Feminism: C or D?

Yes I'm snotty, sorry.

(i.e. maybe it has less to do with "society" than it does mens' actual physiology?)

God, I swore I wasn't going to get involved in this thread, I swore, I swore, I swore...

Yeah, as arguments those types of comparisons are an A1 time-waster and mostly the best response is to treat them with ignore.

Because so many of Feminism's more sensible ideals *have* been absorbed into mainstream society, it ironically becomes easier to write off Feminism as a whole, or else concentrate on the more "extreme" issues.

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.