Thread: Feminism

I class myself as a feminist, I have feminist views and most of my friends are female (though not all of them are feminists, by any stretch). I firmly believe women are equal to men and (this is what I think makes me a feminist) I also believe we should, as a society, work towards true gender equality (instead of just blindly stating it's a good thing). I believe the same of sexual rights and race rights too.

I do, however, agree that militant feminists give a bad impression of feminism as a whole. Groups that complain that words like "manhole" should be replaced by "personhole", for example, come across as petty. I can illustrate this with an recent example from my own life.

A week or so ago I posted a link on facebook to a news story about a newly discovered species of very tiny lizards. My sister instantly commented with "WOWZA! She's gorgeous." and "HOW did they find her?" which begged me to ask "how do you know it's a female?" and her reply was "Under patriarchy people are led to always use the pronoun "he" I say "she" If I had said he, you wouldn't be asking...". I disagreed, pointing out that I have studied feminism and am a feminist which she should know, we have talked about it in the past and, also, reactionary tactics like that do more harm than good. They promote the out-dated "man-hating, bra-burning" connotations of feminism and when you make create issues out of nowhere you're minimising the bigger issues that need to be tackled.

She shouted me down with things like "it doesn't matter if you've studied feminism, it's not the same as being a woman actually living under a patriarchy (would be kind of a valid point if she wasn't casually ignoring the part where I mentioned I AM a feminist myself). The very idea you would try and teach your older sister about feminism is laughable at best!" and so forth.

She basically argued that you can't be a feminist unless you're a woman. If that really is the case women have already lost. Fortunately, that isn't the case at all and gender issues are slowly (very slowly) starting to be resolved. It's just somewhat unfortunate that there are militant and extremist feminists out there holding back 'the cause'.

Originally Posted by KT.

Imagine how different life would be if English had a gender neutral singular pronoun.

"They" is a more than acceptable singular pronoun in most cases.