Let's Discuss Feminism - Page 2

Dave is a guy and ergo is endowed — and as you noticed, well endowed — with the Masculine capacities for rational, intelligent, discussion.

Well like I said, I'm generalizing. And I'm also shoe-horning modern feminists in with nebulous ideas like postmodernism; in reality feminists are trying to dismantle the "NO GIRLS ALLOWED" signs on some grown-up tree fort — not fixating on cyborgs, deconstructing gender, or spelling a word differently. But, my experience with feminists — mostly young, university educated, upper middle class, white, females — has given me the impression that feminism and postmodernism; or more aptly, their intellectual cultures; are very intertwined.

http://www.theonion.com/content/news...t_in_charge_of

Cyborgs? What kind of postmodernist theory have you been reading, exactly, Adam? The term is, admittedly, kind of amorphous and easy to hijack, but I don't think you can blame "postmodernism" for... ummm... cyborg fixations. A number of the predictions made by early postmodern critics have pretty much come to pass. Most notably, we've become an increasingly pastiche-based culture, for better or worse (yes, worse - it's helpful to remember that some of the folks, like Fredric Jameson, who helped define the term postmodernism were far from celebrating its presence, but merely acknowledging it). We're increasingly self-referential in our cultural tastes, and we have a vastly popular music genre whose success relies heavily on previously existing work.

The reason why some folks probably lump postmodernism, feminism, Marxist theory, reader-response criticism, structuralism, new historicism, etc. together is that they probably encountered all of these in lit crit, film crit, or cultural crit survey classes, so some of the same language is used in defining them. There might be some actual crossover, but they're all pretty different, some more than others.

Of course, people have been known to throw all of this theory around in an attempt to make themselves seem smarter than they are (myself included - hopefully, I'm not doing that here), so I can see why any of it might leave a bad taste in one's mouth.

I don't see how you can call getting stuck with the kid an advantage.

Something I've been confused about:

The gender wage gap is calculated by taking women's median earnings for some fixed time period and dividing it by the median earnings men get for the same period of time and this figure winds up at 70-something percent. I usually see this conflated with the idea that women aren't getting paid the same as a man for doing the same job but I don't see how that follows conclusively from that calculation alone. If you're comparing the pay for all women against the pay for all men, then the result would show the difference between the two groups regardless of what occupations the people in both groups actually have.

So what am I misunderstanding here?

For no good reason, I'm compelled to post this.

(Courtesy of postsecret.com)

I've wondered the same thing! I've never seen or heard of a woman getting paid less for the same job as a man in my lifetime. Either I'm missing something or that wage gap just means that there are a lot of girls working at Mcdonalds.

Where I work at my roommate just got hired doing basically the same job as me (just in a different area). They hired three other people also (all guys for the same job, just over other shifts). She ended up getting more than I make (by a nice amount), and more than they got. My resume is actually better than hers (more experience, more education). So maybe the pay difference exists out there, but I have never seen it. I have actually seen the other way, which is great (I am always for people getting payed more).

To be honest, I'm not really familiar with the majority of postmodern theory. However, it's probably helpful to point-out that what I am familiar with is based in the social sciences and not literature or art. Moreover, my experience was that the postmodern ideas presented to me were often placed in a feminist context — thoughts on this tribal narrative from a feminist perspective; beyond urban spaces and aesthetics from a feminist perspective; personality theory from a feminist perspective, and so on.

Some anthropologists I had the misfortune to learn from were the source of the cyborg fixation. (Just google cyborg + postmodernism.) They adored the idea that artificially made human parts "deconstructed" what it meant to be a person; or something ... frankly, I assumed this was all bullshit, so I never endevoured for a full understanding of what these "people" — as they would have it — were trying to say.

Anyway, it was in this mess of fabricated career track obscurity that I encountered most of the self-described feminists I remember meeting;whatever that says about me and the ones I don't remember.

The explanation I've heard is that women have historically worked fewer hours over a lifetime, due mostly to less overtime and more time off for raising children. So when you tally it up, the total can be less than a man's even if they have the same wage. Of course that doesn't explain away all the problems, but it's a way that some statistics could be overstated.

But do you really think that's overstating a problem? Isn't it problematic that a majority of the population is deprived of capital (in a capitalist society) because of biology? There's another active thread about single parent homes with some statistics that demonstrate nicely how tragic this wage disparity can be.

