Okay, let's try this:

[bast_setesh]

This is a public post, much more civil than the last.

I must make a few things clear:

I do NOT feel I was unjustified for my actions earlier, however after talking to glitterygashes, I do know I was wrong. Marissa is actually a very nice, very smart, and very interesting girl, and I was mistaken about her intent. I do feel badly about upsetting her, as the

Comments

[glitterygashes]

Yeah Latino culture is just....really messed up in their view of women. I had a Cuban boyfriend. I don't even want to get into how much I had to put up with.

I agree that personal experiences vary. But when I see trends, I start thinking. My experience is mine only, but then I've met many people who are on the same page as me and continually see the same things I do--and that's when I begin to see there's a problem. I'm a psychology/sociology double major, and that might have something to do with it. In sociology, we constantly learn how our society is based on inequality. It becomes impossible to say that everything is equal, when, based on the statistics, it's clearly not. Even some fields of Psychology this inequality is dealt with. Take the Sociocultural view, for example. That view blames society for the fact that poor people and women tend to have more mental disturbances. Of course, the Biological view can say something otherwise, but my point is that some people involved in the field of psychology would probably agree with social inequality having a large effect.
I understand that our culture is very different; for example, we have larger amounts of Body Dysmorphic Disorder because of our fixation on outward appearance (this actually is even between men and women.) Anorexia is a big one, too. I'm basically talking about American society because that's my concentration. We're on a different level than other societies (not to say ours is better, but that each is different).
But while our experiences are different, there appears to be significant trends amongst the experiences of certain groups.

part 1

[aristaea]

But trends in this case can be interpreted as a good thing. Belief is based on experience, so if you have a large number of women saying they don't see male privilege everywhere, then for them it probably doesn't exist, at least in any meaningful way. Isn't that the goal? To eliminate gender privilege and have true equality? If all these women say it doesn't factor into their lives, then we are accomplishing that goal. Perhaps not everywhere, and perhaps slowly, but we are doing it.

We must, of course, be wary of the possibility that they could simply be unaware of the practice of patriarchy around them-but when significant numbers of educated females say they don't see it, it is more likely that they truly do not experience it than that they are all overlooking it.

No one should be saying that everything is equal, at least not for a whole society. That is a ridiculous generalisation that is easily countered by some simple polls. But for some women to say that they are equal in their experience-that is valid. It is probably true. You don't have to be a sociologist to look around and see that everything is not equal-but if the sociologists are basing everything on statistics, they should remember that statistics are easily manipulated to support whatever theory you want. Basically, stats lie.

Biopsychology declares that both environmental and biological factors be taken into account in assessment and diagnosis, because both play a part. This means that poor people have higher rates of mental disorders because they have decreased access to basic needs like food, shelter, and healthcare. But, like all fields of psychology, biopsych recognises that mental "disorders" are specific to and defined by the societies in which they occur; thus, industrialised Western nations have a higher incidence of depression than other countries, but that is because we recognise depression as a mental illness. People in third-world countries are probably more depressed than people in industrialised countries, but they are so used to being that way that it wouldn't occur to them that how they felt was actually a "disorder." Instead it is a natural response to living in a third-world country.

part 2

[aristaea]

Translate that to feminism. For so many women to say that patriarchy means nothing in their lives, there must be something going on. It could be that the patriarchy is losing power in large scale. I rather think that is the case. But you could also claim it as truth on some level that women are becoming complacent with the staus quo, and that many of them truly do not notice inequality because it has become background noise. I think that this plays a small role, but not a significant one. I also think it is more likely to be seen among older women of generation X, because they will have struggled with second wave feminism, glass ceilings, and similar barriers and by now either gotten fed up or gotten to where they imagine they should be.

The third and even fourth wave feminists of generation Y have grown up in an environment where they expect equality, and would certainly raise hell if they didn't get it. I eventually learned to stand up to my father and his family and stop taking their misogynistic abuse. And when my not-boyfriend pulls that crap with me, I kick his arse verbally. There are a lot of strong women in the latest generation who have been raised by second wave feminists in environments conducive to female empowerment. And they have male counterparts who have also been raised in these environments-even my not-boyfriend admits that he just talks anti-feminist s*** to make me angry, because he likes to push people's buttons (so he's a jerk, but not actually a misogynistic jerk). So you have a new group of men and women coming of age who have been taught that the genders are equal. The problem is that there are still a bunch of old white men in power right now-and this isn't just a problem for women. But what will happen when these old folk get truly old and start dying and getting dementia, and the young people step into their shoes? Will the ideals we've been teaching our children hold? I think they will. In my experience they do. But we won't really know.

In many senses, feminism is still in the experimental stages. I mean, America is over 200 years old and we still haven't gotten that experiment in freedom right; feminism is part of that experiment. It just takes time, and we can't expect the world to change all at once. Frustrating, but true.