Feminism is Not Intersectional
Feminism has been attacked for only accommodating to the needs of white, cis-gendered, heterosexual, able-bodied women while leaving out other minority women from the movement. As a result of this, other forms of feminism have emerged, such as womanism, which is a form of feminism that specifically for black women. To be intersectional, one must have overlapping identities that create a different form of oppression than if only one identity was had, for example being both black and being a woman is to be intersectional. Today I will argue that the exclusion of minorities from the feminist movement and the lack of direct support for minorities in the movement leads feminism away from intersectionality. I will lay my argument out below:
1. If feminism is intersectional, then it directly addresses the needs of women who are disabled, LGBTQ, women of color, and the lower class.
2. Feminism does not directly address the needs of women who are disabled, LGBTQ, women of color, and the lower class.
3. Therefore, feminism is not intersectional.
An important term to define for my argument is ‘directly address.’ When I argue that feminism does not directly address the needs of the intersectional, I mean that the needs of feminism thus far have been targeted at improving the lives of white women. Other minorities and people with intersectional identities may have benefitted from these awards only if their needs happened to overlap with the needs of white women. For example, white women have decided to tackle the pay gap and other minority identities may, over time, notice a change in the worth of their dollar to the dollar of a white man but only because it was originally chosen as a topic of concern by white women. Other issues for minority women, such as the inappropriate touching of black women’s hair or the vast difference in the pay gap for women of different races and ethnicities (with Hispanic women making 53 cents to the white man’s dollar), are all harder problems to solve because the white women in the movement have not immediately observed it as a problem to their freedom. The solution for this lack of intersectional awareness may be to form other versions of feminism for specific identities like womanism has done for black women. Another solution to this issue could be to give the movement time to include the needs of minority women by ensuring minority women have a place in leadership positions within the movement. Although minority women have benefitted from the feminist movement, feminism is not intersectional because it does not work to directly address the needs of intersectional women.
1. If feminism is intersectional, then it directly addresses the needs of women who are disabled, LGBTQ, women of color, and the lower class.
2. Feminism does not directly address the needs of women who are disabled, LGBTQ, women of color, and the lower class.
3. Therefore, feminism is not intersectional.
An important term to define for my argument is ‘directly address.’ When I argue that feminism does not directly address the needs of the intersectional, I mean that the needs of feminism thus far have been targeted at improving the lives of white women. Other minorities and people with intersectional identities may have benefitted from these awards only if their needs happened to overlap with the needs of white women. For example, white women have decided to tackle the pay gap and other minority identities may, over time, notice a change in the worth of their dollar to the dollar of a white man but only because it was originally chosen as a topic of concern by white women. Other issues for minority women, such as the inappropriate touching of black women’s hair or the vast difference in the pay gap for women of different races and ethnicities (with Hispanic women making 53 cents to the white man’s dollar), are all harder problems to solve because the white women in the movement have not immediately observed it as a problem to their freedom. The solution for this lack of intersectional awareness may be to form other versions of feminism for specific identities like womanism has done for black women. Another solution to this issue could be to give the movement time to include the needs of minority women by ensuring minority women have a place in leadership positions within the movement. Although minority women have benefitted from the feminist movement, feminism is not intersectional because it does not work to directly address the needs of intersectional women.
Comments (112)
So, as someone who is normally skeptical, my first thought is to be skeptical of this claim. What sorts of data support it? (That is, the claim that feminism only accommodates the needs of white, cis-gendered, etc.)
Aside from that, jumping ahead a bit (because we probably won't get to it otherwise), and just as a point of logic, this seems to have a problem to me:
"1. If feminism is intersectional, then it directly addresses the needs of women who are disabled, LGBTQ, women of color, and the lower class."
Shouldn't that be something like "If feminism is exhaustively intersectional . . . "?
Because let's suppose that feminism also addresses racial concerns. That would make feminism intersectional in that respect, even though it might not be intersectional with LGBTQ concerns. The only way that wouldn't be the case is if we were to argue that "intersectional" is necessarily exhaustive, but that would be dubious.
Yeah, to want ideological focuses to all be exhaustively intersectional would seem to suggest that they'd "all" address everything, all the same issues, so that there couldn't be different ideological focuses, and the idea of intersectionality would just dissolve away (since it's all the same movement).
At first glance it would seem that hispanic women were grossly underpaid compared to white men. However, there is an intervening factor: On average, hispanic women are not engaged in the same categories of work as white men (or for the most part, white women). Anyone working in the lower-skilled layers of the service sector is going to be paid a lot less than anyone working in the skilled or professional layers of the service sector.
The current fad (or big mistake) is to sequester every conceivable identity in pigeon holes AS IF there was no commonality across the species. So white gay men are in one pigeon hole, gay black men in another; middle class white women go into one slot, middle class white men into a different one. Disabled "cis-gendered" middle class white women go into their hole; disabled transgendered lower class people of color go over there, and so on and so forth.
There are clear historical reasons why hispanic women would be paid much less than middle class white women and men. The same goes for black people, native Americans, and so on. None of the pay gaps are going to be eliminated by anything short of huge changes in the social/political/economic structures of the country, which nobody thinks is going to happen in the near future.
