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ALL_ABOUT_ME_AND_FEMINISM
December 23, 2014
February 19, 2015
I was a young, idealistic and February 19, 2019
overly-intellectual teenager
during the 1970s, and I had the The personal odyssey angle has it's
fun of trying to apply what I problems-- but maybe it'll help with
was learning of feminism to the inevitable question "where is this
life in the suburban wasteland guy coming from, anyway?"
of Long Island where if you
wanted raise some consciousness MALE_FEMINISM_TRAP
you had to find some first.
Learning how to deal with girls
while also trying to apply Great: As I started working on this, I
doctrine about gender relationships then realized that there's a spate of
has it's difficulties-- male whiners out there on the net now
talking about how feminism made them
Just to pick one, consider this suicidal and so on.
interaction: the pretty girl
in the tight blue body suit Feminism did not ruin my life, but
comes over to me in art class, sometimes it was just another
and says "I forgot a pencil annoyance I didn't need--
today, could you break yours in
half?" I didn't say anything, Literally, I didn't need it: I was
and just did it immediately and not, for example, likely to get
handed half to her. A plainer involved with molesting drunken
girl sitting near by commented women -- by Long Island standards I
in a surprised tone of voice was a paragon among men.
"He did it!".
A line I've since heard from
I immediately realized that the women concerning "sexual
*reason* she was surprised is harassment": the guys who
that unlike the pretty girl, she worry about it most are the
wasn't used to getting what she ones who don't have to.
wants from guys... so, had I fallen
into a trap of sexist behavior?
But then, one of the reasons my reaction was off is
that according to the standardized rules of
flirtation, I was supposed to make her work for it
before giving in, maybe using lines like "but what
will *you* give me if I--". That kind of response
also struck me as too politically incorrect, and so
I just shyly complied and passed up the
conversational opportunity completely.
I gradually concluded that this wasn't entirely a
problem with me, it was a problem with feminism-- it
was good at telling you what not to do, but didn't
leave you with any way of going forward. They were
trying to re-engineer all our existing customs
on-the-fly but were effectively removing elements
without providing any replacements.
So there I was at 13 years old,
trying to sort through whether On the other hand, I
I was allowed to treat a girl shudder to think of what
I was interested in differently might've happened to me
from one I wasn't. if I'd actually landed
with a basic Long Island
"party-hearty" girl...
After some initial enthusiasm on my part,
I concluded that feminism had some problems:
o They were doing too much at once: nothing less than a
social engineering project intended to eliminate every
trace of traditional gender roles.
o A follower of feminism knew many things they were not
supposed to do, but figuring out what you should do,
finding ways to to live with both the doctrine and the
world, that was not so obvious.
o Feminism seemed like it was being used as a new excuse
for the same old puritanical attitudes.
o It seemed to me that they were too anxious to fight symbolic
battles because the real issues were so hard to address.
o Separatist strategies struck me as very wrong, an attempt
at fighting sexism with more sexism.
LESBIAN_SEPRATIST_RADIO
Since those days I've moderated
these opinions somewhat:
o Fighting a "symbolic" issue can act as an advertisment
for a set of ideas. Even a debate that seems completely
silly at first glance might succeed in producing a shift
in attitudes.
o If someone wants to try separatism to boot-strap the
process of change, I may be skeptical of their chances,
but I won't bother to object-- e.g. if someone wants to
try a women's-only study group, that's okay by me.
o Maybe the 70s feminists could be crazy and extreme but
arguably every new idea starts off "crazy". Sometimes
in retrospect the crazy doesn't seem quite so.
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