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Feminism is a hot topic, a user before mentioned his thoughts on it's origin, and that got me thinking. What is the social driver behind feminism?
Personally, I see it as a response to modern medicine and work safety standards, and the resulting rapidly booming population. Without historic mortality levels, it is no longer necessary for women to devote their lives to maintaining the population. With women free to do as they please, society suddenly finds itself with a lot of free hands that could be working, and so there is a push to remove the social systems that forbid women from traditional labor.
What puzzles me, is through what force does society implement change like this? It's not like we suffered the woes of overpopulation, and responded with feminist cultural change. This seems almost pre-emptive. But the arguments behind the feminist movement (I think) were based around freedom and equality. Was there a secret utilitarian agenda? Did things just coincidentally line up? Does society naturally drift towards freedom when the roadblocks are removed? Am I simply stupid and uneducated? I don't know enough to figure it out, but I feel like it's at least an interesting question. Thoughts?
This really strikes me in the #MeToo debates. Especially on the low-end, with cases that don't really rise to violence/coercion and a woman could theoretically have solved by being more circumspect (e.g. the Aziz Ansari case)
If feminism was about aligning men and women's standards we would treat these women the way we treat men: you're responsible for this, learn and don't do it again. But that's apparently misogynist - victim blaming (someone else will have to explain how sexual crimes against women are the one place where mentioning how to use your agency is a sin)
If feminism kept old standards we would have their family get involved to help with the "cad" (which is what men who "took advantage" of good women were; immoral but not rapists. We seem to have lost this distinction since now everything falls under "sexual misconduct" or "problematic").
But that is also misogynist. So now people draw on the entire internet to perform the vigilante acts necessary to defend a woman's sexual honor - hidden in moralistic tones cause no one wants to admit that's happening . Given that these people have no personal stake in either side (not even having to see them around the county) and so they have no costs to moderate their behavior, it's not a surprise their behavior is deranged.
Indeed. I wouldn't even mind if we could come to some sort of coherent stance here. Are women the same as men or do they require extra protection where we have sex differences? There's good evolutionary and feminist reasons for the latter (sex is costlier for women) but feminists responded to the problem of evolution by just...rejecting it utterly and deciding it was the province of misogynists so we have to totally ignore that there are differences, while acting like we aren't ignoring that there are differences.
There's no shortage of stories where the victim has been using her agency and it was not enough. Usually a list of precautions and safety measures that those women take but men [in the audience] would never even consider is also provided. When put like that, it is at the very least supremely tactless to act as if the woman did not know to not go into dark alleys with strange shady men.
Yes, that was the original line and it convinced me at the time. There's just two or three issues for it:
No feminist I've ever followed has ever said "so-and-so didn't take those precautions so it's okay what happened". In fact: the argument is "'even if she didn't take precautions this should never have happened and even stating that she should have taken those precautions is now verboten".
There's no evidence that the woman in the Ansari story (or the stories it's proxy for) took extreme precautions - if she had it may have never gotten to the very sex she found so distressing. The story was also not one of being raped in an alley but a sexual experience that was unpleasant but probably legal by most standards. This matters, because there's the question of just what the heck we are supposed to do about it that doesn't exist for straight up rape. For crimes we go to the criminal system. For affronts to your sexual honor you typically go to your parents. How much of a role should the rest of society have here? There's no clear answer since half the time you're told society has no business in someone's bedroom...until something unfun happens.
Finally even if the original intent was good and was aimed at a world where women did take every reasonable precaution I'm not convinced that it can't still have the effect of promoting a certain mentality towards bad sex - i.e. it's not your responsibility, it's the fault of patriarchy or the avatar of patriarchy you had sex with- that is markedly different from the attitude inculcated in men, all at the same time we're insisting on female sexual agency being equal (or even identical) to that of males.
(As I said: I'm not even opposed to having "double" standards. But you have to bite the bullet)
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