Labor has always been layered from management at the top (high pay) down to unskilled labor at the bottom (low pay). If you take all cis-gendered white male workers, you find the same layering from top to bottom. MAYBE race, gender, and ethnicity aren't the critical factor.
I’m not sure why feminism would even try to be intersectional. The female sex is a very broad umbrella and should, at least theoretically, cover everyone in it.
Quoting NOS4A2
Right, so two things:
1. All general women's rights issues are rights issues for all intersections of women.
2. In the past feminism may have neglected intersectional issues, such as poverty and natural hair rights, but I don't think that
a) that has been the case in the last 20 years at least.
b) there are any important feminists alive who would argue against the importance
intersectional issues.
c) adding intersectional issues to the core issues of feminism changes fundamentally changes
what feminism is really about. They are more like very useful, and much needed amendments to
the constitution of feminism.
But those “neglected intersectional issues”, such as “poverty and natural hair rights”, also apply to men. If feminism is turning intersectional it is no longer feminism, but rather another incident of identity politics poisoning another historical movement.
Feminism applies to men.
I know I talked mainly about women's rights, but feminism is also fundamentally about opposing patriarchy, which is widely known to benefit men, but also harms them in significant ways.
Also, poverty affects black women in different ways than it affects black men, for example.
I would argue it benefits woman and children more than it benefits men. But of course there are upsides and downsides.
Because they are women?
Well, yes, because women have been more disadvantaged by patriarchy. There's less to fix for men.
Quoting NOS4A2
Bingo. Or because they are black and women at the same time.
Traditionally, men have toiled in work, given their lives in war, and gathered enough resources to supply their families with a decent life in order to protect them, not to disadvantage them.
Sounds like a job for feminism.
Women have toiled just as much, traditionally, and currently the female workforce does more labor than the male.
Men start wars and then call themselves heroic for getting blown up in them. Women are left to heal the wounded nation.
And, protect me from what? Other men, I assume. Also, hello paternalism!
Quoting NOS4A2
Bingo again. You're on a roll.
The way men have tried to "protect" women has historically included keeping them in the house, telling them whom they can be friends with, what jobs they can do, not allowing them to vote, not allowing them property, and beating them when they get rebellious. If that's not disadvantaged, I dunno what definition you're working with.
Traditionally, all these men who start wars and call themselves heroic were raised by women during the most important moments of their upbringing. Hopefully that’s changing, I suppose.
1. Modern psychology recognizes the limited impact of paternal influence on children.
2. Women, though disadvantaged by patriarchy, have often been brainwashed into being proponents thereof.
3. Children watch and learn from society and their father's as well. Parenting does not happen in a vacuum.
Quoting NOS4A2
Do you have some particular problem with mothers?
I don’t mean to pooh pooh feminism, I just recoil at its latest iteration. I understand it’s necessity during certain periods and places.
However, if it wasn’t for the so-called patriarchy and the systems supposedly built by men, woman could not have found equality in them. Universal suffrage had to be fought and killed for, then implemented, long before Woman’s suffrage was even possible for example. It’s the same with education and employment. It seems feminists want access to the patriarchy more so than its alteration.
Which would be....?
Quoting NOS4A2
So-called?
Supposedly built? Who else built them? Unicorns?
Quoting NOS4A2
Some women have tried to access power through patriarchy (see Hilary Clinton's attempts to out-hawk the men on war). Feminists seek to dismantle patriarchy. The systems (by which I assume you mean economies and government, etc.) can be largely left standing, whilst still being altered to reflect equality.
I disagree. I'd say women have benefited disproportionately to the weight they've been pulling.
I'll refer you to a previous post of mine:
Quoting Artemis
Well, then you have a very strange idea of what it means to be benefited by something. I guess you wouldn't mind being someone else's property.
But do the different ways differ (meta-difference) between black men and women and white men and women? Intersectionality only seems to have a genuine advantage if there is something specific to the combination of being poor, black and female that cannot be adressed from either framework individually.
I don’t even know what it’s called.
There are plenty Queens, Pharoahs and Emperors of the female sex throughout history.
Exactly, where previous feminists sought freedom and equality in society, today’s feminists seek its destruction. There is still plenty of work for feminists to do, in Islam and in places where slavery is the norm for example.
Really? Can you name 10 without using Wikipedia? Bonus points if you omit the English queens.
I think there are elements of racism, classism, and sexism in many of the problems poor, black women face, and the point of intersectionality would be to draw on criticisms of all those isms to explain the unique position of poor, black women.
For example, the "angry black woman" stereotype seems to be a combination of "hysterical woman" and "uppity black," sharing with both the general sentiment of "shut up and let white men speak," while still being a unique stereotype of its own.
Along Echarmion's lines: define "plenty"?
Quoting NOS4A2
Its? I'm assuming the referent here is "society"? Which is only true if you assume patriarchy to be synonymous with, or indivisible from society per se. Not a position I myself would support.
Probably not. Your point?
Which parts of society are not patriarchal?
Cleopatra did not single-handedly create the systems of today's societies.
Neither did men.
