When feminism originated men stood shoulder to shoulder with women for equal rights.

Men were also clamoring for equal rights? In what planet, exactly, were men being denied these rights? And on what planet do they have lower standards of health, employment, and human rights than women?

If your organisation had any sense of fair play at all

MGK has an organisation now? I’m guessing saracen395 just Googles “feminism” and leaves this same comment everywhere, without bothering to actually read anything.

I have no time for you

That pretty much confirms it.

To say: “I don’t even know where to start here. You sound like you have some serious problems. Have you considered suicide? I’m pretty sure the world would be better off without you.”

Seriously, I agree perfectly that akabaka’s post, which you responded to, was terrible. But no need for wishing for the demise of someone for posting a comment on a blog. In general, using rethoric which reduces the worth of other people’s lives, is…uncool, to say the least.

…spend all their energy into either inventing “problems” that are not problems like the gross injustice of women being paid less for doing less productive work…

Um, WHAT?

Where did you ever get the idea that women are less productive than men?

Not every job requires heavy lifting that only big and strong men are able to do, you know. What about lawyers, or CPAs, or journalists, and plenty of other jobs I could name where the main requirement is brains? The playing field’s pretty even in those fields, and women have proven that they can do those jobs quite well.

Uh, wage inequality, the global gag rule, the consistent failure of our legal system to effectively deal with the crime of rape, and douchebags like you aren’t problems for women? I guess the fact that there are places in the world where women can be stoned to death for having premarital sex isn’t a major injustice, either. The world is a great place for women! That’s why one in every nine women is a survivor of sexual assault (and that’s only counting the women who are empowered enough to talk about their experiences).

Feminists have gotten drunk on their own power.

HAHAHAHA feminists have power? What world do you live in? I would actually really like to live there, because apparently in your world major womens’ rights issues have been resolved and people actually treat feminists with respect.

They would do well to remember that western women didn’t gain suffrage through _women_ choosing to be free and emancipated – it was only possible because the men wanted it, permitted it to happen.

Right, because men would have given women the vote if women hadn’t protested in the streets for years on end.

Men are biologically better at applying violence and hold control of all military and police forces in the world. It would be a trivial thing to turn the “liberated” western world into the same kind of a genuinely patriarchal hellhole as, say, Saudi-Arabia or Afghanistan. If the white heterosexual male was really such an evil, oppressive creature as they claim, the very concept of “feminism” would not exist and thus, the existence of any kind of equal treatment between genders at all is proof that the best friend and ally of the western woman is the western man.

I don’t even know where to start here. You sound like you have some serious problems. Have you considered suicide? I’m pretty sure the world would be better off without you.

Currently, feminists lack real problems to tackle and spend all their energy into either inventing “problems” that are not problems like the gross injustice of women being paid less for doing less productive work

You should’ve saved your breath. I stopped reading after you admitted that you don’t think paying women less than men is a problem feminists should tackle.

That sounds a hell of a lot like a threat there. “Quit your whining, wummin, or we’ll be back to the good ol’ days when I could just beat your ass”. I mean, yes, we’re in a better society than Saudi Arabia, but (to use a horribly misplaced analogy) Michael Bay is a better filmmaker than Uwe Boll – it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to be Hitchcock or what have you.

And I apologise again for that terrible metaphor, especially if it came across as trivialising the problems being discussed.

The alternate Earth Skemono lives on sounds remarkably like the one I inhabit. There are loads of sensible feminists around. Bea, also commenting on this post, sounds rather sensible to me.

And while Feminism certainly had a point back when women couldn’t vote, it certainly had one afterwards as well. Back when my mother’s doctor found out that she wanted to be either a doctor or a biologist, he gathered her parents and persuaded them to try and stop her, arguing that women weren’t suitable for the kind of abstract reasoning needed for such things.

That was in Denmark, in the mid-early 60′ies, in a rather progressive family. These sentiments were common. How great is it, as a teenage girl, to be told by your parents, by your family doctor and by society as a whole, that you really do not have the intellectual caliber necessary to live out your dreams.

It is such attitudes (among other things) that feminists fought after the right to vote was won. Hardly man-hating, I say.

Also, I strongly disagree with the somewhat strange view that it would be a “trivial thing” to turn the West into what looks like Saudi-Arabia. It is not a trivial thing to get men to agree on doing that and then carry it out, any more than it is a trivial thing to get 50 % of the population to become communists and carry out a revolution.

