Feminism Thread

[Aristio]

i mean for fuck's sake it's even called HIStory. patriarchy all up in dis bitch

You know what I don't fucking get about Womyn or Hystory? Wouldn't Y be considered the most masculine/male letter there is?

[Blubbartron]

I think all of this diarrhea could easily be avoided if people just limited themselves to actually debating what a single person actually says rather than producing their own idea of what the other person is actually saying and then using vagueness such as "most feminists say this". Because every time i see some guy (or fat chick) whine about feminism, it's usually about their perception of what some feminists think.

I mean, you know what? At this point i would prefer it if they quoted a real feminist, even if she's crazy. Cause it least we wouldn't be arguing straws.

Isn't this kind of begging for the opportunity to "No True Scotsman", though? The "normal" feminists refuse to acknowledge that these other feminists exist (the "patriarchy" retards), so if one example is provided, it's easily dismissed as an outlier. How many examples need to be shown? Without proper polling, we'll never know the exact breakdown of thoughts/beliefs by people who self-identify as feminist. All we have is the classic internet problem wherein the minority's craziness is often the loudest and *appears* to be the majority.

Granted, much like with people like Westboro, I find the feminists who don't actively seek out and ridicule the crazies in their ranks as complicit in their actions. If you're going to include yourself as part of a group (self-identification with some label), then you have a responsibility to weed out the morons so that your group's goals and respectability aren't tarnished. Otherwise you're just one person with your own set of beliefs and you feel compelled to associate with the group that most represents those beliefs. I've never understood that aspect of humanity - always wanting to be part of a group. Do people really feel so powerless that they can't just say "I have my own beliefs, and believe it or not, they probably don't match up *perfectly* with other people"?

[ronin sparthos]

Being a unique snowflake to yourself doesn't help to enact change and most Feminists want change by the very definition of what they argue for/against. This means they need to self-identify and project their positions outward which begins the process of making allies and forming a platform in order to enact social change. Some take the position of wanting to enact change on a micro level but such individuals are often felt but not heard leaving us with the vocal factions.

Let's suppose that egalitarian feminists acknowledge their more radical counterparts in debate and actively denounce their positions. Then what? The radicals are gonna keep on being radical, hysteric, over the top attention-whores and the egalitarian position will be watered down through distraction rather than attempting to convince neutral parties that the egalitarian position is the superior one. Convince enough neutral parties and your opposition will crumble beside your newly amassed allies anyway.

[Charismatic]

The egalitarian position is indeed the superior one, but that's not feminism. I mean, they do have different names for good reason.

[Blubbartron]

Being a unique snowflake to yourself doesn't help to enact change and most Feminists want change by the very definition of what they argue for/against. This means they need to self-identify and project their positions outward which begins the process of making allies and forming a platform in order to enact social change. Some take the position of wanting to enact change on a micro level but such individuals are often felt but not heard leaving us with the vocal factions.

Let's suppose that egalitarian feminists acknowledge their more radical counterparts in debate and actively denounce their positions. Then what? The radicals are gonna keep on being radical, hysteric, over the top attention-whores and the egalitarian position will be watered down through distraction rather than attempting to convince neutral parties that the egalitarian position is the superior one. Convince enough neutral parties and your opposition will crumble beside your newly amassed allies anyway.

I disagree in regard to a single person not being able to enact change. I think the real "change" in these social movements come from individual people, en masse. Seeing gay rights marches does not convince bigots that gays deserve rights. One rational, reasonable person having a conversation with a bigot may change said bigot's mind, though. It's basically an idea virus that spreads from person to person. The unfortunate thing is that the crazies have their own idea virus and they've labeled it the same as the good virus. Then when two feminists talk, they both say "oh yeah, I'm infected with X", but neither knows which virus the other really has. That's the problem with labels and being a joiner.

I've lost almost all faith in humanity, but I still have enough left to believe that the average person can identify crazy when they see/hear it, and even more people can identify it when it's directly contrasted with a reasoned, intelligent view. I see no reason to believe that the egalitarian viewpoint would be watered down. If anything, the contrast would make people more likely to believe the egalitarian view is superior (because it's obviously not crazy).

Basically, I'm concerned that not policing your group will lead to feminism being taken over by crazies in the same way that the Republican party was taken over by neo-cons. The original Republicans were so damn happy to have new joiners that they ignored their craziness. It only took 2-3 decades before the crazies were just as much the heart of the group as the original people. It almost happened again with the Tea Party. Thankfully that crazy was so extreme that it lost them elections, and winning elections is more important than having more joiners. That's an important concept for feminists to consider, as well.