I can trivially name 10 important ruling men from history. I assume so can you. That should suggest something about the historical power structures to you.
There's a difference between being influenced by X and being inherently X.
Quoting NOS4A2
Yeah, okay, men have only been responsible for, what?, maybe 99.9% of the historical creation of society as we know it. Whoop-di-do.
It says something of our ignorance. To assume women, half the population, had no bearing or influence on the course of history and society is ridiculous.
Well, of course it's ridiculous that women haven't been influential. That's why patriarchy is so horrible. But it's what has happened.
Women have birthed 100% of men. I wager this has some modicum of an effect on society as we know it.
Now you're grasping at straws.
Women bearing children doesn't mean they had a voice in the creation of governments or economies. And it's not like women had a choice about when or how many children to have or if at all to have them.
Do you think the “intersectionality” of current feminism testifies to its moribundity? Or it’s strength?
No they didn’t have a voice. Then again, neither did most men. Suffrage is a fairly recent phenomenon, at least in historical terms.
That's true. But the people who did shape governments up until recently historically have been 99% men. So patriarchy, and the resulting societal structures are built by and for men.
That’s not quite true. Men in general took the initial steps, sure, for instance shedding blood and fight for suffrage, but these initial these steps allowed woman to take steps of their own with relative ease in comparison.
This statement seems a bit dated, since for decades there have been many feminisms--lesbian, of color, working class, etc.--that address different sub-groups of women.
The fact still remains that a woman from any sub-group, including priveleged white women, can be the victim of patriarchal injustice and inequality.
Not all women are feminists and some women are very identified with and supportive of the values of patriarchy. But I find it impossible to believe that any woman calling herself a feminist would consciously identify herself with patriarchy.
I doubt that.
The existence of good, feminist men does not mean those supporting patriarchy don't exist.
Why did women need suffrage in the first place? Because of the patriarchal structures put in place by men.
Perhaps, as someone noted, I’m equivocating between “society” and “the patriarchy”. I might be wrong on that, though I think it’s a distinction without a difference.
But I remember Camille Paglia saying “Patriarchy, routinely blamed for everything, produced the birth control pill, which did more to free contemporary women than feminism itself.”
Not every single aspect of a culture should be considered cannon fodder for patriarchy.
It is stupid, and that’s the point. She doesn’t believe in the concept of a patriarchy.
What do you mean, you might be equivocating between society and patriarchy? I would like to understand that better.
I’ve assumed that “the patriarchy” means society in general. In that sense I might be putting a different meaning to it than a feminist might. I still think “patriarchal” is a valid adjective though and has application outside of feminism.
For me, it only conjures up negative associations and a fundamental imbalance.
You are free to call a car a porcupine, but it's not super useful in conversation.
I think you are focusing on the wrong part of the sentence
Quoting NOS4A2
The significant point is that birth control pills, were liberating for women, and were invented by several men. So, big deal. Background: The research was paid for and sponsored by Planned Parenthood (founded by Margaret Sanger), and funded by a Sanger associate, Catherine McCormick, who inherited the international Harvester fortune.
Some feminists do seem to blame the entirely symbolic "patriarchy" for everything from economic oppression to bad hair days. These same people exaggerate the accomplishments of feminism. The mills of the economy grind away without consulting ideologies.
Is science patriarchal? One would think that it was from reading some feminists. But "patriarchy isn't real (IMHO). Science and technology are dominated by men, which doesn't make these fields patriarchal, any more than fields which are dominated by women are matriarchal.
I still think "patriarchy" is a noun naming a non-existent phenomenon which is the Number One imaginary Bogeyman of feminists.
Such a shallow viewpoint. Some men? Sure. Not the admirable ones.
You realize how fallacious this is? You realize what it has in common with many racist thoughts? Identity politics? Etc.
The economy is the most concrete form there is of how ideology is operating in a given society. I don't know about feminists "blaming" patriarchy; the ones I've read describe its operations in a given social realm or institution.
Some, compared to the vast majority over history, yes.
And it's not at all like racism, because I did not say anything about men being inherently anything. I'm just pointing to the facts of their historical actions to explain what patriarchy is and how it operates.
Your formulation is spot on Marx.
But Capitalism isn't about men exploiting women. It's about capitalists exploiting everybody -- men, women, and children -- the earth itself -- for the purpose of maximizing profit. Capitalism is the equal-opportunity abuser, and whether men or women are on the board of directors or in the executive suite makes little difference.
I must say I agree, though I think there is the problem of the patriarchal subjugation of women by men in certain religions.
It's not that bad is it? You abstract away the specifics of the mechanism and give it a label.
Capitalism is a name for any socio-economic system in which goods are produced for monetary profit. There are lots of flavours united under one banner. Capitalism the number one imaginary Bogeyman of socialists and Marxists and communists.
Patriarchy is a name for any socio-economic system that relatively disadvantages women. It's the number one Bogeyman of feminists.
White supremacy is a name for any socio-economic system that relatively disadvantages non-whites. It's the number one Bogeyman of western anti-racists.
All these imaginary foes that totally do not exist!
