I think the word "fair" already has a normative component. So the Society of Patriarchs wouldn't think what they're doing to women is unfair, they approve of it and therefore it's fair.
Then adjust the case: the society does think what they’re doing is unfair, but doesn’t care. (If you think it’s inconceivable for there to be a being who wills evil for its own sake, we can suppose that they recognise that it’s unfair, but think the good of patriarchy outweighs the badness of unfairness.)
Interestingly enough, after years of rejecting the label (after earlier years of embracing it), I’m back to self-identifying as a feminist (though I seldom vocalize it outside of relevant discussions, and try to stay very humble to avoid falling into internet altercations resulting in my throwing up my arms and saying: “fuck you, you can just go ahead and keep the damn word”).
My motivation is laughably reflexive and admittedly sentimental, but I think one of the more admirable strains of the feminist project - roughly: a critique of patriarchal power structures ultimately rooted in egalitarian values - has fallen out of fashion and is probably too important to let go of.
In its place we see these absurd bait-and-switch semantic games that don’t pace with actual usage, as you wonderfully get into here, or radical expressions of resentment that become increasingly indistinguishable from crude misandry but I suspect are mostly a symptom of fear and exhaustion, fueled by novel forms of communication media etc. it’s very toxic to me.
Where I differ from this essay is the tacit assumption that we can frame “men’s” and “women’s” issues into two groups and draw a line of demarcation to weave the concept feminism - sorry, FEMINISM - around in its various patterns of support for each group.
I’ve never taken patriarchy to mean “men”, and while I would never argue that men aren’t the beneficiaries of many of these injustices one might find exacerbated by this particular system, I think the gendered beneficiaries and victims of them are ultimately incidental, CONCEPTUALLY. (Practically/politically/sociologically gender is clearly important of course) Your example of men and war - to me that’s right in line with expectations of patriarchal social patterns (justified or not), which I’ve always taken to be the core concern of a feminism worth defending.
Patriarchy = bad is also too simplistic, but it’s harder to deny that as a common expression of the criticism, which I’m sympathetic to.
Ultimately, I believe that as more women occupy positions of genuine cultural power - which has only been starting to happen as recently as an eye blink in historical time - we’ll start to see genuinely new modes of life and patterns of social conduct. For example, conflict resolution - which of course relates to war and how men are expected to behave, etc.
Counter-argument: 1) feminism is a subset of general egalitarianism 2) the general assumption is that everybody wants egalitarianism, the difference is that the right believes the fact it already happened and the left believes the fact it did not.
I wonder if we could possibly, eventually, at some point, define/frame feminism as advocacy for women: women's rights (equality goes here), women-specific issues or issues that are more relevant to women than to men, and simply advocacy for women as a gender (or sex but no, we're not going THERE today, nope) based category.
I'm thus wondering if feminism could be redefined away form men, relative comparisons and the very concept of patriarchy, or is it so inevitably and deeply rooted in conflict theories of some sort that it's impossible.
This take allows for the belief that women "as a class" are treated worse than men either overall or in specific domains or even on specific issues but doesn't require it. It also allows that a misandrist could be a feminist, but that's not very important from my pov. In this framing your "conscription for cannon fodder" scenario allows for feminism as in your example; but it also allows feminists to focus specifically on issues where men most definitely "have it worse", regardless of who "has it worse" overall, and without addressing that specific disparity, so a feminist could concern themselves with women's suicide or drug addiction or loneliness/social isolation/friendlessness without having to wiggle out of "but men suffer from those problems more". Sure they do, but as a feminist, I (generic I, not actually I) am focusing on the women's experience and challenges.
Ditch "patriarchy" as a concept NECESSARY for feminism (we can STILL use it when it's useful, of course) and paradoxically it allows for a more focused application to women's rights and problems, because it gets rid of the "patriarchy harms most men too" part and allows us to kick away (or politely dismiss) any what-aboutism.
And from this perspective, I think the current usage of "feminism" is closer to not so much misandry as anti-patriarchy than "women's advocacy" I'd like to see it evolve towards.
