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I think you are being a little naive here. Not disingenuous, but you are presenting something of a straw man. You're basically making the Marie Shear argument: "Feminism is the radical notion that women are people."
Now to steelman this, I know what feminists would say is "Duh, we know anti-feminists don't think we're literally not human, we mean they don't treat us as people like themselves with agency and full equal rights." Which would be fair enough, but if you look around (even in a place like the Motte with no shortage of anti-feminists), you will find very few people who think women aren't "people." Yes, we do have a few posters who literally do think women are p-zombies or should be property, but they are a minority.
The people here who oppose feminism are mostly not tradcons who want to repeal the 19th (though there are some of those too). They are people who have grievances with feminism as it manifests today, particularly third wave or "intersectional" feminism. Such "currently-not-widely-adopted" feminist philosophies would be things like #BelieveWomen, which is a classic case of motte-and-bailey, the Motte being "take women's claims of being harassed or assaulted seriously and don't assume they're making it up," the bailey being "Believe any woman uncritically and never express doubt about a rape story," even if it doesn't pass the sniff test.
Intersectional feminism is what also brought us trans ideology, which got many previously feminist women terfed out. JK Rowling, unambiguously a committed feminist, is now called a fascist and worst by many modern feminists, simply because she doesn't agree that trans women are women.
I try to be sympathetic to feminist arguments, because I do in fact believe women are people, but very much of modern feminist writing seems to fall within the stereotype often described here of women wanting all the privileges, none of the responsibility. The memes are kind of mean, but they also aren't... wrong. (I note that the linked article makes an earnest argument that "AKSHUALLY the problem is when men flirt and it's unreciprocated!" Which entirely misses the point.) I think of people like Amanda Marcotte and Jessica Valente, who were vanguards of modern third wave feminism and are some of the most bad faith writers I've ever had the misfortune of once taking seriously. They are practically memes themselves, with zero self-awareness.
Saying "feminism is feminism" and you don't split it into "waves" is kind of like a Christian saying he doesn't split Christianity into denominations. Well, great, you can say "Christianity isn't a religion, it's a relationship with God" all you want, but it is, in fact, a religion, and people ostracize, cancel, and even kill each other over denominational differences. I don't know if I can think of examples of feminists literally killing each other over sectarian differences, but as JK Rowling would point out, they most certainly care about them even if you claim they don't exist.
Well, I don’t appreciate being insulted by being called naive. I heard a lot of that growing up in life, and through sheer statistics I’ve must’ve contemplated the declaration too many times to appreciate it anymore.
As an ex-Christian who went from Lutheran to Methodist to Baptist and then just plain Protestant, I don’t really split it into denominations either and consider it antithetical to the whole Christianity kaboodle. If people are ostracizing, cancelling and killing eachother over denominational differences I can’t imagine God would sanction such behavior since I can’t find it in the 10 Commandments. That a lot of Pharisees think they’re Christians, to me, doesn’t change the definition of being Christian. If God is real, I’m certain there is a great deal of people in for a violent awakening dancing to the tune of “Charlie’s Inferno” when they die.
In my opinion, when I look around the Motte, I actually see a majority in people who think women are not people. Thinking a woman is secretly happier being a stay at home mother and TV shows, newscasts, movies and teachers have convinced her to be miserable removes her agency and treats her own choices as math results, or that women are inherently less funny, less intelligent, less emotionally resilient than men because of their genes. The casual language around here about women is so very much not centered on speaking about them as if they are people capable of the same quality of thought as me in my opinion. In the same vein, if a bunch of misandrist and misogynistic people call themselves feminists, they’re wrong and hopefully will cringe at themselves with enough introspection.
I can’t comment much on your opinion on transgenderism since I don’t think it’s an ideology. I certainly wouldn’t call JK Rowling a feminist since she thinks “femaleness resides in the sexed body”. I’m not a woman because I have titties and estrogen, I’m a woman because I identify with the Western cultural construct of a woman, and in elaboration, I don’t wear a skirt because it’s biologically wired in me to do it. Implying anything else removes my agency, which doesn’t treat me as a person, and therefore isn’t feminist.
How is this the same as “not seeing women as people”? You’ve focused on three specific vectors along which men have an innate advantage on women; men are, on average, better at making women laugh than women are at making men laugh. When we’re talking about intelligence differences between the sexes, it’s not a simple as “men are more intelligent than women”; rather, men are more represented at both tails of the intelligence distribution. There are more highly-intelligent men than there are highly-intelligent women, which is what you seem to care a lot about; however, there are also far more very stupid men than there are very stupid women.
I could easily focus on vectors along which women outperform men. Women are more conscientious, more kind and empathetic, and better equipped to navigate egalitarian and heavily procedural social-professional environments. (And given evolutions in the culture and structure of the modern workplace, this is one reason why women are beginning to economically outpace men in most strata of the white-collar world.) It would be absurd to accuse me of “not thinking men are people” because I have acknowledged women as superior in these specific ways.
I do not believe I am any more kind or empathetic than my brothers, my father, my boyfriend, his friends, my male coworkers, my cousins, my uncles and my grandfather because of how I was born. I think thinking otherwise removes agency from all those people - that no matter how hard they try, they’re always going to be a little less than me - dehumanizes them and doesn’t treat them as a whole person with free will and the choice to be better.
We’ll have to agree to disagree on the whole “men are funnier than women and there are more smart men than women” thing.
Are most, if not all, of the individuals you just brought up taller than you are? Do they have greater grip strength than you do? Assuming the answer is yes, do you believe it invalidates their agency? Do you think tall people just simply work harder at stretching their bones than shorter people do, and therefore the difference in height is a matter of agency?
