Had an epiphany on feminism

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Since you ask, most of what I recently saw myself got deleted, but this may give you an idea of what's been going on, if you read that and the posts following it:
viewtopic.php?f=20&t=409591&p=9182474#p9182474 You might be correct about the earlier work of course, if so I hope the apparent change isn't permanent. Probably best not to dwell on it.

Well said, sir.

Yes we aren't all goddesses, we are people and have problems in a world set up for men. Even the basic ones e.g. all new houses in Britain are designed around a 6 foot tall man. That is why most women have to climb on a stool to get to the top shelves. Why? There's no need to make shelves so high. And showers. They flow downwards, which is easy for men to wash their external 'bits.' Whereas showers which have water flowing in horizontal jets would make it easier for women to wash their more tucked away 'bits'.

Most drugs are tested on men because women's monthly cycles produce inconsistent results. Logical perhaps but it means they don't know the effects of these drugs on women. And until recently they didn't realise that the warning signs of heart attacks and strokes are different for women. Why? Because they were basing their research on men.

All these things build up to make the world difficult for women.

Of course the most obvious thing is: why do women have to change their behaviour, dress, route home, conversation etc. to avoid being attacked by men? Why can't men change their behaviour so they don't attack women?

Thank you KitLily, I'm glad somebody understands what I was originally trying to say before my mood got soured

I haven't read what everyone else said, I only read your original comment and replied because I was touched by your thoughts

Yeah i ended up saying other things that I probably shouldn't have, as I often do when im upset and irrational.

But you seem to understand what I was trying to say. Thank you for that.

That's called being human. But I didn't notice anything nasty.

I think we can agree that "prettiness" extends far more privilege to a woman than most are willing to admit. I don't dispute that it creates certain perceptions and jealousy, but I can't think of a single woman who would give up their beauty regardless of perceived hostility.

I once saw a interview with a popular female musical/dance performer here in Australia named Rhonda Burchmore (you can google her) back in the 1980s. She confided to the interviewer that she wished she could sometimes be a mousy small brunette so she could blend in public. Instead she had to go through life as a beautiful long legged red head who attracted the gaze of every single man in public. Sure....I guess she's telling the truth...but would she give up being who she was to be an ordinary looking woman? I'm 100% sure she would not. Her major asset as a performer was not her singing or dancing (actually she was pretty awful)

Oh! you mean marketing. Yes, pretty boys have some privilege but it's not quite the same.

I'm so glad I was a science worker. Minds mattered a lot more than bodies.

The challenge with discussing this is that people can mean it in radically different ways. For example on the first page where IsabellaLinton was perhaps meaning her use of the meme she posted in a first or second-wave context where Dox read it as a 3rd or 4th wave context, and typically with most use of memetics to phrase it like that without caveats or clarifiers suggests that the meme has that intention. It's similar to the complexities that the term 'racism' has taken in the post-Kendi / post-DeAngelo world, it's enough complexity and vaguery to cause many a friendly-fire incident.

In the broader context it seems like we're naively ripping the wheels off of relationships (yes - this isn't all of feminism but bear with me), part of that is due to the convenience of dating apps and the distorted incentives that yields such as a lot of men simply spamming every female profile, over to the strong suggestion that women value career over marriage and especially over being a stay-at-home mother. You have women such as Mary Harrington and Louis Perry are talking about how this market neoliberal / libertarian ethos seems to be going past the interests of women, getting destructive and it's commonly brought up how one of the big financial firms (might have been Goldman Sachs but I can't remember) brought up that it's a great thing if women can be kept in the work world for their entire fertile period (over 18 at least) because profit. There's also the added concept of why have two or more people living together as a nuclear family and only buying one refrigerator, one or two cars, and one or two TV's when you can multiply that by household where each person is living on their own. That's one of the things Harrington tends to beat on is that anything left to the wind gets taken up by market forces, she had a conversation with Rebel Wisdom where she and Paul Kingsnorth got into the weeds on that dynamic.

