Cathy Young: "Right to be feminist"

Submitted by redwoodwriter on Sun, 2010-06-13 20:37

Article here. Excerpt:

'THE LATEST Sarah Palin controversy has to do with feminism. In a recent article in the Washington Post, feminist author and blogger Jessica Valenti blasted the former vice presidential candidate for “adopting the feminist label.’’ Valenti believes that any talk of a conservative version of feminism is a cynical right-wing ploy to fool women into supporting reactionary antiwoman policies. But while Palin may be far from the best spokeswoman for conservative feminism, the idea itself is essential to feminism’s health.

If feminism is typecast as a left-wing movement, this automatically limits its appeal in a country with center-right politics. Feminist writer Naomi Wolf noted this nearly two decades ago when she urged the movement to drop litmus tests that excluded millions of women because of their positions on environmental policy, guns, gay rights, or abortion. Wolf argued that the beliefs of conservative and Republican women who champion female autonomy and achievement should be “respected as a right-wing version of feminism.’’
...
Who owns feminism today? Many feminists are incensed when the label is appropriated by women who question the Violence Against Women Act, or who argue that the pay differential between women and men is due largely to women’s more family-focused personal choices, not discrimination. Yet critiques of the conventional feminist paradigms of such problems as domestic violence and the gender gap in pay have been made both by many dissident feminists and by many scholars and researchers. To reject them out of hand as incompatible with feminism is not only ideologically intolerant, it also suggests an unwillingness to even consider factual claims that are at odds with dogma.'

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It has been my experience that women criticize other women more than men criticize other men. I believe that, in general, women's competition comes out through their words, while men's competition, in general, comes out through their deeds. All this gossip, back-biting, criticizing of other women among feminists can be, ultimately, good for the men's movement. It could be used to encourage many people, outside both the MRA circles, and also the Feminist establishment circles, to look at what exactly it means to be a feminist today (and in the process see how twisted, weird, selfish, dishonorable and unfair feminism has become). Now how can we MRAs bring the spotlight to bear on a certain way?

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Submitted by redwoodwriter on Mon, 2010-06-14 02:31

Conservative feminists are even bigger hypocrites than the leftist ones. How can they champion the free market, limited government and self reliance when feminism relies so heavily on the state? Feminism is about limiting the freedoms of men and subverting the free market because feminists know in a free world without special dispensations they cannot compete against free men.

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Submitted by Broadsword on Mon, 2010-06-14 13:25

Yes, women don't seem to be satisfied, whatever the circumstances. So many of them wanted to get out of the house, wanted go get jobs, wanted to be "emancipated" (little did they know they were actually protected from having to engage with the savage aspects of the the capitalistic marketplace). So men let them. Now that they've had a taste of that, a good many of them say they don't like the working world, and they want to go back to being in the home, and being taken care of by a man. But it's too late, women have already started a society-wide conversation about equality (although it is far from being implemented) and self-responsibility. That will force them to compete with men, to grow up, to be self-responsible, on the terms of the marketplace. No more chivalry. No more provide and protect stuff coming from men. Part of me gets some silent satisfaction when I see a young woman, doing a menial job, like flipping burgers, a woman who acts like she's above it all. I think to myself "this is what you wanted honey, you made your bed, now lie in it."

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Submitted by redwoodwriter on Mon, 2010-06-14 20:45