Are these people for real?

[boot_the_grime]

So I occasionally stumbled onto this video on Youtube, since it was under 'related videos' to some videos about feminism. www.youtube.com/watch This is a woman ranting about feminism and "male disposability" - i.e. the "women and children first" mentality. The thing is, I agree with her on a lot of things, in that I despise the "women and children

Comments

[gabrielleabelle]

(This is totally related, bear with me)

I was watching The Birth of a Nation last night. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, but it's a silent film from 1917 that's noteworthy for being simultaneously a great work of cinema and horrendously racist. It's a three-hour film about the US Civil War and Reconstruction. The first half is only mildly offensive. The second half, which portrays Reconstruction, is overtly and disgustingly racist.

The premise is that after the Civil War, the "white South" became crushed under the heel of the "black South". by enacted "radical policies" of full equality, black people fully took over, terrorized the white people of the south, disenfranchised them, tried to rape all the white women, etc etc.

The Ku Klux Klan was formed as defenders of the white people and boldly launched a rebellion that put the blacks in their proper place.

It intrigues me because that reflects, I think, current views not only on race but also on gender and feminism. For some people, equality is not equality. It's a radical doctrine wherein the balance is shifted so that men get "crushed under the heel" of women. By giving up their former special privileges, men are subsequently oppressed and only a bold regime of hateful violence (Men's Rights Activists) can the proper order be restored.

It's twisted and misogynist and all sorts of fucked up, but it's very much reactionary and defensive. When watching the movie, I kept having to remind myself that no, the KKK are supposed to be the good guys. It's antithetical to my entire world-view, as is anti-feminist views such as those on that YouTube video.

They're wrong. I mean, you and I both know that. But they're not thinking rationally. They're thinking defensively. I don't know how to reason with them. I'm still in the midst of trying to fully understand where they're coming from. It ain't easy, obviously.

*sigh*

[boot_the_grime]

I'm familiar with The Birth of the Nation since it's such a famous part of film history - and famous for its racism as well; it often gets brought up together with Lenni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" and the works of Sergei Eisenstein in the discussions about art and propaganda, i.e. films that are considered great artistic/aesthetic achievements while also being horrendous propaganda. But I've only seen some scenes from "The Birth of a Nation", never the entirety of it - and I don't particularly want to. I feel it would be far more annoying than the other works I've mentioned: "The Triumph of the Will" is a documentary that glamorizes the Nazis and Hitler, while Eisenstein's propaganda is to use figures from Russian history to raise nationalistic feelings that Stalin wanted to raise at the time. Neither involve the direct and blatant falsification of contemporary history, and I don't know if I'd be able to watch that.

I went on a tangent there. Anyway, your comparison works - men are "oppressed" because they lost the privilege they had earlier. What particularly gets me about the video itself is that the "male disposability" she's complaining about has nothing to do with feminism - it comes from the Western patriarchal idea that women, like children, need special protection, while men don't. That's why the whole point of the video is absurd. It's not like people on Titanic were feminists and this is why they decided that "women and children" should get the lifeboats first. How can anyone complain about men being sent to die in wars, which has been going for thousands of years, or about male victims of domestic abuse not being taken seriously - and then blame feminism for it?! Some people are really confused.

[gabrielleabelle]

Yeah. There's no logic there. It doesn't make any sense.

:/