[archibaldcrane]

Being OK with male genital mutilation and not OK with female genital mutilation is bigotry, plain and simple.

To be brief - not all cutting of genitals is the same.

Do a quick google search of FGM if you'd like to understand why the comparison is faulty.

If FGM was simply a clit hood trimming, then we'd be talking about roughly the same thing. It isn't. And I'm generally against circumcision, and don't wish my sons to be cut like I was. But talking about FGM as if it's comparable makes you, basically, a monster.

[Byrthnoth]

To be brief - not all cutting of genitals is the same.

Do a quick google search of FGM if you'd like to understand why the comparison is faulty.

If FGM was simply a clit hood trimming, then we'd be talking about roughly the same thing. It isn't. And I'm generally against circumcision, and don't wish my sons to be cut like I was. But talking about FGM as if it's comparable makes you, basically, a monster.

Pretty much this. FGM is more comparable to cutting off the entire dick tip.

[Blubbartron]

To be brief - not all cutting of genitals is the same.

Do a quick google search of FGM if you'd like to understand why the comparison is faulty.

If FGM was simply a clit hood trimming, then we'd be talking about roughly the same thing. It isn't. And I'm generally against circumcision, and don't wish my sons to be cut like I was. But talking about FGM as if it's comparable makes you, basically, a monster.

Are you really trying to distinguish different forms of mutilation? I'm pretty sure that makes you much more monstrous than me. *All* mutilation that is done without consent is abhorrent, even if it's well-intentioned mutilation. I don't think I need to bring up the Castrato singers from Italy as an example of awful male mutilation to compete with "FGM", as if that explicitly defined a certain type of mutilation. FGM is a category of all sorts of heinous shit from completely cutting off the clitoris to sewing up the labia and only leaving a small opening for urine. All of it's awful - none of it is inherently more awful than mutilation of the penis. Conversely, no mutilation of male sex organs is inherently more awful than mutilation of female sex organs.

[Byrthnoth]

No. Things don't just suddenly become one single shade of awful after you go past a certain horrible point. Also, being unable to distinguish awful things from each other doesn't make you a better person. It's like this:

Which is worse?
1) Being murdered
2) Being raped and then murdered
3) Being tortured, raped, and then murdered
4) Having your loved ones be tortured and raped while you listen, then you being tortured, raped, and murdered.

They're all terrible, but there is definitely a gradient of horribleness to them. Also, on the scale of awfulness I would say that all of them are probably worse than male circumcision.


Now that we've established that some things can be worse than others, and I'd argue that the average female circumcision is more awful than the average male circumcision.

[Charismatic]

So what though?
We gonna argue about who is wronged more or agree that both are wrong and neither sex should be maimed at birth? (nevermind the fact that there are multiple forms of FGM and not all are worse than circumcision but all are outlawed)

[Blubbartron]

No. Things don't just suddenly become one single shade of awful after you go past a certain horrible point. Also, being unable to distinguish awful things from each other doesn't make you a better person. It's like this:

Which is worse?
1) Being murdered
2) Being raped and then murdered
3) Being tortured, raped, and then murdered
4) Having your loved ones be tortured and raped while you listen, then you being tortured, raped, and murdered.

They're all terrible, but there is definitely a gradient of horribleness to them. Also, on the scale of awfulness I would say that all of them are probably worse than male circumcision.


Now that we've established that some things can be worse than others, and I'd argue that the average female circumcision is more awful than the average male circumcision.

So does that mean we should approach the problem of murder from the perspective of stopping the "most terrible" murders first (with or without the intention of getting to the "lesser" murders later), or should we just try to stop *all* murders? That's kind of what I was getting at.

Also, this is the problem with feminism and men's rights activists. The fucking dick measuring (turn of phrase, don't let your jimmies get rustled) of "the violations against my gender are worse than YOUR gender!"

[Not Kuno]

Whole lot of wrong in this thread when I looked away for a second.

but even here 1 in 4 women will be raped in their lifetime and only 3% will ever see their assailant punished for his crime. there hasn't been a draft since fucking Viet Nam. it's not equivalent.

Super wrong statistic. Here's a wall of text about it.

