"Empowered young women don’t want to be called ‘feminist’"

Submitted by Mastodon on Fri, 2012-12-28 02:40

Article here. Excerpt:

'The trailblazers — Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, to name two heavy lifters — believed that women should have the same legal and civil protections as men without discrimination. As Stanton said in 1854 when she addressed the New York Legislature, “We ask no better laws than those you have made for yourselves. We need no other protection than that which your present laws secure to you.” You might call these first feminists “equity feminists”: They sought equality before the law.

A century-and-a-half later, the modern feminist movement has different aims than those of the women who first gathered at Seneca Falls in 1948*. That is not to say the modern feminist movement shares none of the goals of those early crusaders. Aspects of modern feminism — such as campaigns seeking to end violence against women or stop the sexual objectification of women — are fully consonant with “first wave” feminism. Yet today’s feminists also pursue objectives that go far beyond those of the equity feminists. As University of Colorado feminist Alison Jaggar has said, “Radical and socialist feminists have shown that the old ideals of freedom, equality and democracy are insufficient.”'

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* Ed.: They meant "1848", when the Seneca Falls Convention was held.

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Feminism is an incoherent ideology that rejects chivalry one second and embraces it the next. Let's be very careful to look at the actual reasons why some women reject it, because I'm pretty sure that some of those reasons will be just as incoherent as feminism itself. A lot of modern female artists strike me as the sort of people who produce volumes of misandrist garbage on the one hand, yet embrace romantic ideals of knights in shining armor and love at first sight on the other. Having them reject feminism does not mean that they have the faintest clue about men's rights. Likewise, there is this cross-generational rift within the women's movement, with older grandmas sometimes distancing themselves from the younger yapper snappers and vice versa. It's comedy to behold, truly, when an old woman starts going about how feminism was oh so different in her day. It wasn't. The "first wave" feminists were a bunch of entitled rich white Puritan moralizers who wanted society to put them up on a pedestal and worship their golden uteruses. People criticized them for the same thing back then that we criticize modern feminism for today. If there was anything that "first wave" feminism was ahead of the times on, it was the same "me me me" special snowflake philosophy that would later come to dominate modern Consumerist culture.

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Submitted by dungone on Fri, 2012-12-28 18:36