I'm one of those where I simply see too much complexity to say 'This direction unabated good'. Everything has tradeoffs and it seems like enough feminists are running into increasingly steep tradeoffs and asking what shifts are necessary to now, once liberated on more ways than desired, figure out how the equation works with constants of biology without suppressing individual rights or freedoms (ie. some women indeed are cut out to be life-long C-suite execs who never have kids and would never second guess it, most tend to have regrets, and the trick is balancing the results rather than trying to break so free of the patriarchy as to find a whole new solar system where there's no men).

Especially with our love of extreme cultural pendulum swings here in the US that's a painful process and I don't envy the task of the modern feminists who consider what's happening to be a neoliberal overshoot of feminist goals who want to take it back in a slightly different direction but not to have male/female dynamics utterly liquified by Gesellschaft and market liberalism.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 30 Nov 2022, 6:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Minds matter to science....money matters in dating if you are a man

Being a short guy I have never been allowed to be under the delusion that looks do not matter.

I just watched a discussion that Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster of Triggernometry had with Mary Eberstadt on her book Primal Screams in May 2021. It sounds like she has a tightly correlated thesis around the sexual revolution and its impacts on the way the culture is now and in particular the rise of identity politics. I'm sure this wouldn't erase the significance of Jonathan Haidt's findings on social media's impact on children and early teens but that just makes social media and in particular dating apps two more hard blows against family and childhood development.

I made a rough transcript of the discussion and arguments (didn't jot down all of Konstantin and Francis's questions but did so where they turned the theme of discussion significantly.

"The Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics" - Mary Eberstadt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7JmQD2S1gE


- Opened up free sex without marriage for men
- Primal Screams thesis - in absence of religion, family, and healthy attachments increasing flight to identity politics and collective identities. Lack of primal attachments.
- Who am I? Net of familial and religious themes politics fills the gap.
- Divorce and remarriage weakens family bonds.
- 2010's college meltdowns - young adults trying to answer the question 'Who am I'.
- Emotiveness of riots not likely to be strictly civil rights related.
- Disrupting outdoor restaurants and residential neighborhoods: those without primal connection protesting the 'haves'.
- Direction of solutions - re-norm society in light of incoming data.
- Example of the above - indoor smoking stigmatized due to health data.
- Sexual revolution - notable impacts on welfare system (not just about private decisions in that regard).
- 'best known fact in sociology' but impolitic to discuss - not having a father in the house raises risks to children. Risk of abuse from step-parents, boys having difficulty developing into men.
- Research into animal behavior and development in the past few decades, intensely familial.
- Social learning - animals learn by watching other animals (mothers, fathers, siblings)
- We've shrunk our pool of examples to learn from by our detachment.
- Ways to learn about opposite sex through family has diminished.
- Ensuing struggle in humans to find identity without nuclear and extended family similar to that of animals.
- Debate on family ossified because everyone is implicated and the desire is to not hurt feelings.
- Cumulative effect of this private decision on children? Mentions opioid crisis. Psychological disillusion.
- Woke protests - real private misery, she recommends not looking at it as 'snowflake-ism', wrong names for this thing. Not heteronormativity or even feminism, people psychologically unhinged via lack of familial and institutional detachment.
- Good signals - revivals tend to pop up as needed, new leaders and conversations likely. Humans not meant to live miserably.
- People in their 20's and 30's entering Catholic church are doing so because it fills what they were missing.
- Don't have positive examples of what's a good romantic relationship. Due to collapse of fundamental social learning.
- Feminism has gone libertarian in the wrong ways (no longer antipornography).
- Konstantin: sexual revolution freed men not women.
- Sexual revolution empowered the already powerful, weakened the subordinate.
- 'Fell heaviest on the weakest shoulders' - ie. children.
- Shopping for 'glitter families' has been damaging.
- Francis: deep societal self-centeredness?
- Side effects of sexual revolution took a few decades to manifest.
- Japan where this happened earlier, industry for 'lonely deaths'.
- To be a 13th century peasant you'd be more family-literate than many / most people today.
- Maximizing consumerism with respect to freedom a poor choice.
- Sexual consumerism might need to be addressed in terms of how it should be limited.
- Francis: Primal Scream compares family to religion, pillars of society being destabilized.
- Least truancy, most success in academics - in-tact families.
- Konstantin: why is this issue political?
- Political times, consider positive ways to make it political such as tax breaks, student loan forgiveness.
- Francis: has self-centeredness and supremacy of consumerism become too ubiquitous for changes to be bought into?
- No less heroic. Things about people that don't change, serious concern over climate and sacrifices made, show consideration is still alive and well.
- It would be difficult for society to get more unnatural in terms of broken familial bonds and consumerism, most likely direction is up?
- Francis: position in society for men less clear-cut?
- Deriding the masculine in media won't help.
- Likelihood of unexpected religious revival in light of current drought of purpose.
- 'Identity politics' term first used in 1977 Combahee River Collective - giving up on the people around them, only working with people exactly like themselves. Prescient.
- Identity politics a sign of desperation for lack of community, statement of resignation.
- Francis: Thatcher - no family, just men, women, and children.
- Konstantin: What's the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?
- Speaking to agnostics, at a time where organized religion is in freefall, theotropic nature ineradicable. Without religion we'll make up substitutes in the Dirkheimian sense. Isn't put behind us simply because we're more educated. Note the secular religiosity of our time.

