Why are so many people anti-feminist?

@Leigh: Your post is full of "some" and "most".It seems you've given a fairly good example of the Vocal Minority there.

(Also I'd like to point out that your last second-to-last post seems quite feminist to me.)

edited 2nd Jan '11 6:17:10 PM by BlackHumor

Just because I agree with feminists on some issues doesn't mean I agree on all of them. I agree that some of the wage gap is due to discrimination and societal expectations. I disagree with the feminists who say that breast cancer and women's health deserves still ever more funding while prostate cancer and men's health gets none, and that most domestic violence happens to women.

That is all true and I agree with all of it; but by most definitions of "feminist" I've seen that would still make you a feminist.

Or at least, if it doesn't I've been deluding myself for years.

Well, I mean, it's kind of like how you can have religious views similar to a church but still not consider yourself a member of said church, because you don't want to be associated with them and their organization. You don't want to be "a part of" the feminist "movement" because you disagree with some "key elements" that are "covered in scare quotes for no apparent reason."

Or something.

"Herway is a dating site"

What...the...fuck was I smoking when I saw that add? I thought it was like a political thing. Shit.

I'd like to formally recall that part of the comment, but my point still stands: Once equaliy is reached, liberation movements that continue onward are destined to upset the equality again.

(For example, minority movements. The current incarnation that comes to mind of such movements is an organization that manages to provide extra education opportunities to minorities despite this being illegal, because no one wants to oppose them because they'd seem racist.)

edited 2nd Jan '11 6:36:18 PM by Diamonnes

Whatever it was, I want some.

Well, I mean, it's kind of like how you can have religious views similar to a church but still not consider yourself a member of said church, because you don't want to be associated with them and their organization.

This.

You don't want to be "a part of" the feminist "movement" because you disagree with some "key elements" that are "covered in scare quotes for no apparent reason."

Please Elaborate?

I was making fun of the fact that I was spamming quote marks. Pay no attention to the actual sentence.

Though, all this does bring up an interesting (and on-topic!) point:

Much of the current feminist movement —and I'm not just talking about the nutcases— is unfailingly devoted to the movement and the positions they assume the movement holds, and tend to chase away people who hold less extreme but still mostly friendly positions.

As a result, the group "people who believe things that are compatible with feminism but do not consider themselves feminists" is much larger than the group "people who believe things that are compatible with feminism and consider themselves feminists" because they associate feminism with the most extreme parts of the movement. (In contrast there are many more Democrats (or equivalent) than liberals, and many more Republicans (or equivalent) than conservatives, because political parties already know that the perfect is the enemy of the good.)

edited 2nd Jan '11 6:50:09 PM by BlackHumor

Sounds right. I personally prefer to identified as a 'gender egalitarian' myself. I feel that being 'Feminist' your just building an Us Vs Them mentality.

edited 2nd Jan '11 8:30:21 PM by joeyjojo

Diamonnes: Surely no one is guileless enough to think that legally equal is the same as actually equal. I used to feel as you do—that feminism had outlived its usefulness—but there are so many areas where there are still huge disparities, and it's perfectly reasonable to advocate reducing those disparities.

For instance, Leigh mentioned domestic violence. According to the American Bar Association, 25% of women have experienced some form of domestic violence, as opposed to just 7.6% of men. 85% of domestic abuse victims are women; 83% of spouse murderers are men. 1 in 12 women will be stalked in their lifetime, but only 1 in 45 men. Disparities still exist and still need to be addressed  ^*

Ok then, that and Wikipedia are sufficient to convince me that most domestic violence does happen to women.

The thing is, Leigh, your attitudes are enough to make me consider you a feminist. The fact you aren't part of the feminist movement and disagree with some of it's ideas and aims doesn't change that.

The Christian vs Church analogy expresses it well.

I agree with your general point, that men and women are by no means equal in every area. But I feel that I have to point out that there could be plenty of men being abused who just don't report it to whoever collects this data for fear of being seen as unmanly, so those statistics mightn't be worth much.

edited 2nd Jan '11 9:07:01 PM by LoniJay

I said that most domestic violence didn't happen to women, but that feminists claim that it does, in case I was unclear. Also, men are less likely to report domestic violence than women are. They still experience it at the same or higher rate than women do.

Given jewelleddragon's link, I'm going to have to ask you to prove that.

EDIT: Realized that wasn't quite clear. I'm asking you to prove that men experience as much or more domestic violence as women, not that men report it less.

edited 2nd Jan '11 9:21:53 PM by BlackHumor

But, yeah, discrimination exists as well, and contributes to the wage gap. In one study, videos of male and female actors working the exact same jobs and doing the exact same things were shown to subjects. The subjects rated themselves more satisfied with the man's performance, even though the script was the same for both of them. And in the implicit association test, a test created to measure unconscious bias, people were shown to have an unconscious association between "men" and "career" and between "women" and "family."