Spoiler: show

Let’s examine one of the most frequently cited studies on rape—the 1985 Ms. Magazine study authored by Mary Koss, which determined, based on a random sample of three thousand, that 1 in 4 college-aged women in the US have been victims of rape or attempted rape. In a paper published three years prior to this study, she characterized rape as “an extreme behavior but one that is on a continuum with normal male behavior within the culture”. In other words, rape is not a deviate behavior of certain individuals, but in its essence, just another ‘normal’ expression of male sexuality. Like our late friend Ms. Dworkin, Ms. Koss subscribes to the belief that maleness is not only the root of all rape, but that maleness is synonymous with rape.
In the study, rape was defined as nonconsensual ‘penetration by a finger, penis or other object.’ This is an extremely broad definition of rape to begin with—penetration by a finger? Seriously? In addition, the wording of question 8 (the drug/alcohol question), which was responsible for roughly half the findings of rape, was ambiguous to the point of absurdity, something Koss later admitted when pressed by reporters.
But it gets better. Because of all the women determined to have been raped, only 27% considered themselves to be rape victims. Yes, that’s right. It was the surveyors, not the respondents, who decided who had been raped and who hadn’t.
When corrected for these discrepancies, the number of women in the study who were victims of rape or attempted rape drops to about 1 in 22. Still unacceptable—especially if you’re woman #22—but one thing that number won’t do is get you all kinds of nationwide press.
Another study done in 1992, by Dr. Dean Kilpatrick, found that 1 in 8 women in America would be the victim of forcible rape at least once in her lifetime. Which is pretty scary, especially for the hordes of women who opted not to enrol in post-secondary education, believing it would keep them safe from all those rampant campus rapists.
In order to avoid the uncomfortable conflict that arose in Koss’s study, where victims of rape were apparently in the dark as to the fact they’d been raped (how awkward!), Kilpatrick thought it prudent to omit the question altogether. Yes, you heard me. In a study of how many women have been raped, he didn’t think ‘Have you ever been a victim of rape?’ was a pertinent enough question to include in the 35 minute telephone interview. When pressed by reporters from a small, award-winning investigative newspaper, as to why he’d omitted the question in his million-dollar study, his reply was, ‘If people think that is a key question, let them get their own grant and do their own study.’
Except guess what? He’d already done that study—one where he’d explicitly asked respondents whether they had, indeed, been raped. And the number he arrived at? Coincidence of coincidences: 1 in 20. You’ll understand how that study didn’t land him a spot in Time magazine, whereas his super-scary 1992 study based on the Koss/Ms methodology made him a feminist household name.

Basically, it's completely made up. Women and men get raped at around equal numbers. Men get raped way way more than women do if you count prisons.


Male genital mutilation serves no actual benefits, while it brings all sorts of shit later on (difficulty reaching climax, difficulty getting it up, etc). They don't even use anesthetics on the kids, they are in so much pain they literally pass out from it and tell the parents "they slept right through it". An adult male that has been circumcised as a boy is missing 10 square inches of skin (the most sensitive inches, by the way). Also saying that its "your kid" and you can choose what to do with it is like saying because it's your kid you can abuse them. Also trying to justify it by being "cleaner" is like me telling you it's ok to knock out all of a kids teeth because brushing it is so annoying every day.

It's also retarded to force your religion on someone too young to choose. All infant circumcision is wrong.

[Not Kuno]

Oh man I forgot to address that fake "only 3% of rapists" go to jail statistic. I'm slacking today. That comes from this image, which comes from various bits of info from Rainn.org:

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4...409xo1_500.jpg

The problem is that the “experts” writing this apparently don’t understand the difference between a “person accused of rape” and a “rapist.” Similarly, those “100 rapes” aren’t really “100 rapes,” they’re 46 alleged rapes and 54 guesses at rapes that may have happened but not been reported.

While these numbers might be considered shocking, in reality they’re entirely commensurate with other crimes. Note here that the actual conviction rate for rape is 5/9, or 56%, not 3% or anything remotely similar.

For now we can ignore the 54 alleged unreported rapes. The reality is that we have no idea, but when people are surveyed we overwhelmingly find that the reason so many “rapes” are unreported is because the “victim” didn’t consider it to be serious and didn’t feel they’d been harmed. If the victim didn’t feel they’d been substantially harmed, it’s debatable whether we can even consider a crime to have been committed, and at the very least we can’t count them. Once they’re subtracted, the number’s already taken a huge hit.

Of the 46 reported rapes, only a handful lead to an arrest. This is for a number of reasons. For some (this is actually quite rare, as most rapes are committed by someone close to the victim) the police might not have been able to locate a suspect. For others, they are removed as a result of accusation inflation. Basically, accusation inflation happens when someone reports a rape to the police, but for one reason or another (commonly jurisdiction issues) it’s dismissed and refiled elsewhere. This can result in an additional report even though there was only one crime. For still more, there are cases where a cursory examination demonstrates that the events reported don’t qualify as rape under the law, such as a case where two equally intoxicated people have sex. Additionally, there are cases where the alleged victim is believed to be fabricating their story outright. These aren’t the only factors, but even in short we can see how big an effect these could be.

