What is Feminism?
We can't all seem to even agree on what feminism is and isn't. In my opinion feminism is about equality between men and women. This equality can be legal in the form of rights or social in terms of power. It's easier to deal with the legal aspects because by voting and through the political process we can produce equality between genders. At the same time there are many stereotypes which negatively affect both men and women and as a result both genders get unfair treatment socially.
Why are some women turning against feminism?
This is a question for the women on Steemit. Why is it that women now are blogging and coming out against feminism? As I understand it there are different waves of feminism with a distinction between second and third wave feminism. Is third wave feminism effective for achieving the goals? What exactly are the goals of third wave feminism vs second wave feminism?
The third wave arose partially as a response to the perceived failures of second-wave feminism,[1] and the backlash against initiatives and movements created during the 1960s, '70s and '80s. It attempts to expand feminism to include women with a diverse set of identities[2][3] recognising that women are of "many colors, ethnicities, nationalities, religions and cultural backgrounds". Thus it can be seen as a reaction to or continuation of second-wave feminism, and constitutes a partial destabilization of constructs from the second wave. The related concept of intersectionality was introduced in 1989, a few years before the third wave began, but it was during this wave that the concept was embraced.
What is cultural feminism?
Amy Richards defines the feminist culture for this generation is "third wave because it's an expression of having grown up with feminism".[60] Second-wave feminists grew up where the politics intertwined within the culture, such as "Kennedy, the Vietnam War, civil rights, and women's rights"; In contrast, the third wave sprang from a culture of "punk-rock, hip-hop, 'zines, products, consumerism and the Internet".[18]
A criticism of third wave feminism is lack of a cohesive set of goals. What are the changes desired by third wave feminists? No more clear than this issue be seen than on issues like pornography, or dress codes. Some women for example side with "free the nipple" as a movement while other women are concerned about "street harassment" and women being fired for being too sexy at work. There seems to be no clear agenda or outline of an agenda for third wave feminism so that even feminists or would be supporters don't know exactly what the strategy is. On the other hand there are a lot of tactics, such as the use of social media, or political theater, to bring about change, but without knowing what these changes should be it is hard to find a coherent mission.
Conclusion
I support feminism when there is a coherent agenda or set of objectives to be accomplished. If it's clearly about equality between genders, breaking the glass ceiling, promoting individual liberty, then of course I will support these objectives. Other times I can't figure out what the objective is supposed to be and in these cases I will sit back and watch things play out rather than pick a side. Women must decide what feminism should be about, and supporters will have to pick and choose which particular feminists or objectives to stand behind and which not.
As a woman I cannot be on the same page with the feminists who are, for instance, creating videos of themselves yelling: "Vagina!". Or wearing "pussy-hats". Or the most stupid kind - those wearing the burqa at protest marches. This is not feminism - in my opinion, these are plain attention-seeking totally crazy women.
True feminism was back in the day when women fought for the right to vote, access to higher education up to the right of chosing to be a single mother (I am one of them).
I've made my way in this world by my own wits, working very hard so I have no time to waste on these modern "feminists". Nor do I demand the right to be "fat and beautiful"!
@ladyrebecca Same here. Politicians, and celebrity so called activists have co-opted the feminist movements and are only using it for political power. Hillary Clinton's campaign is a prime example. Most of us were called anti-feminist because we didn't vote for. They ruined feminism for me.
While I cannot speak for anyone but myself, as a woman growing up in America at the end of the 20th century, I have seen feminism work hand in hand with many other nefarious agendas to destroy the family. This is to get control of the shaping of the children's minds as soon as possible. This has worked fantastically for the powers that be. So we get the mess we have today. Who raised these kids? Government, not moms.
And shape the children into what exactly? Doesn't public school already do that?
Not only does a great body of readily-accessible historical, statistical, and documentary evidence exist to refute the claims made by feminists and other critical theorists, but a great many independent researchers have worked to identify the individuals and institutions responsible for feminism and other social engineering programs and in many cases elucidate their motivations. I recommend in particular the work of Karen Straughan and Jan Irvin. I am personally working to contribute to this research with a thesis of my own entitled, "Totalitarianism and the Sexualization of the State".
Basically, the end of feudalism, under which a serf was viewed as the property of his or her master, coincided with the creation of the modern scientific method during a period of time often referred to as The Enlightenment. Towards the end of this period, practitioners of the newly-developed science of Psychology such as Sigmund Freud, Ivan Pavlov, and B. F. Skinner developed an understanding of the human (and animal) mind which certain of the reigning feudalists realized would be invaluable in creating a new form of totalitarian control based on scientific principles. This was the birth of the modern nation state.
As it relates to gender, one of the key realizations of these scientists was that women and men respond differently to certain stimuli. For example, a woman will typically respond to threats with appeasement, while men will respond with threats of their own. This appears to be directly related to the amount of testosterone in the individual and its effect on key brain structures, and the response of individuals with relatively lower amounts of testosterone will be relatively more feminine, and vice versa.
There was also the fact that societies tended to be organized around what came to be called the Nuclear Family, deriving at least nominal authority from the father, and since these would-be totalitarians would suffer no authority besides that of the state, they realized that upending the existing social order would handily deliver the mother and her children into their (the state's) grasp. In other words, they contrived to replace dependence on men with dependence on the state.
It's telling that the first generation of globalists, that of Marx and Lenin, thought they would easily persuade the workers of the world to give up their old order for 'equality' with the new. It turned out that people in general -- no matter how downtrodden -- preferred a world in which they had a sense of purpose, even if it meant having to work terribly hard, to the world of bland materialism offered by the communists. As it became obvious that the revolutionary theory of Marx and Lenin was being disproven by the people's stubborn adherence to family, church, and culture, a new group of wealthy families called the Fabian Society formed with the intention of implementing a multi-generational approach. Thus began what they called the "long march through the institutions".