Moreover, it isn't just a matter of women working fewer hours over the course of their lives - for a variety of reasons, women tend to do the lower-paying work in our society. Because of the line of work I'm in, my personal favorite reason for this is that we, as a society, tend to undervalue caring, service-oriented work (see nursing, teaching, social work, librarianship, etc.) Pointing out the earning disparity between men and women forces us to ask if this is an acceptable situation. At the same time, it should be noted that there are certainly wage disparities within individual fields. Again, I can only speak with any authority to my own profession, but, even though they make up only about 20% of librarians, male librarians tend to out-earn female librarians at every level of the field. They also tend to end up in positions of power more often and earlier than women and to earn more when they get there.

Bump.

I'm trying not to tear my hair out at the moment, but why in the flying fuck do people think that feminism is exclusive to lesbians/women?

Should I just give up this fucking argument now and save my own sanity?

Everyone knows it's also the province of men who'll say anything to get laid.

<ducks>

BUT I ALREADY ASDNK:GK:ASDF

But thanks for bumping the thread anyway, it was a fascinating read.

I'd hope so. It doesn't make the "If you're a feminist and a guy you're a faggot" debate that I'm currently deigning to embroil myself in any easier, though. :P

That's ridiculous, faggots don't like women. I mean, they like them, but they have no use for them. A faggot without a woman is like a fish without a bicycle.

Sounds like you're having a good birthday, Jake.

I approach feminism from the point of view of a guy whose honors english prof gave him a B because he told her he wasn't interested in reading the book from the point of view of any "ism." He just wanted to read the book.

Bah, every TRUE fruit needs a fag hag.

My feminist credentials are about to be tested - after a year of feminist-centric university courses, a female friend wants to see if we can have a nude conversation. I am certain she doesn't think I'm gay. No, I don't find her too attractive, though I admit I would have sex with her anyway should that arise. But it isn't an option in this case - instead of being a thinly veiled 'experiment' for intercourse, she is curious if a male besides one ex-boyfriend can stand to converse and "go to the mind" (no, this doesn't mean I'll be fucking her in the face while reciting my English thesis). I really don't think it says anything about my mindset or views if she proves arousing, but after fucking window hookers in Europe I'd like to see if I can do it.

Unless you turned off a lifetime of experience and opinion, you read the book from the point of view of some kind of 'ism,' you just did it unconsciously.

I have no idea what she would think she's trying to prove. Human sexuality and feminism are two radically different, albeit linked, concepts.

Not when the Western world has such a fucked up mainstream view at the relationships men and women have about sexual roles and sexual freedom.

True, but it still sounds like some sort of weird, I've-taken-too-many-philosophy-classes come on to me. And, yeah, I don't get what the point is.

She sounds like she's trying to tempt you.

Oh, come on, it's not like louse's story is actually true.

Well, yeah. But I just chose to labor a moment under the misapprehension that it was. Let's call it a thought experiment.

Or she may be one of those people you meet and initially think are "interesting" until it turns out they really have no idea what they're talking about.

EDIT: Fuck it, keep going on about how most of my personal anecdotes are untrue, I'll keep speaking on here as usual till I have some sort of 'tenure' on these boards and then maybe I'll be believed...that was utter nonfiction.

You're absolutely right. I was, and continue to be, happy with my preferred "ism."

FIFY

In all seriousness, it sounds like your friend is trying to de-link the physical from the intellectual. If she's so fascinated with the effect of garments on human interaction, why doesn't she just go to a nudist colony?

Huh.
Thoughts?

That was so schmaltzy I could barely even read it, gross. It read like a really bad poem.

Edit: After reading more of that blog I have to say I hate that lady with a passion.

Although it's too melodramatic and exaggerated for my tastes there is a figment of truth in it. At least when it comes to personal relationships, in the vast majority the male is considered guilty by default.

Case in point: A few years ago I met up with a friend of mine. When I asked about his longtime gilfriend he told me they had broken up and in a pretty rough way. My gut reaction was to ask him what the fuck did he do. By default I assumed that this nice guy that I knew since childhood was at fault instead of this girl that I only knew for a couple of years. I only found out how wrong I was afterwards and it's been bothering me ever since.

I know anecdotal evidence cannot trump the well documented inequalities that women have to face but this incident gave me a lot to think about.

Nohing new. Living in this world, this society, no matter your race, sex, or religion, you're going to find the many blamed for the negative actions of a few.

We just tend to ask people to apologize for being female more often than any of the others.

Bump: I'm not familiar with Andrea Dworkin, so is there any truth to any of this?

