Ohh?
"You cannot be sexist against men because they are advantaged"
That wasn't a fake quote or said by some small nobody on like a small blog. It was by a professor of feminism said in a news article.
Have you tried reading the
reasoning?Short definition: Sexism is both discrimination based on gender and the attitudes, stereotypes, and the cultural elements that promote this discrimination. Given the historical and continued imbalance of power, where men as a class are privileged over women as a class (see male privilege), an important, but often overlooked, part of the term is that sexism is prejudice plus power. Thus feminists reject the notion that women can be sexist towards men because women lack the institutional power that men have.
Now, before I say anything else, the obligatory disclaimer: When feminists say that women can’t be sexist towards men, they aren’t saying that women being prejudiced against men is a good thing, or something that should be accepted. Prejudice is bad and should not be accepted.
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s look at why feminists make a distinction between sexism and gender-based prejudice when the dictionary does not. A running theme in a lot of feminist theory is that of institutional power: men as a class have it, women as a class don’t. Obviously the power dynamics do shift around depending on the culture and the time period (not to mention the individual, the other privileges that the person does/does not have, etc etc), but ultimately the scales remain tipped in favor of men in general (if you disagree with that statement, please go read the Why do we still need feminism? FAQ entry first before proceeding).
What this imbalance of power translates to on an individual level is a difference in the impact of a man being prejudiced towards a woman and a woman being prejudiced towards a man. While both parties are human, and therefore have the same capacity to be hurt by the prejudice, whether they like it or not, the men have a whole system of history, traditions, assumptions, and in some cases legal systems and “scientific” evidence giving their words a weight that the women don’t have access to.
The usual analogy is to racism. Racial discrimination is possible against any race, but it only becomes racism when backed by cultural power. As such talking about "anti-white" or "reverse racism" (in the west at least) is meaningless. You can have prejudice against white people, but it doesn't rise to the cultural level of racism without the power structures that work against people of colour.
My perception of the problem feminism has is that it's less feminism itself and more how people perceive it. For starters, a lot of people might hypothetically consider themselves feminists or 'egalitarians' or whatever, but actively oppose it's goals. They either view equality as already achieved or are simply personally invested in structures and systems that feminism opposes or wants to reform, and view these actions as giving women an unfair advantage or otherwise going too far. They are either oblivious to or deliberately work to justify remaining sexism to dismiss feminist criticisms. Anything inside their experience is obviously going too far by challenging the status quo they personally enjoy, and anything outside the experience is simply ignored or maybe occasionally lightly criticised from a safe distance and minimal understanding.
Then there are the genuine ideological splits in feminism which tend to be inflated and used to justify the dismissal of anyone you disagree with as 'radical' or a 'feminazi' without any understanding of those actual terms.
Most of the ideological splits happened in the second wave, which is why the opposing group are so often labelled radfems today. For sure you get most transphobia and anti-porn/sex ideology among those groups today. But other than a few of the anti-sex fringes, most people who attack feminists by dismissing them as radicals aren't dealing with any such topics.
Maybe they are dealing with some of the ideological concepts that originated or were developed by past Radical feminists, particularly the concept of patriarchy, but it's extremely unlikely that someone who knew such background information would still use the term radical in this way.
But because people are aware, vaguely, that there are TERFs in the movement who other feminists criticise they see it as acceptable to dismiss feminists they disagree with as part of such an obviously wrong and 'extreme' group.
As for feminazi, even ignoring the Godwin element, it's useful to look at both the history of the term and how it has been used. For starters, it was created by
Rush Limbaugh to describe, "women who are obsessed with perpetuating a modern-day holocaust: abortion. There are 1.5 million abortions a year, and some feminists almost seem to celebrate that figure. There are not many of them, but they deserve to be called feminazis." Absurdly this reasoning makes more sense than any other use of the term,
if you buy into the concept of abortion as a holocaust. Should I assume that anyone who uses the term is anti-abortion?
Except that he largely dropped the term in the late 90's, then brought it back last decade to use against nearly any feminist or just women he disagrees with. In particular he has used it to describe
NOW, and these days basically uses it as interchangeable with feminist any time he is attacking someone with vaguely feminist views. It just means 'feminist I want to make fun of', not anything more substantial. Which is how I generally see it used online. It's also generally used for the distant, hypothetical positions someone is trashing, not any individual person they might have to actual engage with, even if that person might hold very similar views.
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Topic: [insert gender-related title here!]: Beware the Evil Philosiphers version (Read 28027 times)