I'll close with a few anecdotes to illustrate my claims:
The man (naturally) who broke the taboo against women smoking was none other than Edward Bernays, nephew to the aforementioned Dr. Freud and the first person documented using the word 'propaganda' in its modern sense. His motivation? Why, he was paid to do so by the American Tobacco Company, of course.
Gloria Steinem, former Playmate and founder of Ms. Magazine, has admitted to being a CIA asset. Lest it be assumed that hers was some minor role, it should be known that her 'handler' was a man named C. D. Jackson, the famously-absent editor of Time-Life and Fortune magazines. His many claims to fame include purchasing the only known copy of the Zapruder film and locking it away in a Time-Life vault, granting the US intelligence agencies an invaluable resource known as plausible deniability
Most tragic are the dubious motivations of Margaret Sanger, a life long eugenicist and a proponent of scientific racism. While some applaud her sponsorship of the first female birth control pill, allegations that she was also in favor of forced sterilization are met with awkward apology after awkward apology.
To close, it's this last point that is the most damning of the modern Left. In the final historical analysis, it is an ideology which cannot create, but only destroy. Indeed, the social engineers of the 20th Century were as successful as any devil could have dreamed. However, the result was a population that was not only dependent but demoralized and demotivated, to the extent that when they belatedly began their final attempts to mobilize the masses into something resembling a revolution, they found that most people (and men in particular) simply couldn't be bothered to get off the couch.
Can you cite the evidence that men and women response differently to threats? I've never heard of that.
Respectfully, there is quite a lot of evidence and I was not referencing any specific study. I found these quite easily:
Gender Differences in Emotional Response: Inconsistency between Experience and Expressivity
Exploring differences in how men and women respond to threats to positive face on social media
Tend and Befriend vs Fight or Flight
Gender Differences in Autonomic Nervous System Reactivity to Stress
Biobehavioral Responses to Stress in Females: Tend-and-Befriend, not Fight-or-Flight
Additionally, and it's a bit fringe, but some authors suggest that beer was originally mandated to be brewed with hops and only hops via the Bavarian beer purity law of 1516 due to the observed effect of phytoestrogen-containing hops on hopyard workers.
edited
here are some studies/articles looking at testosterone specifically:
Testosterone in Healthy Men Increases Their Brains’ Response to Threat
Testosterone response to competition in males is unrelated to opponent familiarity or threat appraisal
Male aggression: testosterone increases brain's threat response
Way too informative and reasoned. How can you expect me to not follow you after that?
Cheers and followed in return. I was born and raised in Oregon, moved to New Orleans about a year ago.
More women are seeing the madness. Women make the same as men in the same jobs if they work as much. Women however don't. They work less and are less ambitious, and they chose different (less paying) education and jobs.
Women/feminist complain about "white males" while not seeming to care about muslim women. In fact most "feminists" welcome as many muslim men as possible into their countries.
More and more women realize that there is no wage-gap. They realize that all white western men want equality too, but like most men "anti-feminist" see the lies for what they are, and do not accept to be treated like stupid children.
We all want equality, and we almost have it in the western world. We may lack 1% or something. What we don't need is women caring about how men SIT on the subway, if we are spreading our legs too much or not. What we don't need is women calling every white man a racist (thanks a lot..we have only created the safest and best society in history) while welcoming men from cultures who are waaaay worse than us.
It's hypocracy and lies. And that overbearing tone "feminists" are using. God, we're all fed up with virtue signalling and feminists.
Thats why.
I am not sure this can be responded to in a short comment, but I sense a subtext here that extends beyond feminism, and extends into cultural dialogue, in general.
I have little doubt that the original ideals behind early interpretations of "feminism" addressed some much needed changes... but in today's society I think a lot gets lost in this... the pervasive tendency to "be outraged." As long as we can remain "outraged" at something, it feels like we're taking action somehow... and that must lead to change, even IF the things we're outraged about no longer make functional sense.
As a metaphor, think of a government department that was created to address a certain popular issue. Well, now the popular issue has been addressed and changed... ideally the government department would disband but it doesn't want to, so increasing degrees of hair splitting are examined as "issues" mainly as a justification for said government department to continue to get its funding and employ its officials. Even though it's obsolete.
Am I suggesting feminism is obsolete? Maybe not entirely, but it seems to me that things have gone off-course, perhaps in service of "keeping the fires burning," on axes that have less and less need to be ground. If that makes sense.
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STOPI can't say I have had a lot of personal interactions with anyone in touch with any of the current feminism movements. I know the Media can portray things in a bad light. So, I make no judgement on the movement its self but they way it is being portrayed is terrible.
My feeling is equality is having the same freedoms. If I can learn, earn, vote and own, the rest is cultural and time.
The similar freedoms AND risks is equality. There are risks associated with going into certain male gender oriented professions and if women would like to take on those risks then it's fine. It's ultimately an individual thing not a gender thing.
I have never really described myself as a feminist. I do have a friend though who recently left a group of fellow INFJ types because they accused her of being misogynist because she chooses to not wear loads of makeup and high heels. Her reasoning for separating was that they were becoming far too judgy and insulting to others who don't align exactly with their way of thinking. What I have discovered is that people are just looking for something bad to point out so they have something to talk about, when in reality they probably need to spend more time holding up a mirror to their own nature.
Thanks for posting and getting the discussion started.
Best,
Mo
How do you define "infj" types?
I haven't known many to compare differences, but the ones I do know are introverted, but social enough if they really connect with someone; creative AF and ever the helpers. I tested INFP myself, so it is no surprise that she and I get along really well.