Threads like this make me want to take a drill to my frontal lobe..
Anyway, since this is clearly some people's first time. Hello, and welcome to the magical world of Feminism. Why is it called feminism? Well, let's find out!
The prefix 'fem' refers to femininity, from the latin 'femina'. Both referring to the social position associated with women. Femininity as a concept applies to everyone. After all, you can say "that man is so effeminate" or "I'm getting in touch with my feminine side" and it still makes sense, doesn't it?
See, one of the earliest interventions of modern feminism was the separation of biological sex from the social behaviours associated with a given sex. Those social behaviours are what we call gender. It's not that complicated really: the fact that women have vaginas is sex, the fact that women wear dresses and grow their hair long is gender. Femininity refers to gender, if we call a man 'feminine' it doesn't mean he has a vagina, it means he is socially positioned closer to female than you would expect.
Why focus on "femininity", why not call it "genderism". Well, there's a tendancy, which we call androcentrism, to view masculinity as the default format of human life, and thus to make it's functioning kind of invisible even to people who have it. This is a complicated thing to explain, but probably the simplest way to put it is to imagine a history class. Unless it's a history class specifically about women, it will probably mostly be about men. That doesn't mean we have to call it the 'history of men' class, because the 'of men' can just be assumed when we call it 'history'. But think, if you went to a history class and it was only talking about women, you'd probably notice and ask where the men were and why it wasn't called 'history of women'. The reverse is not true.
I did say this was complicated. For now though, this is why it's called "feminism". Because femininity is the marked category of the gender system. It's the thing which sticks out by being exceptional, and that's why we call it feminism. It's a way of understanding gender by looking at how femininity is marked out from the "default" masculine subject position. That doesn't mean feminists and pro-feminists don't look at masculinity directly, but we recognize that if you want to understand how gender as a whole works, it's necessary to understand how femininity is marked out.
Still with me, cool.
Traditional feminist understandings of gender generally frame themselves around a concept called patriarchy. You've probably heard that word, but what does it mean? Does it mean that women hate you and want to chop your scrotum off? Well, strangely no.
See, originally patriarchy was an anthropological term which meant what it actually said. A society in which fathers (patriarchs) wielded the majority of social power, not just over women but also over junior men. Think of a gorilla herd, you have a dominant male, a collection of females and maybe some subordinate males who are allowed to hang around as long as they don't challenge the alpha male's authority.
With that in mind, maybe you can start to see how patriarchy is a fitting model for our society. It's not about all men scheming with each other to dominate all women, it's about the status of masculinity as an achievement (remember gender again, masculinity isn't something you just are, it's something you learn to put on) and femininity as a much lesser achievement. We don't live in Gor fanfiction, all women aren't chained and treated as slaves for our collective amusement, we live in a system in which everyone has a place, a place where society tells us we should belong and feel comfortable, and one of the major organizing principles of where our "place" is is our relationship to these unequal positions of masculinity or femininity. That doesn't just apply to relationships between men and women, but in particular to relationships between men, who are competing to live out the most "dominant" forms of masculinity.
Of course, patriarchy isn't the only inequality in our society. In slave owning times, a rich white woman could still wield enormous power and prestige in society compared over a black male slave, for example, but that's not because he's a man and she's a woman, it's because of a whole range of other factors. There have never been many situations where a woman will have recognized authority over a man just because she's a woman, unless the thing they are doing is not considered very important or socially valuable. The reverse, again, is not true.
But what is feminism today? Surely it doesn't matter any more right, everyone is equal and it's all fine. Well, no, everyone is equal under law, but from quite early on feminists have generally understood that changing the law would not be enough to bring about social equality. Even today, most men just assume they will have careers, and most women assume that if they have children they will be primary carers. That doesn't mean we're not committed to gender equality, we just tend to follow quite rigid assumptions about how to behave. In other words, we still live according to gender roles.
The point is to break down some of the restrictive elements of these gender roles, to the point where everyone, both men and women, can grow up in a society where what they have between their legs and the way they gender themselves will no longer determine the entire expected pattern of lives. The point is to break down the idea of separate "male" and "female" worlds (the public and domestic sphere, respectively) to the point where our lives are no longer riddled with assumptions about how we will act, behave and live in particular situations.
However, you are right in one area in that feminism is no longer a coherent movement in the same way it used to be. This has probably lead to a lot of misconceptions about what feminism is, because it's no longer possible to assume that all feminists share the same opinions. Even these ideas which I've written down here might not be acceptable to all feminists, and that doesn't make them bad feminists, because you don't get a feminist membership card when you become a feminist. The only criteria for being a feminist is calling yourself one. Feminism is (and always was) a coalition of people with very different ideas bought together by a common cause, and there's no reason why men can't be part of that too.
So yeah, that's feminism. Now please stop talking all this bollocks about feminazis and how it's all terribly unfair to mens.
If you're scrolling down to see how fucking long this thing is. Maybe start reading from here.
One more thing, let's move on briefly to the actual issue. The video, and why it's caused so much controversy.
The problem, fundamentally, is that noone treats violence against women exactly the same as violence against men. We all assume, to some degree or another, that men shouldn't hit or hurt women. That is because women are generally not perceived to be a part of the competition for dominant masculine subject positions. Even if they win a fight against a man, they don't gain any man-points from it, the man just gets laughed at for being beat up by a girl. It can always be assumed that a woman is too weak to compete.
However, this leads to the theoretical other side, where I have to introduce the idea of misogyny. Misogyny is an irrational aggressive response towards women, particularly certain types of women whose existence is dangerous or subversive to the masculine sense of self. Misogyny manifests particularly in an attraction to sexual violence or coercion, in the desire to dominate or force women into a submissive sexual role, but some people will also read it as an implicit component in making "deviant" or sexualized women acceptable targets for conventional violence.
The point is that women are not normally deemed acceptable targets for violence, but suddenly become so when they are highly sexualized or express deviant or sexually aggressive personality traits. That is why this is dodgy, not because it has women and they're being murdered, but because of the circumstances by which murdering women is made an acceptable act.
I don't think it's completely valid in this case, but I can see the logic behind it.
I will say that disagreeing with people without even understanding why they find something objectionable is not going to work. Feminists will simply think of you as ignorant, and until you've read the relevant books, you kind of are. Heck, the thought crossed my mind earlier when I was reading this thread and wanting to bore my own brains out with a drill. I hope you feel less ignorant for having read all this bollocks, but you're still pretty ignorant. Women can read, and many feminists read a lot of books before forming an opinion. They're not just ignorant women who don't understand all your important man stuff, it's more like the opposite. You need to learn something in order to have a respectable opinion.
The way to engage with feminism is not to try and shout down all the silly women with their bad ideas, and certainly not to turn into reactionary douche about it, but to take the time to develop a meaningful opinion which actually answers some of the concerns which people have. If you can do that, people will listen to you and you won't come across as a screeching manchild.
Because right now, some of you are making me feel bad that I even share a hobby with you. I fucking love the hitman series, I'll happily defend it and its sexually charged, violent imagery all day. But I can do that from a pro-feminist position, I can do that without engaging in microaggression, gender-blindness, invalidation or all the other fucking bullshit which comes out whenever someone mentions feminism on this site. So can you.
