To repeat a point from earlier.
Humanism/Liberalism already exists. It is the dominant understanding in our society, and yet it convincingly hasn't worked.
A baby pops out, and the first thing which is said is generally 'it's a boy!' or 'it's a girl!' (not so much nowadays as people tend to already know, but forgive me a little hyperbole - the point is that discerning the gender of a child happens early and is important) and from that day forth a person is treated differently based on how a doctor interpreted what exists between their legs. Their life aspirations are adjusted, the roles they are expected to undertake are adjusted, the kind of social relationships it is acceptable for them to have are adjusted.
While we can sit here and talk about how we should focus on equality rather than specific genders, that is still happening, and liberalism/humanism has never bothered to look beyond the most basic political strategies of 'equality'. In fact, it's interesting to watch a lot of you here taking up gender blindness as a positive thing. Do you genuinely not 'see' gender? Do you not act on it every single day in countless ways? I'm guessing most of you advocating this position are men, and there's a pretty simple reason why I can assume that.
We don't live in a patriarchy (arguably, anyway) but we do tend to live in a societies where masculinity is hegemonic and femininity is emphasized (Connell, again). This means that, in very simple terms, the public sphere is overwhelmingly male gendered, both in the sense of being dominated by men but also in terms of rendering women within it visible and noticable 'exceptions' to the male norm. This is why 'feminism' is a useful term, because it is difficult for men to encounter and genuinely confront their own gendering without recognizing how it is differentiated from femininity (or more technically, how femininity is abject to it).
Feminism is not a 'movement' 'for women', it is a particular way of looking at gender based on the experience of women as the emphasized group. Work on masculinity and men is widespread and common in feminist literature. Heck, my work at the moment is mostly researching polyamorous relationships, which are not in any way female dominated, yet it's still feminist research because I'm using feminist techniques for analysing gender. Those techniques work because femininity is more obvious than masculinity, if I were to declare myself gender blind I would not be able to do that research in anything like the same way or with anything like the same rigour.
Imperator_DK said:
Indeed everyone do focus on something; which is exactly why feminists can't expect anyone outside their own group to take an active interest in their cause, as - like themselves - they have every right to keep their focus elsewhere. Extending the same passive acceptance of feminists - and of their plight - is plenty, as they themselves do towards the plights of other innocents.
As always, you have a funny definition of innocence.
Is the person who lives in an overwhelmingly gendered world where the percieved shape of your crotch region (I say percieved because we don't generally walk around with it hanging out, yet we have very sophisticated social codes and systems to establish socially what is between someone's legs - gender is weird) still determines massive areas of your life expectations, experiences, acceptable modes of behaviour and so forth and who does so without complaint, merely accepting it as normal and uncritically repeating the same assumptions in their day to day interactions an 'innocent'?
Not to say that 'feminists' are all innocent of course.. God no. But really.. I don't think anyone is an innocent under that definition. We condone a wide range of imbalances of power and potential abuses just by existing day to day. Lapsing into moral relativism or simply supporting the status quo does not make you neutral and free from moral bias. Only talking about 'humanity' does not make you innocent in the gendering of 'humanity', in fact in my opinion it makes you negligent.
Any 'human' you can name is gendered, raced, presumed to be engaged in certain types of relationships and activities which mark them as human - if you don't talk about those things, you're just assuming their existence in way which overwhelmingly favours the 'normative'.
Ledan said:
they don't support equal draft! Why should it be only men who get drafted into the army? I know that there are plenty of women out there who are more physically fit than me, so why the hell do they not get sent to army training?
Why should
you be drafted into the army?
It doesn't only work one way. Just because your liberty is compromised in some ways on the grounds of gender doesn't mean that, as a (sort of) feminist, I think women should be subject to the same to make the world 'equal'.
Rather than just assuming that equality means 'women being more like men', maybe look at how your position is gendered and less than optimal as well.
