Feminism: What is It?

[RhumbRunner13]

Tyger,

Perhaps my post didn't express the proper feelings, I apologize.

What I meant to say was that I never called anyone "Hon" as I was quoted as saying. "Hon" was used by someone else referring to Texan. I signed off on my first response to Lavy with, I guess, a mistaken "Luv Ya" and a "smiley". Although I don't always agree with Lavender's political views, I believe she/he has the right to express them to the fullest extent of her/his ability to do so and enjoy her/his thoughts.

I responded to another of her/his posts and closed, still trying to be friendly, with "still luv ya". Seems for some people on the site, it might be a mistake to make an attempt to be open and discuss very difficult issues we all, male and female, face.

The jist of the post I think you were referring to was that, I called no one "Hon", and, when the friendly (I hoped) closing of "still luv ya" was criticized and rejected as being sexist, I found another way to close the next message. I'm truely sorry if I offended you or anyone else on the board. That was, nor is, my purpose here.

Oh, BTW, I have no idea what St. John's Wort does! Could I spell better?

Runner

PS: I didn't use her/his, she/he for any reason other than I don't want to be accused of ANYTHING wrong, promise!!

 

[TygerEyez]

Thanks for the clarification, Rhumb. St. John's Wort is the herbal "happy pill." I meant no disrespect by my comment. Just a head's up.

Although I'm not completely sure seeing as I wasn't around for the original post where the problem happened, but it seems that maybe someone took your "still luvs ya" the wrong way. There have been a number of problems on the board about things like that.

People will disagree with someone's point of view, tell them their wrong, or (basically) shit on them, and then finish with a "still luv you." It's like those "I love you, but you're a bitch," conversations.

They say they love you, and then proceed to rip you a new ass. Maybe that's where all of this stemed from.

Even if you disagree with someone, and mean nothing personally against them, try not to sign off with anything that tries to "prove" your still friendly. Doing so can be misunderstood. As long as you debate your point with a calm mind, and make your opinion known, I'm sure Lavender would respect that.

*chuckles* Take it from someone who knows, Rhumb: trying to prove you're friendly makes it look like you're trying too hard. There are plenty of people who will respect you, and become friends with you for you and you alone. Alot of people don't like it being shoved in their faces... *shrugs*

A heartfelt apology to Lavender might make her feel better. It might not erase what has already been said, but it would be the mature approach.

 

[RhumbRunner13]

Tyger.

Thanks for coming back, maybe I explained it better at least to you!

"It's like those "I love you, but you're a bitch," conversations. "

Or a bastard, I guess! Maybe I should just put a thread on the board saying I don't care what everyone calls me because the ideas are why we are here, or at least why I'm here. I don't think any of us will ever meet in RL, so it is our ideas and beliefs that carry our personalities to those others we touch over this strange way of meeting and exploring each other. Oh, yes, I want to be accepted and liked by all, and I do care what everyone thinks or calls me!

Maybe I'll PM Lavy and quote you,
"I love you, but you're a bitch," Nah, I don't think that will work!!

Goodnight,

Runner

 

[Svedish_Chef]

Re: I am a feminist.

I want choices. I want fairness. Don't ever try to deny me that. I am vigilant.

I'll take that eveyday and I am male.

Men, know women are not the lesser half, they are Equal.

Treat them as such.

Treat me the same as them.

I dont believe in feminism, any more than masculinism. Equality.

 

[CelestialBody]

 

[Cheyenne]

Re: I am a feminist.

There were no sports for girls when I was growing up. I had to wear a dress to school. Guidance counselors directed us women to women's work. Boys had to take shop and girls take home economics. No choice. Sex education was the film on what your period was and I have no idea what the boys saw. We didn't see it together. I learned about all the men of history, but the only women I was exposed to in school were attached to men.
If your female body parts didn't work, they just gutted you, hell, you didn't need that uterus or those ovaries. A lump in your breast? Take the whole thing off, including the muscle and the lymph nodes. You really don't need that arm. PMS and menopause are all in your head.

Wow! You must be my age or a little older. I'd actually managed to forget quite a bit of the stuff above, but it all applies to my live growing up, too.

The dress code changed while I was in high school to where I didn't have to wear dresses anymore. But that was a fight to get it to change! I hated home ec class, too. I became a room monitor for the boys' shop class.

My guidance counselor wanted me to take steno in high school and maybe become an executive secretary when I graduated. I disagreed, and went to college to become the executive instead.

There were still hiring quotas on women when I graduated from college in 1979. Not how many they HAD to hire, but how many they would be ALLOWED to hire. It didn't make sense to train women because they'd all up and leave to stay home and have babies once they got married. Of course, it was only about 8 or 9 years before then that they hired NO women at all, for the same reason.