Sarcasm aside, if you want to look at intersectionality, you'll probably see that the processes united under these labels all overlap and have sub-processes of relative autonomy; that idiot down the bar complaining about the pikeys isn't just doing so because of capitalism, and that executive in charge of performance review structure isn't just prejudiced because of racism or sexism. The sites of overlap are intersections.
If you wanna look whether there are novel features in the intersections, you have to go and look. So trans people, trans in non-white communities in America get assaulted a lot more than trans in white communities. Why? Capitalism! Class! Base! Superstructure! Yeah right. More complicated than that.
There is no debate that males tend to be more powerful, more dominant, and so forth. Biology makes it difficult for the male of any species to assure his genetic contribution. In humans this has resulted in women being controlled by men. Yada yada yada -- you know the drill.
But "patriarchy" is the practice of an ideology, projected backwards onto history. It's a great theory because it is vaporous and can claim anything it wants. (And patriarchy is by no means the only vaporous theory that gets regular use.)
Yes, I don’t think the noun “patriarchy” has any validity or evidence in support of it. “Patriarchal”, as an adjective in anthropology, does have some validity I think, when it describes situations where men rule over women as a matter of principle.
Sounds like you agree that what is generally understood to be the definition of patriarchy exists, you just don't like the label.
I do not agree: I see capitalism as quite a patriarchal edifice, along with all the other major institutions. I shouldn't have to repeat that it's all been controlled almost exclusively by men, with very few exceptions. No one ever said that men have a problem exploiting other men. The fundamental power paradigm throughout history privileges male strength and aggression (duh!!) and subordinates the role of those who menstruate and carry babies for 9 months. Clearly menstruation and pregnancy are going to limit certain kinds of activities for limited periods of time, but what does that mean? That women can't reason? That they aren't as smart, if not more so? That they shouldn't be Pope or study Torah at a Yeshiva? No one ever talks about mens' moodiness like they do about women, but violent, aggressive men are extremely moody. Just a different kind of moodiness.
The question for me becomes, Would things have been any different had men and women shared equal power and voice throughout history? Can estrogen claim a place beside testosterone, or is that irrelevant? What about the dearth of estrogen in post-menopausal women?
I perceive many patriarchal characteristics in most public women: patriarchy is the master brain-washer.
I see a lot of issues that have to be parsed out here:
1) How fundamentally different are women and men in terms of human thought-process and proneness to aggression? If it is fundamentally different, is it biological or social for most of it? Would a women's economy really be that much different than a man's? Is this binary division arbitrary or falsely correlated?
2) If women acted aggressively like a man, are they "patriarchal"? What if throughout history, all women acted like what is traditionally attributed to men when in power? Would that change things? Would that even be called patriarchy or would that just be called "an inclination for domination in power and control"?
I haven't kept up with this discussion, so I was just going through your comments to see what you had to say. I have a question about the statement above. Unless my memory is off, in a previous discussion you said that women are oppressed, which I disagreed with. How does that tie in with your statement about patriarchy?
1. I won't make any generalizations about men and women thinking and behaving differently, because it's just too easy to disprove and find the exceptions to the rules. I do think the psychic economy is very different for men and women; I tend to conclude that this is mostly due to socialization and have no idea how much of it is biological.
2. Your "what if": If men and women had had equal share in composing the philosophical and religious texts, along with all other literature; if they had equal share in establishing all the socio-cultural institutions; if they had chosen to divide all realms of labor equally; if they had shared power and decision-making equally...
There would have been no need for the term patriarchy, for the founding mothers and fathers would have shared equal responsibility for the results.
That's a point that might negate the idea that patriarchy itself is bad. Perhaps it is just control itself. Now sharing power is definitely a problem, but that might be something that can be decoupled from the control aspect itself.
It brainwashed you, apparently.
Which is why "patriarchy" is meaningless. If a few women are just as patriarchal as men and oppress most women, if a few men oppress most other men as much as they oppress women, then clearly there must be some other principle at work besides hormones and genitals. At the present time (present = last 400 years, more or less) human economic function has become dominant. The kind of work we do defines us, and most of us are defined as the class which labors to produce surplus value, and outside of that function, we have little value to the elite. We (about 95% of the male and female population) are oppressed by a small minority of men and women. Capitalism isn't patriarchy.
In Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times – 1996, Elizabeth Wayland Barber asks the question, "Why were women at home taking care of children and spending much of the day weaving, when men were out and about hunting, chopping, and digging? Her answer is that weaving was safely compatible with child rearing, in ways which hunting, chopping, and digging were not. (20,000 years ago is towards the end of the hunting / gathering stage of activity which had gone on for maybe 300,000 years.). She notes that at least some women developed economic independence in this model. We know this from 4,000 - 5,000 year old records on clay tablets from Babylonia (et al) recording directives of "business women" to male trading agents in other cities, telling them what to buy.
Later on after agriculture and animals came together, and horses, cows, goats, pigs, etc. were domesticated, and tillage and harvesting replaced hunting and gathering, men's work was more dangerous for children because of the large animals and tools involved.
Primate males evolved into larger and stronger animals than primate females. That's our pattern too. Men have tended to do heavier, harder, more dangerous labor, the activities of which would put little children at risk.
