Am i looking at feminists the wrong way? What are they like and what are your views on it?

Question

What do feminists stand for? Do they want equality or do they want to be treated better than men, given the priviledge of equality as well as chivalry which tips over the equality? I always thought that feminists not only expect the same treatment as men but demand more because of chivalry and all that. But i read some stuff and thought "Maybe i should read a book on this to see what feminists really stand for and what they are like" I know i was being closed minded so dont give me any critisizm on that. If your a feminist can you tell me what things you dissapprove of and your thoughts on chivalry? What do you think of woman who expect or demand chivalry? And do feminists despise men? I had this notion lodged into my head that women dislike men in general which is why i really disliked feminists because i strongly believe that you should hate persons not people. But im starting to think otherwise, its not a for sure judgement on which way i will think of it until i get some more info

Answer 1

Feminists are for equality when it is to their advantage.  Otherwise, they are for whatever will benefit them, even if it hurts men.

They have earned the reputation by being hypocritical and pushing for anti-male policies while claiming they are for equality.  Women in general do not despise men, unless they have been influenced by feminism.

Answer 2

Who do you think feminists are, people from another planet? Or a recently discovered tribe.

People here will give you differing answers, it's your own choice who to believe, but always try to get to facts, never opinion. A purely emotional response is rarely one that corresponds to reality.

Answer 3

Very few feminists hate men.  They hate the "system".  The only way to explain why we hate the "system" is to start at the beginning.  In the beginning, early human society revolved around an animalistic system of males attacking and fighting each other for exclusive right to all the females.  In time, human males grew stronger and bigger due to elimination of weaker smaller males.  

All females "belonged" to the strongest "alpha" males.  Alpha males, through brutal domination, subjugated all other males and those males obeyed their "masters".  As with lower primate social groupings today, early humans raided and attacked nearby rival groupings for territorial rights.  In those raids, non-alpha males raped the rival group's females, nature's way of strengthening genetic diversity.  Subjugated males grew to like war for that reason and formed warrior classes and brotherhoods.  At that time in our history, humans were part of the food chain and those organized males rose to fight against the enormous predators who were dragging off to eat approximately 7 out of 12 of our young every night, keeping human populations in check with natural basal rhythms.  By taking us out of the food chain, everything changed.  Predator species grew smaller or became extinct and human populations began to swell.

When a group was attacked, females fought just as viciously as males but their babies ran to them and clung to them, encumbering the females' ability to fight.  Males became specialized fighters, grew even bigger / stronger.  Then, they figured out there was strength in numbers so they began protecting their young and the food source for the young, lactating females.  Alpha males evolved quickly into chiefs / rulers / kings / masters and essentially enslaved or owned all the other males and certainly the females, which were "given" to the best warriors as reward and incentive.  

Humans are afraid of the unknown.  Early humans had a lot of "unknown" to contend with.  In every grouping, the "smartest" person, male or female, who could best explain or predict became highly respected as shamans.  Masters or rulers subjugated shamans into their service because knowledge was power.  The alliance between shaman and master formed religions that served as a form of animal husbandry to maintain ignorance and fear so that people could not rise to overthrow the masters.  Shamans taught the people by using fear of the unknown and superstitious belief constructions to be meek and obiedient to their masters / lords or risk punishment from unknown evil forces and "gods" and demons" in an abstracted training program for how to behave as docile fearful slaves of the group's alpha male ruler /lord.  

Modern religions evolved from those early Master / Slave moralities which to this day teach people to obey and worship their lords and which fight to maintain fear and ignorance and dependency based on teaching people what to think rather than how to think for themselves using elaborate dogma constructions that evolved specifically to prevent objective / rational thinking.  Everytime civilization rose into rational thinking, libraries and free-thinkers have been burned or genocided.  The Christian religion with the Malleus Malificarum, for example, slaughtered up to 50 million women of "independent mind" over about 300-400 years to breed the gene pool back down into ignorance and docility.

Humans struggled against the unknown and continued to make objective discoveries about the world around us (science) and those discoveries were controlled by masters and used mostly in warfare to better plunder rival clans and villages and then nations.  Religions served to keep those discoveries from the masses, to maintain subjective "darkness", such as in the Dark Ages.  