I don't have access to the results at the moment, but there is (or was last I checked anyway) a poster up in the psychology wing at my college which shows the results from two experiments like this. The first one (which I believe was conducted in the 80's or 90's) showed these results, but the second, conducted in the 2000's, did not show a difference in performance or competency ratings between men and women.

I'll try to find the poster again when the next semester starts, so I can give a more complete review of the info on it.

I'm anti-feminist in some cases. In places where opportunities are just not open to women, I'm pro-feminist. But in America, Western Europe, most of the Western world in fact? The door is open, walk through it. Legally, women have the same rights. I object to a movement designed to oppose a cultural problem by discrimination.

And about domestic violence. First, I don't think those figures are accurate. But in almost all of those cases of man abusing woman, I'm willing to bet the man is physically stronger. That's not a cultural problem, it's an imbalance of physical power in a bad relationship.

While I agree there is a Double Standard, and that's a bad thing, it's a societal problem. I'm a social liberal, but this is my one sticking point. You can't solve problems by reverse-discrimination.

Feminism in countries that are actually unequal, though, is great.

I jsut don't think legally equal means much of anything. The Chinese Constitution makes women way more equal than any western constitution, even down to military and conscription concerns. Does that make them equal in China? Hardly.

The fact that there exists sexism or abuse against men is not a good reason to oppose feminism. Why not tackle both problems?

You don't make a very compelling argument by countering actual data with "But I thought of a source of error, ergo the whole thing is clearly false." After all, neither of you (Loni or Leigh) have cited a source indicating that men underreport violence (sources I've seen, but can't find at the moment, indicate that men tend to underestimate their own violence but overestimate violence against them, while women tend to do the opposite), preferably one that shows how much of a margin there is, so that we can estimate whether or not the effect on the actual numbers is significant?

Also, care to explain how underreporting accounts for the discrepancy in murders?

EDIT: I'd also say that if you're contesting results from peer-reviewed journals, the burden is on you to read through and verify that they haven't already corrected for those sources of error.

edited 2nd Jan '11 10:21:46 PM by jewelleddragon

The door is open - but there is still stuff in the way preventing women from walking through it. Most of that stuff is social pressures.

I would also disagree that domestic violence is caused by physical imbalances. You can be much stronger than somebody else, and yet still allow them to beat you up. Simply because you have emotional issues, you love them too much, you don't want to hurt them, whatever.

edited 2nd Jan '11 9:57:21 PM by LoniJay

I haven't taken a good look at the Chinese constitution recently ever, but I doubt they have laws about discrimination in the private sector.

Edit: I'm not saying it's necessarily caused by physical differences, I'm saying that's the reason the statistics are higher for women.

edited 2nd Jan '11 10:03:40 PM by Ultrayellow

Thanks for the crude insult, mate.

Yes, I'm not a walking brick. I understand that things aren't quite exactly equal in the social sense. I'm also studying to be an anthropologist, and I know for a fact that the movement won't do shit, to put it bluntly, until the previous generation dies off and makes way for the new generation. Why do you think there had to be such a large timespan between the abolition of slavery and the Civil Rights Movement?

Also, the 'not very compelling argument' is the one most anthropologists and psychologists agree on. Raw data isn't actually quite as accurate as people seem to think.

edited 2nd Jan '11 10:32:26 PM by Diamonnes

I think that gender equality has come a long, long way since, say, the 1950s. There are still some disparities, but they are beginning to even out a bit. However, I don't consider myself a feminist, I consider myself a "gender equalist." I don't believe in just female rights, I believe in equal rights for everyone, regardless of their gender. "Feminist" is really a misnomer, as men are subject to stereotypes and the like almost as much, if not moreso, than women are.

There's also a vocal minority of feminists on the interwebz who say things like, "Pornography is teh evulz because it subjugates women LOLOLOL" or "Prostitution should be illegal because it makes men disrespect women ZOMGWTF! Or they act as if all men, regardless of how nice of kind-spirited they are, are secretly out to rape you. "Men are driven by their carnal desires to dominate women LOLOLOL" and all stuff similar to A Man Is Not A Virgin makes me sick.

Diamonnes:

Address the point. And for the love of God, cite a source. You haven't shown that there is a bias in reporting at all; you haven't shown that the bias is large enough to obliterate the differences (it would have to be a whopping sixty percent); you haven't shown that the studies cited (which were written by people who had not merely studied to become social scientists, but actually become social scientists) don't already address the bias.

Your fourth and fifth sentences don't add up to anything. Are you suggesting that, because social change takes time, social movements shouldn't exist? Change takes both time and effort—it isn't like equality would magically materialize if everyone just ignored the inequality.