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Roderick

Feminism

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I guess I kinda know what you mean. You don't want to be called a feminist because of what (in your worldview) the crazy man-hating feminists believe. It's kinda like how some parties are disinterested in being part of PAX because of the rape-joke person's behaviour.

It isn't like you can attribute the call to wipe out the male gender to Steve Feminist, founder and public face of feminism. 

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This strikes me as really naive, if not obtuse. What intellectual or ideological movement isn't and hasn't always been heterogeneous to the extreme? Even going back five hundred years to Renaissance and Reformation humanism, that wasn't the case. Did the Protestant reformation "stand for nothing" because there were Lutherans, Zwinglians, Calvinists, Anglicans, and fifty million different kinds of Anabaptists? Well, in the eyes of dyed-in-the-wool Catholics, it did, but I really shouldn't take this analogy any further.

i am sort of an all or nothing kind of guy, and if we are going to use a religious analogy, i would say that if you don't believe everything in the bible or all it's teachings, you shouldn't be a christian, you should just be a good person on your own terms, you can still use the bible or any other religious texts to help guide the way you decide to live, but if you are picking and choosing what you do and don't like/believe from a religion you are already making your own religion, so you may as well not call yourself a person of that religion.

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You basically just said all religious people aren't religious.  Pretty much every religion both interprets and chooses what they deem important in their relevant texts or belief system.  There's effectively no such thing as being 100% anything.  100% is a lie when it comes to talking about ideals/beliefs/schools of thought.  If it's not a quantifiable mathematical number, chances are you can't have 100% of it. I'm 100% sure people would be pretty boring if they could go 100% into a belief system, as that would pretty much mean removing individuality from the equation.

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You know it's entirely possible to believe the same things as other people and still be an individual.  Just because you share someone's view on one thing (or many things) it doesn't mean you're the same as that person.

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maybe I'm an individualist (even though i just made up that word and it turned out to be a thing)

The description you're looking for is "lacks principles," I think.

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Fear of labels that describe principles, I think. I don't know if thestalkinghead would refuse labels like "person" or "man" or "Idle Thumbs reader" or something.

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you shouldn't describe yourself as a feminist you really give them a bad name

 

Says the "individualist" who believes that ideologies should be one hundred percent consistent and labels should be one hundred percent accurate.

 

You seem as though your greatest concern here is someone thinking that you believe something that you do not believe. Therefore, you refuse to call yourself a feminist (or anything else, I imagine). I didn't want to say it, but since the words have already been bandied about, that does sound like someone who lacks principles to me. "I don't consider myself a supporter of civil rights because someone might then mistake me for a Black Panther. Better than segregation continue than someone misunderstand who I am and what I think."

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Says the "individualist" who believes that ideologies should be one hundred percent consistent and labels should be one hundred percent accurate.

 

You seem as though your greatest concern here is someone thinking that you believe something that you do not believe. Therefore, you refuse to call yourself a feminist (or anything else, I imagine). I didn't want to say it, but since the words have already been bandied about, that does sound like someone who lacks principles to me. "I don't consider myself a supporter of civil rights because someone might then mistake me for a Black Panther. Better than segregation continue than someone misunderstand who I am and what I think."

well you hear wrong.

 

principles  plural of prin·ci·ple (Noun)
Noun
  1. A fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior or for a chain of reasoning.
  2. A rule or belief governing one's personal behavior.

 

i have my own principles, obviously a lot of what i believe is similar to other people and that doesn't make me any less of an individual.

 

feminism is only around to help women, i wouldn't call myself something that is only around to benefit one subset of people, i support everybodys rights equally

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you shouldn't describe yourself as a feminist you really give them a bad name

Nah, he's okay.

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feminism is only around to help women, i wouldn't call myself something that is only around to benefit one subset of people, i support everybodys rights equally

So you are opposed to, let's say, breast cancer awareness and treatment campaigns, because there's all of these other cancers and diseases that need awareness and treatment as well, and you think it's unethical to give any single one a spotlight?

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feminism is only around to help women, i wouldn't call myself something that is only around to benefit one subset of people, i support everybodys rights equally

That's funny, because earlier in this thread you stated you did support the cause of feminism, but hesitated to call yourself one because some feminists (although you couldn't name them) have radical notions you don't support. But now the problem is that feminism is about helping women, which surely you could have figured out from the name.

Do you have any other reason to be here other than to derail and disrupt conversations and reiterate anti-feminist propaganda about supposed angry and unreasonable feminists?

And you're wrong, it's not around to help women, it's around to stop women being fucked over for being women as well as all the secondary patriarchal influence that comes from that such as all people being treated badly if they exhibit qualities which are deemed feminine.

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well you hear wrong.

 

principles  plural of prin·ci·ple (Noun)
Noun
  1. A fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior or for a chain of reasoning.
  2. A rule or belief governing one's personal behavior.