But, men constantly struggled against the subjective darkness and explored objective rationality through politically correct philosphical debate, ever risking punishment from masters and "shamans" for daring to counter the subjective dogma.  Eventually, ages of enlightenment began to peek through and rationality burst through, allowing humans to make enormous discoveries that altered the paradigm or our world view.  It was NOT demons in the water that made us sick.  It was bacteria, which we could see with our own eyes with grounded glass lenses.  But, religions fought back to maintain their grip and plunder rights over the masses.  When Galileo, for example, went to the Pope to show him a new telescope and that the moon had craters and was land and not essentially something made of cheese or whatever as the Catholic Church declared, the Pope said this in a debate that was published in newspapers then: "It does not matter what you see clearly with your eyes that is the Truth.  The Truth is whatever I say the Truth is."

Rational free-thinking men finally broke humanity out of that nightmare and men began to rise above the Master/ Slave paradigm on a wave called "humanism", culminating in democracy, constitutions, legal protections for their unalienable rights, the decline of monarachy and tolerance for tryanny. Before that, laws served only to protect the masters and their elites from the masses.  Toward the end of the 1700's, women like Mary Wollstonecraft argued that women, too, had unalienable rights, that women, too, needed rational educations.  She argued that without rational thinking, we cannot be free of the Master / Slave paradigm, could not become self-determining.

After the age of enlightenment, objective rational thinking and science flourished, culminating in the Industrial Revolution in which masters attempted, and succeeded, at enslaving workers. Huge advertising propaganda campaigns were launched to shame men off their independent rural ways of life to move into urban areas and work in factories of industry.  The Industrial Revolution and greedy industrialists changed all of our cultural institutions, tweaked the economy to deliberately force women en masse into the work force and squashed unions and worker's rights.  Fathers no longer worked near their homes in pedestrian communities or spent most of the day with their children as 95% of men had done prior to 1900 in their agraian lives.  Extended families ended.  Girls began to date in automobiles unsupervised for the first time in history.  Electricity, air travel, mass communications, tv . . .everything had an effect on "gender roles" and courtship / marriage / family.

Women had organized to help free the Black slaves and we rose above the Master / Slave paradigm even more.  Then, women, mostly wealthy women with rational educations, maintained those organizations and fought successfully for the right to vote.  Feminism, the struggle to help women rise above the Master / Slave moralities and acculturations into legal protections for their unalienable rights is ongoing in a struggle to remove discriminations such as how men have locked women out of equal educational access and otherwise prevented women from becoming self-sufficient and self-determining.  To this day, misogynistic religions continue to indoctrinate people with the Master / Slave moralities and continue to support prehistoric subjective dogma abstractions related to male entitlements and right to dominate and control women.

Today, there are numerous factions and individuals that call themselves feminist.  A few are actually motivated not by humanism but by the M/S paradigm themselves in that they do not support pluralism and democracy but instead, like religions, fascistly desire to impose their pet set of sensibilities onto everyone else.  Anti-women individuals focus on those really rather rare exceptions and use them as fodder for their own M/S agendas of imposing THEIR pet set of sensibilities and "traditional" expectations onto everyone else.  Although the "bogeyman" feminist does exist, it is not by far mainstream or of consequence, but especially less rational individuals frequently maladaptive to social changes, have rallied around those exceptions.

The male whine for a return to "Chivalry" is a part of that maladative problem some men suffer about the rise of women into legal protections for their rights.  In every patriarchal society, women are required to cripple or deform themselves in some way to conform to male social sexual fetish standards of "attractive".  In the days when women needed help in and out of a carriage, for example, they were horribly crippled by corsets.  Women HAD to cripple themselves to be attractive because they were locked out of equal opportunity for self-sufficiency and had only two choices, prostitution or conform to male standards of "femininity" in order to get a meal-ticket man.  The whine for a return to "chivalry" today carries with it a threat heard here quite frequently, that if women are not meek and docile and let men "protect" them, then they do not deserve common courtesy.  Many such men brag about letting doors deliberately close on women and such as "punishment" for feminism. That is not chivalry and women are no longer need such men or "have" to respect them or administer to their male-entitlement expectations.  We do not "despise" them.  We just walk around them like hot dog c**p on the sidewalk.

Today, feminism struggles to reduce the harmful acculturations that plague women, such as media sexual objectification of young girls before they are old enough to be cognitively rational enough not to believe everything they hear, including messages that women are not as intelligent as men, that men are better at math or science or technology, or that men are "superior" because they have 2-

Answer 4

From feminists I know like Sam, they do want eqality. It's only anti feminists that state about the negative things from what I have observed - never ever heard a feminist say they want superiority.