I just want to add something. While I now see that it's wrong to put all women on a high pedestal in a world that has often looked down women and still does in many countries. Because it's like basicly ignoring the many real issues women face in society and it treats women like they arent just as human as men.

But spiritually I'm still drawn to what is sometimes regarded as "Goddess Worship". Simply because I find the tales of many of the world's Ancient Goddesses more admirable than the patriarchal God of Abraham whose followers nearly wiped out every other religion and culture on the planet.

And yes as I said in my other thread I'm more drawn to the darker goddesses who are malevolent in nature.

Is it problematic to my personal valid views on feminism? I'm not sure tbh...

I just have some very bizarre spiritual beliefs and I'm drawn to dark things. Maybe I'm just an edgelord? I dunno anymore and I dont really care anymore.

We all tend to have a skewed view of the status of women based on culture and environment. At the moment a lot of lonely young men "simp" to women who friendzone them or use them if they have Onlyfans etc.

What is universal is we all have mothers, sisters and (many of us) daughters.

On the flipside there are many of the men who abuse women but who love their mothers.

That's all very true, and I don't feel it's right how many men have always treated women like they were these alien beings. Even if they're overly admiring women (which I admit im guilty of at times), it just feels like the wrong thing to do.

Kinda like racism too, you have people who look down on one race and treat them like garbage but then you also have those who will put another race on a high pedestal. I know this from personal experience being a casual fan of Japanese entertainment and culture you wouldn't believe all the 'weeaboos' who obsess over Japan to the point that it almost comes across as laughably ignorant and disrespectful to the Japanese.

Like when they use Japanse words like "baka" or "kawaii" in every sentence out of context or express their lust for young Japanese women in a creepy fashion. Not to mention putting down their own culture while praising Japan as this perfect utopia while failing to acknowledge the very real cultural problems Japan faces like the xenophobia towards foreigners, the sexism in their culture, and the problems with alcoholism and high suicide rates.

When I think of this kind of racism among basically geeky white guys (frankly I have found geeks to be some of the biggest bigots of all having been into video games my whole life which are dominated by young straight white men) who put Japan on this high pedestal in such an insane manner it reminds me of this meme "White People but with Subtitles"

You can see an example of a weeaboo at the very bottom wearing the tshirt of an anime girl with pink hair saying "Asian women are so quiet" which translates to "Let me tell you what kind of porn I enjoy"

But you get my point with this, right?

It's no different from how sexism can work when one puts all women on a pedastal instead of realizing that they're human.