 

i have my own principles, obviously a lot of what i believe is similar to other people and that doesn't make me any less of an individual.

 

feminism is only around to help women, i wouldn't call myself something that is only around to benefit one subset of people, i support everybodys rights equally

Are you the person that claimed that Gabe Newell hacked your Half Life 2 playthrough and used it for promotional materials? Was that you? Was. That. You?

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Here is something I struggle with:

Is there such a thing as a feminine perspective?

Typically, when discussing social-justice issues, the argument can often be reduced to "Don't make assumptions about people based on their race, beliefs, history, or gender." The idea of desiring a feminine perspective (or a hispanic perspective or a sikh perspective) seems to assume that one's perspective is enclosed within their gender or race.

I certainly understand the benifits of diversity in any workplace or creative pursuit; having a wider spectrum of human-experience available will likely provide more well-thought-out concepts and executions, and provide a larger pool of experience from which to draw inspiration. But when I browse Netflix looking for a movie that was built from a feminine perspective, I feel that I'm making unfair assumptions with the labeling. Agnes Varda does not have THE feminine perspective, but certainly she has a more feminine perspective that J.J. Abrams. But I don't want to assume that The Beaches of Agnes (possibly the greatest documentary ever made) speaks for every woman, nor do I want to reduce the experience it provides by labeling it with the genre "feminine".

Any thoughts?

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In our society there are experiences that are more common or that are unique to people of the female sex, and experiences that are more common or that are unique to people who are gendered as women, which means that females and women will potentially have perspectives on various issues (like street harassment or child bearing or anything, really) which will be different from the kinds of perspectives males and men usually or can even potentially have.

This does not mean any given expression of what a female or a woman thinks is necessarily from the perspective of someone who has the kinds of experiences that females or women tend to have or uniquely have in our society. It's of course true that this stuff shapes us both subtly and explicitly, but it shapes us into individuals, not categories, so all you're necessarily getting from, say, an Agnes Varda film is the viewpoint of an individual who is able to see things from certain perspectives that males and men might not be as inclined to see things from. Whether the movies Varda makes reflect this or not depends entirely on what kind of films she makes. And it certainly does not mean that movies she makes are representative of the perspective of every woman any more than anything I type (or, god forbid, anything thestalkinghead types) is representative of the perspective of every man.

One of the strong tenets of modern feminist philosophy is feminist epistemology which relies on the idea of situated knowers and standpoint theory. The idea is that inhabiting a certain place and time and being a certain kind of person puts you in a situation where you can acquire various knowledge in light of these facts. That doesn't sound controversial, but it is when you realize that the opposite idea is that no matter who you are, you can (at least in principle) acquire any knowledge you want without having to be a certain kind of person. All you have to do is read a book or do a scientific study or something. Feminist epistemology challenges this and points out that there are certain things (say, what it's like to be harassed as a woman on the street in Western society) that you just aren't going to be able to fully understand from certain standpoints.

Standpoint theory, then, explains why you might look to a woman to get the "woman's perspective" on things, rather than looking to a man. From it, though, we can't deduce that a woman will automatically give you the woman's perspective: all we know is that potentially she can access it. This says nothing about whether she'll put insights derived from that perspective into her movies.

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thestalkinghead, your logic is deeply flawed and you repeatedly contradict yourself as others have pointed out. If you are an all or nothing type of guy then that must mean you don't believe in anything and have a nihilistic perspective. There cannot possibly be any movement or belief that is pure enough in its messaging for you so I have to assume you believe in nothing and disagree with every possible movement or belief out there. And even if a movement or belief was pure enough you can only get behind it if it benefits every single person on earth? So fuck the civil rights movement, fuck feminism, fuck feeding the hungry, fuck curing cancer, fuck things that benefit the rich, and fuck things that benefit the poor. Or do you only believe in things that benefit you?

 

Long story short, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU SMOKING AND CAN I HAVE SOME?

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I cannot believe people are still responding, frankly. I think it speaks well of their patience and hope, but man alive, I couldn't do it anymore.

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I have an absolute shit ton of patience but I think I'm about done trying now. I just had to get that last post in to vent a little on how fucking ridiculous that logic is.

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It's worth considering that a conversation about making space for and listening to women, particularly in gaming, has become about how it can be changed to appeal to one man. For TSH, I really think you need to spend more time on the idea of "how can we make this better for them" rather than "what they need to do for me." 

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I think I'm just weirdly entertained by tsh in his weird contradictory stances, however I've been skimming in and out of the on going saga, so I haven't been exposed enough for annoyance yet.

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A really interesting article that suggests a possible relationship between social-welfare and misogyny via Jake Rodkin's twitter:

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/cockblocked-by-redistribution

Ahahah oh man, this is beautiful. It's like everything I love in a single article. A society where PUAs automatically "offend every [...] girl without even trying" is like, the ideal society.

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It's like dowsing for good social-welfare with douches.  I don't know if it's science, but it's sure as butts weird.

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