Anarcho-Fabulous

givemesomethingtotalkabout:

You’re sorta proving my point. Always referring to the patriarchy instead of gender inequalities. I’m not saying we don’t have patriarchal tendencies. I’m saying you’re narrowing in on one area.

And to all the feminists bashing me, I fucking support equal rights, so don’t tell me I’m probably homophobic and racist too. Because I’m not. Jesus. You people assume because I don’t identify as feminist that I hate all who are different than me. I AM A HUMANIST. I WANT EQUALITY FOR EVERYONE. I fucking know what feminism is. I’m saying it has good intentions, but is somewhat narrow minded.

Fuck.

The reason I’m always referring to the patriarchy is because THERE IS NO MATRIARCHY.  The patriarchy is responsible for the dual repression of women AND men. It is not narrow minded to focus on a practical, pragmatic, and very real threat to equality.  Indeed, it is one of the largest preventative measures holding us back from real equality.

You say you are a humanist and that you want equality for everyone, but I don’t think you grasp that by concentrating on combating the patriarchy is a good thing.  It focuses effort and increases the chance of success.  And when the hydra like patriarchy, which permeates and infects all aspects of our society, and afflicts men and women alike is the target, everybody wins.

I think a lot of the problem you have is that you think there needs to be a catch-all word that means “combating all the worlds problems”.  Feminism doesn’t claim to combat all the world’s problems, but the ones it does combat are very real, very serious, and very big.  Many socialists are also feminists, hence the term socialist-feminism.  Obviously a descriptive combination of words, but it doesn’t need to be replaced with a single word.  What do you call someone who is against homophobia and against sexism? …someone who is against homophobia and sexism.  There are words that can incorporated these meanings (such as humanists, in some contexts), but these two definitions transcend any other labels and can be applied to any people.

And these people who are bashing you obviously don’t know you, so can be forgiven owing to the proliferation of racist, sexist, homophobic trolls on the internet.  You most certainly aren’t homophobic, that’s for sure.   However their critiques of your stance on feminism in particular stand.

You see feminism as narrow minded.  If by narrow minded you mean it is focused, then yes it is.  If by narrow minded you mean ignorant or somehow ‘missing the point’, not it is not.  Because to miss the point you have to define the point.  And what, pre tell, is “the point” to you?  If it’s equality, I don’t see how you can be opposed to feminism when it is all about equality.  You seem to be putting the cart before the horse, or to use a better analogy, you are advocating that men remove the splinter in their eyes before women remove the plank in theirs, or that at least that they do so with ‘equality’.

This I think is the biggest flaw to your argument; that you conflate equality of effort, with equality.  You do not need to make equal effort on two things to achieve equality, because then all you achieve is privilege for one thing.   The point made about affirmative action is important, where do you stand on it?  Because this conflation of equality of effort WITH equality itself could easily be applied to an anti-affirmative action stance.  I hope you can see why some people freaked out on you now.