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A few thoughts on the male feminist sex pest.
With the (in internet terms, not very) recent news of Neil Gaiman's escapades, a lot has been said about the agency (or lack thereof) of women, and to the corrupting effect of fame on men, but I've been giving some thought again to the Male Feminist Sex Pest phenomenon.
Most people here are probably aware of it, it's notable enough to get a comic from good ol' Stonetoss. Basically, the idea is that male feminists are disproportionately prone to acts of sexual misconduct.
What is the reason for this? I've been thinking about a few possible ones:
The MFSP as a predator: The classic right-wing stereotype. Guys of dubious moral character will take up an ideology with the intent of making potential victims lower their guards.
The MFSP as salience bias: Basically, male feminists are not particularly rapey, it's just more suprising so it makes the news. This could be true, but is basically impossible to verify in either direction.
The Male Feminist as a man struck with guilt: In this formulation, the man's bad behaviour is in their past, and their male feminist views are, in a way, compensation for the fact that he has behaved shittily towards women.
The Male Feminist as a man seeking absolution: If all or most men behave poorly, then the male feminist's past behaviour is not particularly noteworthy. By subscribing to the most deranged feminist assumptions, the male feminist can morph from a "bad man" to just "a man", or even a "good man", because at least they're willing to fight their deplorable male instincts.
The Male Feminist as a man stuck in time: For this man, being a feminist means some vague notion of "equal rights" and it being acceptable to have non-committal sex with younger girls. This is not in line with which more modern feminists believe, as he might eventually find out.
I am aware this is not the audience most in tune with the mentioned cohort, but what do you guys think? Any of the above resonate more? A little bit of each? Something else entirely?
As an aside, the last few explanations imply a type of person that people here might be very familiar with: the nerdy anti-feminist nice guy (no capitalization). It is perfectly possible, as an upper-middle class guy in a moderately to very liberal environment who doesn't like partying or going clubbing, to never notice the behaviour many women complain about (because neither you, nor your close friends and family engage in it), see that they don't seem to be particularly disadvantaged in any of the environments they interact with them, see that their ire is directed very broadly at men in general, and conclude that the whole thing might just be a scam.
The simplest explanation in my eyes is:
Male feminists, being feminists, tend to hang around with female feminists.
Female feminists are more likely to make sexual misconduct accusations at any given level of sexual pestiness than are non-feminist women.
It’s Simpson’s Paradox all the way down.
Am I more likely to make sexual misconduct accusations at any given level of sexual pestiness? That’s news to me. What evidence do you have that maintains that belief? And what is a “non-feminist” woman, according to you?
I am a woman who is not a feminist. I will not adopt an amorphous philosophical label that means different things to different people, and I find that many currently-popular strands of feminist philosophy poorly model social reality.
Yes, I have directly benefited from work by first-wave feminists. I have been paid for my work on the same level as my male colleagues. I vote, and while my vote counts for little except in very local elections, many politicians take women's issues into account, so I benefit from women having a vote.
I have also benefited directly from work by second-wave feminists. They pushed for increasing percent of women in various well-paid professions. I participated in well-financed programs geared to attract women into mathematics, then I benefited from graduate programs trying to increase female representation among their grad students, then I benefited from math departments trying to increase female representation among their full-time faculty.
Benefiting isn't the same as buying into the underlying philosophies, though. I gladly take equality of opportunity and equality under civil law, that I buy into. I question everything else, including the push expanding female representation in various professions that I personally benefited from. As for the third-wave feminist strands, I have yet to find one that I am willing to adopt.
So let me toss a question back at you: what specific currently-not-widely-adopted feminist philosophy do you find helpful in modeling social interactions?
I don’t split things into the “first wave” “second wave” “third wave”thing. To me, feminism is feminism; a social movement that advocates for equality between men and women in all aspects of life. Anything else is…not feminism. So, to answer your question I’d say none, because I don’t believe there’s a “currently-not-widely-adopted feminist philosophy”.
The statement "equality between men and women in all aspects of life" has lots of hidden assumptions, which feminist philosophers have interpreted in radically different and contradictory ways. Let's take a specific case and clarify what such equality would mean to you.
