The confirmation bias is strong with this one.sanquin said:Or rather, feminists these days are all about getting special treatment just so they can 'feel' equal to men even though they do less work, are weaker, etc.
The confirmation bias is strong with this one.sanquin said:Or rather, feminists these days are all about getting special treatment just so they can 'feel' equal to men even though they do less work, are weaker, etc.
/mindboggledWindknight said:Pretty much this. people talking negatively about 'feminist agendas' and treat feminists like their trying to crush all men underneath their heel want you to feel sorry for the poor, maligned white heterosexual male who is being so badly mistreated now! I mean, he dominated society for so long, why should he be forced to share it with people not like him?Worgen said:Sounds like someone is getting their definitions from fox news. Actually feminism is about equality, people that say its about female dominance are getting their definition from right wing idiots who seek to discredit it.sanquin said:Then you're not a feminist but an equalist.Marv666 said:Thats not true I am an amazing feminist. I fucking love tits and am all for giving them equal rights.Feminists, these days, are only all about women's rights. No longer about just equal rights. Or rather, feminists these days are all about getting special treatment just so they can 'feel' equal to men even though they do less work, are weaker, etc. (Not saying women all do less work or are weaker, just that the ones that are want to still feel equal for doing/achieving less.)
So yea, you're an equalist! Same with me.![]()
An interesting topic, but from a weird and in my oppinion wrong angle.Zappanale said:You know what I really love? Ever since the Hitman trailer, gamers have undertaken serious studies of feminist theory and put consideration into how social norms have developed to favour male traits above those of female ones.
Naw, just kidding, they've become reactionaries for whom sexualization must necessarily mean debasement or exploitation.
Feminism is an important social movement, and sadly, judging by the comments that are rapidly spreading throughout game blogs, forums, and so on, more or less all of us have decided instead to become puritan anti-boob crusaders.
As an example of this, I give you the frankly juvenile comments of Jim Sterling during today's e3 events. These refer to a Far Cry 3 trailer which made the all of a sudden mortal sin of showing a topless women for a few seconds:
Also, see Miracle of Sound's twitter, refering to the host of Ubi's presentation:When all else fails, voodoo breasts! That's the creed of FarCry 3. #E3
Forget the breasts. That sweet green jungle is what'll obtain and maintain MY penile engorgement. #E3
Amazingly, in an apparent effort to decry sex stereotypes in gaming culture, these guys gone an insisted on viewing everything done through sex-tinted spectacles. This is reactionary- not principled. Indeed, it's not even logical- unless we are to believe having women at all staring in your games, or presenting your e3 shows is an inherently sexual act.Why is she being such a **** to Toby? Does she think being a complete **** is sexy or something? Because it isn't.
Feminist critiques of culture are often great. But, by and large, it's an art form that gamers have far from perfected. Can we please put these stupid reactionary outrage to bed now?
It's not just a vocal minority on the net. Really, it isn't. And no , I don't think you're a hypocrite ***** that I hate. I just call you an equalist, even if you label yourself as feminist.Eamar said:Correction: having been on the internet for more than a few days I know all too well how people on the internet view feminists in general.
Oddly enough, the overwhelming majority of people I've interacted with in real life do not have this problem. They don't necessarily agree, but they have the common sense not to use "feminist" as an insult.
EDIT: my apologies, that last part was needlessly confrontational. I was pissed off, is all.
EDIT the second: but tell me, I am a feminist. I am unrepentant about calling myself one and am not about to start using your definitions. There are others on these forums, in this thread, who are the same. Are we "hypocrite bitches that you hate?"
Woa, that's the biggest twist of words I've seen so far in this thread. I never said women need to 'work and do a lot' in order to be worthy of equal rights. However they DO need to do the equal amount of work to deserve the same rights. Same goes for men, for me.TheSear said:Because in your point of view, women have to work and do a lot in order to be worthy of equal rights, whereas men automatically qualify for better treatment by the fact that they are men, regardless of how much work they do.
