About 49,500 people took their own lives last year in the U.S., the highest number ever, according to new government data posted Thursday.
About 49,500 people took their own lives last year in the U.S., the highest number ever, according to new government data posted Thursday.
In my left leaning circles it’s pretty well understood that feminism is about helping women. And that’s a good thing. Trying to make feminism an ideology which serves all genders is problematic because it implies an omniscient perspective counter to proper intersectionality. Men experience oppression but only men can represent their oppression in discourse.
Women can’t and shouldn’t feel like they can have an opinion on men’s issues. “Stay in your lane” comes to mind.
How far do you take this perspective? As a lefty that doesn’t sound like a very leftist take, rather it sort of completely eschews the principles of solidarity and reason-based argumentation…
I do agree that feminism is about helping women (and that’s great!), but should mothers not advocate for better mental health resources for their sons? Should I not advocate for better access to birth control for the women in my life because I’m male or for Ukrainian liberty because I’m not Ukrainian? Denying someone access to public discourse about a topic because they’re not suffering the consequences of the topic seems a bit silly to me. And of course, men do actually suffer under patriarchy, albeit in a different way than women obviously.
I am taking some rhetorical leeway towards a more radical presentation of the perspective, for clarity.
Solidarity can only be achieved once people can recognize one another as equals, and “women tell men how men should advocate for themselves” is not equal recognition. Of course women don’t think they’re womansplaining the oppression men experience.
I don’t believe in reason-based argumentation. Reason is how consent is manufactured. I trust reason only within the confines of the emotional message a so-called rational actor is emitting within the performance of the ritual of discourse. Too many women have been told to shut up for being ‘unreasonable’ for me to take reasonability all that seriously.
Certainly mothers should perform their motherhood within this lens. Their motherhood is centered, not the primacy of their opinion. The mistake the essentialization&monopolization type feminists make is centering feminism, when an ideology is not a cure for anything except the nagging sensation that if we come up with and communicate the right ideas the problems will go away.
Regardless of your gender, you are coming across as quite unreasonable.
I’m not even sure the point you’re trying to make.
Then read it again. And don’t police tone.
Oh yeah no clue why you’re coming off as unreasonable.
I have explicitly told you I don’t care if I come off as unreasonable, so what’s your problem?
Please, I’m asking nicely, watch your tone. Your italics are upsetting me.
At least they could have the social courtesy to hop on the digital bandwagon and use autotone.
To be clear here, when I say “reason” I mean the fundamental capability humans have to use logic, rationality, and data to make decisions and inform their behaviors. If this is the understanding you had when you wrote your comment I suppose we just disagree fundamentally, and that’d be an exceptional take on the matter.
We can be both emotionally and logically intelligent creatures, the two aren’t mutually exclusive and reducing people to their base emotional responses takes away from their agency. In my experience people are typically much more reason-based in their decision-making, even people who are victims of the term “unreasonable woman”. We don’t go around doing things just because.
I don’t think I shall commit to the insane proposition that humans use logic, rationality, and data to make decisions and inform their behaviors when climate change is currently killing the planet’s ecosystems off. To some extent I think you’ve got a high bar to clear for that proposition to be accepted!
Jokes or half-jokes aside, it’s not a new observation that people rationalize their politics after having decided what it is they feel. I’ve seen too much consensus reality with completely reasonable paragraph after paragraph to take reason all that seriously.
But I do believe that people are ‘reasonable’ in the way that you say: we don’t go around doing things just because (and to the extent that we do, it’s a good thing!). It’s when a group of people gather around a list of reasons that become an ideology that I start to get twitchy.
Feminism is a great movement but men who apply it as an ideology have missed something fundamental about the basis for reason in the expression of emotion.
I think you can help people and stand up for people being hurt regardless of what you got in your pants. Yes, education and personal experience may allow you to do a better job at it clearly a medical professsional can solve problems that I cant for example, but most of the time I think basic empathy can get you pretty far.
A homeless woman this week asked me for water, I gave her a bottle of water. I don’t think I need to be a women or ten courses of feminism to know that humans need water to survive.