Feminists hate the idea that biology is destiny. In some ways it is, like it or not: pregnancy and lactation are just not fairly distributed between men and women. At least some of what is biologically sensible for men isn't biologically sensible for women.
I don't remember the context of our back and forth. Maybe I misunderstood. I guess I think when people say that women are oppressed, that means that they are oppressed by men. Perhaps I am jumping to conclusions, at least in your case.
But it just so happens that our world has been largely man-controlled, and history tells the story of men behaving badly on the grand stage of things. There's no current need to neuter the term when men systematically kept women outside of all spheres of power and cultural creation.
Patriarchy refers to a feature of society and culture in which women are oppressed or devalued in relation to men. It isn't one specific action which men take against women (though those do happen), but a feature of certain social contexts and relations. In this respect, participation in it or its presence is not limited to or divided on sex and gender lines.
Our capitalism is a patriarchy because it has these relations, whether they are enacted by men or women. This question isn't about whether someone belongs to a virtuous sex or gender, it's about how they understand and treat women. Women can partake in this just as much as men.
I have to say I disagree with you here. Bitter gave a very cogent response to you there. If he was being antagonistic or hostile, he would have been that, but he gave you a lot of justification for his ideas there.
Feminists do not deny biology. In fact, most feminists argue for women's rights based on biology, like when they push for lactation rooms in workplaces and abortion rights for women.
Yes but I think we should separate two aspects- the control aspect and the equality aspect. If men and women controlled the economy, and it was oppressive, then it is just oppression, not patriarchy. Patriarchy only pertains to the equality aspect. That is to say, are men and women getting the fair share of power and access to power.. However, the actual use of that power for whatever system itself can be wielded in any which way by male or female. A female might as well back capitalist tendencies as much as male. There is nothing male about capitalism or communism or any other economic ism really. If I came up with a way of life, and I'm male, that doesn't mean the ism is male, and thus a patriarchy.
I don't believe that our society is a patriarchy and I don't believe women in the US are oppressed as a class. I can understand @Bitter Crank's point that woman are oppressed in the sense that everyone who is not in power is oppressed. Pardon if I've misstated your position BC.
I am convinced that a culture of hostility dominates here and acts as the fragile mask in front of an awful lot of misery and insecurity. When people have to go out of their way to put others down, I have to conclude they're miserable beings.
Research demonstrates that men are more prone to suffer from malignant narcissism, Machiavellianism and sociopathy/psychopathy than women.
Women raise all these terrible men, and yet you want to take away their responsibility for their own lives and the consequences of their actions. That's the opposite of showing respect. Your position relegates women to the status of children. I hang around with strong, opinionated, stubborn women. They would not tolerate anyone telling them that.
Hey, wait a minute - aren't you a strong, opinionated, stubborn woman?
I think I'm strong; I will express and argue my opinions and my beliefs without trying to force them on anyone; but am I stubborn? I don't think I'm a particularly stubborn person.
I truly love a mobile, enlightening dialogue with others whom I can take seriously. I hate interacting with rigid, authoritarian minds who shout at you like Hitler.
I put that in for rhetorical purposes. I have seen that you are strong and opinionated. It just didn't feel right to leave out the stubborn part. For the record, I don't consider stubbornness a vice. Ok, ok, I'll say "strong-willed."
And for the record, @Bitter Crank is as far from a hater as there is on this forum.
All spheres... That's too sweeping a term, particularly in the area of cultural creation. Hollywood isn't the world.
Women have gained a great deal of purchase in politics in some large constituencies, like the European Union. Women played a much larger role in the sciences, for instance, and in government in the USSR. True enough, there were once zero women voting in the US and UK, but that has changed, you probably noticed (though I'm not claiming the vote is much access to power, if it is access at all). Women played a zero to almost no roll in government in the US up to 1920, but over the last century that has changed. Around a quarter of congress are presently women. that's a huge change over 50 years ago, when there were 15 altogether, and zero a century ago.
Power is conservative and change in who wields power is slow. Progress is being made.
What do you mean by "cultural creation"?
It seems like women do play a a fairly large role in culture--from creation to criticism. The contribution of women in cultural production has certainly increased a great deal in the last century, last 50 years, last 25 years.
But the assumption always seems to lurk in the second row (not in the distant background) that it is women who suffer, whether women partake in the oppressing or not.
It seems clear that in the history of capitalism--hell! The history of the world--the suffering has been abundant for both sexes, whether women have participated in oppressing or not. Capitalisms concern for the family is two fold: One that they consume, and that they reproduce the culture--maybe capitalist bosses are concerned about reproducing patriarchy, but mostly it seems like they are concerned with reproducing a population who fit into the capitalist system of production--eager consumers and docile workers.
I'm not a female or a feminist, so... I probably don't get "patriarchy", or maybe I have patriarchal genes or a patriarchal biome, or something.
Sure, there's been suffering on both sides, particularly when you bring in class.
But women of all classes have historically been considered property of their husbands. Men of all classes have historically perhaps been beaten down by the next higher up man, but could in turn beat down on their women.
You feel what you feel, but disagreement with your views really shouldn't be taken as evidence of hostility or hate.
I suppose that's a possibility. I'll have to think about it more.
