Posts by BenWilson
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Up Front: Say When, in reply to Russell Brown,
Am I offended by being termed a “lifestyle feminist”. as if that precludes serious thought and study? Yes. Immensely. Do I care? Not all that much, no. I know what my views are, and I am happy to argue them.
It seemed like the intention was similar to "chardonnay socialist" - in the same vein as farmers sneering at "lifestyle blocks" which aren't "real" farming. But I'm not really sure that sally meant that. She might have meant "feminists who believe different feminist lifestyles are possible". Sally?
Further, despite the possibility of a sneer in there, I notice sally has sparked off a nice debate. I'm grateful for that. We've got to be careful we're not falling into the "don't use words the way you want to use them" trap ourselves.
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Up Front: Say When, in reply to recordari,
where identity is even more fragmentary, where so many big battles about who gets to use which labels take place.
Yes, it was on the rise as I was leaving university. It didn't seem productive to me.
But I'm not totally convinced about this point. There's definitely times and places for definition battles. I guess I'm saying there's a constructive and a destructive way to go about them. The two are not always mutually exclusive, of course.
Edit: Bugger, for some reason this is in response to recordari. It's meant to be in response to Megan. My bad, most likely.
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Up Front: Say When, in reply to Danielle,
Yeah I should have been more careful in saying I don't know what the current state of play is - hence "Lingo call" - I wanted some guidance here. That was a wave of belief that I remember, around the time when I was surrounded by people who really cared about feminism, as opposed to corporate types thereafter who mostly sought to co-opt it. It might have been a much smaller wave, far less women getting into it, than the previous - that seems totally likely.
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I can't see the labeling process as very productive generally. Labels agglomerate words, and can be useful to speed up idea transmission. But if the agglomerations are disputed, they lose value and waste time. This seemed to be Gio's complaint right from the start - to me the solution isn't to rescue the lexicon around which the battle rages (they're only arbitrary sounds/letters after all), but to just aim for clarity in which one you are using at the time. That can cut through the dogmas.
That's if your aim is idea transmission/facilitation. If it's beating people up with words to push a particular viewpoint, well, by all means fight over them. I don't think you can win a fight like that, though, it's just a flame-war.
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Up Front: Say When, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I simply don't feel comfortable pushing for anything other than the balance point where you demand equality but nothing more.
Lingo call: Aren't there "waves" of feminist belief, and this one is just the prior one to the current? I tend to agree with it myself - it was the feminism of my parents, and many teachers in my formative years. Believing each wave became harder - the first was a piss-easy sell, there was nothing good about deny women basic rights like voting, and the suffrage movement was as powerful as Gandhi to me. The next one, which I'd characterize as "Girls can do anything", since that was the slogan I heard most frequently, was a bit harder because it seemed to fly in the face of certain facts. But I got the basic idea was to encourage women to try to do everything, and to challenge any patriarchal views which had formed barriers to them trying. The next one seemed to me to hit a much more difficult issue, reverse discrimination. I'm still not sold on it wholesale, although I can see that it does work, to some degree. It just seems much more likely than any previous wave to create a counterflow, and also to set up structural inequity between women. Are there more waves? Or waves moving in different directions? That seemed like a likely outcome of the third wave, once you breach the sea-wall, water spills in every direction. Mixed metaphor, sure, but I guess I felt analogies from other revolutionary movements were indicative - when they went for overkill, pretty much anything could happen.
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Up Front: Say When, in reply to nzlemming,
one can see that Sally has successfully managed to divert and direct the discussion by misquoting or, at least, misunderstanding Giovanni's comment which is a standard tactic in ideological argument, regardless of the flavour of the ideology.
Be a bit fair to her. It was misunderstandable (early bid for word of the year). Knowing Gio, as most commenters here do, it's easy enough to see what he meant, that surely there are still some useful words in the feminist lexicon. He wasn't saying there were none, he was lamenting what had happened to the lexicon.
Cut her some slack on that, at least. Just point it out, rather than construe it as a "standard tactic".
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Up Front: Say When, in reply to Danielle,
Oh, I'm sure there are also right-wing feminist peeps - I just think it's slightly more likely that the tenets of feminism are problematic for, say, social conservatives who fall under the right-wing banner.
Yes, it would seem to me that it's not incompatible with libertarianism. You could argue that "economic liberalism" is bad for women's lib, but I don't see it as an automatic win.
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men who are neither gay nor feminist like women to be promiscuous and wear as little clothing as possible.
I do support the ideas of feminism (can leave labeling me as a feminist out of scope for this comment). However, I still like women to be promiscuous and wear as little clothing as possible. If that's their thing. Actually, I like them to do their thing, whatever that thing is, even if I'm not into that thing.
Is this called liberal feminism? I don't know the lingo.
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Hard News: Gaying Out, in reply to Emma Hart,
I thought he was channeling John Goodman in The Big Lebowski. "This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass!" <smashes up the wrong car, the owner comes out, enraged, and retaliates on Lebowski's car>
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Hard News: Gaying Out, in reply to Kracklite,
Well said, and 'nuff sed too.
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