All Episodes
Previous Next
March 8, 2016 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
16:54
Why Do People Hate #Feminism？ #8 - Yes All Feminists
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
The more I've spoken about feminism, the more I have realized that fighting for women's rights has too often become synonymous with man-hating.
My recent research has shown me that feminism has become an unpopular word.
Why has the word become such an uncomfortable one?
Before we start, I'd just like to thank Twitter user Mr. Bunn for this wonderful piece of fanart that he's done for me.
I really like it, and so I thought I'd use it in the video.
Anyway, welcome to Why Do People Hate Feminism Number 8.
Yes, all feminists.
An inextricable part of dealing with feminism and feminists is listening to feminists say some really crazy shit.
Things like, I feel that man-hating is an honourable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class hatred against the class that's oppressing them.
Or, I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig.
Or even, to call a man an animal is to flatter him.
He's a machine, a walking dildo.
You might come across feminist blogs that say things like, PIV is always rape, okay?
Just to recall a basic fact, intercourse slash PIV is always rape, plain and simple.
And in these blogs, they might say, the term fuck you is not an insult for nothing.
Men know why.
It's the worst thing you can do to a human being.
It is in itself an extremely physically invasive act, very often painful, generally at the beginning before the pain may be cut off by the genital arousal.
It causes all sorts of tears, bruising, swelling, discomfort, STDs, vaginal infections, urinary infections, genital warts, HIV, and death.
PIV stands for penis in vagina, so any heterosexual sex.
And don't make the mistake of thinking that this raw distilled insanity is confined to the amateur feminist bloggosphere.
Oh no.
A wonderful paper from the University of Oregon called Glaciers, Gender and Science, a feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research has just been published.
Just look at this abstract.
Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change.
However, the relationships among gender, science and glaciers, particularly related to the epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge, remain understudied.
This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components.
1. Knowledge producers.
2. Gendered science and knowledge.
3. Systems of scientific domination.
And 4. Alternative representations of glaciers.
Merging feminist post-colonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to a more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.
Well, thank goodness someone's finally talking about more just and equitable human-ice interactions.
God forbid, the ICE feels like it's been dealing with unjustly.
And just look at these keywords.
Feminist glaciology, feminist political ecology, feminist post-colonial science studies, folk glaciology, glacier impacts, glaciers and society.
But hark, what is that racket I can hear?
It sounds like a mob of angry, topless, vagina-enabled misandry denialists, with goggle eyes bursting through their lensless problem glasses, tearing at their rainbow-dyed hair as they screech, NOT ALL FEMINISTS!
Shit lord!
And you know what?
These deranged harpies are right.
Not all feminists believe the most ridiculous, outrageous, and lunatic things that certain feminists have said.
So what do all feminists believe?
To find out, I decided to go to Wikipedia.
Now I know what you're thinking.
Wikipedia?
That's wrong on everything.
Well, maybe, maybe not, because I didn't choose Wikipedia arbitrarily.
This is why I chose Wikipedia.
Welcome to the second annual Art and Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at the Museum of Modern Art.
In 2010, there was a study that found that around 8.5% of Wikipedia editors were women.
Other studies have shown that it's somewhere between 8 and 16%, so the numbers are quite low as far as female editors go.
There's a lack of history in feminist art, in women artists, and in topics about gender and gender expression on Wikipedia.
And we'd like to change that, so that's what we're working on today.
Yes, feminists actually hold Wikipedia edit-a-thons to presumably increase the truthiness of Wikipedia.
And one look at the feminism page of Wikipedia shows you that yes, feminists have indeed been getting their grubby little hands all over it.
But that's fine because I actually want to hear what they all believe.
Now, like I said, not all feminists believe all the same crazy things, but there are some crazy things that all feminists believe.
So apparently feminism is a range of political movements, ideologies and social movements that share a common goal, to define, establish, and achieve equal political, economic, cultural, personal, and social rights for women.
I don't really know what a cultural or personal right is.