Of the 12 that lead to an arrest, several will be dropped because the suspect is proven innocent (predominantly via alibi that wasn’t originally accessible), and others will be dropped because the DA feels the case was too insubstantial to prosecute. This could be a real crime with insufficient evidence, or a false allegation (or misdirected allegation) where the evidence doesn’t exist because the crime never occurred.

Of the 9 that are prosecuted, slightly less than half fail in court because while there was sufficient evidence to take the case to trial, there wasn’t enough to prove that case beyond a reasonable doubt. Additionally, some cases end through plea bargains, often when the DA doubts that there will be a successful rape conviction. There’s a reason it specifies “felony” convictions, as many of these plea bargains result in misdemeanor convictions. This may be accidental, or this may be a purposeful attempt to mislead.

Finally, we get to the most misleading of the statistics, that a number of the convicted rapists will not “spend even a single day in prison.” This, of course, is bullshit. The reason for this is that many rape trials end in convictions for sexual assault. Sentences for sexual assault are not as long as sentences for rape, and given the normal length of a rape trial and general proceedings what’s actually happening is that many of these offenders are being sentenced to “time served”; that is, they’re already been in prison for their entire sentence before they were convicted. As mentioned, this makes the statistic intensely and likely intentionally misleading. They are not just letting convicted rapists go without jail time.

But hey, why bother with silly things like accuracy when you can get a good infographic out of it, right?

[hey]

In the study, rape was defined as nonconsensual ‘penetration by a finger, penis or other object.’ This is an extremely broad definition of rape to begin with—penetration by a finger? Seriously?

Stopped reading there.

[Blubbartron]

Super wrong statistic. Here's a wall of text about it.

<knowledge bomb>

Many thanks for that - I had heard elsewhere the rape percentage was bunk, but now I have names of the people who did those studies so I can confirm for myself what you've claimed here (I don't doubt you, it makes sense), and similarly drop knowledge on some bitches.

[Outlaw]

The reason FGM is so horrible is that the reason they do it to women is to prevent them from feeling sexual pleasure. They think if women can enjoy sex that they will cheat on their husbands, or be generally promiscuous. Not too even mention the unsanitary conditions. In the cultures this goes on in it will usually be done in a dirty hut with some rusty piece of metal or a sharp rock. I would go into more detail but it could make you puke.. I saw a documentary on the subject once.

Male circumcision isn't even close to the same thing.

[Not Kuno]

Male circumcision isn't even close to the same thing.

Why is this a fucking competition? Gee, studies show most men suffer in life when they get their left arm lobbed off as opposed to girls who don't mind as much. It should happen to anyone. At all. Period. You cant justify something by saying it's WORSE for someone else when done to them. That's bullshit assbackwards logic. Nobody should have a body part permanently removed without their consent.

[Blubbartron]

Stopped reading there.

Let me throw a hypothetical at you:

A couple is making out and things are getting a little heated. Girl seems to be into it, so guy escalates (slowly). External stimulation of the vagina, etc. She doesn't object, so he escalates further and begins/attempts to finger her.

For most people, this is common foreplay before actual intercourse. But imagine the girl suddenly decided against it (for whatever reason, totally her choice) after he began fingering her. The guy stops when asked. Did he rape her? She didn't explicitly give consent to the escalations, so the fingering could easily be labeled as "unwanted". The study would probably say, yes, he raped her. Common sense says otherwise. People don't sign legal fucking contracts before banging.

[Outlaw]

Why is this a fucking competition? Gee, studies show most men suffer in life when they get their left arm lobbed off as opposed to girls who don't mind as much. It should happen to anyone. At all. Period. You cant justify something by saying it's WORSE for someone else when done to them. That's bullshit assbackwards logic. Nobody should have a body part permanently removed without their consent.

Yes, I get that. >.>; But with men it doesn't interfere with normal function or sensation. That's the only point I'm trying to make. I'm a guy and if it would have been my choice I would still have it done.

[Tyrath]

That's fine and dandy. Whoever wants to get it done can do so when they are of age. But nobody should be forced to have it done at a young age where they don't even have a choice.

Also, you claim you get what Kuno said while you still throw in a comparison. It doesn't matter if it's more or less interfering for a guy. Forced mutilation is forced mutilation.