RE: I would like to identify as a feminist
November 30, 2015 at 10:41 pm
(This post was last modified: November 30, 2015 at 10:43 pm by bennyboy.)
(November 30, 2015 at 3:59 pm)DespondentFishdeathMasochismo Wrote: What's stopping me you might ask? Well for one, I'm not really sure what the definition of feminism is. All I know is that the feminists I've talked to agree on some things. Very pro race, pro multiculturalism, pro gay, pro trans, looking at gender as a spectrum and not binary, all very good liberal ideas that I also align with. I have started to question my stance on modern day feminism, which there seems to be a lot of misperceptions about. On one hand modern day feminists don't seem to know that there's a counter movement, which looks at the radicals of feminism today and doesn't back it up by saying that there's rational feminists too.
I've followed people like shoeonhead, sargon of akkad, and the amazing atheist, who for years filled my head with ideas that feminism was trash; these are people who I thought I could trust. I'm starting to question these points of view, because I think I would rather stand in solidarity with rational feminists, instead of against a movement that seems to have a lot of ideas that I could align myself with too. I find it difficult to just straight up get behind any movement, because it's multi faceted in it's views and I am too. I'm having a difficult time deciding who's side that i'm on. I was surprised that the feminists in the "why are there so many atheist anti feminists thread" weren't on my side when I was arguing with them.
Feminism isn't a club or a namebrand. If you look at the word, it's basically a "doctrine of female," and that can mean whatever you want. But the problem is that to very many people, "feminist" means "extremist lesbian man-hating bitch."
I would go ahead and identify with that term exactly for that reason. You will have to tell people over and over what feminism means to you, and perhaps some will say, "Yeah, that's right. That's what I think it should mean, too." Don't let man-hating bitches, who really aren't representative of most females anyway, bully their way into ownership of the term.
That being said, I'm a middle-aged white man, and a business-owner to boot, so fuck me, I don't get to be involved in these kind of discussions anyway.
