By Maggie Monson
I’m a feminist. Does that mean I hate men? Definitely not.
Feminism seems to have a bad rap these days. I hear people, women and men alike, speaking against feminism. They say these activists are too harsh or hate all men. Some even say there is a case for the group that’s discriminating.
Extremists exist in every belief set. Some people really do believe that all men are terrible people. However, this small faction of people doesn’t represent the truth or the real sentiment behind feminism.
At its core, feminism is a good and necessary cause. Feminism is “the doctrine advocating social, political and all other rights of women equal to those of men,” according to Dictionary.com
Women still need to advocate for themselves. Even if men don’t actively persecute women, they still benefit from a culture that favors them.
Nearly one in five women es have been raped in their lifetime according to a survey by the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey in 2010.
This fact alone should be enough to convince anyone that feminism is necessary. Women should not have to live in fear of attack. We should be teaching all men how to respect women from a young age instead of teaching women to constantly live in paranoia.
Women only make 77 cents to every dollar men earn, according to thinkprogress.org.
Some people argue that this is due to a woman’s individual choices. They say women choose lower-paying jobs or work fewer hours due to their families.
While this may be true, our culture doesn’t push young girls to succeed in business, mathematics or science. Society rewards girls who spend time on their image. Being good at math isn’t “cool” for young adults.
These are just some of the problems women still face on a daily basis. Culture tells us we aren’t good enough. They tell us our problems are our fault.
These issues can’t be solved with one simple solution. The problems happen because of the things we say and do every day. All of us contribute to the inequality of women and men.
Feminism isn’t bad, being a feminist means believing that women and men are equal. We shouldn’t let the extremists cloud our views of these issues.
We need to take stock of our lives and how we choose to view the women around us. Women and men alike can help change the way society views women. Men can make a commitment to stop degrading women and women can stop putting each other down.
It takes time for a mindset to disappear from the public. Sexism will still be around for a long time. However, it’s up to us to take a stand and be able to say, “ I am a feminist” with pride.
According to Dictonary.com: An “ism” is a distinctive practice. Synonyms include “doctrine” and “theory” The Merriam Webster Dictonary defines “ism” in two ways: A distinctive doctrine, cause, or theory and An oppressive and especially discriminatory attitude or belief.
What do know? Feminism is all these things!!!
Feminism is an ideology, based on a set of theories: its foundation being the unifying (false) paradigm of The Patriarchy, and whose theoretical offshoots include Male Privilege, Female Oppression, Patriarchal Domestic Terrorism (otherwise known as the Duluth Model on Domestic Violence) and Rape Culture Theory. This is the core system of what ideology feminism is. Not a fringe or exterme views and how you would like to put it.
Quite simply, the above theories is what a society looks like, how it operates the way it does and how men and women coexist within that the model of Patriarchy and different theories born out of it. In short,given the theorical models mentioned above feminist contend such behaviors such as sexual assault, rape, domestic violence, oppression, coericion domination and abuse are intergal aspects of masculinity and behaviors not just normalized by the patriarchy but instristic to it. These Negative qualities are not considered human qualities, they are masculine qualities and they are an intergral part of how masculinity and feminiity interact under the Patriarchy, a system where men have always held power.
But when feminist are presented with solid empirical evidence that is NOT consistent their unifying theory of the Patriarchy, that women are just as likely to engage in this negative human behaviors, for many of the same exact reasons, what did feminists do? Engage in boycotts, censorship, intimdation, silencing//shaming tactics, terrorism, death threats, black-listing, information suppression, denial, dismissal, false accusations and cover-ups. And ones who didn’t who said “Hey wait a minute, maybe we should look into this.” They were for a lack of a better term, excommunicated.
Here are 2 examples:
Case 1) In California, feminist-inspired domestic violence mandatory arrest policies enacted in the 1980s led to a 37% increase in arrests of men and a 446%(No it is not a typo, you read it correctly) increase in arrests of women. That’s some pretty solid evidence right there, especially when taken in conjunction with the then-multiple studies on DV that showed gender symmetry. Within a few years, however, feminist legal experts and supported by feminist backed lobbyist, had written and successfully implemented predominant aggressor policies which prioritized relative height, weight, strength, AND patriarchal/feminist models of domestic violence (Duluth Model again), over inconvenient matters such as “who is the abusive party?” They essentially adjusted policy to make outcomes conform to their theory, rather than adjusting their theory to conform to reality. And conform the outcomes it did–arrest rates returned to normal: at least 85% male, at least 1/3 of which would have been victims.
Case 2) In Ontario, a recently penned feminist report on domestic violence, cited data from Statistics Canada. In her report, the author transformed the data from the StatsCan report to reflect feminist ideology. She reported that about 1.2 million Canadian women had been abused by their partners in the past 5 years, even though the StatsCan report clearly indicates that that 1.2 million refers to “Canadians” including 601k women and 585k men. Not only are this feminist grad student and her feminist supervising professor essentially doubling the number of female victims, they’re erasing male ones–portraying domestic violence as sexually directional when it’s anything but.
