it needs to address that. As an example, LGBTQ+ was extended many times to cover everyone in the community, and that’s the right thing to do. There isn’t just L and everyone repeats “Oh! Lesbians are for rights for everyone, no need to update that”
I don’t know what the new name should be, but it should cover gender equality for everyone.
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Call it whatever ya like. Just keep it to your circles. That shit gets no play in public. Not IRL.
I mean this comes off as why isn’t there a C for Cis or S for Straight in LGBTQ+? Shouldn’t they represent all genders/sexual expression? Isn’t it about equality and rights for all genders?! To be clear, I find that stance ridiculous.
Just because straight people are left out of the movement’s title doesn’t mean LGBTQ+ theory is advocating for superiority over straight/cis people, which is kind of your unspoken argument here for the “poor branding” of feminism.
And if you’re looking for the overarching term for all of this. It’s Gender Studies or Gender Equality. Always has been.
Feminism is a field of study not just a movement and it has vastly different interpretations. Liberal feminism and radical feminism are perhaps the most visible and mainstream but that doesn’t come close to all of feminism theory out there.
Feminism is very much meant to be, a criticism of, and in opposition to the patriarchy or male dominated social structures. Hence why “fem” is frontline and center. While cis-men are victims of the patriarchy in nuanced ways they are not its primary victims, and certainly not victims to the same degree as women and LGBTQ+ individuals. And pretending they are to onboard allies is a bit of a slap in the face and a watering down of feminism itself.
That’s definitely an interesting response because I have spoken to several feminists that will say that they fundamentally agree and believe that all people should be treated equally by default and yet will also post things like “kill all men” or other things about how women should be given special treatment unironically.
It ends up at some level being hypocritical, and hypocrisy is intolerable from thought leaders.
Yeah, this sounds like a pretty common slander arguement, and certainly a use of hyperbole. You’ve seen some memes from some self proclaimed feminist accounts so all of the established feminist literature and established discourse means nothing.
And if you repeat it enough it magically becomes true. You don’t have to experience it first hand anymore because there’s a dozen accounts repeating it and they’ve all had the same exact first hand magical experience you did.
So, disregard women who are actually active in feminist circles and disregard academic critiques and established discourse. Your account and a dozen others repeating the same is clearly a better gauge. Not like bots and bad faith arguments aren’t running rampant.
It’s not slander if it’s true.
I mean, I get what you are saying, but I feel like you’re overlooking my lived experience.
The discourse online is there are an enormous number of feminists who post “men are trash, etc.” get hundreds and thousands of upvotes and reposts.
There are people who have made their entire career off of talking about how trash men are.
I don’t like that.
Do you hate them more than patriarchal figureheads like Andrew Tate, whom take advantage of this unfairness to deride feminism and reduce any femininity to be a threat to all men?
I’m a guy and I do get it, it sucks to be lumped in with the rest. And if asked, of course you disagree with Andrew Tate. You’re a good guy and feel dismissed. But this viewpoint is very male-centric, and I mean that with the utmost empathy.
Women, almost universally, will experience much worse sexism than being called trash (they are also called trash in certain contexts). So if individuals need to be human and vent their frustrations in a way that doesn’t consider you, it is okay to feel bad - but saying “that’s feminism” is misleading as feminism theory does not conclude this.
Yeah, no, Andrew Tate needs to fucking fall off of a bridge onto a large rusty spike and scream for several hours before he finally dies. People like him that promote toxic masculinity as if it is in any way a good thing are some of the worst people on the planet.
Not to mention that he is a rapist and a predator and a sex trafficker. Like, that’s even aside from that. Just his ideology itself deserves him death.
It’s not true though, those people don’t speak for all feminists. You’re focusing on the subset that validates your biases because it reinforces your worldview, i.e. confirmation bias. Some people using female empowerment to put down men does not mean female empowerment is bad.
I never said I was accusing all feminists. I was saying that there are feminists that attack men and upvote each other and circle jerk each other and talk about how great they are for being feminists and being women and all this other stuff and it’s offensive.
I am also aware that for every one person like that there are probably a hundred that are not like that and so I’m talking about a very specific minority of the group is just a loud one that has caused me personal offense
Well, click bait “influencers” trying to ramp up engagement on platforms meant to feed off of controversial content probably isn’t the best place to formulate a legitimate opinion on feminism. Pointing at a handful of bad actors or even just hyperbolic venting on systemic issues or women who feel frustrated, upset and on the defensive isn’t “feminism” as a whole.
I would suggest you engage with more legitimate sources and literature before drawing your conclusions on what feminism is.
Clickbait man hating is not feminism anymore than incel pandering is masculinity.
PS — I don’t like that either (the mindless man hating I mean, preying on disillusioned, upset and vulnerable women.)
I agree with you but your reply misses my entire point. There is a group of people who trash talk all men under the guise of feminism and get a LOT of positive encouragement and support for it online.
That is not cool.