This is denigration of women, therefore falls under misogyny. Hopefully you see the link.
Why, thank you sir, I shallRyotknife said:Eamar, keep on rockin![]()
In which case, let us agree to disagree on the terminology. I just wanted to make sure you weren't actually anti(my definition of) feminist. Thank you.sanquin said:It's not just a vocal minority on the net. Really, it isn't. And no , I don't think you're a hypocrite ***** that I hate. I just call you an equalist, even if you label yourself as feminist.
Well that is seriously how it comes across. You still have completely different opinions to me. I believe that you shouldn't get less rights because you do less work. There are people that do a lot of volunteer work, should they get more rights than me? I personally don't think so.sanquin said:Woa, that's the biggest twist of words I've seen so far in this thread. I never said women need to 'work and do a lot' in order to be worthy of equal rights. However they DO need to do the equal amount of work to deserve the same rights. Same goes for men, for me.TheSear said:Because in your point of view, women have to work and do a lot in order to be worthy of equal rights, whereas men automatically qualify for better treatment by the fact that they are men, regardless of how much work they do.
This is denigration of women, therefore falls under misogyny. Hopefully you see the link.
Both women and men that don't do as much work or have different conditions, yet complain about how they aren't treated equally, are idiots. That's what I'm saying.
*sigh* If only.MetalMagpie said:Is it possible to add "feminism" and "sexism" to Godwin's Law?
Just because your neighbor has no house doesn't mean you shouldn't patch your roof?Eamar said:Agreed, and I'd be pretty worried if people seriously had an issue with first wave feminism. That wasn't really my point though, I was just pointing out where the word came from.Helmholtz Watson said:I don't think people have a problem with first wave feminism, its second wave feminism and people like Andrea Dworkin that people have an issue with.
This is one of the most common arguments you see against modern feminism, and it's completely fallacious. I'm sorry, but the existence of a worse problem elsewhere doesn't mean other, "smaller" problems don't exist. It is possible to support multiple causes, you know?MetalMagpie said:Sexism most certainly exists.
On this planet there are women who can't leave the house without a male relative to accompany them. There are women who suffer dangerous working environments with no safety equipment, for less than half what a man would be paid. There are women who are forced to lose their children in order to divorce an abusive husband, because the law grants the man custody. There are girls forced into marriage at twelve years old, to a complete stranger more than double their age. There are women standing in front of councils of men to make humiliating pleas for blocks on the import of sanitary products to be lifted. There are baby girls who are mutilated, who are abandoned at birth, and who suffer barbaric illegal abortions.
A female character wearing a bikini in a video game is not sexist. It's not even close.
Maybe it's just my experience but - like I said - when someone on the internet shouts "Sexism!" they're usually not talking about any of the things that matter.
Holy hell, man. That was a pretty meaty post, and every word was unvarnished truth. This bit in particularSchadrach said:Amazing snip
pretty accurately summarizes all my beefs with the idea of modern feminism, and does so way better than I could have articulated.Schadrach said:"Feminism is not a monolith" lets you get away without having to defend feminist positions by simply claiming that you don't hold them and they don't really count. At the same time, it lowers the bar to be a feminist essentially to the point of meaninglessness.
wowza, that was a crazy long post. Pretty well thought out and informative too.Schadrach said:The term egalitarian is more common, and if you Google "gender egalitarian" you'll certainly find some blogs on the topic.Ickorus said:I actually really like the term 'equalist' (Never heard of the term before just now, by the way) it implies that you support all equality as a whole rather than a single facet of it and I think that's far better than simply calling yourself a feminist which suggests a bias towards one form of equality over another.Worgen said:Sounds like someone is getting their definitions from fox news. Actually feminism is about equality, people that say its about female dominance are getting their definition from right wing idiots who seek to discredit it.sanquin said:Then you're not a feminist but an equalist.Marv666 said:Thats not true I am an amazing feminist. I fucking love tits and am all for giving them equal rights.Feminists, these days, are only all about women's rights. No longer about just equal rights. Or rather, feminists these days are all about getting special treatment just so they can 'feel' equal to men even though they do less work, are weaker, etc. (Not saying women all do less work or are weaker, just that the ones that are want to still feel equal for doing/achieving less.)
