Is feminism a force for good?

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After witnessing a flamewar break out in women's discussion, I agreed with the one's who said this type of debate is better suited for PPR.

Please feel free to argue and counterargue any aspect of feminism or a related topics such as the patriarchy or who has it harder, while being respectful to your opponents i.e. attack your opponent's argument, not your opponent.

I find Feminism in "real life" to be a force for good, usually.

I don't feel women should be placed in a subservient position vis-à-vis men; that is fundamentally wrong, and those sorts of ideas should be squashed immediately

Academic Feminism has its adherents who, I feel, take its precepts too far. They feel that all men are part of a "patriarchy," and that they should all be treated as "oppressors." I don't feel that I should be treated this way, as I don't "oppress" women.

I do feel that we have to know the historical fact that women in "western" society didn't have many legal rights until relatively recently. They didn't win the right to vote until 1920 throughout the United States.

It should be remembered that quite a few women were able to bypass the "de jure" elements of subjugation, and establish a "de facto" place for themselves.

But it should also be recalled that many other women had their potential squashed, beaten down, etc., by the entrenched society of those times.

Feminism has come to mean to different thinks to different people and this often leads to people talking past each other about what it is.

But it isn't very complicated. The dictionary definitions (Merriam-Webster) are:

and


The movement for equal rights for women got going in the 18th century when enlightened women and men noted the injustice of the legal and social treatment of women and called for a recognition that the principles of liberty and equality that were firing democratic and republican revolutionary sentiment in Europe and America should be applied fully to women as well as men. In some places, this early feminist movement was very successful, but in most it took centuries of struggle to get even partial legal equality between men and women written into the law.

Many men and women wrote essays, novels and speeches promoting these ideas through the 18th and 19th centuries and by the end of the Victorian age a strong political movement in favor of extending the right to vote to women had emerged. In the US, this movement for women's suffrage resulted in the passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution in 1920, giving white women the right to vote.

This early period has been described as "first wave" feminism, followed by a second wave consisting of efforts aimed at reforming a culture that habitually treated women as second class citizens regardless of their right vote.

The second wave (more or less coinciding with other social reforming movements of the 1960s) was an effort to change a traditional culture that implied and reinforced a sense of inherent male superiority and relegated women to roles as supports for men and sexual objects for men that constituted the heart of the second wave.

I guess historians will look at the last thirty years or so and subdivide the movement into additional waves, but the main direction seems to be expanding the scope of feminist egalitarianism to recognize more kinds of people and ways of being male, female and having other kinds of gender identity.

This is what feminism means. To consider it anything but good is to declare yourself against women having the right to vote, to own property and to be treated as the social equals of men.

If you think the sexual conduct of Bill Clinton and Roger Ailes was just fine and would like your own wife, daughter, mother, sister or self to have to consider demands for oral sex from managers and higher ups as just a normal and acceptable part of a working career, by all means, be against feminism.

I find the content and style of Marxism tedious and annoying and dislike feminist discourse that is based in that kind of framework. I disagree with specific points by a number of feminists. But feminism, which really means the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities, no matter what your personal definition of it may be, is good. To be against it is to be against fairness and justice and that is axiomatically evil.

That depends on what you mean by feminism. Plenty of feminists are sane, rational people who talk about real issues involving gender inequality across the globe.

However, if you are talking about mainstream third-wave feminists who claim that America is a white supremacist patriarchy that has a prominent, pervasive rape culture, then no. They are not concerned about actual gender inequality. Anita Sarkesian, a mainstream feminist, complains about people calling her names on Twitter, and makes videos about how it's hard to see Batman's butt in Arkham City. In my opinion she is just a scam artist, but there are plenty of idiotic little girls who eat that s**t up.

Probably the biggest problem with mainstream feminism are the claims like "1 in 4 women at universities are raped", or "Women make 77 cents on the dollar compared to men." These claims are simply false; both of those studies were not at all sufficient to make those claims, and other studies have completely disproved these claims, and yet we have politicians like Obama and Hillary, as well as celebrities and other mainstream personalities, spouting that crap like it's undeniable fact.