Waffling.
Quoting Artemis
Some. Not all.
Are you now claiming the majority of all men, as in... throughout human history acted like that?
Ok.
One is more than ought be. Trust me. Plenty of otherwise peaceful men have dealt with some of the same overbearing aggressive physically threatening insecure men, like those you mentioned. All such treatment of women was and is wrong.
Now...
Other men protect the woman's right to the pursuit of her own happiness.
The way some men have acted towards women is unacceptable. Others are perfectly acceptable. There are different standards for what counts as "protecting women". Some of those you'd probably agree with. Sometimes, those standards are held by men who do not appreciate being placed into the same bag of rotten apples(your target). Such men would be your friend, one would think, an ally of sorts, unless your notion of "feminism" equals man hater.
It's not that you disagree with me--I have no problem with that--it's you beginning your response by telling me flat out I'm brainwashed. So I respond flat out you're rude.
I mean the creation of cultural institutions as well as art. Cultural institutions include religion, politics, education, military organization, govt., distribution of weath (class system), etc.
Patriarchy disintegrated in the 20th Century but it wasnt replaced. People just blundered into trial and error, looking for a new set of rules and roles.
That means that there is an attraction for some to reanimate the corpse, for both men and women. Conservatism is safety.
Don't be a blind scientist, declaring that there is no light.
While I acknowledge that there have likely always been good men, I would caution you against assuming the majority in past centuries were female allies. I think as the culture has changed, so too have men and women.
There was a time when it was "common knowledge" (as is, people, men and women alike, assumed to be true) that women were inferior in many ways. It was also commonly accepted that, while a husband should not beat his wife to a bloody pulp, he had the perfect right to hit her if she got "hysterical" (code for, having her own opinion).
If the majority of men did not go along with that, as well as with many other injustices against women, these injustices would never have been part of the framework of society.
We would not, for example, still bear the vestiges of such a history in such phrases as "rule of thumb."
A cake has many layers and no matter how you cut it the layers are preserved in every piece and in the same order.
So, we here have feminism, seen as a just cause, but within it, injustice, discrimination based on race, sexuality, ethnicity, etc. exist.
It is not wrong to say that if we don't correct the issue of the lack of intersectionality we would be hypocritical, short-sighted and self-serving to boot, making us no better than a slave-owner who wants to free his kin from slavery.
However what redeems us is that we're doing the best we can with hands bound behind our backs - societies and cultures have limits and will react violently to changes that are just too radical - and that may make it impossible to correct all societal ills at once. It's inevitable that racism, homophobia and other injustices exist within the otherwise just cause of feminism - giving women equal rights. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't do anything about. Lending support to other just causes can work out to be beneficial to all sides - not being a hypocrite and helping another good cause can really boost morale and people-convincing prowess.
No caution needed. I've assumed no such thing.
Not all men are they way you've described some. Not all females are like you either(assuming you're a female).
The 'intersectional' aspect of the thread would be unnecessary if everyone were given some equal modicum of respect/value/equality/etc simply because they are human.
I don't think women are from Venus and men are from Mars, and Saturn really should have been named Athena to Zeus's Jupiter. Pluto could have been named Persephone, and Neptune Demeter. But... those damned patriarchal astronomers.
It seems very unlikely to me that in the penultimate stretch of human evolution (modern homo sapiens wandering the Veldt for 300,000 years, at least, hunting, gathering, and living an exceptionally sustainable lifestyle, men and women were in constant war with each other. It wasn't the Peaceable Kingdom, if Steven Pinker's theory about the state lessening violence is right, but it had to have been been fairly good, because archeological/anthropological evidence indicates that they were reasonably healthy and long-lived. An inhospitable, inharmonious society living where willing cooperation and fellowship was a requirement would have difficulty surviving and thriving as well as they did.
10-12-14 thousand years ago life changed dramatically -- the agricultural revolution. We settled down on the land. Now, there are some interesting theories about how and why that came about. With agriculture came the tilled fields, the city, and the state. Some anthropological historians suspect that there was a conspiracy. Agricultural was promoted vigorously by the state (initially consisting of one family stronger than the rest living in a bigger rock pile than everybody else) because surplus food could be TAXED, and the tax would feed the state. Compared to 300,000 years of amicable wandering the earth, agriculture, the state, and the city took off like a rocket. It wasn't long before family life (the prime reason for humans existing) was severely altered by work, religion, politics, trade, economy, state, garbage heaps, shit piles, (what happens when people stay in one place), and then domesticated animals in addition to our canine alter-egos, writing, etc.
All this happened VERY FAST. Agriculture brought with it the need for control and regulation and our cultural inventions turned on us -- not in the 19th century a.d. but in the 10th millennium b.c. I don't know what life was like back then for ordinary people. Probably a mixed bag.
We know more about the high culture of ancient Greece in the age of Pericles. If not patriarchal, it can certainly be described as male-oriented. Women were expected to stay at home. Important men were the public eye (unimportant men were irrelevant). But it was also a harsh society, despite the high levels of culture. The punishment for unpaid debts (not a dollar owed for a cup of wine, but more like bankruptcy) was enslavement for one's entire family, and not a symbolic slavery either.
