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“Why I’m Not a Feminist”: [Modern Feminism]
Posts
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
That's not as easy as it sounds. Google is a large place, and unless you know what you're looking for to start with you're going to get varied and contradictory results. Some people are better at searching Google than others, too.
In fact, it's so basic I would not recommend using it or Wikipedia for complex academic topics.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Wikipedia is much simpler to use for subjects like this. This isn't specifically about academic feminism, but to give them a starting point so when the start going deeper they're not operating blindly - which would easily lead to disaster as soon as they see bullshit from anti-feminists.
Not everyone can do it right, the less someone knows about the subject the less likely they'll be able to find what they're looking for.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Or they're ignorant. What's vital is that they have the curiosity, and will to take steps forward, rather than being discouraged.
I teach CS. Many of my students can't Google for shit. Some have literally seem surprised when I looked at a SECOND page of Google results.
You have to be pretty charismatic to make people want to learn during their internet surfing time. Why are we here, talking about this? About feminism? This is a video game webcomics subforum with no particular verified experts. We're not getting CE credits out of this. I'm in Vegas right now because grown adults can't be bothered to upkeep their job critical education unless they can expense a lavish vacation on top of it. Most people I know fill their spare time with Netflix rather than spending a single second of rational thought off the clock.
I guess I'm saying that we're freaks?
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I have a lot of thoughts on how a feminist "should" respond to questioning, and how a question "should" be posed, and what would further the goals of feminism the most. That's the problem, though. The best I can muster as an ally is a tiny shred of awareness that you've most likely heard all my ideas before and I'm just going to piss you off. That's a bitter pill.
What I can do is echo the sentiment that talking less and listening more helps. My initial reaction to every new feminist thought I come across is a feeling of being under attack. Had I put my 2 cents in and been rejected at first, I'm sure that feeling would have been reinforced. But for whatever reason, I was silent. Couldn't really say why, just a fluke of that period of my life. And each idea that seemed hostile or crazy at first glance slowly became clearer. At some point I noticed the pattern and just went with it. I just assume that eventually whatever feminist concept I'm introduced to will eventually make sense.
And, I'll be honest, this fucking sucks. I want to be a hero. When it comes to environmentalism, I want to be Captain Planet. I want to be Barack Obama on the political stage. Being part of a movement where the ceiling for my participation is to stop getting in the way... It's a buzz kill. That's about as close to seeing my own privilege as I can get. When people are telling me they are under constant duress, I'm upset that I can't be super awesome and fix it.
If someone asked "Can someone tell me about toxic masculinity?" you could just link them the wikipedia?
Are people ignoring what I am saying about google though? It's not useful sometimes. A lot of times actually, I should say. Especially if you're not in the habit of being liberal and left leaning, or learning.
Even in the original text, it's laid bare that McIntosh can perceive and indeed tries to perceive her privilege. It's not that it's impossible to perceive, it's that it's assumed to be normal for humans to have privilege (standard just world fallacy) and so is invisible except to those who don't.
Which leads to the significantly more complicated argument: is the objective to break dominant racial/male/cis/straight/middle class privilege and find a medium between it and where non-privileged groups currently exist, or is it to bring those groups up to the current privileged level without lessening dominant privileges. It's complicated for three reasons: firstly, shock and surprise, you will find that a lot of privileged people are still not particularly happy with their lives, and can identify a multitude of ways in which they could be happier and less stressed out, so saying they should make themselves worse off is a difficult sell. Secondly, a number of the privileges McIntosh talks about are based around things that aren't really personally mutable; historical populations, current populations, attitudes of groups in other areas of the country, etc. Thirdly, privileges vary wildly within groups because even groups like "white people" are still extremely diverse. You could realistically make an argument that people in STEM have privileges over people in retail; job security, social standing, wages, etc.
(I also have always strongly disagreed with McIntosh's assertion that we teach the value of autonomy in first world societies with the explicit intention to disguise privilege; I think the argument for why that isn't the case should be fairly obvious)
I'm pretty sure that Google has me correctly pegged as "single white straight middle-class income cis male in his 30s." Which is a thing that means that it throws a lot of car and mortgage ads at me, which I have no interest in, but whatever. Where it irks me is that if I type in "Reddit the" it wants to autocomplete to "reddit the red pill" or "reddit the donald" rather than "reddit the good place." I'm just looking for cast interviews and clips of upcoming episodes for my favorite show, but Google is like "I know what you really want based on your demographics: some good ol' fashioned misogyny!"