Incarceration: Which best describes your advocacy of equality: (A) the length of a person's sentence should be independent of one's gender, or (B) the penal system should be set up such that the burden of incarceration falls equally on men and women? Version A is "equality of opportunity", version B is "equality of outcome". The US penal system falls short on both versions of equality: women get much shorter sentences for similar crimes, and females make up just a bit over 7% of all prisoners in US.
So in this specific case (an important "aspect of life"), which kind of equality do you advocate for?
Uh, A? Equality of outcome isn’t equality that’s equity, and the definition doesn’t include that. If women are getting shorter sentences for similar crimes because of their gender, that’s sexist and very much so not feminist to me.
Don't you find it interesting that essentially every prominent feminist activist has campaigned in favour of shorter prison sentences (no sentences at all, in some cases) for women regardless of the crime? I mean, seriously, please point me in the direction of a prominent feminist activist or academic demanding harsher sentences for female murderers.
You can be as prescriptivist as you like, but at the end of the day you have to look at the facts on the ground, how the term is actually being used and how the people who describe themselves as such are behaving. This game of "my extremely specific stipulative definition of feminism is the only true and valid one, if you criticise anything associated with feminism that doesn't fall under that stipulative definition then you're arguing in bad faith" is really just a kind of navel-gazing, and it was old hat in 2014:
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Would you advocate for extending the sentences for female felons, then? Would you further advocate for undoing the "separate-but-equal" penal system of having separate women's prisons?
On a meta note: I realize that you have gotten a lot of responses from questioning your assumptions about feminism. Some people thrive on such attention, while others may feel overwhelmed. In case you feel more like the latter, let me assure you that I will not take it personally if you decide to stop responding to my particular line of inquiry, and neither will anyone else.
If you're aiming for a productive discussion with someone whose perspective is significantly different from yours, one useful technique is to taboo the words at the center of disagreement. Since "feminism" means so many different things to different people--even if we look at the main schools of feminist philosophy, of which some do indeed center equity--we can drop the term "feminism" and focus on specifically what you mean by it.
You and I did that.
Once we the specific ideal that you are defending ("equality between men and women in all aspects of life"), we have gotten somewhere further by establishing that you definitely "equality of opportunity", and not "equality of outcome".
Good, we are further along towards reaching common ground, since I also would rather live in a society where my opportunities are not constrained by my reproductive organs.
But I also realize that, if we are to consider "all aspects of life", we must also consider what "equality of opportunity" would mean in the negative aspects of life. Thus I ask for the two of us to focus on incarceration, a truly negative burden that our society places on a small but substantial portion of our population, where the differences between the treatment that men and women get are particularly stark. Examining what "equality of opportunity" means to you in this specific situation will help clarify the nuances that you allow "equality" to have, and also your commitment to the principle of equality (as opposed to whatever-benefits-women principle), since in this case men are very much the losers.
So if you are up for continuing this discussion, I will happily go down this rabbit hole with you.
I would advocate for extending the sentences for female felons to match the rate of male felons. There is not much a reason to do so otherwise than the sexist notion that women are incapable of being as conscious of their actions as men. I would not further advocate for undoing the "separate-but-equal" penal system of having separate women's prisons because I don't think incarcerating polar body types is a good idea. I suppose if there was a system that properly vetted an incarcarated person's weight to match their cellmate similar to wrestling I would support it, otherwise, putting someone obviously heavier than someone else inside a room is a recipe for wasting the prison guard's time.
I don't mind continuing I just have to move from my phone to my computer because I do a majority of this on my tiny little phone screen while squatting in the shower like a toad to pass the time until I can get out so I've got about as much bandwidth as that medium allows. I don't mind the questions; people are just curious and it's not every day a bonafide thoroughbred blue blood liberal feminist technically-nonbinary Democrat comes around here. I'm sure I represent the boogeyman they've always wanted to debate as much as they represent the boogeyman that haunts my nightmares lol.
See I think "feminism" means so many different things to people who don't want to be feminist but sure don't want to deal with the consequences of it. Same of Christianity; there are lots and lots and lots of people who are not Christians who try to convince others and themselves they are because, well, otherwise they would be in moral trouble. Imo it's the duty of actual Christians to remind everyone what constitutes, and more importantly, what doesn't constitute that; otherwise words and meanings are lost to manipulation and then nobody knows what the hell they're talking about.
Roundabouting to incarceration; I do not support unequal sentences for women or men. Let's jump together Mr. Rabbit.
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