But then, there are a few plays that survived like Lysistrata or Antigony where women play important cultural roles.
Our view of ancient cultures, or for that matter our own culture several hundred years ago, is pretty limited because the lives of ordinary people just aren't recorded. The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England by Barbara A. Hanawalt suggests a reasonably happy existence of men, women, and children. The Decameron by Boccaccio and Canterbury Tales by Chaucer aren't anthropology, of course, but suggest a reasonably decent society for better-off people in the late medieval-early renaissance period. (Nobody wrote Tales of the Proles, unfortunately.)
Putting together 10,000 years of 'civilization' practically had to involve everyone. Well, that's my take on it. I don't imagine any period of women's liberation that would resemble the current time, but it doesn't seem reasonable to impose a ghastly tale of universal, unending female oppression, either. Yes, there are ghastly practices imposed on people: foot binding, castration, female genital mutilation, circumcision, etc. But those weren't universal.
This has clearly never been the case; nor is it now, although feminist philosophy etc. has had serious cachet for the last 40 years. Clearly, for the vast majority of the time, women were tied down to taking care of babies and men were tied down to hunting and foraging. I can understand the physically-stronger and more aggressive sex being bossy, but then it turns into all sorts of wretched ideological systems when writing becomes serious business. Which is when the really sick shit gets carved in stone, so to speak.
I know how the history of humankind developed; and you've got to be joking if you try to argue that Greece wasn't as phall-logo-centrically patriarchal as they come.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Who said that? I don't recall anyone saying that??? You're not trying to manipulate us, are you? The above unfortunate statement doesn't in the least reflect what this discussion has been about--at least according to my understanding of what we've been discussing.
Patriarchy puts men in charge of the socio-cultural institutions.
No one denies that things have changed a lot in the past 40 years.
It's fucking about time Me, Too happened. (Oh, sorry, went off on a tangent, but the point is there.)
This is how I see it, and you may not at all see things the way I do:
* change is slow to occur;
* only recently did women have equal access to education;
* even more recently women obtained more freedom from domestic thralldom (and I'll bet if you'd asked them if they wanted to go out and work some and let the men stay home washing poopy diapers, they'd have said yes); (and this would have been good for some men, too, who would have benefitted from staying at home);
* much of humanity continues to see women fundamentally as sex objects and inferior beings;
* too many men disrespect women's intellect by telling them they're brainwashed (and when they do that, they owe an apology);
* women have never had the chance to share equally in the decision-making apparati;
* men and women are oppressed and made sick by the dysfunctional dynamics that pervade.
We are a truly primitive species who may extinguish itself long before it gets a chance to truly grow up emotionally. I find this thought so sad cuz we were in charge of the whole planet.
I can't believe that you put these practices all on the same level. Castration has never been a universal cultural practice the way that female gen. mutilation is, and I'm sorry, but circumcision is almost insignificant compared to foot binding. What does circumcision do? You lose a little feeling. Maybe the head of your penis gets cold in a breeze. But foot binding? You're fucking crippled for life. Unable to walk, skip, jump, run, dance. You can never go anywhere under your own steam. That's hellish.
I didn't say they were. So what's your point?
Quoting creativesoul
Feminism would be unnecessary too. So would any social justice movement. Alas, that's not the world we live in, and so they are, in fact, necessary.
Well, I didn't really mark out an aristocracy of suffering.
No, castration was not universal practice, but eunuchs were handy to have around guarding harems or singing counter-tenor, or higher. FGM is hardly universal (which is not to lessen its awfulness). As far as I know, most of the world outside of the Islamic sphere has not practiced it--but there are... a billion Moslems.
Just for your information, if a guy is not circumcised, then his foreskin gets cold in a breeze--maybe colder than the head. For Minnesota winter bicyclists, one's whole dick can get cold. Peninsular structures are dead ringers for freezing solid and falling off. Very inconvenient, Yes, foot binding is bad. Read about it in The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, about Gladys Aylward, a Foot Inspector. Apparently it was done to make young girls sit still and work all day at boring tasks like weaving, which families sold for income. Economics again. Without foot binding, the young women would have jumped out of their stockings and devastated the countryside (per Ambrose Bierce, Devil's Dictionary).
And how do you know, anyway, that circumcision isn't traumatic?
Yeah, you kinda did. And I think it trivializes this discussion.
She stirs the pot with the most triggering controversial topic to date and gets the fuck out of the way.
She has not responded to one post. She's hilarious and I'm really laughing.
One of the ideas that some gay liberation thinkers developed in the 1970s was that gay men and gay women were separate cases, in terms of oppression. Gay men were a psychological affront to straight men--not because straight men all feared they themselves were homosexual, but because gay men failed to fulfill the collective social expectations for men. A lot of straight women also thought that gay men were failures.
Gay men didn't have all the burdens that straight men had to put up with in the typical marriage --supporting one's wife and a bunch of whining, crying, sick, shitting, vomiting children, commuting to a fucking job, all sorts of social demands, no time of one's own, etc., etc., etc. Gay men were objects of disgust, displeasure, and hatred (jealousy?)--in the same way that anti-war protestors, hippies, communists, and so forth were objects of loathing and hatred by "red-blooded American men and women". All these deviant people were disgracefully shirking their sex-linked responsibilities. (And they might unforgivably have been having more fun.).