Also, the SJW crowd in general thinks they are justified in censoring people who don't agree with them, which is obviously a violation of free speech. A lot of them even outright say they disagree with freedom of speech. They are also world-class race baiters.

In a nutshell: classic feminism is good, but the current brand of feminism is an entirely different thing, and is completely antithetical to gender equality.

I would say that the current crop of third wave self identified feminists have been more harmful than helpful, I would not lump them in with previous generations of feminism. I would not even call these people feminists really, cultural Marxists and useful idiots.

Currently? I'd say no. Historically they at least had some legitimate grievances, though many orders of magnitude less severe than many people seem to believe. The current third wave intersectional academic I-win-at-victimhood feminism is somewhere between a cult and outright insanity, and keep in mind that I'm saying this as a guy who leans pretty far to the left in an already left-leaning country.

My biggest gripe with it is that it, like creationism, perpetually repeats and proliferates half-truths or outright falsehoods, even long after their claims have been thoroughly deconstructed and demonstrated to be incorrect, which tells me they are more interested in pushing an agenda than getting at the truth of anything.

The original meaning is actually another altogether. French philosopher Charles Fourier coined the term "feminisme" (because French! He also originated the concept of the "phalanstère", but I digress), by which he meant "the practice of judging the merits of a society based on how it treats its women". I don't know if he meant exclusively, or merely including it as a factor. Either way, that actually seems to be the attitude of many feminists: no matter what, improving the current situation for women is desirable and should be a priority. Nevermind how orphaned such a statistic might be.

One should also keep in mind that dictionary definitions are descriptive, not prescriptive. It's the reason why Merriam-Webster also includes a description of "literally" to literally (ha!) mean its own opposite e.g. "I literally died!" (figuratively).






"To be a Christian means you follow the Bible. In the Bible it says not to commit murder. To declare yourself not a Christian is to declare yourself in favour of murder".

"To be a Muslim means you follow the teachings of the Qur'an. It says to give to charity in the Qur'an. To declare yourself not a Muslim is to declare yourself against charity."

Seeing the flaws in your logic yet? Feminism does not have a monopoly on a belief in equality any more than Christianity has a monopoly on opposing murder. And declaring opposition to a political ideology "axiomatically evil" is a rather spectacular case of poisoning the well.

"I don't think the ills of society can be referred upwards to a nebulous boogeyman called Patriarchy" - Evil!

"I think merit should trump genitalia" - Evil!

"I don't think violence is less severe when commited by a woman" - Evil!

"The wage gap is actually an earnings gap, and not indicative of discrimination" - Evil!

"I think legislation dealing with things like sexual assault and domestic violence should not be gendered" - Evil!





More poisoning the well. I'm not familiar with Roger Ailes, but Bill Clinton is more than probably a war criminal and almost certainly a serial rapist. I'm not even certain which of the current presidential candidates would be worse, but I'm leaning towards it being the alleged feminist and her serial-rapist war-criminal of a prospective
First Gentleman (?). I say "alleged" because Hillary can't hold an opinion without first taking a poll, but
thats' what she calls herself, so who am I to argue?

By your reasoning, if you support the conduct of "Jackie"/the Rolling Stone with regards to the UVA Rape Hoax, or the feminist-influenced family court system as described in Hannah Wallens "Seven Years in Hell" article, then by all means support feminism!




The history of the vote in the USA is a bit messy due to separate state legislations, but certain states had voting rights legislation using the wording "he or she" dating back to the 1790s. Suffrage was tied to land ownership, not gender. When later the law was changed to tie voting rights to the draft, women lost the vote due to not being subject to the draft. Later on, women were given the vote while still not being subject to the draft. Progress, of course, but an undeniable imbalance of rights and responsibilities.

