Thread:Madkatmaximus/@comment-25625534-20150602104025/@comment-3444778-20150602142809

Ooh, cool! A feminism thread!

First of all, the feminist movement is not about equal rights for women. Disparity no longer exists in terms of civil rights, and has not for years - if feminism was really about equal rights, it would have folded back into egalitarianism. It has had to invent the Wage Gap™ (thoroughly debunked), Microaggressions™ (hypersensitivity treated as violation of rights), Rape Culture™, and a whole host of other monikers in order to survive. It is embraced by every first-world government because it buys the ever-growing young, single woman vote, and by every money-grubbing corporate entity because it gets women out of the home and into the workforce. It is driven as a populist movement by its appeal to emotion (see: "You don't understand because you're privileged," "you're perpetuating rape culture," etc., which all amounts to "you disagree with me because you're a bad person, even if you don't mean to be"), a legacy of its origins as a cultural Marxist movement started in England in the late 1800s by disgruntled misandrist lesbians.

My theory is that most of us, as well as most rational people in the world, all want the same thing. None of us think rape is anything less than horrendous, I can assure you. The difference is the means we will engage in to prevent it (i.e. advocating parental responsibility, stable familial situations, and early introduction to the concepts of moral absolutes, etc., versus nationwide government-mandated and taxpayer-funded "safe sexual exploration" exposure from Kindergarten forward or else). These differences stem not from ignorance, as those well-paid graduate researchers at Yale who are much smarter than the rest of us and are also who discovered that all males possess the psychology traits of a "benevolent sexist" (whouda thunk?), but from deception; or, as more eloquently worded by none other than Reagan (okay, you bleeding hearts can leave now), and which I shall paraphrase to the best of my memory, "It's not that [they] are ignorant so much as that they know so many things that aren't so." Madkat, you say that feminism is about dissolving gender stereotypes. This is false because it is ground in false assumptions. What stereotypes might you be referring to? We could go through virtually any stereotype that you might imagine and analyze it (which I have done for quite a few, in my travels), and we would find that 1) its purpose is exaggerated, 2) its effects are exaggerated, or 3) it presents an issue that genuinely needs to be fixed. I am confident that so few would fall into the third category that any objective thinker would dismiss the notion of sexism ingrained into the human psyche, which would in turn jeopardize your foundational belief in the existence of a universal patriarchal order.

Feminism must be evaluated principle-for-principle rather than an overall package of beliefs. That said, I challenge you to find any single virtue exclusive to feminism that should make anyone consider buying the entire package. Feminism = "equality" & "equality" = "good" ∴ feminism = "good" & anyone not a feminist = "bad" doesn't really count as consistent logic in the real world. And before someone throws out a load of things wrong with the world that "prove" the existence of the patriarchy or rape culture or some other core feminist belief, consider this: if each of your anecdotes were debunked contextually, would you abandon the conclusion that they allegedly point to, or has the conclusion possibly been predetermined?

Just throwing that out there.