Original post by KingBradlyIt has become considered, by many, the sensible position to defend feminism. Saying that they are all a bunch of man haters will usually result in one being placated about how one should stop looking at tumblr as the source of all feminism, and should actually read some feminist texts.
Well, actually I have read a quite a lot of feminist texts, and I have to study many for my course. Some of them aren't terrible, and a very few of them are even quite good. But the idea that feminism is on the whole a quite reasonable, levelheaded movement is just total rubbish.
Let's look at the roots of the movement; the suffragettes. A group which had a very worthy film made about them recently, presenting them as brave and right-on to the core.
People seem to conveniently forget, though, that the suffragettes would send white feathers, symbolising cowardice, to conscientious objectors during WW1. Not so reasonable, in my opinion.
Or shall we look at some of the most foundational feminists texts? For example, the famous and widely respected (among feminists) The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. The writer, Shulamith Firestone claimed that men cannot love, that male culture is "parasitical", and that “All men are selfish, brutal and inconsiderate". This is a woman who has been praised by writers as a feminist "hero" in publications as mainstream as The Guardian.
Then we have Andrea Dworkin, another feminist who is considered by many in the movement as foundational, and a hero. In fact, Shulamith Firestone and Andrea Dworkin, along with Germaine Greer and Simone de Beauvoir, are perhaps the most respected and popular feminist writers ever. People just getting into feminism will often read the works of these people first.
Here are a few Dworkin quotes: "Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine."
"Feminism is hated because women are hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of women hating."
"The civil impact of pornography on women is staggering. It keeps us socially silent, it keeps us socially compliant, it keeps us afraid in neighborhoods; and it creates a vast hopelessness for women, a vast despair. One lives inside a nightmare of sexual abuse that is both actual and potential, and you have the great joy of knowing that your nightmare is someone else’s freedom and someone else’s fun.”
Hardly sounds level headed to me. Sounds more like insane hyperbole and baseless conjecture.
Feminism has very small number of reasonable, intelligent adherents. It has some intelligent, unreasonable adherents. But to say that there is a REAL feminism, aside from the tumblr brand, which is very intelligent and very reasonable, and not man-hating at all, is utter rubbish. Tumblr feminism arose because there has always been a large section of feminists who really do hate men, either implicitly or explicitly, and who really are totally bonkers.