I like the way you approach this. A point implicit in my response to Amos yesterday that I’ll make explicit here: I think debating the nuances around types of harms and its gendered impact as a way to frame feminism take me the byproduct of the object of criticism rather than the object itself, which is: how is power distributed within a social system? Who is at the table genuinely shaping policy? Whose perspectives are genuinely shaping the values that are normalized within a culture that ultimately shape the way problems are navigated and which solutions become live options, where the horizons of acceptable behaviors are set, etc. I remember a picture from Trump’s first term that was depicting something like “council on women’s health” and it was a picture of about 17 old white dudes. *that* to me is far more significant than how we might situate, say, the wrongs of rape and if they are primarily women’s
issues or both men and women, as victims, or how this makes it an issue for feminism. To me it’s obviously both, no? Amos’ interlocutor (I think? Maybe it was someone else so apologies) wrote that it’s true men are also the victims of sexual assault, it isn’t women who joke about male rape or primarily perpetuate it. It seems to me that the real question here is: what reenforces this behavior? What modes I status signification reenforce brutish behavior? (And let’s be absolutely clear: both men and women perpetuate patriarchal status signification - another reason why I think deferring too closely/literally at gender as a crucial grounding gets very messy) How might this change if women hold a sustained seat at the table and genuinely shape modes of conflict resolution, status hierarchies, etc? Because we simply haven’t had anything like that for any sustained period of time - it’s just barely starting
But now that it is: notice how the horizon of acceptable behavior shifts when women are finally getting a seat at the table? Notice how abortion as a political issue becomes much more open as a spectrum of possibility just by virtue of the fact that female autonomy is starting to take hold in the body politic? This isn’t an argument but an observation. During Trump’s first term I once saw a picture of something like a “council for women’s health” and it was a bunch of old white dudes. The joke of that photograph says far more than any nuanced analysis of gendered-wrongs could, as I see it.
It’s very simple: offer a seat at the table of power and norms will shift. Anything short of that is just a silly game to me
Two more things: (1) apologies for the redundant example - I had to write that comment twice bc I can’t use Substack properly (2) I don’t want to give the impression that gender doesn’t matter, but not do I want to fetishize identity either - my core point here is that identity does matter in a perspectival sense: what *comes from* agents of x identity or y identity, in an open system where there is genuine, dynamic representation. Not *token representation* or siloed identity politics. Sorry so long
Riffing on your version, we could distill the first two clauses into one, and remove the normative test from the last clause:
"Feminism is a movement that sees women being badly treated as a class, and offers suggestions in response to this."
We can then add some anti-normativity to define the *pejorative* use of feminism:
"Feminism is a movement exaggerates the degree to which women are being badly treated as a class, and offers unreasonable suggestions in response to this."
If someone has that second thing in mind, they might simultaneously say that they take women's rights & plights seriously while scoffing at being called a feminist. This is the vibe of the "third wave" rhetoric you spoke to above: "The first couple waves were legit, but now they're imagining bigger problems so they still have something to fight, and to fight for."
This coupling of both a deluded perception of the scale of a problem, plus unreasonable responses accordingly, is found in words like "alarmist," "pearl-clutcher," "fanatic," "extremist," "zealot," and "radical." People who think the government should spend big on social welfare for the needy can be called "bleeding hearts" as a category. People who think the climate is decaying and we need to make big moves to alter our energy sources can be called "climate crazies" as a category. People who think racism & bias remain alive and well in culture & institutions can be called "wokeists" as a category (wtf Huemer?).
To be in these categories is to both have that bent *and* to bend too far — they are innately wrong by definition — and now folks with more measured views feel obligated to say what they're *not* up front (the phenomenon to which Regan Arntz-Gray spoke).
Your first definition has the same flaw that AWOL quotes RA-G about: people who enthusiastically endorse the mistreatment of women would count as feminists. "Feminism is a movement that sees women being badly treated as a class, and offers suggestions in response to this [as to how to perpetuate this or make things worse for women]."
By "in response to this" I meant in the remedial sense, that is, suggestions to fix/stop it.
The subsequent one was not another attempt, it was how we might define feminism when used in a pejorative sense (the sense by which someone who is otherwise a feminist in the first sense might nevertheless resist the label).
I have no problem with feminism as “the radical view that women are people” in general, but it leads some into Feminazism, which is "the commonsense fact that men are not people". In short, we need to acknowledge that all inequality needs to be addressed no matter who is affected by it.
I think the word "fair" already has a normative component. So the Society of Patriarchs wouldn't think what they're doing to women is unfair, they approve of it and therefore it's fair.