Seriously, what the fuck is a cultural right?
Anyway, this includes seeking to establish equal opportunities for women in education and employment.
Feminists typically advocate or support the rights and equality of women.
Which is interesting because young women are now earning more than men.
But that's not sexist, just fair.
And women are taking record numbers of university places, making them 35% more likely to be at university than a man.
Feminist movements have campaigned and continue to campaign for women's rights, including the right to vote, to hold public office, to work, to earn fair wages or equal pay to own property, to receive education and to enter contracts.
Well, mission accomplished ladies.
To have equal rights within marriage and to have maternity leave.
Feminists have also worked to promote bodily autonomy and integrity and to protect women and girls from rape, sexual harassment and domestic violence.
Well, that is when they're not trying to actively prevent other people from doing women's rights activism.
But okay.
So these are indeed all things that all feminists believe.
And also non-feminists.
I mean people who don't identify as feminists all agree with these things by and large in the Western world.
In fact, most of these things were achieved decades ago.
So one might wonder, well, what the fuck are feminists whinging about?
That's right.
The patriarchy.
All feminists believe in the patriarchy, and they describe it as a social system in which society is organized around male authority figures.
In this system, fathers have authority over women, children, and property.
It implies the institutions of male rule and privilege, and is dependent on female subordination.
So just from their own definition, we can be sure that we don't live in a patriarchy.
There is nothing about modern Western society that ensures fathers have authority over women and children.
We can prove this by simply looking at the statistics, if empirical data is acceptable for everyone watching this video.
The number of US children living in single-parent homes has nearly doubled in 50 years, with 15 million being raised without a father.
And that's three times higher than those being raised without a mother.
And the problem is even higher in black communities.
This statistic of 72% includes cohabitation, but it's still going to be remarkably high.
But the thing is, most forms of feminism characterize patriarchy as an unjust social system that is oppressive to women.
In feminist theory, the concept of patriarchy often includes all the social mechanisms that reproduce and exert male dominance over women.
Feminist theory typically characterizes patriarchy as a social construction.
More on that later.
Which can be overcome by revealing and critically analysing its manifestations.
By talking about it.
That's what you're saying.
Patriarchy can be overcome by talking about it.
So not only do we not live in a patriarchy, which is a universal feminist delusion, but the effects of not living in a patriarchy appear to be taking their toll on children.
Studies have shown that children in America living in homes without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty than children who live with both their mother and their father.
Fatherless children are also two to three times more likely to develop an emotional or behavioural problem requiring psychiatric treatment.
Studies have shown that children who grow up without fathers also are more likely to commit crime and do poorer in school.
And perhaps most tragically of all, children who grow up fatherless are also more likely to commit suicide than those who grow up in a home with both their mother and their father.
But hey, smash the patriarchy.
Am I right, feminists?
Of course I am.
And that word is patriarchy.
The next thing that feminists believe is that everything is a social construct, even the patriarchy.
A social construct is an idea or notion that appears to be natural and obvious to people who accept it but may or may not represent reality, and so it remains largely an invention or artifice of a given society.
Put simply, feminists believe that there is no biological basis for male-female interactions.
In the late 20th century, various feminists began to argue that gender roles are socially constructed, and that it is impossible to generalize women's experiences across cultures and histories.
Post-structural feminism draws on the philosophies of post-structuralism and deconstruction, in order to argue that the concept of gender is created socially and culturally through discourse.
This of course applies to men and masculinity.
Feminist theory has explored the social construction of masculinity and its implications for the goal of gender equality.
The social construct of masculinity is seen by feminism as problematic, because it associates males with aggression and competition and reinforces patriarchal and unequal gender relations.
And this is of course because modern feminism challenges the biological essentialist view of gender.
For example, in Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fiennes disputes scientific evidence that suggests that there is an innate biological difference between men and women's minds, asserting instead that cultural and societal beliefs are the reason for differences between individuals that are commonly perceived as sex differences.
Of course, this flies in the face of scientific evidence.
