Posts by BenWilson
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Up Front: Say When, in reply to sally jones,
But I appreciate what feels like a whole lot of support (for the cause) coming from your corner, not to presume anything in the way of support for my personal views, of course.
I guess it will feel that way if you don't care to read the comments and consider the ideas in them. It has actually toed and froed around your attempt to seize definition, which led to it being
sidetracked by a largely semantic question over the usefulness of the label feminist without much discussion of feminist politics
Do you seriously not want to own having caused this? Makes me wish I hadn't bothered to question whether "lifestyle feminist" really was a sneer (it was), and whether your attempt to turn the debate on itself was a deliberate tactic (it seems so).
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Up Front: Say When, in reply to Lilith __,
Same shit, different century.
What hit me from Mill was, having discussed vile tyrannies of all kinds, particularly slavery, he said:
"How different are these cases from that of the power of men over women!.....The clodhopper exercises, or is to exercise, his share of the power equally with the highest nobleman. And the case is that in which the desire of power is the strongest: for every one who desires power, desires it most over those who are nearest to him...If ever any system of privilege and enforced subjection had its yoke tightly riveted on the necks of those who are kept down by it, this has."Somehow that struck a nerve, I saw the desire for power like that in myself, but I had never considered it quite so revolting as working a man to death, or sending them into an arena to fight each other. It was the first time I'd really opened my eyes to quite how constant the oppression of women was. At least the oppressed man had his woman to grind under him.
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Up Front: Say When, in reply to recordari,
It sank in for me, but it could well have been because it was a man writing it for men. Probably the first essay I've read where I actually felt ashamed of myself, recognizing some key things he said far more than I recognized them in works by women on the subject.
Classic example of talking on behalf, though, he acknowledged that he was very much influenced by his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, whose published writings are very few, but clearly had a huge impact on John. It took my own partner at the time to point out there was at least a bookshelf of published stuff written by women on the subject well before him, when I claimed he was really forward thinking.
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Up Front: Say When, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I think that word means something different to you than to me. I'm not trying to hide anything.
Seems so, it doesn't mean secrets to me. It's just the state Plato's Socrates dragged his victims into, rather like confusion, a loss of confidence in one's own definitions, and uncertainty about a way forward. It was not pointed at you, I'm suggesting it's feeling going round. I think deconstruction can often lead to it, that's usually how Platonic dialogs begin. Plato seemed to think it was a beginning point of wisdom when you felt like you didn't know anything.
I'm not so sure, it seems like an extremely vulnerable moment. That doesn't seem like a good time to be making big choices.
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The number of gay people in this country is well into the thousands.
Well. I'd have thought hundreds of thousands.
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I'm feeling eirôneia has entered this thread.
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Do you really need to be labelled Ben?
No, but it does save time. Beating around the bush can also be a very annoying habit, can be used to wreck debate too.
What’s wrong with having ideas and opinions and experiences and thoughts without having a label?
Labels are not universally bad. Language would be nearly impossible without them. Of course they're always generalizations, but they might point to the locus of your viewpoint, without accurately ring-fencing it.
However, you might have missed that I was actually not really arguing to be given a label. The point of that was a thought experiment designed to show the poor direction that introducing gender into labels for viewpoints can go. You can go the reverse direction, like you're arguing, and try to drop the labels altogether. But I think this is impractical. Say a label stands in place of ten words, you could use those? But within those ten words will be yet more labels, which might take their ten word toll each. This recurses very deep, the number of ideas contained in a big label might be enormous, and not much idea transmission is really going to be going on if they have to be used every single time. That exercise might be inevitable in a lot of cases, where a mismatch in label usage seems to be apparent, but it's not guaranteed. A lot of the time, the label does point to a sufficiently similar idea-space/point (I'm undecided whether ideas are points or locuses in idea space, indeed unsure whether such a space really exists at all, but it's a useful theory), for the purposes of the point being made.
I don't think the entire feminist lexicon has degraded to the point where just about every single word popularly used in it has no useful meaning. There's lots of fantastic ideas which can be readily used there. "Feminism" itself is still meaningful, IMHO, but it's one highly prone to definitional fights. Might be best avoided, or at least highly qualified, sure.
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Up Front: Say When, in reply to Megan Wegan,
No feminist is a perfect feminist, but the word doesn't have meaning to me if it includes everyone.
It's pretty clear even in the broadest sense that it doesn't include everyone. Chauvinists will often happily disavow the word. Men from societies with awful treatment of women actively suppress the idea.
Edit: I'll also note that the men of my acquaintance most happy to lose the label, who have often done so because they have been told they can't take the label, are the most chauvinistic of the lot. "It's not my battle, good luck to them". They're perfectly happy to acknowledge gender difference all the time, noting female superiority in the kitchen and childcare.
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I also feel it's a distraction from the actual issues, what's the problem with (for example) men not being able to be feminists?
It's a distraction, sure. Give me a word for "males who believe in some selection of feminist principles", and I'll happily use it. It does seem a rather strange thing to do, though, if that selection is identical to a particular feminist sect - introducing gendered words into the language has always seemed odd to me. But if it means we don't have to have this argument every time we want to talk about the actual issues of feminism, it could serve the purpose nicely.
It would be interesting to see over time whether that makes transmission of feminist ideas easier or harder.
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Up Front: Say When, in reply to Megan Wegan,
Megans:
Wegan
If you can't hear a sneer in there, you are a better man than I.
I can hear a sneer, but I'm still not sure I know what "lifestyle feminists" is supposed to mean.
I'm glad you're grateful for the debate. For me, I feel like we spend a bit too much time talking about the definitions, and not a lot of time talking about the real problems.
It seems like talking about the definitions IS one of the real problems, so ironically it is worth talking about. But yes, this is not a new debate.
Like, for example, teh focus on women's appearances Emma was talking about in the original post.
Nor is that, really. It's not even new for Emma to talk about it here. But I take your point, it does derail things a bit, a more thorough look at third wave perspectives is good, without having to spend pages justifying even talking about it.
Clayton
Yes; the former relies on a level of self-consciousness in debate that itself can sometimes inhibit debate, especially on matters where it's appropriate and even desirable to have guns blazing, as it were.
A perennial problem in polite debating organizations. It's like boxing with your sparring partner - neither of you will really go for a KO.
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