Happy International Women's Day!!
and Fat Tuesday too, I guess. :D Here, have a semla.
Things I'll do my best to do, as a woman in society:- Feel secure enough in my worth as a member of society, to not feel insulted when someone tries to be corteous to me (opening door and such) but rather thankful that chivalry hasn't died and go on to do the same things for others. (What? Only ( Read more... )
Things I'll do my best to do, as a woman in society:- Feel secure enough in my worth as a member of society, to not feel insulted when someone tries to be corteous to me (opening door and such) but rather thankful that chivalry hasn't died and go on to do the same things for others. (What? Only ( Read more... )
... you do realise that is generally a bad sign, right?
(Although I have started to wonder if my self image is to keep myself from contemplating the horrifying truth...)
In fact, I'm pretty sure that if you only oppose sexism against one gender, and support sexism against the other, then you do not in fact oppose sexism at all.
Equality is like liberty in that respect, and many others, in that "Liberty/Equality for some is Liberty/Equality for none". I have honestly seen a feminist deride the term "equal rights" in favor of "women's rights", on a basis that can be summed up as "women need to be equal more than men do", just this week. The arguement was that "equal rights" imply that men need someone to advocate their rights. Funny, I thought it implied that you weren't just interested in having a bunch of rights piled up on you, but to have actual equal worth to other humans whether you have a penis or not.
Which reminds of another respect in which liberty and equality are the same = responsibility. I'm getting real tired of the internet missing that one important word when talking about their rights and their freedom. The person that is most free, is also the person most responsible for their own actions and their consequences. If a person can't take other people criticizing and confronting the speach they made with their freedom of speach, then maybe they should have just kept it to themselves. If you want to be kept from the consequences of your own actions, the word you're looking for is protection, not freedom.
Same thing with equality: Equality does not mean that there should be equal ammounts of each sex/gender in every profession, but that their sex/gender should not be a factor in their employment. (At least not unless really relevant, for instance in prostitution. Prostitution should be equal for men and women, but a customer's pickiness in this area can be understandable, especially if monosexual. Not that prostitution is legal here, but still. German feminists managed to legalise it, because they saw it as empowering, why can't we have it too? *sigh*)
Okay, that may have been a bit random, but there's a huge double standard in Swedish prostitution law, that is supposed to make things better for the "victims" but just end up making things worse. And I'm so tired of general double standards, especially in sexuality, that I might end up writing a song about it, sing it and post it on youtube, be banned forever but not before becoming a minor internet meme soon to be forgotten. (Går händelserna i förväg, lite bara.)
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I just want to be treated fairly in all situations and I want the same for everybody, because it's right. I don't consider myself on the same side with all women, but with all people who are sometimes treated unfairly based on their gender.
*slow clap*
This is true. And there are some people who call themselves feminist but seem to believe that women shouldn't have to think for themselves or speak up for themselves and generally need to be protected, not given responsibility. I don't think that's feminist at all.
You see this with most minority defense crusaders. It can get disturbing when you see some white people talking about the plight of blacks in a way that almost implies that they have to because the blacks won't speak for themselves. (The potentiality that the "plight" in question might be so minor that most people affected by it don't give a shit about it, can make it almost amusing though.)
Den "stackars kvinnan" är ju den alla svenska feminister vill beskydda ifrån allt manspåhittat ont i världen, för det är ju bara män som hittar på ont.
One thing that disturbs me in about 99 % of all feminists, even the ones I mostly agree with, is that I just don't see gender roles as such as a problem.
My MtF-friend is genuinely annoyed that feminists are trying to remove all traces of gender roles, because she wants to fit into hers. It's her own choice.
And there's also a complaint that gender roles are always upheld by men, even when a lot of the time it's other women's expectations that keep women (and men) in their roles. For instance, courtship rituals:
When it comes to initiating relations with another person, many women, no matter how liberated, still expect the man to do all the initiating. This is something that my brother has as a huge pet peeve, because he has always liked women who can and will take the initiative themselves, in part because they strike him as more confident. He couldn't understand why it's so difficult for women to take the first step, so I said "they feel they can't because of expectations". Then he made the following list of people that keep that expectation intact (wording is not exact, heard the list about a month ago):
- Other women, which is just "bravo for sisterhood", isn't it? You don't dare to take the initiative because then your fellow female friends might think you're a slut.
- The men that can't stand the woman taking the initiative. Why would you even be interested in that kinda guy? He's obviously unconfident, in the need of being macho, and stuck in a stone age thinking.
I personally think and told him that it's a little bit more complicated than that, but he's right in the essentials. According to feminists, all women should feel a sisterhood with each other for being women. But that's not how it works.
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Truer words, my friend. Never spoken. (It's the same with some of the children's pornography laws. You may feel uncomfortable knowing that someone wanks to Japanese drawings of naked children, but 1) no children are hurt 2) you don't have to look at the drawings yourself and 3) wouldn't you rather pedophiles got an outlet for their supressed sexual feelings that didn't involve molesting (non-ink-and-paper) children?)
Not "drugs are bad, mm'kay?".
I generally dislike the rule based morality we have nowadays, where we keep reiterating the things we think are bad, but don't keep in mind why they are bad. Somehow we think that if we tell racists that racism is wrong enough times, they'll suddenly have an epiphany and agree with you and reject their entire world view in favor of the right one. Which is frustrating, because it's so easy to come up with reasons against racism, but somehow people think that listing these reasons implies that it's not obvious that racism is wrong and therefor you're being apologetic to racists.
Not to mention, that if you keep accepting things as wrong because they're wrong, it suddenly becomes easy for anything to be declared wrong, because you don't have to give a reason for it. Sometimes a strenuous connection to something already established as wrong becomes enough for people to find it wrong and morally reprehensible, when in fact it has nothing to do with why the established wrong thing is wrong. Child molesting is wrong because it forces sex onto children who are not emotionally or physically mature to make the choice if they want sex or not. A pedophile is wrong because they're sexually attracted to children. Ignoring that you can be sexually attracted without acting on it, and that you don't have to be attracted to someone to molest them. It's a slippery slope.
Also, tv-tropes have removed their "All Pedophiles are Child Molesters" trope, so I couldn't appropriately link to it. Which is a shame because it did go into that important difference of sexual attraction and acting on it.
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