As you see when you get feminists answering in positive ways, people will thumb them down. Seems anti feminists just want to see the bad things in people.

Answer 5

I read somewhere that this door opening tradition started when women wore dresses with hoop skirts that made it awkward for them to open them themselves. Since we don't wear them now, it's no longer necessary. People should be treated the same.

Answer 6

Feminism is not about "equality." It's a one-way street (i.e. equality that only benefits women). Feminists pick off individual issues and define what they mean by "equality" with respect to those issues in isolation from the total picture. Therefore, issues of equality that affect men are disregarded.

There is a huge Feminist research and propaganda industry in western countries and the United Nations (e.g., Women's Studies departments, Ministries of Women's Affairs, the American Association of University Women, the National Organization for Women, Ms. magazine, etc.), which, under the deceptively appealing cloak of "equality" has flooded the political landscape with issues they have unilaterally selected, defined and "solved," because they allow men's pressure groups no input into this political process. For example:

1) men's rights in the family (divorce, separation, custody, access, matrimonial property, paternity, etc.);

2) men's rights in the workplace (sexual harassment, equal employment opportunities, affirmative action, etc.);

3) men's right to life and health (longevity, spending on men's health, circumcision, conscription, etc.);

4) men's legal rights (the invention of still more male-only crimes and still more female-only excuses – "syndromes" – for crimes, the decriminalisation of any predominantly female crimes, and increases in the present penalties for male-only crimes).

A specific example from 3) is how men get prostate cancer at a rate of 147 cases per 100,000 men. Women get breast cancer at a rate of 113 per 100,000 women. The mortality rate for breast cancer and prostate cancer is about the same. Yet, the federal government spends roughly four times as much on breast cancer research as prostate cancer research. Have you ever heard of a feminist working to bring equality on such an issue? Ahhh...no.

So even those Feminists who most people think of as working towards sexual equality are actually working for selective gender equality -- they themselves select the issues where they think more s*x equality is needed, and they also define what "equality" would mean as far as those issues are concerned.

"Equality" is just a propaganda slogan for them. If they were genuine about seeking equality, they would ask Masculist groups to join in the process of deciding what "equality" would mean for a particular issue. Then Masculists and Feminists together could look at the whole of Society and draw up a master plan for achieving sexual equality across the board.

Answer 7

Feminists are a group of people(mostly women) who fight for more special rights, benefits and privileges for women; these special perks for women that feminists fight for often discriminated against men and have negative affect on men's rights.  

Feminists often claim that they are about "equality for the sexes";  but the real truth is that "equality" is simply a mask that feminists use to fool and brain-wash people into supporting their movement.

Answer 8

more of EQUALITY of both gender. fighting for women's RIGHTS.  For example: they said that women who are wearing s**y clothes are prone to harassment and sexual assault and that is their fault. if they want to be respected they must not wear something s**y LOL. so there, a lot of feminist will get mad and express their sentiments about the issue.

Answer 9

I am a feminist as defined as someone with a 'belief in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes'.

I do not want to be treated better than men. 'Chivalry' is a ridiculous and outdated concept. I do not expect men to leap up and open doors for me, but I don't expect them to slam it in my face either. Men should be courteous to everyone, not just those women they want to sleep with.

I think women who expect or demand 'chivalry' clearly have daddy-princess issues they need to resolve. They should toughen up and learn how to do things themselves.

No, I don't despise men. I have great relationships with my partner, father, brother, nephews and male friends and colleagues. My father is a wonderful man who has always encouraged me to believe in myself. My partner is my equal. We support each other. We make joint decisions. We share the housework. We share the bills.

Get the picture?

Edit

Thank you for your question and for having the interest and intelligence to actually ask us what we believe instead of just jumping in with the feminist-bashing that is commonplace around here.

Answer 10

I don't like being treated differently just because I'm a woman. I don't care if the treatment is good; I'll have none of it. I like to take care of myself.

Feminists do not dislike men; we have plenty of men in our own lives. We dislike:

-men who dislike us

-laws that favour men

-societal double standards that favour men

And that's it.

Good for you for taking the time to educate yourself, unlike SOME people.