Ignorance is no excuse in either of these examples. These feminists weren’t ignorant of the facts–they wanted to keep the public ignorant of them. It’s no excuse for the treatment of Erin Pizzey by the feminist establishment in the UK, who were so angered and threatened by her assertion that women are as violent as men in their relationships that they subjected her to a campaign of bomb threats, death threats to her, her children and her grandchildren, and finally killed her family dog when they couldn’t get to her. It’s no excuse for taking data from tables and not just ignoring the actual numbers, but lying about them, so you can inflate the number of female victims and cast all the perpetrators as male.
Why would feminists do this? And keep in mind, it’s not like they chose to merely persist in their belief system even when evidence proved it wasn’t consistent with reality, they didn’t just ignore the evidence and go on their merry way. They actively suppressed the evidence, misrepresented the evidence, attempted to keep that evidence from public and government scrutiny, threatened and blacklisted researchers to prevent them from finding more evidence, and the moment that evidence began being reflected in arrest rates, they actually changed legal procedures so that arrest rates would conform to their theory.
The 77 to One dollar agruement is also a bunk statistic and is very misleading: It does not compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges, so to speak. It does not take into account what jobs they have, or how long they have been working, geographically location, career field, what company or coperation they work for, they take into account these or any other factors. So how can you make this into a reliable statsitic, and given what feminism does with research make it fit there thoery or agenda instead of changing the theory to fit the facts, it makes the agrument pretty moot.
And Rape Culture?
Feminist continue to perpetuate the lie that sexual aggression is a masculine behavior–even though women are more likely to report engaging in it. They claim that the number of male victims is tiny, and they cite research that describes forced sex perpetrated on a woman as rape and forced sex perpetrated on a man as not rape, to “prove” it. They ignore the findings that a large percentage of women have reported having forced a man into sex, while a smaller percentage of men report they’ve repeatedly forced a woman into sex–which actually demonstrates that rape is more common a behavior in women, not men. This is exactly what Mary Koss did in her “research”, you know the 1 in 4 statistic that gets thrown around a lot… The statistics National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey in 2010, uses the same research methodology, as Mary Koss did.
They continue to frame rape culture as a social attitude that normalizes sexual violence by men against women, even though the justice system has bent over backwards to make it easier for women to report rape and easier to convict male rapists. Does this sound like a “culture” that accepts or normalizes rape? Even though black men hung like the song said, “strange fruit” from trees in the deep south based on nothing more than a woman’s pointed finger, and even though the first response of society to a man’s complaint that he’s been forced into sex by a woman is, “was she hot?” They blame the rape of women on Patriarchal norms, masculinity and male dominance, even though it was a male-dominated system that enacted marital rape laws to protect only women from sexually aggressive husbands, while the exact same system will force a man to pay punitive damages to his ex-wife for not putting out enough for her liking, and will consider him withholding sex from her a form of domestic violence. ( A man in france was ordered to pay over $5,000 for just the above reason, just imagine the public outcry if it was a woman who had to pay)
Individual feminists might not be primarily motivated by a hatred of men, but feminism as an ideology is, absolutely, hate. It encourages hate, gives people moral permission to hate, condones and endorses that hate, and incites individuals and governments to act on that hate–and it is the specific elements of feminist theory with the least validity and empirical support, and which serve these very purposes, which are the ones most closely nurtured and guarded by feminists invested in them, and most zealously shielded from scrutiny, refutation or challenge. The ideology, and those in control of the narrative, are at their most vehement when it comes to maintaining feminism’s most hateful premises. So when the definition of feminism is: “the doctrine advocating social, political and all other rights of women equal to those of men,” you have to ask yourself, what does it do in practice?, Because it is two totally different things.
“Society rewards girls who spend time on their image. Being good at math isn’t “cool” for young adults.
These are just some of the problems women still face on a daily basis. Culture tells us we aren’t good enough. They tell us our problems are our fault”.
I find it very intersting that you should say this, especially when considering the fact that there is no law or regulation that prevents women the oppurtunity to take Math, Science or engineering course and presue a career in these fields or any field for that matter (If there is one, please let me know). Also considering that the National Average of Women attending University is at around 51-54 percent. The fact that they are more laws and regulation that are passed to protect women from dirty jokes at the workplace, they are exclusive all women business synposiums and conferences, Events that honor women in buisness so given all that how is it that our culture is not accepting of women success? Women are just as much of an equal oppurtunity to succed as men do. But at the same time, Equality of Oppurtunity does not entitle equality of Success, there are just too many factors out there to guarantee an equal outcome. What else I find funny is how feminism is pointing up at the “glass ceiling” but refuse to acknowledge the glass cellar were all the dangerous or otherwise risky career fields are, that are also male dominated?. Feminist don’t want equality, they want entitlement. My question is what is stopping Women from doing these things that you are alluding to. besides there own idividual choices? Be it lifestyle, Career, Education or other things?