Smokescreening Radical Feminism

This is a rebuttal to iwentdowntotheriver’s rebuttal to my “problems with feminism video”. Iwentdowntotheriver is far to long as a handle for me to repeatedly refer to it so from now on I will be calling him “river”.

First of all I just want to say that I really love sensible video replies. I think this is what youtube should be about. It also cuts through the miasma of the youtube comment system which really prohibits sensible debate. And I hope we can continue this format.

The distinction that the “beliefs of a leader does not equal the particular ideology of that group” was not missed by me. As anyone could have come up with that particular platitude, and many did. This is a comment that is levelled at me all the time and is part of that silly claim that you cannot criticise a particular person or a particular group because not all the people in that group may meet the standard of your criticism.

And indeed they may not but I doubt that any group in society can be criticised if we were all so sensitive. If I were to criticise the American right for being bible bashing religious nuts. Not all on the right meet this standard of course, but the point would be well taken would it not? And I feel that it would accurately describe a problem without me having to be so guarded about my own words that it would take five pages to write one sentence in the interests of “fairness” to the miniscule fringes.

A story from my past applies here. I was talking to a good friend in university about how much I hated rap music.

And he said to me: “Well, you can’t say you hate rap because you haven’t heard it all”.

And I said: “Well I have hated all the rap that I’ve heard”.

He said: “oh that’s just the modern stuff, you can’t really say that you hate it then, because there is some really good stuff outside the chart stuff that would make you surprised and you’d probably like”.

And I said to him: “That may be true. However, there is a populist front to rap, and that is what we hear on the charts and this is the centre of gravity to the genre. So this modern front defines what we mean by the word “rap” in its most generalised form. If I don’t like rap in this form then I can accurately state that I do not like “rap”. However, if I were to find a subset of rap that I actually like then I would state so when talking about the subject”.

I hope you can see how the analogy can apply here. Feminism has a populist front, a centre of gravity to it. Like all movements or groups have. The set of beliefs that this aspect of the movement have can be legitimately criticised. Examples of what these beliefs would be, would be something like a belief in patriarchy, or a belief that the wage gap is the result of discrimination. These are things that are commonly held true.

River cited an example of a leader, who mentioned something and the people in the group disagreed with him, this can happen. But I don’t believe that it is foolish to say that a leader is chosen on their ability to represent the views of a group. The democrats are not going to put forth a republican as a presidential candidate for their party. They are going to put forth someone who represents them.

You can criticise the leader quite happily. And if they stand by themselves then point it out to me and I will take it back. However, when river criticise me he doesn’t provide any rebuttal to my points but instead wastes his time critiquing my style.

Hatred of men

River states that my argument that many feminists seem to have a hatred of men is not an argument against feminism but is simply an argument against certain feminists. When you look at some of those feminist hate marches from back in the 70s. How much love do you feel?

Yes, this clip was from decades ago. But that’s how modern feminism started. How much love can you feel when you watch that? Don’t be surprised that many people who saw that and haven’t read into the topic like you or I might, would have come away with the impression that their private areas were in danger. Let me read you an article by Carey Roberts called “A rash of feminists hate speech” [1].

A woman named Mary took the open microphone. "Hello, my name is Mary Man-Hating-is-Fun," she explained. "Ever since I learned to embrace my feminist nature, I found great joy in threatening men's lives, flicking off frat brothers and plotting the patriarchy's death. I hate men because they are men."

The 40 women in the audience, many wearing scissors around their necks, laughed and clapped, then broke into a light-hearted song about castration.

Extremism is a problem in every movement as you yourself well know. You cannot have it both ways. You have made no efforts to rebuttal my points you simply cry out of context. Well I think that river and people like him are simply burying their heads in the sand when it comes to making excuses for the militant and radical wings of any movement, not just feminism.

I don’t know how much feminists exposure river has had but I talk to the worst element all the time, and never does the drumbeat of animosity fade from their hearts or the venom of contempt stop dripping from their lips. Hate is a strong word and many do, others merely dislike men, and others are merely contemptuous of men. A lot of them are not like that but on those cases it should be self-evident that the problems I have listed simply do not apply.

When Robin Morgan talked about class hatred she was being honest. When you have a view that there is this force called patriarchy and that rape and oppression lurks behind every corner. Then it is not surprising that you’re going to end up distrusting or hating men. Logically, the attitude that I see in many feminists follow from what they believe.

What worries me is that this feminists attitude of oppression behind every nook and cranny seems to have been passed down to normal young women who would not describe themselves as feminists but would cite certain feminists tidbits such as the 1 in 4 rape stat, the wage gap as an instance of oppression and the fabled oppression of the past being just a few. I met these kinds of girls at university and they had a faint hum of anger about them. A chip on the shoulder and an attitude that they weren’t going to take “it”, whatever “it” was.

Anyone who turns themselves off of these very real problems to feminist anger and hate is deluding themselves.

Andrea Dworkin

Not many people are more hateful then the now deceased Andréa Dworkin. Dworkin was a notorious radical feminist. But when I gave a quote of hers that would make the toes curls on a normal person not attuned to this nonsense. I get a cry of “out of context”.

And this “context”, apparently, is that Dworkin was working from a framework that current sexual norms are rape.

So not only was she a misandrist. But she was also a loon. River then said.

“one must not however give simple sound bites for complex theories of human sexuality”

It’s enough to make a cat laugh. If you cannot conclude that there’s enough context in that quote to conclude that Dworkin was hateful or that her legion of head nodding followers who lapped up her every word were hateful. Then there’s not much I can do for you.

I must cite this very strongly lest I get more accusations in the same vein that we’ve heard already. I stated that the original video was to answer the questions of the form “why do you have a problem with feminism” it was an honest admission of the problems that I see within feminism and was kept sufficiently broad to address the most common problems. But nothing but denial followed. I’ve always felt that you can never trust a person who is completely unwilling to admit that their own position has problems. This kind of attitude is unrealistic. I’ll be the first one to admit that there are close minded and proselytizing atheists or misogynistic and uncouth MRA’s.

In the same way that religious moderates make a smokescreen for the radical elements of religion. Excuse making feminists apologists like River make a smoke screen for the radical feminists. No one social movement is perfect and can’t be criticised in any way but instead of refuting my points river is merely critiquing the style of my writing. And insisting that they’re not all like that. Sometimes the proper adult reaction to take is to say “yes, those are problems. Let’s see how we can solve them”.