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pwhodges:

--- Quote from: KvP on 05 Mar 2011, 03:55 ---most would not support equal say for both parents of a growing fetus, for example.
--- End quote ---

But that is designing inequality into a system which should surely be aiming at equality.  However, equality needs to be measured right - say, equivalence of respect for each person's contribution, which would automatically deal with the case of the foetus, for instance.

KharBevNor:
I just realised that in this thread Tommy is a dude who is saying who can and can't be a feminist, which is pretty funny when you think about it.

Would you really lump all people and ideas involved in the 'men's movement' or whatever in as misogynists? Though many (most?) of the people who identify as such are reactionary there are those who are not, and there are issues (conscription, street violence, violence and sexual violence in male-only prisons, etc.) which are important but don't necessarily fall under the remit of feminism (nor should they, feminism is about helping women). There are people who write on these topics who are explicitly not hostile to feminism. The important thing about oppressive systems like male privilege is to realise that, whilst mainting the moral distinction between the oppressor (especially the witting oppressor) and the oppressed, such systems have negative impacts on the oppressors as well. Almost no one in an oppressive system is really free. Abstract concepts like 'honour', 'manhood' and whatnot, intimately tied up with the social system that oppresses women, have lead many men to pointless misery and death over the years, whilst also fuelling the oppression of women. Why this realisation is important is because many men have the mentality that for the goals of feminism to succeed they will have to give up something, whilst actually the liberation of women from the social construct of femininity results in the liberation of men from the social construct of masculinity (and of course the liberation of LGBT people from basically everything).

pwhodges:
ITT everyone agrees, but disagrees that they are agreeing!

Yunior:
I really, really do not think we are agreeing. Tommy has his particular strain of feminism that makes sense to him, but puts him in a bit of a bind label-wise because that strain does not want any of Tommy's meddling. And honestly that makes perfect sense if you give it more than maybe five seconds of thought? Like, of course feminism should be wary of absorbing men. Not because men are actively bad people (insert Tommy's probable dissent here), but because a feminism that is successfully absorbing a lot of men has probably changed itself to make it more palliative to men, and ideas that are palliative to men are historically not very good for women. And then everyone in this thread (sorry to lump us all together, I'm not suggesting we all think alike), operating from their own conceptualization of feminism that differs from Tommy's, is like, Tommy, you should call yourself a feminist! And he is like, nooo. And we are like, yeah! Yeah yeah yeah!

Unless I'm incorrectly representing the thread, there is a fundamental disagreement about what feminism should look like going on here. Neither is without merit, but they are fairly different.

Johnny C:
yeah, we're talking about appropriation here, which is very, very thorny. i should really stress that personally i didn't wake up one day and say "i'm going to start calling myself a feminist now," nor did i reach that conclusion after reading a bunch of feminist theory and agreeing (largely) with it; in fact, up until about last spring, i used "profeminist" myself. it was only after basically being argued into it by women that i saw it as something acceptable. tommy said earlier in the thread to defer to the people who know – and i really, really doubt the women i've talked to on the subject would tell me that identifying myself as a feminist is acceptable in order to like soothe me somehow, or whatever it would accomplish, especially since i made it pretty clear that it wasn't an uncomfortable choice. if anyone is reading this thread and actually on the fence about this, i'd encourage you to talk to the women in your life and defer to them, as well. equality in a broad ethical sense is meant to benefit everybody, but that doesn't mean members of the oppressing group automatically have the right to put on the equality team jersey, you know?

i should also point out that it almost never comes up, outside of discussions with feminist/profeminist types. most conversations you don't go around stating your own personal ideology or conveying the things you identify yourself as. even moreso for actually taking action. what speaks is the action, first and foremost.

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