On another note, this week I found myself having to find a new doctor - an internal medicine doc. I am very comfortable with my female OB/GYN so I decided to ask for a female doc when I called for the appointment. Probably 1/3 of the doctors I had to choose from were women. A few of them were so busy they aren't even accepting new patients! Female doctors were still unusual when I was growing up. I'm glad to see there are more of them now and they are busy!

 

[ksmybuttons]

Re: Re: I am a feminist.

I'll take that eveyday and I am male.

Men, know women are not the lesser half, they are Equal.

Treat them as such.

Treat me the same as them.

I dont believe in feminism, any more than masculinism. Equality.

I cannot live your experience, only my own. I do know the challenges of being a woman.

I am not a half of anything. I am a whole. With my husband, I have a partnership. We are symbiotic. If you treat me as a half you are ignoring a whole side of me.

I would never treat you as many men treat women. I will not trivialize or minimalize your concerns or your experience.

When the welfare system started paying for drugs for the working poor in this lovely State I live in, they would not pay for birth control pills but the would pay for 5 Viagra pills a month. The cost of one Viagra pill is about equal to a one month's supply of oral birth control.

Go figure.

 

[Calamity Jane]

The deffinition of a Feminist coming from a female friend of mine as well as myself, would be any woman that considers herself a complete equal to a man. Disagreeing with Pagancowgirl, a feminist is a girl that would be willing to take the trash out half the time because she knows she is responsible for her share.

Oh, I'm willing to take the garbage out any ol time. The point is, HE thinks it's the man's job to do it, and so he does. If it's not done by the time I go to bed on garbage night, I do it. I don't wake him up and tell him to. I used the garbage as an example because it's about the only gender specific chore in our house. I'm out there bucking hay bales (when 8 months pregnant if necessary)... feeding the animals, mowing the pasture, chasing the kids, doing the laundry, trimming the trees, splitting firewood, etc. If the fact that it's his job to lug the garbage barrels from the barn to the road makes me a non-feminist, so be it.

By the same token, I'd expect the man to help take care of the kids as much as possible too.

i've yet to meet a man who takes on even 1/3 of the responsibility for the children that the female in the relationship does. I also don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I'm better at kissing boo boos than he is.

edited after i caught up on other posts...

I loved home ec... i love to cook, and i sew a lot of my children's clothes... i also took shop class. i'm the fix it person around the house, i help my husband out in his carpentry business. I help the vet hold down pissed off/scared/injured horses, and i don't get squeamish when there's blood or bone visible.

i'm physically strong enough to do damn near everything that most of the men i know are capable of doing, and mentally strong enough to know that sometimes, i do too much, and it's time to let them do things for me.


is the cold medicine affecting my ability to communicate?

 

[Dillinger]

"There are as many brands of feminism and interpretations of its role and purpose in society as there are women."

Historically I have seen it written that Feminism has gone through 2 stages to date... (or I guess, more correctly, "waves"). But the basis of the 2nd stage are 30 years old now. Perhaps we are looking at a 3rd stage.

Sheila Tobias - who is known for her work on girls and mathematics ("they're not dumb, they're different") and science outreach - has discussed the history of the feminist struggle as it was defined in the 60's and the 70's and how the world is much different now then. 60's being the first wave, 70's being the second. And has basically said that feminism today is just leftover momentum of the second wave in the 70's.

Personally I think that's doing a disservice to women... to people today... do you agree? Disagree? I'm curious because the days of my activism are behind me, to an extent. I certainly stick up of my beliefs - and those of others - and will not put up with bullshit and hypocricy and unfair behavior be it from my friends, family or at work. But back in the 70's I was VERY active. Nowadays my activism is more in my words then my actions. So for those of you who are more in the "thick of things" - I'm curious... do you think Tobias is right - or do you think that she is reliving her glory days - like me - and is out of touch with what is going on these days on campuses and other places where movements tend to be born, revived, re-created?

"What is your personal understanding of feminism? How does it apply to your life? How does it influence your views of other women? Do you consider yourself a feminist? If so, in what ways to you believe your actions follow your feminist theory?"

My personal understanding is no different then how I would deal with any other person in this world. Regardless of gender or race.

"For the men, do you consider yourself feminists? In what ways do you think your views and your actions have helped the cause of women in their personal lives, their family lives and in their career?"

Yes I do consider myself a feminist. Again, quite active in the 70's... and it was an education that helped enlighten me beyond the more traditional upbringing of my youth. Opened my eyes - expanded my universe. How have my actions helped? Many years ago, in my lobbying efforts - in my contributions both of time and money - in my writing and speeches. And nowadays... in who I am. How I interact with people. And maybe most importantly how I am raising my children, both girls.