Source: trust me bro
I played a game called “smear the queer” as a closeted gay teen. When the LGBTQ+ community took the word ‘queer’ back, I resisted. It brought up terrible feelings in me. Turns out I had to do some inner work to heal what the world told me to believe about my own people. There was no other way I could be a proud gay man if I refused the label that gave our community our power back. If you want a word that feels better than ‘feminism,’ you’ll find endless external validation online. If you want to feel proud of being a man or worthy of the woman you marry, you’ll have to drown out that noise and look inward.
This has “all lives matter” feels
I don’t know what to respond to this. I vaguely know about Black lives matter/All lives matter situation (I’m not from US) and it looks like you’re implying I’m some racist, bigot, right wing asshole. All I can say is - I am not.
And when I think about it, I hate that the right achieved that any discussion on this topic is immediately shut
I don’t agree it’s exactly like saying “all lives matter,” but feminism is about bringing women up to a level of equality with men. Like why LGBTQ+ doesn’t include cis/het people without being against them, because it’s about increasing queer acceptance. Cis/het people are already accepted. While feminists and queer activists may want/fight for equality on all fronts, and be aware of the ways a patriarchal society is shit for everyone, feminism does focus on helping women because things are a bit more shit for them.
Knowing some people who said “all lives matter,” they weren’t necessarily racist, they just didn’t get how bad it was for black people. Or didn’t understand “black lives matter” wasn’t excluding their lives. Similar to how feminism isn’t denying the inequalities men suffer, it just doesn’t focus on it.
(*Yes, “All lives matter” was used by a bunch by racists as well.)
I wouldn’t take this as an attack on your character like you’ve said. It’s drawing a correlation between that situation and your opinion.
BLM when it started is all about bringing attention and equality to black individuals and communities. Think of it as black people saying, “hey, we matter too”. Conservatives, as a means to attack and weaken the movement said, “not just black lives matter, all lives matter” which is true, but all lives matter doesn’t bring attention to the parity between black people’s situations and white’s.
My first reaction when reading your post was similar to the person you responded to, but not because I think your a bad person, but maybe because of a misunderstanding or skewed view of what feminism is and stands for.
If you had said, feminism shouldn’t exist because males matter too, then I would have said you’re intentionally being like the all lives matter crowd with the intent of keeping the disparity between genders in place. But you didn’t.
That’s quite a stretch, I’m not saying that at all.
All Lives Matter was something that was intended well - but missed the point completely. While Bernie originally said it trying to say that all lives should matter, it missed the point because the movement was specifically saying that black lives matter - because all too often people forget that black lives do in fact matter. In the opposite, we don’t need all lives matter because society as a whole already knows that white lives matter - what they were fighting for was that black lives also matter.
You’re feminism argument I feel is trying to argue the same thing. Society already knows men should have rights and equality. That’s not the point of the feminism argument. Feminism is that women specifically deserve those things.
Saying feminism should be more about all equality is the same as saying all lives matter - it may be well intentioned, but it minimizes the actual issues they are facing. We know that men and women should be equal, but men have all of society and thousands of years of history on their side already, women can have feminism on their side. Men have enough already fighting for them.
Think of it by adding a “too” or “also”. Black lives also matter. Women deserve equality too. It’s because they’re the outside groups.
Way to all lives matter equality there buddy
I agree; Feminism strives to be egalitarianism. It’s inherently a misnomer in that it (the movement) strives to benefit more than women while only being named for women.
And to be clear, feminism is great. It’s just a peculiar name given its actual tennets.
I would be all for giving women special treatment to make up the balance.
But, I need to know exactly how much special treatment to give women, and I’m not talking about just treating women equally, I’m saying giving them special treatments, special privileges, making them A class citizens and men B class citizens for a set time period, or whatever it takes until the balance is zero.
If they can show me an accounting or put together a concise, hey guys, you owe us exactly 800 trillion karma points, which can be redeemed by one good action at a time.
Sure, fine, let’s get to it, let’s take care of that debt, let’s get rid of the interest, let’s set everything back to 0 and start over from scratch.
Are the people downvoting me because I have been crass or crude in some way?
Have I missed some fundamental concept that would have caused a different outcome?
My statement is I want to zero out the debt and start over as a society with men and women being completely and totally equal in every way.
No past debts lingering overhead, a blank slate, a fresh start, a new us.
Why would anyone be against that?
I, as a man, have the capacity to apologize. Women, as women, have the capacity to forgive.
Why are we not making this happen somehow, some way?
My statement is I want to zero out the debt and start over as a society with men and women being completely and totally equal in every way.
No past debts lingering overhead, a blank slate, a fresh start, a new us.
Why would anyone be against that?
probably the “making them A class citizens and men B class citizens” part, that’s not very cash money, blank slate, fresh start. Certainly not “No past debts lingering,” so the downvotes are probably a combination of your cognitive dissonance and smug attitude about fixing oppression with more oppression.
There’s nothing about my attitude that smug. I’m saying that if there was a clear accounting of the total amount of damage is done by men to women, we should pay that debt off.
Like, please assume that I am collaborating in the conversation and that I’m looking to build something positive and not that I’m just trying to, like, one up or get up votes or anything else. I am contributing my viewpoint to the conversation. That’s it.