So yea, you're an equalist! Same with me.![]()
You'll find very few people who disagree with the statement "Women are people too and should have the same rights as any other person."arbane said:Ayup.Worgen said:Sounds like someone is getting their definitions from fox news. Actually feminism is about equality, people that say its about female dominance are getting their definition from right wing idiots who seek to discredit it.
"Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings." ― Cheris Kramarae
If that's the total definition of feminist you want to go with, then sure, why not, I'm a feminist.
If you go from there to "therefore women should be given special preferential treatment and/or lowered standards to do things that aren't already at least 50% women, and possibly even then", then I stop agreeing. Equality doesn't mean special explicit systematic privilege for one group.
Or perhaps an argument that relies on the assumption of women as always victims and never perpetrators, or of women as never being deceitful, malicious, cruel, or otherwise horrible, you've lost me again -- those are human traits, not gendered traits. A *lot* of feminists particularly engage in this one, for example claiming that women are never violent, or only men rape[footnote]For purposes of this post, I am defining "rape" as "sexual acts performed on a person through force, the threat of force, or while the victim is intoxicated, unconscious, or otherwise incapable of consent.[/footnote], or women *never* falsely accuse (one particular popular feminist blog I've read in the past likes to make this claim, and summarily delete/ban anyone who provides a contradictory example).
Or maybe, "we need to discriminate regarding victim services with respect to gender." Or to go all radfemhub[footnote]http://radicalhub.com/[/footnote] on you, "therefore we need to employ biological solutions to dealing with the male problem." Or that "when women are behind in some field or activity it shows that there is something wrong with that event or activity; when men are behind, it shows that something is wrong with men." Or that gender privilege is a one-way street (it shocks me that feminist women [the only women you ever hear talk about male privilege] can claim that "privilege blinds" when referring to men not seeing advantages, but then not realize the same statement applies to women).
The three above paragraphs all reflect things I've heard feminists argue in the past. All pretty terrible. All stuff I disagree with. That's one of the problems with "feminism." "Feminism is not a monolith" lets you get away without having to defend feminist positions by simply claiming that you don't hold them and they don't really count. At the same time, it lowers the bar to be a feminist essentially to the point of meaninglessness.
Personally, I believe women are people too and should have the same rights and responsibilities that men do, or equitable ones in any case where identical rights and responsibilities are literally impossible. I also believe that men are people too and should have the same rights and responsibilities that women do, or equitable ones in any case where identical rights and responsibilities are literally impossible.
[ul]
[li]That means holding both to the same standards and requirements, everywhere.[/li]
[li]That means giving men some means through which to opt-out of the rights and responsibilities of parenthood, and the mother having no say in that choice; much as women have that same right through abortion, adoption, and in some places abandonment, with no say from the father in any case.[/li]
[li]That means assuming joint custody as a starting point, barring good reason to make it otherwise.[/li]
[li]That means enforcing custody arrangements as strongly as child support.[/li]
[li]That means taking a rape accusation seriously regardless of the genders of perpetrator and victim, investigating it thoroughly, trying it properly on the basis of actual evidence corroborating testimony like any other crime, and it means taking the possibility of false allegations seriously as well.[/li]
[/ul]
A few choice quotes from Erin Pizzey[footnote]http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1215464/Why-I-loathe-feminism---believe-ultimately-destroy-family.html[/footnote], who literally started the first DV shelter ever, and was a major part of making DV shelters a "thing" in the first place:Worgen said:You cite a story without providing any other information about it, you need to work on that. Plus I never said that everyone who called themself a feminist wasn't a moron or jackass, I just said the ones that are morons or jackasses aren't really feminists. Also, there is a group who call themselves the feminists who do want to see women get better treatment then anyone else but these are't feminists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_FeministsDarkmantle said:you know that lady who opened the first woman's shelter? That brave feminist icon?Worgen said:Apparently you do since a feminist is about equality, people that think its about female domination are getting their definition from the right wing.sanquin said:I'm getting my definitions from personal experience. The feminists and equalists I've met are as I've described them. Plus, here in the Netherlands we don't really have those right wing idiots you guys have in America.Worgen said:Sounds like someone is getting their definitions from fox news. Actually feminism is about equality, people that say its about female dominance are getting their definition from right wing idiots who seek to discredit it.