"How much further do we have to go? Our goals simply aren't achieved, but how many of you experience the everyday benefits of the feminist movement without caring what your role as a woman, or a man supporting women, in society really means?"

Tough question. I think we all experience certain benefits - that there has been obvious advances. That the more every person - regardless, again, of gender, of race , of any false and society based imaginary separation - contributes to society as a whole - the richer and stronger that society, and each member of that society, becomes.

How much further? Till there isn't even the question in anyone's mind - anyone and everyone around in the entire world - till the question isn't even considered that there is any iota of a suspicion of a difference implying inequality. That there is difference - there is no doubt... and in our variety we compliment, we are stronger... but that there is no doubt that even though there are differences, there is equality - and that it is not even necessary to state it. That a discussion such as this would not even be necessary.

 

[sigh]

How much further? Till there isn't even the question in anyone's mind

i'll buy that

 

[ksmybuttons]

Thank you, Dillinger.

 

[Hamletmaschine]

I’m enjoying this discussion very much, and feel a bit silly about just ‘lurking’ and not contributing, so let me start by saying that, yes, I consider myself a feminist.

My contributions to the feminist ‘cause’ come mainly in the classroom, since I am an educator, although it is impossible for me to measure the ‘success’ of what I teach. I hope that I have also made some small steps through my own changed attitudes toward and treatment of women.

For me, feminist thinking begins with Simone de Beauvoir’s observation that one is not born a woman (or a man, for that matter), but that one is made a woman. From the moment of birth (or before), once we have been ‘sexed’ according to our genitalia, we begin to be ‘engendered’ by those around us.

This is not to say that differences in sex do not exist (as some 2nd-wave feminists suggested). Of course they do—although recent genetic research, I have heard, suggests that there may be more than 2 sexes, biologically/genetically speaking. But the important point is that differences in sex are meaningful —they are given meaning and significance in accordance with various social codes. And so when feminists argue that females are "made" into women, what they mean is that they are reared in such a way as to conform to and uphold the meaning structure associated with their society’s coding of sexual differences.

In itself, there is nothing particularly wrong with this. Noticing differences and assigning meanings to them is what we humans do. The problem comes when we recognize that simple differences like male/female tend to acquire meanings within a structure of value and power, such that male/female becomes

male
female

Heterarchy (difference with no value attached) becomes hierarchy. And what troubles most feminists, of course, is that females historically have been made into gendered subjects (women) within an inegalitarian structure of power.

In ‘consenting’ to become a woman, one is consenting to become a second-class citizen, at least within societies that are patriarchal (which is to say, damned near every society we’ve ever known about).

The second problem is that the meanings associated with gender tend to be ‘naturalized’—i.e., projected back onto the biological differences themselves—with the consequence that the inegalitarian power structure seems to get its "alibi" from nature itself (or ‘god’ or whatever...). Sex may be a function of nature, but gender—sex + meaning—is a cultural construct. When our culture’s construction of gender becomes ‘commonsensical’ to us—when it makes sense to us in such a way that we don’t have to think about it—then we are hooked—hailed or interpellated, to use the jargon—as subjects within a patriarchal ideology.

At that point, it becomes difficult even to imagine alternatives. We may see or experience problems, and we might want to tinker with this or that part of the system (e.g., the whole "equal rights" business), but to question seriously one’s status as a gendered subject is to put the whole system in question.

And that’s precisely what some feminists have proposed, of course. Others have suggested here (and elsewhere) that the solution would be to fall back into some sort of prelapsarian state where the biological difference between male and female would no longer make a difference—i.e., that it would go unremarked, and thus lose its meaning.

Theoretically, that’s an interesting proposition. Historically, I can’t entertain the fantasy of its ever happening. The drive for mating and sexual intercourse is too strong in us for the sex of each other not to matter, I think. (And I don’t believe I’m guilty of heteronormativity in my sexual thinking to say that.)

To me, the most compelling course of action is trying to convince people of what I just said. That there is no ‘natural’ meaning or value attached to us because we have one kind of genitalia or the other. We make the meanings—and those meanings have consequences in terms of how we think about and experience life. The optimistic bit is that because we make the meanings, we can change them. It ain’t as easy as just ‘saying makes it so,’ of course, because the meanings are too deeply embedded and have been around too long. But we can start by becoming more ‘cognitively complex’ with respect to the question of gender.

And now that I've put you all to sleep, I'll shut up. (Sorry ... got on a roll there....)

~H~

 

[lavender]

 

[Weevil]

You know, it's funny but I remember once in high school when a teacher asked a class of mostly girls if they considered themselves feminists and maybe two or three hands went up. It's a shame that a lot of young girls nowadays aren't taught the actualities of feminism and what it means to be a feminist.

I personally consider myself a feminist.