Feminist movement had a point back when women were not allowed to either work or vote – when they were genuinely held back in a tangible way. That time passed almost a century ago. Currently, feminists lack real problems to tackle and spend all their energy into either inventing “problems” that are not problems like the gross injustice of women being paid less for doing less productive work, or just pretending against all scientific evidence that there isn’t any actual difference between men and women at all and sexual dimorphism is some kind of a giant patriarchal conspiracy instead of a fact of biology. Modern feminism is just another entry in the long lists of movements that devolved into rackets.

Feminists have gotten drunk on their own power. They would do well to remember that western women didn’t gain suffrage through _women_ choosing to be free and emancipated – it was only possible because the men wanted it, permitted it to happen. Men are biologically better at applying violence and hold control of all military and police forces in the world. It would be a trivial thing to turn the “liberated” western world into the same kind of a genuinely patriarchal hellhole as, say, Saudi-Arabia or Afghanistan. If the white heterosexual male was really such an evil, oppressive creature as they claim, the very concept of “feminism” would not exist and thus, the existence of any kind of equal treatment between genders at all is proof that the best friend and ally of the western woman is the western man.

When I walk down the street in Toronto, I am treated like a white woman. What does it mean to be treated like a white woman? That is a very long and complicated answer. But no doubt my experiences as a white person living in Canada is different from a person of colour living in Canada.

In general, I will be treated in such a way that when I interact with people, I never have to think about whether or not my treatment (good or bad) is a result of the colour of my skin (even if it is). White privilege.

Patriarchal privilege would be similar, but with a focus on gender rather than race. (Obviously these things are interconnected).

I also don’t buy it as a tool of “guilt propogation”… or at least, it shouldn’t be used as one. I was born white, there’s nothing I can do about it. Males were born males. They didn’t choose to be born into this position in society, but, nevertheless, these positions are beneficial. All people have to do is realise that.

If you realise racism exists, or sexism exists (to use other language), you already realise this. “Privilege” is, for me, just a way of articulating the social dynamic of the relationship.

Likewise I’ve had some trouble understand exactly what is meant when “privledge” is brought up. I think it’s an intentionally abstract and fuzzy concept which can encompass must about any sort of action in society and as a concept impossible to ever remedy.

It’s always bothered me, at least in the sense that, when I studied feminism to some degree in college, what struck me was that with some rephrasing of ideas or perhaps different ways of presenting them, some would be excellent; what turned them sideways and derailed them were expressions like the ones mentioned in this post (i.e., “all sex is rape.”). Sometimes, I think it causes very cool people to express things they don’t quite mean or in ways they don’t quite mean them. For example, up above, Zifnab said:

“When many girls becomes aroused, they lose inhibitions and becomes very passive. Likewise, many guys lose inhibitions and become very aggressive.”

And I’m still trying to parse why that sentence requires mention of gender in any case. I think it might be more accurate to say that arousal, like alcohol, lowers people’s inhibitions, though in a less depressive way, which can cause some people to act on impulses they might not otherwise. Which not state things quite so forcefully or concisely as Zifnab’s original statement, and certainly loses some context and connotation while altering the meaning, but I’m not sure that’s a bad thing if only because the original meaning seems so wrong. I don’t really think I believe Zifnab thinks women are, by nature, passive, nor that arousal reduces them to their natural state when they have worked hard to be more aggressive in their daily lives. I’m not sure if Zifnab believes men are naturally more aggressive, but then again it seems to be the thought most of society tends to propagate.

Likewise, this idea of ‘privilege,’ which in some ways seems more an academic construct of guilt propagation than actual social anything. I mostly understand the idea; back in college, I once did a research paper whose thesis was that, though many academicians noted the use of insanity as a theme in Victorian women’s literature (Bronte, mainly), there was no such thing. Sanity is simply (in many ways) conformity to common social perceptions, and given that the perceptions at that time were so patriarchal, literally any thought of feminine empowerment was ‘insane’. I think that’s a great deal less true today, which reduces the efficacy of the idea of ‘privilege’ toward social reformation or even awareness. To me, it seems like using a microscope to study quarks, in a way; interesting thoughts, but it’s like academicians are using outdated instruments to study theories and ideas now several decades at least obsolete.

I wonder if we’ll ever see a version of feminism that treats neither masculinity nor heterosexuality as a crime to be punished or a disease to be cured.

Sure. In fact, it’s been around for the past, oh… hundred and fifty years? You were probably just busy all those days and so missed it.