In Britain, the vote was given to women (by the Labour Party) the same afternoon they appeared to want it. A majority of women did in fact not want it, because A: In that time, politics was seen as something dirty and beneath the dignity of a proper woman, and B: they were afraid they would be subject to the same responsibilities of citizenship as men were, again including the draft, bucket brigades and the hue-and-cry laws.

We should in fact be grateful that the most popular voting-template among the suffragettes is not what was implemented: had the suffragettes had their way, white women of high social status could pay £10 (accounting for inflation, about £400 today) and cast their vote. The universal suffrage that was actually implemented gave the vote to all women* and also to the 4/5 men* who were also excluded from the vote at the time.

* Well, whites, I presume. Still, progress!

I think overall it has been a positive thing the right to vote is important and having equal rights and all that...however, there seems to be a lot of negativity and extremism coming out of it lately so kind of hard to see it as entirely good. Even in the definition 'organized activity in support of women's rights and interests', some feminists seem to think interests means to the extent of supporting womens interests over males interests and in effect making them less equal. Basically the attitude to stop at nothing for womens interests seems more damaging than helpful to the movement yet even the ones that don't have that mentality seem to ignore that this is an actual issue with the movement that is probably a large part of why people are seeing it more negatively.


I don't think that means I am against the right for women to vote, own property or have equal social standing to males.

I think feminism BEGAN as a "force for good"----back when women began the fight for equal pay for equal work, and fighting to be able to vote, etc.----but, nowadays, there just seems to be too many RADICALS in the movement; and, IMO, most radicals don't seem to wanna listen to anybody who has an opinion, that's different from their own.

Feminism on the whole is overwhelmingly a force for good, and remains so today.

I am concerned by the anti-empirical tendencies in some corners of the movement, particularly the gender theories of Radical Feminism (which is a different thing from "a feminist who goes a bit far for my liking"). The evidence is pretty conclusive that sex and gender are different but at least partially biological, and yet many RadFems (particularly of the Trans-Exclusionary persuasion) maintain that gender is entirely socially constructed.

Ultimately I don't think feminist political correctness is anywhere near as big a problem as, say, Trumpist political correctness or Eurosceptic political correctness, but perhaps it has the potential to be in the future. However, unlike the far-right, the feminist movement as a whole is mainstream enough to be self-correcting.

Of course third wave feminism is a force for good. Gender roles, rape culture, FGM, MGM etc. should not belong in 2016.

Yeah I'm also not buying the "first and second wave = good, third wave = bad" thing.

The second and particularly first wave focused on important issues, but largely ignored issues that didn't affect straight cis middle-class white women. Third-wave feminism embraces intersectionality. It also doesn't reject traditional notions of femininity as such, it says that they're valid but shouldn't be restrictive, whereas the second wave often shunned "feminine" things such as lipstick.

If they don't believe gender exists then why do they talk about to so much?

Yes I agree that it's transphobic to say say gender is not biological but a social construct because trans-people maintain they have a biologically female brain in a biologically male body (or vice-versa).

To say that gender is merely a social construct is to say that gender reassignment surgury is a choice rather than a medical necessity.

Gender is a social construct more or less based on your biological sex...basically female is both a gender and a sex, maybe that's confusing though...I used to be under the impression gender and sex were the same thing but apparently not.

Could you give a brief summary?

i think the main problem with "feminism" is that, in this day and age, the word itself inevitably implies something different than what it stands for in theory. and that alone is enough for all kinds of confusion and misappropriation to happen

in my book, it has joined words like "empathy" and "love" in the list of words that have lost their meaning. because they have too many meanings, they tend to be loaded, and people rarely stop to clarify what they're talking about when they use it. either by omission in good faith (simply assuming that everyone is talking about the same thing, which is rarely the case), or on purpose in order to promote one agenda or another by conflating different things (weaponized semantics. typical politics)

it's a word that simply has no meaning if it's not used in very specific contexts or thoroughly explained otherwise. which is impractical and counterproductive

The classic feminists, in the vein of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Betty Friedan are definitely people that should be held to high regard.

The radical ones, like Andrea Dworkin, Germaine Greer, et al, not so much.