yeah her, did you know she also wanted to open a man's shelter shortly after?
do you know who stopped her?
the feminist movement.
I wish I was kidding bud, don't count the other side of the argument out withour debating it.
It's worth noting that she had two abusive parents, but I didn't use any quotes with direct reference to her father's violence, because no one even suggests that men can't be seriously and destructively violent and abusive."Thirty years later, when feminism exploded onto the scene, I was often mistaken for a supporter of the movement. But I have never been a feminist, because, having experienced my mother's violence, I always knew that women can be as vicious and irresponsible as men."
"They were vicious words that I have heard repeated over and over by mothers everywhere. Indeed, when I later opened my refuge for battered women, 62 of the first 100 to come through the door were as abusive as the men they had left."
"Many years later, when feminists started demonising all fathers, these stark images continually reminded me of the truth - that domestic violence is not a gender issue."
"Feminism, I realised, was a lie. Women and men are both capable of extraordinary cruelty."
"Harriet Harman's insidious and manipulative philosophy that women are always victims and men always oppressors can only continue this unspeakable cycle of violence. And it's our children who will suffer."
I have a theory regarding the tendency to gender the ability of people to be horrible. I think it's a form of confirmation bias, and in the "men are terrible, women aren't" case it's supported by studies funded through sources that encourage those kinds of results (kind of like "cigarettes aren't addictive" studies funded by the tobacco industry, or "stevia is a dangerous drug and should not be allowed into food" studies funded by NutraSweet).
Essentially, since most people have romantic interactions primarily with one gender [IOW, bisexuals are a minority of the set of all people], are generally decent people, and people tend to hang out with people like themselves in various ways [thus skewing demographics within a given social circle], it creates a skewed perspective in which they are more more likely to hear about and/or interact with horrible people of a specific gender and thus lean towards that group having more terrible people (for various values of "horrible" and "terrible").
IOW, "most bad people are men" and "bitches be crazy" come from more or less exactly the same root, observing from a social context that tilts the number of "bad" examples of a given gender encountered. It then gets colored by social memes, hence why women get referred to as "crazy" rather than some of the words used to describe similarly behaving men. There's also a tendency to minimize women's agency when they do wrong lumped in with that.
You mean it hasn't been the primary face of feminism since the 70s. Because I can certainly point out examples post-70s. Like it or not, Solanas, Dworkin, Daly, and the like have had significant influence. There's a reason the senate version 20112 VAWA reathorization included language to bar discrimination of all the usual kinds but left in an exclusion for if you really, really, want to discriminate against men. [footnote]Technically, it permits discrimination on the basis of actual or perceived gender. However the STOP funding guideline require that any service that receives VAWA funding is required to serve women, regardless of who else it may be directed toward.[/footnote]Eamar said:Fantastic. It's always so good to see so much wilful misunderstanding of feminism in threads like these. I particularly enjoy the liberal use of extreme examples that haven't held true since the 70s. Almost as much as I enjoy the assertion that modern feminism is just a cover for The Great Conspiracy To Punish Men (TM).
"I have black friends and like rap music, so I can't possibly be racist." Nope, doesn't work for that either.Eamar said:Guess what? I also have no problem with men. I have lots of male friends. I have a boyfriend. I take part in traditionally male dominated hobbies.