Similarly, do you think it dehumanizes me to suggest that no matter how much effort and resources I dedicate to improving my appearance, I will never be as physically-attractive as Henry Cavill? That he simply has better baseline genetic potential than I do? Do you think that makes me less human than he is?
Yes, they are taller. I have no idea what their grip strength is but I'd hazard 50/50 have more strength than mine. I don't think it invalidates their agency because I don't think the physical differences between the sexes has anything to do with a person's ability to be funny, or intelligent, or the myriad of other aspects of a personality. So no, I don't think tall people work harder at stretching their bones lol.
I think you're dehumanzing yourself by boxing yourself into a rigid view of attractive, I guess? So what if he has better baseline genetic potential if I think, and therefore others think, that his chin and neck are too thick to be a 10, much less a 9? That doesn't make you any less capable of reaching the objective level of attractiveness you want than him.
This is statistically extremely unlikely. On average, men have roughly twice the grip strength of women. Do you have some reason to believe that all of the men in your life are so far below the male median in grip strength that only 50% of them have higher grip strength than you do?
The problem here is that you’re not engaging at all with any of the relevant knowledge we have about how genetics and heredity affect personality. The brain is a physical organ, same as any of the others in your body. Of course it is more operationally- and computationally-complex than your gallbladder; that does not make it exempt from being a product of physical processes mediated by the output of your genes. You apparently acknowledge that there are fundamental genetic processes which cause men to grow penises and produce motile gametes, and you appear also to acknowledge that the same basic genetic processes lead men to achieve significantly higher height on average than women do.
Why, then, do you refuse to acknowledge that these processes also act upon the physical architecture of the brain? You seem to have adopted as an article of faith the proposition that individual humans have 100% agency to develop each and every aspect of their personalities, shorn of any probability distributions produced by heritable traits. A pure tabula rasa view of human potential. But where is your evidence for this view?
Uh, yes? I don't know what to tell you lol they don't work out, are skinnier than me, or the myriad of reasons why a person has poor grip strength.
My evidence for what? That women are not less funnier than men? That women are less intelligent? I'd say statistics. I don't find my father funnier than me, so unless I'm just wrong about humor because of my brain which I can't be because humor is a subjective trait, not an objective trait, my father is therefore not funnier than me. If it was wired in my brain to be less funnier than him, I'd find him hilarious, but I don't. Statistically, if I am experiencing that, somewhere out there another woman is too, which means there are >0 women who are funnier than men. Therefore you cannot say "women are less funny than men" when you literally have at the minimum two who are. You can say "some women are less funnier than men". Repeat that for every subjective aspect of a personality.
So, your contention because there is a non-zero number of funny women, and a non-zero number of non-funny men, we can’t draw any reliable conclusions about populations averages?
You would immediately recognize this as specious reasoning if applied to height. Suppose I said, “I once met a woman who was seven feet tall! That’s taller than I am! Therefore, we can’t say that men are taller than women.” You would understand that I’m failing to engage with what statistics and population averages mean. If I lined up a hundred men and a hundred women, I might end up with a handful of women who are taller than the average height of the men. The vast majority will not be, and I think you understand that. The existence of some overlap in the distributions due to outliers does not at all invalidate our ability to draw conclusions about the population as a whole.
Suppose you and I are at a bar, and I offer to make a bet with you: The next time a straight couple walks through the bar, which of them will be taller, the man or the woman? If you predict it correctly, I’ll give you $50, and if you predict incorrectly, you give me $50. Now, maybe you’d hesitate to take the bet, suspecting that I’ve rigged it in some way. (Maybe I have my friends, Short Shawn and Tall Tracy, standing by to enter once I give them the signal.) But assuming no foul play, you’d have to be very misguided to predict that the woman will be taller than the man. Population averages are what they are, and we have very reliable measurement data to demonstrate it.
My contention is that personality traits work this way as well, to at least some extent. If you ask me to predict whether the child of two people with a Ph.D is also very intelligent, as measured by an IQ test, the SAT, etc., the very easy money is on “Yes.” If you ask me whether I guess that your friend who gets in fistfights all the time is male or female, obviously I’m going to guess male, because that’s a personality trait infinitely more common among men than it is among women.
And if you asked me to predict whether your friend who is a theoretical physicist is male or female, I’m similarly going to guess male, because that too is an extremely heavily male profession, due to (among other factors) aggregate personality differences between men and women.
Telling me that you’re funnier than your dad gives me almost zero useful information about how funny men are on average. Sure, humor is subjective, but only to some extent: there is actually a measurable end result, which is “did I make somebody laugh”. If I had ten randomly-selected men and ten randomly-selected women enter a room and try to make each other laugh, my prediction is that the men would have significant more success than the women in achieving this goal. This is based not only on my own anecdotal experience, which is only marginally useful, but also in more reliable population-level data.
For example, British researchers Gil Greengross and Paul Silvia aggregated 28 studies on sex differences in humor, and found that 63% of men are funnier than the average woman. Now, this obviously does not mean that no women are funny! Nobody on earth has ever claimed this! Nor has anybody ever claimed that every man is funny! But, just like height, there is a bimodal distribution here, with men clustered on one end and women on the other.
Visual-spatial intelligence is also unequally-distributed between men and women. The number of men who are very good at mental math and at mentally rotating shapes is significantly higher than the number of women. This does not mean that no women are great at these things! I’m a man, and my spatial reasoning is certainly a relative weakness of mine; I have no doubt that there are many thousands of women better at it than I am! This does not in any way invalidate populations-level aggregate data.
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