Basic feminism (Feminism 101 was taken).

If you’re wondering about the gap, it’s because I couldn’t think of anything to say. I want to talk about Libya, but two political posts in a row seems a bit much. So today I’m going to talk about something completely apolitical. Feminism! After all, what kind of hopelessly ignorant person would oppose such a self-evidently worthy cause as feminism? Apart from, for example, most of the human males* on the planet**. This is going to be less political than philosophical, though, since, I’m going to be describing what we believe.

First, as both of the people who actually read my introduction probably noticed, yes, I’m a feminist. Not all feminists are actually female. Just most of us. Which is because the point of feminism is to eliminate any and all sexual gender discrimination (which should make them a natural ally of LGBTIQAA***, but I’ve never really encountered that much contact between them, since both sides tend to keep to their own issues for the most part). To exclude males would, in fact, be gender discrimination.

Which brings me to the idea of feminists as 'man-haters'****. Or even the idea that a large number of feminists are 'man-haters'. Let’s be clear here. That’s not feminism, it’s misandry. If you look closely, you can see a slight difference in spelling between those two words. A misandrist might call themselves a feminist, but that doesn’t actually make them one, especially since they’re in direct opposition to what feminism actually stand for. It’s the same as how calling yourself communist doesn’t actually make you one, and why people don’t bow before me, despite my referring to myself as ‘God-king of all humanity’. Also, the number of ‘feminist’ misandrists is a lot lower than people seem to think. There’s a story everyone seems to know about how a man opens a door for a woman, and she starts raging at him for sexism. The strange thing is that no one seems to have actually had it happen to them. I’m pretty sure at this point that it’s an urban legend, but even if it’s true, it proves nothing except the existence of idiots in the feminist movement. All groups have idiots*****.

Another thing people always bring up is ‘radical feminsim’. Clearly man hating feminists exist as a significant proportion of the movement, they say, since there’s a whole section on Wikipedia on ‘Radical Feminism’. You keep using those words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean. Although I have several philosophical differences with the ideas of radical feminism, and even more with some specific radical feminists, radical feminism does not mean hatred of men, and next time you might want to try actually reading up on the theory, rather than just reading a bit on radical Islam, and assuming that all radical views are basically the same kind of thing

Which actually leads to the idea people seem to have that all feminism is one big united group, or that there are feminist views on things. Now, to some extent, that’s true. For example: rape is bad. But the thing about feminism is that it’s about equality between the sexes. How we’re going to achieve that equality, and even what it’ll look like when we get there isn’t exactly a point of unity.

Another thing to address, of course, is why it’s called feminism, rather than, say, ‘egalitarianism’. Far too many people say that they don’t identify as feminist because of the name being orientated towards females. As though it mattered what a philosophy was called. But let’s look at this logically: Rape victims are mostly female (although still not all); ditto domestic abuse victims; the only country in Europe to elect two female heads of state in a row is Ireland; females get paid less; promiscuous women are derided; massive amounts of film, advertising and drawing is focused on portraying the women as sex objects (google ‘male gaze’). In return, females get to wear nice clothes (so that they’re nicer for heterosexual men to look at), get to learn dancing (so that they can show off their bodies to heterosexual men), and get more control over their children (partly because they had to have a baby in their body for nine months and suffer the pain of childbirth, but mostly because females are naturally the primary caregivers, far better at bringing up children than males). When the feminist movement started, things were even more skewed. So yeah, even though I’m slanting that a little, I think calling it feminism and placing the focus on women’s rights is probably understandable.

I can’t currently think of any more things you need to know about feminism, although it’s always possible that I’ve wiped some of the stupider objections from my mind. This is rather general because there are some more specific things I want to talk about, and I wanted to do some groundwork first, just to make my position clear.

* Quick aside: male/female refers to sex, which is biological, whilst man/woman refers to gender, which is cultural. Feminist philosophy tends to be a bit more focused on gender discrimination. That’s a bit of an oversimplification, but it’ll do for now.

** Based on talking to about twenty of them about it. Truly, mine is a well researched and totally non-sexist statement.

*** I’ve probably missed out a few letters there.

**** Actually, it brings me to the idea of butterflies. But unfortunately, butterflies have nothing to do with this post, so let’s go with the vaguely logical connection.

***** Except people who read this blog, who are all handsome, charming and intelligent^†.

^†Except you Hubert^††.

^††Apologies to anyone actually called Hubert.