Feminism: C or D?

Is this true? I'm not disagreeing, I just want to know if it's true.

Women don't have to accept their "place".

I don't think someone should get paid to look after their own kids. Similarly, people shouldn't get paid to clean their own houses, polish they're own cars or do their own dishes.
Also

Where can we get figures for male and female deaths by war?

Military casualties are a fraction of total casualties, though.

In WW2 you have

a) area bombing of Germany, Japan, UK
b) the Holocaust
c) pretty indiscriminate slaughter in China, Russia, and Eastern Europe
d) this is irrelevant cos it's so fucking stupid to talk about 'more men dying in wars'.

which i think sucka and blount are oddly both buying into.

anyway if you wanna do the demographic parsing poor women have it worse than poor men and women in general.

there is a problem with the whole argument about "family time" being denied men though -- sure it's the necc. counterpart of "workplace/social time" being denied women but it also relies on a certain valorization of "family time" which was one of the contradictory kernels in feminism to begin with -- arguing for the revision of valuation of social role to give more props to extant and historic gender roles of women.

Like I said.

Sigh.

You mean this?

This is a VERY good point: society consists of females and males.
-- mei (meirion.lewi...), December 5th, 2003.

I was responding to this:

Yes. Describing "male behavior" as a problem, neglects that society places men in a position of competition, and a role of disposability. Violence is a natural outcome of being deprived of security and safety. Sure it's not exactly women oppressing men but it is society oppressing men, a bi-sexist society.

I actually disagree with the sentiment of the bit about "Violence is a natural outcome": saying something is "natural" is a very weak excuse.

I think I might have misread "bi-sexist" as meaning "society is composed of people of both sexes".

What I'm trying to get across is that society is made up of EVERYONE, men and women.

If society discriminates against anyone then it's all our faults.

If someone says "women are unfairly paid less", then 'women' are just as much to blame for this state of affairs as 'men' are.

Stephanie Coontz to thread.

it also relies on a certain valorization of "family time" which was one of the contradictory kernels in feminism to begin with -- arguing for the revision of valuation of social role to give more props to extant and historic gender roles of women.

was that due to 'big tent'ism so as to not repulse the fha 'i have a job, i'm a homemaker' crowd or to make sure feminism didn't (re?)define women as 'just' victims?

Not too seriously though.

haha 'was this the face...'

...I don't consider two armies killing each other to be a result of "male behavior" but rather an issue of property and class. okay, and the difference is? afaik, this q is one of the central args within feminism (or was): which comes first; if women's oppression is a component in the total picture of oppression, or if women's subjugation is the model for all other classism, racism etc.

I find this a touch facile.

Feminism clearly is/was a very positive development, I think that goes without saying. But nothing's black and white and perhaps one of the negatives was to encourage the general worldview that when women do poorly it's because they're victims of men/society, but when men do poorly it's their own bloody fault. Women = passive victims, men = actively responsible for their own miseries. I remember doing a class in gender studies at university in the eighties, when girls did less well than boys at school. Various theories for this were put forward, on reflection some good, some preposterous in light of later developments. Then, a few years back, the trend started to reverse, and a new debate on why boys were performing poorly germinated. Lots of hand-wringing, lots of talk about the damaging effects of "lad culture", lots of talk about how girls are more responsible about studying, behave better in class, etc., very little talk about boys being victims of anything. They've brought it upon themselves with their silly lad culture, and anyway girls are better at that sort of stuff! I caricature, and yes there has been talk that there aren't enough male teachers, but I think I'm right in saying that the tenor of the debate is very different, that boys are hardly portrayed as passive victims in the way that girls were. Curiously, this most conventional stereotype has lived on even in more progressive discourses.

So if this doesn't have anything to do with external pressures of gender roles, what does that leave? Women are just naturally not as intelligent as men?

To be more facile still: a problem isn't a problem if there's a straightforward solution to it that everyone accepts.

No, Mark S, I think you've got the horse before the cart. It's feminism that's the outgrowth of an enlightenment discourse about social disparities. This discourse is a very good thing and feminism is/was a refinement of it, and it also is/was a very good thing. Which isn't to say that you can't say anything negative about it, and I was simply pointing out that one quite conventional stereotype has lived on in the discourse, and that this conventional stereotype wasn't very useful in tackling discrimination that men as a gender might face. Feminism was specifically developed to tackle discrimination specific to women as a gender, and I think we need to think about other tools as well to tackle problems men as a gender might face.

the other issue is that when it does get halfway serious, it boils down to the fact that people would be better served by reading a book or taking a sociology of gender class instead of arguing about stereotypes and misconceptions. there can't even be a meaningful dialog when people aren't even on the same page in terms of basic knowledge about the subject. i don't mean that it in an 'ooo people are sooo ignorant way' but i do mean it in a "wouldn't it be more productive to educate yourself a little on the topic before you go making sweeping statements about it?" i mean would you talk about Derrida in such an offhand way? (o wait, nevermind ;-)

please note this isn't posted 'at' anymore, it is a musing about the feminism thread and other threads of its ilk.

Nevermind the uppercut or the haymaker referred to before, I think this one is the stilletto slipped between the ribs, metaphorically speaking. Perhaps rather more effective, in its quiet way.

(anyway sorry to be a bit tart jonathan, it wz panic stations at work and i wz in the middle of thinking that one of my colleagues had fucked up and caused me loads of work - he hadn't) (quite the opposite in fact, oops)

I'd love to see a thread where none of the (often misunderstood) academic(?) terms are used: feminism, gender, socicalised, identity-politics, modernity, etc.

It doesn't help to look these up in a dictionary because what they mean to each person is quite different. I know that's true of most words, but these ones aren't used enough for people to get an accurate idea of what others mean by them.

I To clarify, I still want the ideas behind those words discussed, but with relevant explanations/alternatives used at each point instead of those evocative words.

So Blount I suddenly realized I think I read somewhere you were in the navy? I owe you an apology for some of my snotty remarks. Love to hear some opinions from you on your job. You said: "how many wars were started by women btw?"

to which I have to ask, do the people who start wars have more or less involvement than you, a person whose job might have you fighting the war? Do you feel like your job gives you any say in whether a war happens or not? Do you think the fact that fighting is done by hired labor in a capitalist contract change the motivation behind starting a war? What about the people who aren't fighting: do you feel like your job affects them, and do you think it's a privilege for them or not? Well, hey I guess I'm pretty demanding too.

oh my, thread of pure gold and KKKKrazy post deleting!
also, was toraneko for real?
Hey Maura, I reckon you're wrong. I reckon it was because they were fat, ugly, hairy bitches that couldn't get a man in the first place that they started the whinging.
-- toraneko, Thursday, November 15, 2001 5:00 PM (5 years ago)

Wow, those Toraneko posts are really wtf! At first I thought she was being highly ironic, but I'm not so sure anymore. Though it's kinda weird reading someone who (if I remember correctly) identifies herself as a lesbian complaining about how men don't make enough money anymore to support their wives and kids.