As a consequence, gay men had been coming in for a much more severe social repression than gay women did. Homosexuals besmirched the reputations of real, red-blooded men. That's serious business.
The situation for lesbians was asymmetrical. Men weren't very upset with lesbianism for three reasons: A) lesbianism didn't have anything to do with masculinity; B) whatever women were doing with each other just wasn't very important. Lesbian sex was sex between unimportant people. C) an unknown percentage of men found lesbian sex titillating. They were less subject to social condemnation because their lives were peripheral to start with.
Lesbianism seems to be more challenging to heterosexual women than heterosexual men (in general; whether this is still true, not sure).
I'm not a big fan of patriarchal theory, so my opinion is biased. I blame capitalism for a lot of our problems. Capitalism and Christianity. But all that has changed too. It isn't that Capitalism has become humanized, and most people are finding fulfillment in their work--fulfilling Luther's view that all work is holy, whether it's the work of a farmer, a miner, or a priest.
No indeedy. The extractive, efforts and alienating effects of capitalists haven't softened up one bit. It's just that Europeans, Americans, and maybe 1/2 billion middle-class people in China, India, South America, and middle east petro-states are not currently the subjects of crude value extraction. The curse of profit weighs most heavily now upon the backs of lower working class Chinese, Vietnamese, Bangladeshis, Indians, Pakistanis, Jordanians, Mexicans, Brazilians, and so forth. The Folks Who Live on the Hill, the well-off Americans, Germans, Chinese, Japanese, Indians, etc. still have to produce, but it's managerial work and idea production. Idea work can be pretty tedious, too, of course. The primary purpose of the middle class is to work enough to afford to consume all the peripheral products that are being turned out, from fast fashion (that falls apart after a few wearings) to the latest gadget.
"Hey, you middle-class parasites: if you don't earn enough to buy all this crap into the foreseeable future, then the economy crashes and you crash along with it. So, let's see a little enthusiasm for that Octoberfest White Sale!!!"
You made a universal claim about men. It is universal because all men qualify for the criterion you used.
Men.
Some men.
Some men have never had such privileges afforded to them. Some men have been given the same shortest straw by the same people... some men. If our path forward does not include more opportunities for the male who has not reaped the benefits of this idea that has become a movement aimed at all men, based upon just the fact that some men do bad stuff, then these men will be essentially punished for the sins/crimes/trespasses of other people simply because they all share the same name.
"Men".
If you judge all men solely by virtue of being men, then you're assuming that they have something in common aside from just sharing the namesake. That is a mistake that many racists make as well. Making the mistake does not make you a racist. Rather, it makes you both guilty of gross overgeneralization.
Some men have not done the things you've said counted as men protecting women.
Some of these men(arguably most) are all for promoting women's rights. That doesn't mean that we have to agree with everything that every women says. That doesn't mean that we cannot add value to the movement towards women's rights.
The impending possible challenges to Roe v. Wade are startling though. Clearly planned systematic elimination of the only place all women can afford regarding their health concerns and/or feminine needs.
Shameful way to take away the ability for some women to realize the results of using their rights. It is a woman's right to decide what is done to her body. That right ought be afforded to everyone. All to whom it's afforded should be able to use it. Eliminating all the places for them to use it is to take away their ability to use their rights. The notion becomes empty. You have the right, but... we have made sure that you cannot use and/or benefit from using it.
Imagine a snarky receptionist...
Well... technically... you do have the right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, unfortunately you'll have to travel to another state because new regulations put into place somehow made all the former places no longer qualify. Existing walls too narrow to meet our new criterion for what size halls were needed. We determined this by whatever was larger than what you currently have. No grandfather clause to speak of.
Ex post facto.
Isn't it wrong to punish someone for having a hallway that is too small for current standards even though that same hall has been well used for decades prior? Upon what reasonable ground does a governmental agency employ new standards to be met by everyone in such cases? Sorry, we know that you're one of the few places that women in this area can exercise and/or use their right to end an unwanted pregnancy, or acquire birth control but... from this date forward, in order to do that it has to be done within a building that has bigger hallways than yours.
How on earth does this not qualify for being illegal?
Someone on a state level decides to eliminate all the places for women to use the rights recently afforded to them after long hard struggles. Are you f***ing kidding me?
Dale Martin, Yale New Testament scholar, says that male homosexual sex was abhorrent because it defied the God-given order of male dominance. So yes, it was interpreted as weakness, but by virtue of that weakness, it was sin.
I agree that capitalism has the potential to be an equalizer. A strong-willed English woman comes to the US, marries a weak man because she has to in order to engage in business, and subsequently becomes a regional power house. True story. In some cases capitalism can benefit a member of an oppressed class more than any government intervention has.
Still: why don't gay politicians come out more often than they do (especially conservative ones)? Patriarchy. They want to be electable.
Maybe it's an academic take on patriarchy that you object to?
I did not. You just wish I was the strawperson you're trying to make me out to be.