Then adjust the case: the society does think what they’re doing is unfair, but doesn’t care. (If you think it’s inconceivable for there to be a being who wills evil for its own sake, we can suppose that they recognise that it’s unfair, but think the good of patriarchy outweighs the badness of unfairness.)
It’s currently 03:38 in the morning. I don’t even know what to say. It’s literally wayyyyyyy too early for me to process this
😭
Interestingly enough, after years of rejecting the label (after earlier years of embracing it), I’m back to self-identifying as a feminist (though I seldom vocalize it outside of relevant discussions, and try to stay very humble to avoid falling into internet altercations resulting in my throwing up my arms and saying: “fuck you, you can just go ahead and keep the damn word”).
My motivation is laughably reflexive and admittedly sentimental, but I think one of the more admirable strains of the feminist project - roughly: a critique of patriarchal power structures ultimately rooted in egalitarian values - has fallen out of fashion and is probably too important to let go of.
In its place we see these absurd bait-and-switch semantic games that don’t pace with actual usage, as you wonderfully get into here, or radical expressions of resentment that become increasingly indistinguishable from crude misandry but I suspect are mostly a symptom of fear and exhaustion, fueled by novel forms of communication media etc. it’s very toxic to me.
Where I differ from this essay is the tacit assumption that we can frame “men’s” and “women’s” issues into two groups and draw a line of demarcation to weave the concept feminism - sorry, FEMINISM - around in its various patterns of support for each group.
I’ve never taken patriarchy to mean “men”, and while I would never argue that men aren’t the beneficiaries of many of these injustices one might find exacerbated by this particular system, I think the gendered beneficiaries and victims of them are ultimately incidental, CONCEPTUALLY. (Practically/politically/sociologically gender is clearly important of course) Your example of men and war - to me that’s right in line with expectations of patriarchal social patterns (justified or not), which I’ve always taken to be the core concern of a feminism worth defending.
Patriarchy = bad is also too simplistic, but it’s harder to deny that as a common expression of the criticism, which I’m sympathetic to.
Ultimately, I believe that as more women occupy positions of genuine cultural power - which has only been starting to happen as recently as an eye blink in historical time - we’ll start to see genuinely new modes of life and patterns of social conduct. For example, conflict resolution - which of course relates to war and how men are expected to behave, etc.
Counter-argument: 1) feminism is a subset of general egalitarianism 2) the general assumption is that everybody wants egalitarianism, the difference is that the right believes the fact it already happened and the left believes the fact it did not.
I wonder if we could possibly, eventually, at some point, define/frame feminism as advocacy for women: women's rights (equality goes here), women-specific issues or issues that are more relevant to women than to men, and simply advocacy for women as a gender (or sex but no, we're not going THERE today, nope) based category.
I'm thus wondering if feminism could be redefined away form men, relative comparisons and the very concept of patriarchy, or is it so inevitably and deeply rooted in conflict theories of some sort that it's impossible.
This take allows for the belief that women "as a class" are treated worse than men either overall or in specific domains or even on specific issues but doesn't require it. It also allows that a misandrist could be a feminist, but that's not very important from my pov. In this framing your "conscription for cannon fodder" scenario allows for feminism as in your example; but it also allows feminists to focus specifically on issues where men most definitely "have it worse", regardless of who "has it worse" overall, and without addressing that specific disparity, so a feminist could concern themselves with women's suicide or drug addiction or loneliness/social isolation/friendlessness without having to wiggle out of "but men suffer from those problems more". Sure they do, but as a feminist, I (generic I, not actually I) am focusing on the women's experience and challenges.
Ditch "patriarchy" as a concept NECESSARY for feminism (we can STILL use it when it's useful, of course) and paradoxically it allows for a more focused application to women's rights and problems, because it gets rid of the "patriarchy harms most men too" part and allows us to kick away (or politely dismiss) any what-aboutism.
And from this perspective, I think the current usage of "feminism" is closer to not so much misandry as anti-patriarchy than "women's advocacy" I'd like to see it evolve towards.