Look buddy you asked why
Yeah, and you said I was smug about it, when there is no sense of smugness coming from me, which implies that you misread my intentions, so I clarified.
which implies that you misread my intentions
Or perhaps you’re not presenting as you intend
There’s nothing about my attitude that smug.
Smuggest shit I’ve ever read.
I think the word for that is gender egalitarism or gender equality. And depending on how you define Feminism, feminism is just a part of that. Or maybe not if you define it another way. Feminism has had several waves and comes in different forms, so the entire term is vague.
I think it kind of depends what you’re trying to convey. If you’re talking to a feminist and aren’t aware modern societies are patriarchal, and now badly this needs to be addressed… but you start an uneducated conversation on equality and how men need to be factored in, too… You might be technically correct, but you’re not going to make friends. That’s kind of dismissive of what they focus on, and showing you’re not really equipped to recognize the issues they might face.
And the difference in my definition would be mainly focus. Feminism might be part of gender egalitarianism for most people. It’s just the part that necessarily advocates for just treatment of women. Everything else might come on top, fighting for other people too, or hating them… That’s just beyond the definition.
I completely agree: the name has been compromised. Haters have successfully turned it into something negative. Perhaps it will get the respect it’s due if it can leave some baggage behind.
I was one of many who fell for the propaganda about feminists being man haters and wanting superiority, and I’m sure some do. However most women I know who claim to be feminists are so in the egalitarian sense. They just want equal rights and opportunity. My own eye opening was when we had our first kid. At the time my company had no paternity leave. It was a group of feminists at work who raised a stink (unasked) to try to get that changed, that men also deserve some time off for the birth of their child
I don’t think it’s because of the name. The people against the movement won’t like it no matter what you call it. Like Suffragettes(back in the day,) Pride, LGBTQ+, Black Lives Matter, DEI, and hell, depending on your crowd, even “Equality” and “Empathy” are sneered at.
I think it’s a similar argument to “woke”. The original meaning was a good thing but the term has so much baggage now that people abandoned it
I disagree. “Woke” was always tongue-in-cheek and never represented specific goals.
I always thought the expansion of feminism was called Intersectionality.
Intersectionality isn’t the expansion of feminism. It is a recognition that an individual from two separate oppressed groups has an experience of oppression that is unique and something other than the addition of the two systems of oppression.
Right, but didn’t that get folded into and shape the overall concept of modern feminism? And isn’t that why OP thinks the label should be changed (even though the term and concept exist today)?
I think you’re referring fourth wave feminism. I’ll say that I know very little about it, but it seems not to be have the level of thought behind it found in second wave, third wave, or crt. That may change, but I think most people working on the field are rigorously extending previous waves. So I wouldn’t call fourth wave a replacement for previous waves therefore making it any more modern other than it’s origin is more recent.
My next question would be, is it truly integrated into a theory or is it just added to an set of beliefs picked from both second and third wave. Honestly, I have no clue.
If you disagree with op, how about you actually engage in the debate instead of resorting to ad hominems?
I don’t like the name of your movement, so you should rename it for me
-The most “man” take you can have
Not for me, it’s just objectively incorrect name
It’s about women, so the name objectively fits.
I think before we play word games, we need to revolutionize the societal belief that men are in control and at the top.
There is a ‘patriarchy’ every bit as much as there is a ‘matriarchy’ if you follow me.
I actually believe, very sincerely, that women drive most of the social dynamics and mostly define gender roles. I genuinely feel that women have more power than men, in most areas of life.
It’s a sensitive topic to bring up, because it runs counter to the narrative, but there’s something that doesn’t get looked at, and until fair acknowledgment of that occurs, we can’t really move forward into an equal society.
No, it should still be called feminism. That’s what it is. It’s an ideology with a ton of different variants/branches, with the most ‘generic’ sort of definition, from dictionary.com, being the advocacy of women’s rights on the basis of the equality of the sexes. Feminism has always been about this, hence the advocacy in favour of equity in areas where women are under-represented, but no advocacy for non-women in areas where women are ‘ahead’. Sorta like how left leaning sorts point to a theory of equity that values the equality of outcomes to justify things like DEI – but if anyone points out that the aggregate ‘outcome’ from our healthcare approach results in women living ~5 years longer than men on average, meaning an ‘equality of outcomes’ approach should preference men’s health care needs until that gap is closed, suddenly they’ll have excuses why their vision of equity exempts that particular case.
There’s no real reason to change the term feminism, it fits with what feminist ideals generally are and has a valid place as a general ideology. It’s especially pertinent in areas where women’s rights are massively under-represented / ignored.
Equality of all people is egalitarianism. It’s been around for longer than feminism, in general. Feminists are not egalitarian, as they aren’t about equality of all people, and instead only focus on a specific niche, and ultimately are ok if their niche is preferenced / comes out on top. Both ideologies can exist just fine. What needs to change is your perspective of what feminism is, as you seem to mistakenly think its about equality for everyone.
something something, coming from incels and mysogyny. they think its a counterpart to toxic and hypermasculinity its not even the same thing.
How about “Womanizing?” Everyone pro-woman is a “womanizer.”