But it's just something I say to get chicks.

 

[lavender]

 

[Weevil]

The fight has just begun. Those who think it's complete are blind.

Is it any wonder that Lav is at #7 on my list of favourite women?

 

[lavender]

 

[Weevil]

My goal is to be in the top 5.

I'm working on it. I'll have to get an environmentally sound car, form the Socialist Green Party, get better taste in music, and learn to appreciate red silk shirts. But damnit, I will get there.

Naw. The top 5 is an exclusive club that is right now 4/5's occupied by members of my family.

And you'll have to go many a mile before you displace Ms. Swanson

 

[Dillinger]

I'd like to add some comments about "activism" to my previous post.

There are many ways to be active and to effect change.

The "young" tend to want things immediately. I know I have more patience now (though some of you might say... "not much") then when I was younger. But I have no less conviction, no less fire, no less passion about what is right and what is important. In fact, I am more passionate then ever about things - with perhaps a more refined ability to understand which of those those things are truly important. This is one of those things.

From the point of view of history women - all people - have been more than patient. Things should have changed long ago. But, from the point of view of the individual, there is the impatience of youth to affect change in society (in mores, in values) immediately. Unfortunately it doesn't work like that. But without the unrelenting passion and tireless effort of youth - I believe that things would indeed change slower. In many ways I am a child of the 60's even though I missed them by half a decade... I believe much good can be done and should be expected to be done right away - because right is right... end of story. However I also know that true change - change in the way people think, in their values does not happen just because a law is changed. Look at the civil rights struggle for a recent example of that. Laws might say one thing, but it hasn't changed the fact that racism still exists. Women have the right to vote but there are people who don't think they should... though much less people who feel that way then there were 50 years ago...

25 years ago I was all set to change the world. To change society. Today I can say that I have... or at least that I continue to try. One person at a time. Starting with myself... and then trying to instill those values in my children. With how I conduct myself day to day - how I act, what I say - whether online or at home or with friends or at work.

There are many forms of activism...

"There are as many brands of feminism and interpretations of its role and purpose in society as there are women."

Historically I have seen it written that Feminism has gone through 2 stages to date... (or I guess, more correctly, "waves"). But the basis of the 2nd stage are 30 years old now. Perhaps we are looking at a 3rd stage.

Sheila Tobias - who is known for her work on girls and mathematics ("they're not dumb, they're different") and science outreach - has discussed the history of the feminist struggle as it was defined in the 60's and the 70's and how the world is much different now then. 60's being the first wave, 70's being the second. And has basically said that feminism today is just leftover momentum of the second wave in the 70's.

Personally I think that's doing a disservice to women... to people today... do you agree? Disagree? I'm curious because the days of my activism are behind me, to an extent. I certainly stick up of my beliefs - and those of others - and will not put up with bullshit and hypocricy and unfair behavior be it from my friends, family or at work. But back in the 70's I was VERY active. Nowadays my activism is more in my words then my actions. So for those of you who are more in the "thick of things" - I'm curious... do you think Tobias is right - or do you think that she is reliving her glory days - like me - and is out of touch with what is going on these days on campuses and other places where movements tend to be born, revived, re-created?

"What is your personal understanding of feminism? How does it apply to your life? How does it influence your views of other women? Do you consider yourself a feminist? If so, in what ways to you believe your actions follow your feminist theory?"

My personal understanding is no different then how I would deal with any other person in this world. Regardless of gender or race.

"For the men, do you consider yourself feminists? In what ways do you think your views and your actions have helped the cause of women in their personal lives, their family lives and in their career?"

Yes I do consider myself a feminist. Again, quite active in the 70's... and it was an education that helped enlighten me beyond the more traditional upbringing of my youth. Opened my eyes - expanded my universe. How have my actions helped? Many years ago, in my lobbying efforts - in my contributions both of time and money - in my writing and speeches. And nowadays... in who I am. How I interact with people. And maybe most importantly how I am raising my children, both girls.

"How much further do we have to go? Our goals simply aren't achieved, but how many of you experience the everyday benefits of the feminist movement without caring what your role as a woman, or a man supporting women, in society really means?"

Tough question. I think we all experience certain benefits - that there has been obvious advances. That the more every person - regardless, again, of gender, of race , of any false and society based imaginary separation - contributes to society as a whole - the richer and stronger that society, and each member of that society, becomes.

How much further? Till there isn't even the question in anyone's mind - anyone and everyone around in the entire world - till the question isn't even considered that there is any iota of a suspicion of a difference implying inequality. That there is difference - there is no doubt... and in our variety we compliment, we are stronger... but that there is no doubt that even though there are differences, there is equality - and that it is not even necessary to state it. That a discussion such as this would not even be necessary.

 

[CelestialBody]