"What people need to keep in mind is that Dworkin--and the kind of "feminists" she attracted--viewed any and all heterosexual sex that had an equal or traditional power relation between the man and woman as an instance of 'rape.'" This is a reference to her book Intercourse. I invite you to read the book or look up any resource you'd like. The wikipedia article deals almost entirely with this controversy and presents a balanced take here.

"This is one reason why Dworkin had a henpecked, shell of a man for a husband" John Stoltenberg is the current head of AARP and a "radical feminist" who self-identifies as gay. He refused to acknowledge he was married to Dworkin until she died. He has a lovely and healthy attitude toward male sexuality. This is found in his line "Porn tells lies about women but the truth about men." In the context of his depiction of porn, that is just a ridiculously misandrist statement.

Regarding the rape fantasies, those can be found easily online either by googling a query like "Dworkin drug rape Paris"--as can the porn controversy--or by viewing the relevant section on her wikipedia page here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_...nd_controversy

I don't know that I'd argue with that statement, at least regarding mainstream porn.

Just because it was you who asked, dear, dear feminist Hulk:

:: uncaps red pen ::

I wonder about the quotes here. It implies that our author doesn't believe that Dworkin and those who agree with her are feminists. She was absolutely, most definitely a radical, anti-porn feminist. I'm curious how the author of this post would go about refuting Dworkin's feminism.

Dworkin never said nor wrote this. It is a common misinterpretation of one of the central arguments in either Right Wing Women or Intercourse. Dworkin clarified in an interview in 1995 with a London publication, New Statesman & Society:

The full interview is here, for those who are interested.

Her husband (btw, it was only revealed late in the game that they actually were married) was a writer and gay man, John Stoltenberg. He is the author of works on masculinity. I could unpack the implications of the above, but it's kind of hard to type with my jaw all the way down there on the floor.

Sources, please. The Andrea Dworkin Online Library (which is what I'm using to fact-check my own post, btw) suggests that Ms. Dworkin was sexually assaulted at some point in her life. I don't know enough to confirm or deny, but I choose to be decent enough to take a woman at her word.

Andrea most definitely did not conform to stereotypical western beauty standards. And I'll leave it at that. Has this been included to suggest that no one would want to rape her, coming as it does after our author questions her history of sexual assault?

I want this one to sit there all by itself and think about what it has done. Because... what?

Again, let's leave the woman to her suffering, shall we?

If this were a Wikipedia entry, there would be a superscript "attribution needed" right about here.

And another one!

Unfortunately, Wikipedia is the best source that I can find to address the above, as the Librarians' Internet Index has no information on Linda Lovelace (someone should fix that). In the documentary The Other Hollywood Lovelace said ""Between Andrea Dworkin and Kitty MacKinnon [another anti-porn feminist], they've written so many books, and they mention my name and all that, but financially they've never helped me out. [...] They made a few bucks off me, just like everybody else." I think our author is doing a fair bit of interpretive heavy-lifting to arrive at the particular version of reality above.

She did pose again as Linda Lovelace after she distanced herself from her work in pornography. But the author should make sure to lift with his knees, not his back when making statements like the above. He's bound to pull something.

Alright, having done that, let me say this - I couldn't possibly disagree more with a lot of Dworkin's writing. I am sex-positive, radical feminist who loves my wedding ring, my husband, and getting on my back. The author of the post at hand chose a creepy, sexist, factually inaccurate way to go about criticizing a person who's pretty damn easy to criticize. It was completely unnecessary.

I think you're being incredibly unfair in your interpretation of my post and jumping to conclusions about my choices in wording and phrasing.

Her rebuttal of the charge that she claimed all heterosexual intercourse is rape is flimsy at best. Her description of heterosexual intercourse in that book and elsewhere fits with the interpretation. And I pointed Jake to the same quote you did to demonstrate that.

I didn't describe her as fat and middle-aged to suggest "nobody wanted to rape her." I did it to point out that the bad legs had other, more plausible and more likely causes. Al Roker also needed knee replacements. It doesn't make me a racist to point that out.

Stoltenberg and Dworkin are both patent misandrists. You can't portray men and heterosexual relationships as negatively as they did their entire lives and escape that charge. Dworkin and Stoltenberg have issues with men. It's the reason she's called a "sad ghost that feminism needs to exorcise" by the newer waves of the movement.

She's routinely called insane and misandrist by her critics, I don't think that makes them sexists and I don't see why I should be called "creepy and sexist" for saying it either.

