(May 3, 2014 at 8:51 am)Esquilax Wrote: And I hope you realize how hard that might be when the status quo benefits men and disempowers women to the point that their say in how society is run is significantly weaker. To characterize this as an equal blame thing is to simply ignore the actual facts at play here; you can't sit at the tail end of a system that for the longest time made it difficult, if not impossible, for women to ascend to positions of power, and for that system to be bolstered by a male class that became used to a certain level of assumed power and respect (this is a human trait, not specifically a male one, but it did its work on males here) and then assign women equal blame for not crawling out of that rut.
I don't think anyone sensible would blame any individual man for the existence of this system, nor even present day men at all; we're all just inheriting a centuries-old apparatus, after all. This isn't the fault of anyone living, and it would be hard to point fingers at specific groups in the past because of how diffuse culture is, but when we just ignore that there are imbalances here, on both sides, because it's "not our fault," well, then it becomes our fault for perpetuating a system we could improve.
I'm replying to this out of order seems I agree with you on the whole 2nd paragraph. People do however generalize all men as responsible for sexism as if we are responsible for what other men long before we were born have done. Which is really my only bone to pick here. I find it frustrating when some feminists alienate people who agree with them by using language that seems aimed at creating further divides.
This isn't me trying to shrug off modern sexism at all. I agree with the majority of feminists, I also think we as a society are responsible for fixing such issues.
As for the first paragraph, I wasn't as clear as I thought I was looking back at that. My intention wasn't to make it seem like 50/50 blame. More that it isn't as clear cut as one group vs another.