Answer 11

Obviously I stand for equality between women and men. I like good manners (which has nothing to do with feminism, more humanism) -so holding the door open is polite.

In the area of Romance I think it is lovely to be given flowers as long as its not done with an assumption that as a woman I function as a slot machine- i.e.- put in flowers and chocolate -get out bl*w job.

I love genuine compliments that show he's really thinking of me (again not the slot machine mentality -i.e. using re-cycled lines that 'worked' on other women).

If a man wants to pay for a meal that's great - I'll return the favour sometime soon. In fact with my own fella, because I knew he enjoyed the chivalry of paying for me when we first got together, I put money in his shirt pocket when he was broke so he could still by me the drinks...

I don't dispise men. I dispise sexism, sexist oppression, being patronised, held back, ridiculed, used, harassed, belitted, under-represented, violated, objectified, caricatured, silenced, overlooked, etc - because I am a woman. I know that sounds heavy, but I have experienced all of these things - it is not in my imagination, or in the imagination of other feminists. In almost every culture in the world women suffer through a lack of representation by the people in power and through the prevalent norms which make it okay to mistreat women and ignore their genuine wishes.

There are indeed some selfish people who are female, who have benefited from the hard work of feminists (i.e.- the right to vote, own property, have good health care, etc), but have double-standards - i.e.- expecting the man to pay for everything whilst having the same wage as him. These are selfish people and I don't think they represent feminsm.

I often get men saying "you're not what I imagined a feminist to be like" and that is simply because feminists have an awful lot of bad press because they are trying to change the status quo.

I see myself as a feminist - someone who challeges and fights against injustice, but also as a loving, nurturing woman. Its quite hard for men to get their heads around this... I see that all the time!

To respond- my man was in a bad financial situation when we met and he felt embarassed about this. I certainly wasn't the cause of it, and I paid my way equally. It was more of a game really. It just made him feel more debonnaire to pay and he felt he just couldn't sit there and let me buy the drinks all night. Perhaps some people might criticise me and say I should have challenged him on being so insecure about his masculinity that he needs to have some financial power in order to feel like a man, but I thought in essence his intentions were sweet, so I didn't want to leave him feeling emasculated or embarassed.

Answer 12

First, thank-you for having an open mind and looking at all sides of the issues before reaching any conclusions. As you can see, feminism has been an often misunderstood movement.

The early wave of feminism called for equal opportunity. Women were shut out of educational and occupational possibilities for quite a while. It was a common perception that females didn't have the gray matter to do much else but clean a house and make babies. We know this is not true.

I would like to suggest that you read some history and study the contributions that women have made to society. Also, talk to women in person about their experiences. You will find a goldmine of information.Remember that a lot of "information" can be opinion, get the facts.

It was never intended to be a hateful movement. Sure, you have a percentage that will disregard men, but that doesn't represent the larger picture

Thank-you again for being open to discussion.

Answer 13

Stop thinking in labels.

They're not "Feminists", they are PERSONS.

Each of them is an individual, each will have differences.

Some will be excellent, some mediocre, some very bad.

Labelling forces you to use the lowest common denominator in the group, which distorts your perceptions.

Answer 14

I think another way you could put it is equality or equity (as I have a few times)

Different being equality is defined by the outcomes produced which as the term suggests must be equal.

Equity is about fairness of treatment and is defined by the methods or means employed to create ANY outcome

For example it is equitable (fair) that everyone is given the same opportunity to produce any outcomes (equal or unequal) they wish to pursue

However it is equal to give everyone an equal outcome to begin with pretty much and the means employed thereby would be whatever is most expedient. So it could just so happen that equal opportunity is given but as we know from experimentation this is highly unlikely.

So having accepted that feminism primarily advocates equality and thereby they view equal outcomes (or lack of them) as the issue to solve, they will not take into account equal opportunities or even rights for men since it is clear that we have continued to dominate high powered positions which is obviously unequal by definition but as far as I can see is still perfectly fair since we all started off with the same opportunity (following the 2nd wave). Now they have to deny us these opportunities by implementing quota systems like in Sweden. It's really pathetic and I know there are many feminists against this so it's just a few giving them a bad name by saying "we need to even out the playing field"

p.s. having said all that it is interesting to note that chivalry and "special considerations" could in fact be equitable even if by definition they are unequal. But since feminism has made it clear they want equality, they MUST reject any of these considerations they still receive.