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Demonhype's avatar

"I had an awful job for a few months working for a women's international "empowerment" organization, and I was treated as someone not yet having learned to walk upright because I was straight and (then) married to a guy. And that was 35 years ago and look where we are now."

Pansexual, genderqueer,very feminist here, and that never ceases to amaze me. The whole point was and is about choice and most people like me tend to get that the problem isn't being straight and/or married to a man or even being "stay-at-home", its about being coerced to in any way. The ones who act as if the only "right" way to do it is to kneejerk reject all the traditionals...its amazing anyone could fail to get it that bad. They end up behaving in the exact same terrible way as the absolutist patriarchal structure they oppose.

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SCA's avatar

This is why I've always had absolute contempt for the professional feminist crowd (who were remarkably prone to poaching men from one another...). And having lived overseas in a brutally patriarchal South Asian country at various times over the past 45 years or so, both as a single woman and as one married into (and now divorced out of) a supposedly educated family, I can testify that women are often active, enthusiastic colluders with and enforcers for that patriarchy thingy, and that has nothing to do with their own educations, social status or family resources. Everyone everywhere has a moral code or lack of one, and I've seen poor families more devoted to and struggling for rights for their girls than high-status ones (ask me about my now ex- now late father-in-law, may he be toasting in God's tandoor even as we speak (write?).

Pardon me, but "feminism" is, I think, a particularly pernicious kind of nonsense. People regardless of sex are good, or bad, or just weak and easily led. I remember those long, long ago HS days when we had to read "The Awakening" and I thought the protagonist was a moron. A bored temper-tantrum of a purported feminist tragic heroine if ever there was one.

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baker charlie's avatar

Feminism for me begins and ends with opportunity. I will fight for women in countries who forbid it to have the right to drive, vote, work, control their money/labor and enjoy public contact. In my western country 100 years ago this was not guaranteed either until women worked for it.

I believe women should be allowed to be whatever they want and judged on the results. Special snowflake stuff pisses me off. All I want to be is human, no more, no less.

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Satan's Doorknob's avatar

Generalist comment: I'm a Nietzsche fan. Now I don't know how unique he is among philosophers, but he was rather revolutionary since late 19th century. He was a fan of questioning everything, to include the often-unconscious assumptions behind (say) a formal philosophy. Many, indeed perhaps all, of a system of belief's premises, even those in the sciences, cannot be proven. This doesn't mean that all such systems are "false," although he at time even claimed as much. I think he meant in the sense that we are denied access to the underlying reality. He used the terms "interpretation" and 'text." We get an interpretation ("perspective") but we have no access to Reality's underlying text. Applied to morality, well how do we know which is right, or best? My reply, not necessarily "the answer," is to ask how does it work in the real world?

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