I can point to feminists that I agree with on more than not. I can also point to feminists who hold every single one of the terrible positions I mentioned above, and they are more influential.Eamar said:But hey, what do I know? Some people on the internet have decided they feel threatened by feminism, maybe met a few manhaters once, so it must be evil. I, and all the other feminists I know, male and female, must really hate men and want "special treatment" so we can punish them, we just somehow didn't notice.
Oh, sure, I agree entirely. Indeed, I was recently informed of several studies which actually dismissed the idea of a wage based gender gap, something I'd been hearing typically from some feminists for years (Along the lines of "72 cents for a dollar" type numbers).Darkmantle said:While this is a fair point, it is not a fair example. When reputable, widely accepted, feminist groups actively skew statistics to paint men in a worse light , so that they can play the victim card, that crosses the line for acceptable for me.
To use your example, if the LGBT were to say that since 90% of all straight marriages fail, gay marriages should be given special treatment, would you continue your support.
Again, with Domestic abuse. Many feminist organizations say 90% of domestic violence is perpetrated by Men, when in reality all the studies have pegged it as anywhere between 50/50 to 60/40 with men over representing. I find this out right lying to be an affront to a "equal rights" movement, and puts the whole movement firmly in ill repute.
also in b4 "no true scotsman" fallacy.
Isn't "press X to not be raped" a step in the right direction? It shows a girl in a nasty situation turning it right the hell around on itself. That's female empowerment, is it not?Mahoshonen said:On the other hand, when I look at the recent history of games and see:
2010: Metroid Other M-"Samus is my precious wittle waifu uguu~!"
2011: Duke Nukem Forever-"Hey Let's make constant misogynistic jokes and show bimbos getting raped to death!"
2012: Tomb Raider-"Press X to not be raped."
No, I feel you don't understand that lobbyists claiming feminists as the group they represent have clout because of how many people call themselves feminists or say they support feminism. Support comes in many forms. You're talking about individual beliefs, but the issue is that the term feminism is not a belief in and of itself. It's more of a brand. And brands have power. Power that is currently being used by people who do things most of those associating with the brand, and thus supporting it, probably wouldn't like. This is a problem.Revolutionaryloser said:You realize feminism isn't a charity, right? I'm not actually giving money to people to help some cause. I feel insulted. You might not be aware of this but people have these things called "brains" so they can come up with their own points of view and opinions, they don't need to subscribe to someone else's opinions just because they have vague similarities. You probably feel that I'm being patronizing. If so, read your own post before you think of critizising my attitude.infinity_turtles said:Anyone who says feminism is about equality hasn't taken the time to familiarize themselves with the modern feminist movement/lobbying groups/ect ect. Sure, most people who say they're feminists probably mean equality, but those who most actively pursue things in the name of feminism aren't after that anymore. People who call themselves feminists and mean they're for equality somewhat remind me of those who donate to Peta because they want to help animals. Those who are most invested in Peta/Feminism aren't doing what most people who support them think they are. And bad things happen as a result.
indeed feminism as it is now can sometimes be as bad as chauvinism these days, although there's no denying they had noble goals in the past.Ryotknife said:im not even a republican, nor do i listen to any right wing...anything.Worgen said:Apparently you do since a feminist is about equality, people that think its about female domination are getting their definition from the right wing.sanquin said:I'm getting my definitions from personal experience. The feminists and equalists I've met are as I've described them. Plus, here in the Netherlands we don't really have those right wing idiots you guys have in America.Worgen said:Sounds like someone is getting their definitions from fox news. Actually feminism is about equality, people that say its about female dominance are getting their definition from right wing idiots who seek to discredit it.
but i agree with the other poster's definition. feminism is not about equality anymore. it is either about A. men should suffer for past sins or B. women should be superior to men and should be treated as such.
like so many things, what was once a good and pure movement has now been twisted into something dark and self serving. It is not the first, and it wont be the last. This does not diminish the movement's past accomplishes however.