I like the way you approach this. A point implicit in my response to Amos yesterday that I’ll make explicit here: I think debating the nuances around types of harms and its gendered impact as a way to frame feminism take me the byproduct of the object of criticism rather than the object itself, which is: how is power distributed within a social system? Who is at the table genuinely shaping policy? Whose perspectives are genuinely shaping the values that are normalized within a culture that ultimately shape the way problems are navigated and which solutions become live options, where the horizons of acceptable behaviors are set, etc. I remember a picture from Trump’s first term that was depicting something like “council on women’s health” and it was a picture of about 17 old white dudes. *that* to me is far more significant than how we might situate, say, the wrongs of rape and if they are primarily women’s
issues or both men and women, as victims, or how this makes it an issue for feminism. To me it’s obviously both, no? Amos’ interlocutor (I think? Maybe it was someone else so apologies) wrote that it’s true men are also the victims of sexual assault, it isn’t women who joke about male rape or primarily perpetuate it. It seems to me that the real question here is: what reenforces this behavior? What modes I status signification reenforce brutish behavior? (And let’s be absolutely clear: both men and women perpetuate patriarchal status signification - another reason why I think deferring too closely/literally at gender as a crucial grounding gets very messy) How might this change if women hold a sustained seat at the table and genuinely shape modes of conflict resolution, status hierarchies, etc? Because we simply haven’t had anything like that for any sustained period of time - it’s just barely starting
But now that it is: notice how the horizon of acceptable behavior shifts when women are finally getting a seat at the table? Notice how abortion as a political issue becomes much more open as a spectrum of possibility just by virtue of the fact that female autonomy is starting to take hold in the body politic? This isn’t an argument but an observation. During Trump’s first term I once saw a picture of something like a “council for women’s health” and it was a bunch of old white dudes. The joke of that photograph says far more than any nuanced analysis of gendered-wrongs could, as I see it.
It’s very simple: offer a seat at the table of power and norms will shift. Anything short of that is just a silly game to me
Two more things: (1) apologies for the redundant example - I had to write that comment twice bc I can’t use Substack properly (2) I don’t want to give the impression that gender doesn’t matter, but not do I want to fetishize identity either - my core point here is that identity does matter in a perspectival sense: what *comes from* agents of x identity or y identity, in an open system where there is genuine, dynamic representation. Not *token representation* or siloed identity politics. Sorry so long
Riffing on your version, we could distill the first two clauses into one, and remove the normative test from the last clause:
"Feminism is a movement that sees women being badly treated as a class, and offers suggestions in response to this."
We can then add some anti-normativity to define the *pejorative* use of feminism:
"Feminism is a movement exaggerates the degree to which women are being badly treated as a class, and offers unreasonable suggestions in response to this."
If someone has that second thing in mind, they might simultaneously say that they take women's rights & plights seriously while scoffing at being called a feminist. This is the vibe of the "third wave" rhetoric you spoke to above: "The first couple waves were legit, but now they're imagining bigger problems so they still have something to fight, and to fight for."
This coupling of both a deluded perception of the scale of a problem, plus unreasonable responses accordingly, is found in words like "alarmist," "pearl-clutcher," "fanatic," "extremist," "zealot," and "radical." People who think the government should spend big on social welfare for the needy can be called "bleeding hearts" as a category. People who think the climate is decaying and we need to make big moves to alter our energy sources can be called "climate crazies" as a category. People who think racism & bias remain alive and well in culture & institutions can be called "wokeists" as a category (wtf Huemer?).
To be in these categories is to both have that bent *and* to bend too far — they are innately wrong by definition — and now folks with more measured views feel obligated to say what they're *not* up front (the phenomenon to which Regan Arntz-Gray spoke).
Your first definition has the same flaw that AWOL quotes RA-G about: people who enthusiastically endorse the mistreatment of women would count as feminists. "Feminism is a movement that sees women being badly treated as a class, and offers suggestions in response to this [as to how to perpetuate this or make things worse for women]."
Maybe that is why you moved on to other attempts?
By "in response to this" I meant in the remedial sense, that is, suggestions to fix/stop it.
The subsequent one was not another attempt, it was how we might define feminism when used in a pejorative sense (the sense by which someone who is otherwise a feminist in the first sense might nevertheless resist the label).
Less ambiguous to say:
"Feminism is a movement that sees women being badly treated as a class, and offers suggestions [to reduce this bad treatment]."
Yeah agreed.
I have no problem with feminism as “the radical view that women are people” in general, but it leads some into Feminazism, which is "the commonsense fact that men are not people". In short, we need to acknowledge that all inequality needs to be addressed no matter who is affected by it.