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One of Feminism's main pushes 2014-2020 was explicitly to make sexual misconduct allegations require less proof and to have more consequences, and to increase the rate of report generally while explicitly arguing that safeguards against false accusations must be systematically removed. Notable early examples included Atheism+, #ListenAndBelieve, Jackie's story, #TeamHarpies, We Need to Talk About Jian, along with too many smaller ones to name; on a policy level, we had the Title IX "Dear Colleague" letter implementing these as policies in the university system, and "affirmative consent" laws in California. This led to #MeToo, which culminated with the farce of the Kavanaugh accusations. This is a very abbreviated list, and this particular set of demands has been at least arguably the dominant one within Feminism over the last decade.
Maybe you are an atypical feminist, but to the degree that Feminism is a coherent category that can be analyzed, "dramatically lower threshold for sexual assault accusations" seems very clearly to be one of its most prominent characteristics.
I would define it as a woman who does not identify with the presently-dominant ideological form of Feminism. This would describe my wife, sister and mother, as well as a number of other women in my life.
“Sexual misconduct allegations requiring less proof”, “increasing the rate of reports” and “arguing that safeguards against false accusations must be systematically removed” all, to me, run afoul of the definition of feminism, which is “a social movement that advocates for equality between men and women in all aspects of life”, so that’s not feminist.
As a feminist myself, I'd agree that that's not the type of stuff that I support as a feminist (in fact, I've spoken out against other feminists who espouse them). Unfortunately, feminists like you or me tend to be either rare or quiet (for me, personally, I chose to be the latter due to noticing that speaking out in the way you did in this comment tended to be met with extremely harsh abuse from other feminists), so I have to admit that comments like Quantumfreakonomics's or FCfromSSC's in this thread are entirely accurate when describing the general group of people who both call themselves feminists and who other people recognize as feminists. I've just had to learn to leave my ego at the door and not feel attacked when people talk about "feminists" supporting [thing I, as a feminist, oppose]. I think having relatively unpopular or at least less-loud (we could be a silent majority among feminists, and I actually suspect that that's the case!) perspective within a particular ideological group unfortunately tends to require this kind of thinking, and this forum in particular tends to have a high proportion of people with fairly idiosyncratic opinions that make them relatively unpopular or, again, less loud compared to the common, mainstream ones within any given ideology.
I think feminists “like” you and me are quite loud and common. They’re just not very reactionary and tend to be busy doing things instead of participating in online flame wars. That there are people on Twitter posting sexists takes and arguing that it’s not sexist and getting a bunch of other people angry doesn’t change the fact they aren’t feminists and it’s wrong to regard them as such. If they get together in a group and say they’re feminists their numbers sadly don’t change the definition. If that group makes noise and mainstream news outlets pay attention to it, that still makes them not feminist, and if some Congress people call them feminists that’s a lot of wrong Congressmen and a very wrong mainstream that is using the wrong word. It’s Pharisees all the way up and down, in my opinion.
Well, besides online flame wars, these self-described "feminists" also tend to run actual policy and companies and write essays in mainstream publications and books. These are the people that the layman picture when they hear the word "feminist," even if they don't meet your or my personal standard for what constitutes a "feminist." And they are certainly far more influential in modern USA politics than feminists of your or my sort (though the recent election might be evidence that that is changing).
I disagree, but our disagreement here doesn't matter. God didn't hand us a tablet that says "the English word that starts with 'f,' ends with 't,' and has 'eminis' in between shall forever be defined as XYZ." If enough people use a word to mean something, and they all agree with how it's used, then people like you or me with unpopular definitions don't get to walk in and demand that they submit to our own idiosyncratic definition of the term.
In any case, again, this disagreement doesn't matter. You are free to believe in a prescriptive model of word definitions rather than a descriptive one. But what should be understood is that other people, including likely most on this website, see the word "feminist" as meaning something different from you, and they have zero problems communicating with each other this way. If this semantics issue is too much of a hump for you, I wonder if a mental trick of replacing "feminist" with a new made-up word "pheminist," where it's prescriptively defined as something like "person that people on TheMotte generally agree is being described when they use the word 'feminist.'" would be helpful. At the very least, that'd be a way to escape from feeling like you yourself are being scrutinized or discussed.
Gonna have to agree to disagree for sure. To me, by your logic Jesus should have submitted to the judgement of the Pharisees because a majority of people agreed with them, and yet we can all universally agree he was right to call them un-Christian and he was right to flip tables in the temple. God didn’t hand us the tablet, we wrote it ourselves. A bunch of sexists being sexists and calling themselves feminists is no different than a bunch of people thinking beating their children into submission is God-approved and Christian. That sexist people go into governmental work and try to enact sexist policies while calling it feminism still doesn’t make them feminists. And if people want to talk about sexism on this site and call it feminism that still doesn’t change the definition of it. “A person that people on TheMotte generally agree is being described when they use the word 'feminist’” would be, to me, a sexist.
In that case, it seems that TheMotte - and, honestly, most of America - is a place where they speak a different version of English from you, where "feminist" refers to a certain strand of "sexist." As such, when you see "feminist" being analyzed, it should be clear that it's not referring to the same thing you are when you use "feminist." As long as everyone involved can communicate to each other using words that each other recognize and agree on the meaning of, I don't see any problem.
I don't want to argue this, but I'm curious who is "we" here, though? In my own descriptive model of word definitions, the "we" would be referring to just the sum total of how people, throughout their everyday lives, make noises (and write scribbles on paper or screen, etc.) at each other by flapping their mouths in order to convey things to each other, through which the noises become associated with meanings. You seem to believe in some sort of authority that gets to override this sort of emergence of meaning through behavior, and I'm not sure who specifically that authority is.
The "we" is, uh, I guess Charles Fourier and/or the Oxford English Dictionary in 1852. The word was invented, given a definition, and then people took that definition as a label. I disagree "most of America" speak a different version of English from you; the part of America that's wrong about feminism does, and good thing I don't speak to them outside this site. That people take a word and try to convince others that the word means something else is the neverending creep of stupidity that, as you pointed out, interrupts the flow of communication between people.
Fair enough, so it seems to me that, to you, the original person who wrote the first entry of a word into some particular dictionary (OED in this case) is the ultimate authority of the word's definition, and no matter how people "in the wild," so to speak, use the word to communicate to each other doesn't affect it. It's essentially the equivalent of a tablet handed down from God at that point and forevermore.
There's nothing wrong with this perspective, even if I disagree. But much like how there's nothing wrong that many people don't feel obligated to follow the 10 Commandments when it comes to how they live their lives, I hope you understand that there's nothing wrong that many people don't feel obligated to follow the OED or any similar authority when it comes to how they communicate with others.
Given how general polling about people identifying as "feminists" in America goes - IIRC, every poll indicates that a majority of American women don't identify with the term, and the proportion of people who agree with some statement about men and women deserving equality or being equal is always far greater than the proportion of people who identify as feminists - I think you're likely living in a bubble.
I mean, that's precisely what you're doing in this thread though, right? You're the one trying to convince others that the word that they use to communicate to basically everyone else clearly is actually being used wrong.
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