Posts by giovanni tiso
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I am the parent of a girl. I champion her rights to autonomy of person-hood, which involves challenging patriarchal beliefs with feminist ideology. That makes me a feminist.
Good point. And I'm sure I'll be an advocate for my daughter, probably in ways that she herself couldn't be. Yet I'm never going to know what it feels like to be autistic, nor what it feels like to have my rights advocated for, for that matter. I don't have access to that experience, and I think it's the experience that entitles you to make full use of a word like feminist.
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Do they doorknock, or do you meet them at social events, or what? Seriously.
One could cite the "women don't like group sex" thread of infamy on THM, but it was, shall we say, indicative of a larger trend?
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I really don't see why not. If feminism is an ideology, and as loose and open a one as people seem to be saying generally here, then why can't a man be a feminist?
Because, not unlike other ideologies, it is meaningless without lived experience. I don't think I could be rich and be a socialist. But I am relatively rich compared to other New Zealanders and certainly very rich compared to almost entire populations in other countries whose struggles aren't mine simply because I can comprehend them intellectually but not experientially - and that makes all the difference. I can be a supporter of third world socialist struggles, but not a third world socialist. I can be a supporter of feminism, a person who has an interest in feminism, but not a feminist.
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it displayed a nearly complete lack of any understanding of feminism by under-grads.
Could you expand on that? Are you saying that the fact that a man was asked to write for a feminist magazine showed lack of understanding of feminism in itself?
I'm not saying that a man can be a feminist, but surely men can comment on gender issues, and this commentary can be of interest to feminists. As a matter of fact, you expressed a very strong position in your last paragraph right there:
Feminism still matters - there are real structural inequalities based around gender. But everyone is so busy drinking the kool-aid of mass culture they don't notice.
Why should a feminist magazine not be interested in considering for publication a more considered elaboration of this statement? I don't think that being a male disqualifies you from holding that view, or makes your thinking irrelevant.
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I'm confused now. Does Sue Bradford want to found the Alliance?
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Like your work Bart and your point that NZ Inc has been hamstrung by the Greens
That makes me want to vote for the Greens, actually. I'd go to quite some length to hamstring "NZ Inc".
Repeat after me: a country is not a corporation.
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She might regard herself as left-wing, perhaps because her family are life-long Labour voters, but all the evidence is to the contrary.
Roger Douglas will go to his grave - and, quite possibly, ours - maintaning that he's a socialist.
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Ah, going through the comments has been just tremendously informative. Thanks everyone.
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And if Gio's One Dimensional Woman author-person tries to take away my shoes and handbags, I am going to be *peeved*
I believe Ms Power intended to critique the view that emancipation equates to the freedom of consumer choice. Not that shoes or handbags are bad.
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Yup, Power's book is in large part a polemic against consumer feminism and therefore the anything-goes, can't we all get along notion of feminism. I submitted it to you because I thought you might nonetheless enjoy the challenge, and there's a section about the emancipatory potential of pornography (also relevant to Deborah's latest post, cross-posted at the Hand Mirror) that I find usefully provocative. Frankly there is pretty much not a single sentence in that book that I disagree with, but that's by the by.