Google is great at providing people with their answers that they're looking for, which can be a completely different thing than the answers that they need.
Use incognito mode, a different browser, or a different search engine.
Feminism is a big enough deal to have several discussions, at different levels.
I think if you want to talk about OP stuff you can just do that? I don’t think the thread is derailing so much as meandering, so it can easily meander somewhere else if you want.
That doesn’t address what I’m trying to say. I’m just using myself an example of a S/W/M. What you’re basically saying is: the solution to Google (and Facebook, and others) feeding people with the information that it thinks a person wants based on their demographics is that every S/W/M should always try to minimize their online footprint at all times, in order to provide the most neutral search results.
That won’t fly.
A more realistic solution is to push Google to curate their results differently.
So you agree "just google it" is bad advice?
Those are simply the most popular searches for those prefixes, unless you've done a search like that before it gives you the list sorted by popularity
If you want to know what it thinks your demographics are: https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated
Let's be real here, if you say "just Bing it" you've not only turned them off from your way of thinking, you've possibly made a lifelong enemy as well.
Dominance, self-reliance, suppression of emotions, and competition are repeated in the article as confirmed trats.
My argument is that in seeking social justice, we embrace some of these toxic masculine traits, falling prey to Crispin's critique of "buying in" in the name of feminism.
Dominance: the act of "owning" somebody hard with a good diss (even if they are an MRA) can be seen as embracing this principle.
Self-reliance: telling somebody to google something on their own can be interpreted as encouraging self-reliance. The article mentions this only applies to extreme self reliance, but doing things in the absense of group support qualifies. It's unclear, which is why I hate wikipedia.
Suppression of emotions: Heck, even I advocate this. Some emotional tirades are just too ugly to bear. Especially when they come from a mixed up person. I think we can all agree that we should suppress emotions that would hurt others if expressed.
Competition: I think we're good on this one, but I value it as a premise.
The rest of the stuff is pretty obvious, but I think most of us are in implicit agreement with these core values. We use social isolation (the common thread of all these values) freely as necessary tool rather than fight it.
Anyway, sort of topical to the conversation at hand and topical to the central theme of the thread. Go me.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Toxic masculinity is not about traits themselves, but how they are embraced to a point where they become toxic.
"owning" someone in an argument through better made arguments is hardly a toxic dominance play, especially when the person getting "owned" was the one who walked into a situation seeking to dominate it themselves.
Telling someone to google some basic terminology, or giving someone a wiki link and asking to read the overview, is hardly demanding self reliance to a point where it becomes toxic.
Not sure i can really talk much about suppression of emotions, coming from a culture that's pretty big on quiet stubborn stoicism in both men and women. Possibly to a point where it becomes a problem.
Intensity matters, then. Certain aspects can be imbibed in manageable quantities. That does fit in with the wikipedia summary. Masculinity is good in moderation. I suppose that's reasonable.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
That these traits are seen as masculine is itself a problem.
That said, i started thinking about toxic traits, and how traditionally feminine traits can also be taken to toxic levels, but we almost never talk about them, atleast in how they are seen as feminine.
Why? I think it's largely because mostly these traits, when they become toxic, end up harming the person who has them, instead of those around them.
We might be getting some of that with this Crispin situation, simply because of the strife among feminists. What is toxic femininity and what does it look like? Can femininity be overdosed?
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
For fuckin real
https://www.paypal.me/hobnailtaylor
Lots of new words for me here.
Quiverfull - conservative Christian movement that does not believe in any form of contraception
Christian submissive movement - Google failed me, probably because a movement has to be distinct fruition common ideology. I cannot find a historical beginning or ending, so I must assume this means Christianity in general.
Choice feminism - the idea that women doing whatever they want is inherently feminist
Bleached asshole - a cosmetic procedure to make the anus look more similar to the surrounding skin, primarily used by people engaging in anal sex and/or hardcore pornography
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
https://www.paypal.me/hobnailtaylor
I'm not super invested in this thread, but I wanted to see the results of this search on account of being a weirdo, and having done so:
I am (basically) the woman in the Short Skirt, Long Jacket, Feral. Why does 2010 you think I'm superficial?!?!?
