Comment by maldeh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maldeh | Hacker News Reader

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Your musings here are legitimate, so long as you recognize your feelings as a single datapoint and don't mistake them for a general trend, or extrapolate them to the wider population.

As a counterpoint, I don't know of any friends or close acquaintances who would consider feminism or femininity a dirty word. To me, it's a fairly straightforward proposition:

Q: Are you pro- women having equal rights to men w.r.t. social structures, family responsibilities, economic opportunities, etc.?

A: Yes?

Q: And are you willing to take a second look at your social and professional conduct to make sure it doesn't put your female peers in difficult, awkward or uncomfortable positions?

A: Sure, why wouldn't I.

Hooray! you might be a feminist, it's not that hard.

Also, personally don't see what's wrong with unisex products, and I think it may be possible companies might possibly occasionally find the odd not-shitty cause they can back because their employees collectively believe in the positive message and that also aligns well with their goals, and not solely because of a small group of cynical PR managers running focus groups.

I think you've kind of proved your opponents' points here: support for equal rights and dignity for women is something supported by feminism's opponents as much as it is by feminists, so it's a poor differentiator between the two.

I think I can do better. I'm pretty sure non-feminists would disagree with both of the following. How many feminists would disagree with either?

Q: Do you believe that The Patriarchy controls society and oppresses us?

Q: Do you believe that unequal rights under the law (e.g. Affirmitive Action) are necessary to correct the injustices you perceive in society?

(1) is the question that I would expect most clearly correlates with being a feminist (by self-identification); from an information-theoretical point of view, this would be what defines feminism.

(2) is the counter to your argument directly: women have at least equal rights to men in most developed nations; feminists blame differences in outcomes that remain on The Patriarchy, whereas opponents of feminism typically explain them by actual differences between men and women, dispositionally and otherwise (For example the "gender wage gap": https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/UberPayGap.pdf). Actual feminists typically argue against equal rights for women (for example demanding governmental pressure to change hiring ratios: https://nwlc.org/resources/affirmative-action-and-what-it-me...).

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TBH I don't really care about unisex/gendered products. I'm not going to waste my money on Gilette's patronising garbage (I mean Stealth? Mach 3? And oh my word the prices. It's a razor for Christ's sake). Nonetheless, if people want to pay more for a product to have it branded for their gender, that's their business and none of mine or anyone else's.

For your first claim, I wish people would stop talking about feminism in this way precisely because it is such a generally accepted stance. The better question is in what ways does one believe men and women aren't structurally equal?

That's a naive look at feminism. Unfortunately nowadays many other ideologies jump on the feminism bandwagon. It's rare to see someone who is feminist without being also anti-law enforcement, anti-white men, anti-capitalist.

The post to which you replied seems to address your concerns:

“Your musings here are legitimate, so long as you recognize your feelings as a single datapoint and don't mistake them for a general trend, or extrapolate them to the wider population.”

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