Hacker News Reader

Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

The anti-feminist movement has done an outstanding job redefining feminism to alienate people.

"I’m a very big supporter of the advancement of women, the importance of women role models"

I'd say that easily qualifies as being feminist even if she rejects the label.

Perhaps this is a naming issue. If it wasn’t called something as general as “feminism”, despite having such a specific culture and beliefs, then maybe more people would align with it. As it stands, a lot of women don’t relate to the feminist style and culture so they reject it despite having very strong pro-woman qualities

No, it's a typical tactic of the right to redefine leftist and progressive terms in a bad faith way to poison discourse. They did the same thing with "woke", "anti-racism", "toxic masculinity" and countless other terms.

Feminism doesn't have a specific culture and beliefs. Like any other social and political movement, it has a diverse and often internally divisive set of ideologies sharing common general axioms. Of course, one can still be feminist without being "militant," what ever that actually means.

I think that is a problem of the right for sure but the left also suffers from moral elitism and this is evident in their choice of terminology. Ultimately I think all of these issues are much more complex than their labels suggest and it is a product of the information age requiring neat buzzwords to profit off of confirmation bias. There were times when people discussed the ideas themselves and used fewer catchall labels like feminist, woke, snowflake, antifa, etc. For the record, I am a feminist but can’t deny that it has a culture just like any other movement and that means some people feel othered

My dude. There was a #killallmen hashtag that trended in 2020. It was covered in major left leaning magazines like Atlantic and Vox. So of course the right pick it up to pull more men into their coalition.

I don't care if it was ironic. You can't build consensus with that kind of bombastic language. The wsj recently had an article on how men are moving to the right[1]. The left needs to avoid identity politics and focus on material interests that help everyone for the sake of politics.

This isn't all some right wing propaganda effort. It's also the left's own goal.

1. https://archive.is/Bis2q

No one is saying militancy doesn't exist. Only that it's not synonymous with feminism. The illiberal powers will always try to associate a movement with it's most extreme members. It's the equivalent of labeling conservatives as Nazis because Nazis exist at the fringe of conservatism.

it behooves people to reject the toxic members of their community though.

If someone comes up with "Kill all Jews", as a right wing person you should kick them out and shun them.

Right now it's much more like "I'll take all the help I can get" and those equivalent statements are not denigrated from both sides, so of course everyone understands it as accepted positions.

Well I saw one feminist on twitter say something stupid so now I'm against a century of progress and all feminism.

Not her fault a whole lot of unrelated baggage got attached to to the term. People want to free ride off of social movements and say that they belong to the same raft of issues. When terms get overloaded it is natural to want to start regaining specificity.

Any sufficiently vague label is useless.

DevOps suffers exactly the same.

If "feminism" means "advancement of womens issues", "a defence of misandry" or "equality" to different people, yet they all would be correctly identified as being Feminists, then it ceases to have any value as a label.

If I criticise someone for conducting themselves in a way that generalises, denigrates and alienates a gender; I could be called "pro-feminist", despite talking against a person who could equally be described the same way. It's useless.

Egalitarianism[0] is the correct word for believing in equality in society. Bonus points: it's not gendered.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egalitarianism

Well, it's a label, so it's meaning depends on how it's applied. When 85% of people agree with equal rights but less than 15% will call themselves feminists, that's enough to conclude that the two are not synonymous. You can try to clean up the connotation by trying to include the calm good people against their will, but I doubt such an endeavor will succeed. The term is just accociated with nasty people at this point, who needs a label anyway?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com