(I've always loved that song because it's about a woman who gets shit done and a man who's attracted to that... until reading that thread just now I never knew anyone thought it was supposed to be a criticism of said woman, kind of interesting how different perspectives color a song)
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
Except they're not worse off, the playing field is simply less in their favor as it used to. What they fear is that they're going to be on the other side of being discriminated against like women or minorities, which is being paranoid. What's infuriating is that many of these people are in bad spots, and have had trouble in society yet they reuse to give any empathy or assistance to those in worse spots because "fuck you, got mine." It's incredibly selfish, and short sighted.
The movement has had them over the decades, TERF's being one of the obvious ones. That said, even radical feminists can have views which are useful under the right circumstances. Here's an article about Feminism in the 60's which is enlightening.
https://pictorial.jezebel.com/up-against-the-centerfold-what-it-was-like-to-report-o-1762716355/amp
I'm imagining Data androidsplaining this on the bridge of the Enterprise.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
The messaging typically features religious married women talking about things like "finding themselves through God" by properly submitting to their husbands and abandoning careers. They include various Bible verses to support the lifestyle, because of course they do. The message is that this is the only proper path, and women who try to take any other path are going against God's will, with the result only being suffering and unhappiness. Many ills of society are blamed on women not properly submitting, from moral failings to economic hardships (low wages, unemployment, etc).
It is specifically, intentionally, proudly regressive.
Yes by doing nothing at all you too can be the moral superior of every woman who wants to do something for themselves.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
I tried asking friends for advice, but most don't have much to give. They found their significant others in high school, through mutual friends, at work, etc. They don't have advice for asking someone out that you don't already see often or know through their own social network.
When I've asked on here before the advice hasn't been too great either, and I would often get a weirdly antagonistic vibe in some of the responses, like people were trying to frame everything I said in the worst light possible and either refused to or were incapable of understanding what I meant.
I was looking on a site just now that claimed to offer great advice for getting a woman's attention and soon got to this:
My eyes rolled out of my fucking skull.
This could be considered a problem that feminism should tackle, right? Socially-awkward men without helpful IRL social support networks pretty much having to turn to pick-up artist sites to have any sort of idea how to date, where they are also exposed to straight-up misogyny and toxic masculinity?
This has been some years back, but I'm wanting to think during the #OneReasonWhy threads a poster who claimed to be a feminist also said that they had very little success with dating until they started reading and applying certain Pick-Up Artist concepts, trying their best to sort actually good advice from macho "HERE'S HOW TO GET ANY BEAUTIFUL WOMAN YOU WANT TO FUCK YOU" garbage.
It's frustrating because I don't want to make anyone uncomfortable, but it seems like there's a lack of dating advice for men that doesn't come from potentially toxic sources. More than once I've seen self-described feminists act like men should exclusively use online dating services, which doesn't exactly seem realistic. Meanwhile you have inexperienced men who honestly don't understand why it is considered creepy, for example, to hang around a store waiting for the woman they are interested in to get off work so they can approach her to ask for a date. Then when a guy learns his behavior is creepy he turns to the men who are eager to tell him how not to be creepy: pick-up artists.
For an example I read a few hours ago, a man was asking for advice on how to ask out a woman while she was at work. A number of posters (presumably mostly, if not exclusively, men) gave various advice on how to do it, but one poster who self-described as a woman gave advice like that I had seen given on Penny-Arcade often: "don't do it, she's paid to be nice to customers and will be pressured into acting nice towards you even if she actually thinks you are a creep, women in retail get hit on all the time and it's irritating, etc".
The original poster eventually came back and said "I asked her out and she said yes, so we went to get coffee after she got off work and had a great time!" Another poster replied "see, if you had followed that woman's advice you would have missed out on a fun experience; just goes to show you can never trust womens' advice on asking out women."
Sorry if this doesn't turn out to be a good fit for this thread. I was hoping the dating norms thread could have been about this instead of just being one guy arguing against nearly everyone else about one thing for 50 pages.