Also, the reason "feminists" is in quotes is I consider, as i mentioned above, Dworkin and Stoltenberg to be misandrists, not feminists, radical or not. To me, feminism is about the understanding that women are different from men and that difference isn't a bad thing. It's not about demonizing men or restricting access to certain information or materials. I think Dworkin is pretty much the worst person you can pick to be a standbearer of the feminist cause both due to her misandry and her assaults on free speech. I'm sort of amazed that a person in your profession would defend a person who is such an enemy of freedom of expression.

As is calling persons you don't agree with "batshit insane" and casting aspersions on a man's psychological fortitude just because you don't agree with his worldview.

I don't quite agree with this, as I think that her writing about heterosexual sex is contradictory. I think one is on fairly easily refuted rhetorical ground no matter which side one comes down on when arguing whether or not Dworkin believed that straight sex always equaled rape.

Yes, you did. We were posting at the same time, drawing the quote, I assume from different sources. We were also drawing different conclusions reading the same quote. I think that's worth pointing to, but not resolving - Dworkin leaves us no good way to do that.

Point taken. Do note that your reference to her physical appearance came, without a paragraph break, directly after you were calling into question her history of sexual assault. I now see the point you were making, but I still think you're assuming too much. Yeah, she may have had bad knees because of her weight. But you still seem to be bringing this up to either undermine her self-reported history of sexual assault or to call into question her overall sanity. I really don't think these are helpful things to do when criticizing Dworkin. It just makes you sound like you're going for the same tired nonsense that most critics of radical feminist thought reach for - i.e. attacking the person instead of the philosophy.

All of my information on Stoltenberg is second-hand, so I'm out on thin ice here, but it seems to me that he has a problem with what he perceived as western masculinity. I don't think that means he hates men. This is tricky, highly subjective territory here.

You can, actually. It's possible to separate what some feminists choose to call "the patriarchy" from individual men. Clearly, as Dworkin lived with Stoltenberg and as he was a homosexual, they did not hate all men. But, again, I've got little to go on here, so I'm going to have to leave this lie.

That quote, for anyone who is interested, was pulled from the Wikipedia entry on Dworkin. The full editorial is here. Those are the words of one woman. I'm sure there are many who agree. Fwiw, I'm part of one of those newer waves, too, and I think Young takes it a bit too far. Dworkin was an intensely reactionary, deeply wrongheaded theorist and thinker, but I think there are also ways to use what she wrote and said, even if the good is tangled up with a lot of bad.

Like the many of her detractors, the overall tone of your original post was condescending and dismissive. You had your hand right on one of the most deeply divisive issues that Dworkin left in her wake (the relationship of feminism to sexuality) and you were content to dismiss her by calling her sanity into question instead of engaging with her ideas. Yes, this is a message board, so we're not going to sort out western civilization in 250 words or less, but your cavalier attitude got my back up. That's all there is to it.

That's the book that started this whole spiel! I just haven't gotten to that pullquote yet, sadly.

Also, out of curiosity, where/when did she restrict acces to certain things/assault free speech? Are you referring to the R v. Butler case, or just her anti-porn work in general?

http://theblacksphere.net/wp-content...s/beatdown.gif

Cuchalain made a grievous error. It's a Celt-on-Celt crime here.

Any in-depth discussion involving MissZooey or DaveB get's me pretty amped. I'm a shameless mark for their big ole juicy brains.

Sure beats reading a 20 page discussion on nitpicky bullshit in The Dark Knight or whatever.

Feminism is a flexible label. They called/call themselves feminists, so they are. Stripping them of that label is a cheap shot that doesn't do much.

Really, I'm not crazy about how leaky the category "feminism" is, but there's not a lot we can do about it. We don't have membership cards or an exam.

That's a touch reductive. You're creeping up on essentialism there, too, which is a minefield when you're talking gender, believe me.

Again, I don't think Dworkin demonized all men. And I will not defend her pro-censorship views for a moment.

...except no one around here was doing that. At all.

Nice try. I wasn't defending Dworkin, I was getting on your case about intellectual laziness. Please note the distinction. Also, she might be an "enemy of freedom of expression," but I'm not. So, yeah, I'm going to defend her right to have held forth in whatever forum would have had her, even if I passionately disagree with a lot of what she had to say.

Her crusade against porn in general. Dworkin has the same views about "decency" and the sexual revolution as the far right does. It's the whole reason that she was repeatedly accused of being a pawn of/in bed with the far right. I'm an absolutist when it comes to the First Amendment. Anyone who tells me that there is something I should not read or watch, whether it's Jerry Falwell or Andrea Dworkin, can go fuck themselves.