We know that there are physical differences between male and female brains.
A pioneering study has shown for the first time that the brains of men and women have wired up differently, which could explain some of the stereotypical differences in male and female behaviour, scientists have said.
Research has found that many of the connections in a typical male brain run between the front and the back of the same side of the brain, whereas in women the connections are more likely to run from side to side between left and right hemispheres of the brain.
You can of course hear the distant rumble of feminists getting up to speed, with the traditional feminist rallying cry of not all.
The brains of men and women really aren't that different, study finds.
Well we didn't have to say they had to be that different.
The fact is, they are different, as your headline shows.
As soon as scientists could image the brain, they began hunting for sex differences.
Some modest disparities have been reported.
On average, for example, men tend to have a larger amygdala, a region associated with emotion.
Such differences are small and highly influenced by the environment, yet they have been used to paint a binary picture of the human brain.
The team found a few structural differences between men and women.
And this has been extrapolated into, well, there's no sense in talking about male and female nature.
There is no one person that has all the male characteristics and another person that has all the female characteristics.
That's right, because if they don't have all of one thing or all of another, they aren't generally one thing or generally another.
For fuck's sake, why does it have to be all?
No one is saying all, no one has ever said all.
But there are general patterns that we can distinguish between male and female biologically in the brain.
We don't have to be talking about all in order to distinguish between male and female.
It isn't actually a binary, as you point out.
That doesn't mean it's not true.
Even infant primates demonstrate preferences for rudimentary gender roles.
I personally am happy to chalk this up to gender roles having a distinct biological impetus.
However, maybe I'm wrong and it's actually the monkey patriarchy.
And finally, it's important to remember that all feminists are material feminists.
Material feminism highlights capitalism and patriarchy as central in understanding women's oppression.
The theory centers on social change rather than seeking transformation within the capitalist system.
Material feminism insists on examining the material conditions under which social arrangements, including those of gender hierarchy, develop.
Material feminism avoids seeing this gender hierarchy as the effect of a singular patriarchy and instead gauges the web of social and psychic relations that make up a material historical moment.
Materialist feminism argues that material conditions of all sorts play a vital role in the social production of gender and assays the different ways in which women collaborate and participate in these productions.
Material feminism also considers how women and men of various races and ethnicities are kept in lower economic statuses due to imbalance of power that privileges those who already have privilege, thereby protecting the status quo.
Now, I know that there are going to be some people who say, well, hey, not every feminist is a material feminist.
And I would agree with you, if feminists weren't busy decrying those people who aren't material feminists.
For example, Christina Hoff Summers is not a material feminist.
This is her entry in Rational Wiki.
Christina Hoff Summers is a self-declared feminist, though third parties typically refer to her as an anti-feminist.
She believed in the feminist movement in the 70s and 80s, but made an abrupt about turn, splitting with mainstream feminist thought in more modern times in favour of a more conservative view on gender equality.
This is the list of citations from Rational Wiki of people declaring Summers to be an anti-feminist.
Because if you are not a material feminist, you are not a modern feminist.
at least according to popular feminist consensus.
In fact, you are an anti-feminist.
You are someone who is directly opposed to the goals of feminism.
And this is because materialist forms of feminism grew out of Western Marxist thought, and have inspired a number of different but overlapping movements, all of which are involved in a critique of capitalism and are focused on ideology's relationship to women.
Christina Hoffsummers is not a feminist because she is not a Marxist.
She believes in women's agency.
She does not believe in the patriarchy.
And she believes women can be the equal to men based on their own actions and decisions.
So when a feminist says, well, not all feminists believe that, you can point them to things that all feminists do believe.
Yes, all feminists are patriarchy conspiracy theorists.
Yes, all feminists are biology denialists.
And yes, all feminists are Marxists.
They are all guilty of believing in some kind of ludicrous crap.
So if they say to you, well, not all feminists believe that, just pin them down on something that they do believe.
There is plenty that they believe that is ridiculous and indefensible.
▲
Export Selection