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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (6858)	12/14/2005 6:29:55 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542125

I'll post the permalink, so people can reference it later. I assume you are refering to ...In any case: Here are a few basic principles of my kind of feminism, whatever one wants to call it. 1. Equal treatment regardless of gender. No excuses for unequal treatment such as "we need to make allowances for women's lack of power/history of oppression," "real equality means redistributing power from the oppressor to the oppressed," etc. Feminism should be about equity, fairness and judging people as individuals, not "siding with women" (individually or collectively). 2. We should seek to achieve greater equity/equality by expanding choices for both men and women, not narrowing them -- e.g., not make it less socially acceptable for women to stay home with their children, but to make this option more available to men. Equity does not necessarily mean full parity in every field; it means equal opportunity, including freedom from cultural barriers that can hold men or women back from excercising their options (e.g., the belief that it's unmanly to be a child care worker, or that a woman should be interested in "people things" rather than scientific abstractions). 3. Western women today are not an oppressed or powerless group. While women have some gender-based problems, so do men. Gender-based disadvantages and prejudices should be addressed whether they affect men or women. In today's society, "more for women" is not necessarily synonymous with justice. 4. Women as well as men can be sexist -- toward men as well as women -- and can have sexist expectations of and prejudices toward men. Female chauvinism (e.g., the belief that mothers have a special bond with their children inherently superior to that of fathers) should be taken as seriously as male chauvinism. 5. Not everything bad that happens to women (e.g., rape or domestic violence) is the result of sexism or "the patriarchy" (which, in my view, is a meaningless concept when talking about the West in the 21st Century). Women's personal wrongs in relationships with men should not be considered a feminist issue unless some institutional or cultural bias against women is involved (for instance, a man's belief that he is entitled to multiple sex partners but his wife or girlfriend is not). 6. Claims of sexism, sex discrimination, or male mistreatment of women should be taken seriously, but not given a presumption of truthfulness and objectivity. Giving a woman's account greater credence than a man's because of her gender is just as sexist as presuming a man to be more believable. 7. Finally, my kind of feminism takes a non-adversarial stance toward Western and American society. This was brought home to me by Jeff Goldstein's exchange with Lauren, who sees a young Muslim immigrant's decision to wear the hijab as possibly a positive and empowering one because it's a protest against the majority culture. I don't regard an adversarial stance vis-a-vis American culture as something valuable in itself. For all its flaws and its much-less-than-perfect history where women are concerned, the West today is the civilization that champions freedom and equal rights for women. For that alone, from a feminist point of view, it is worth defending. cathyyoung.blogspot.com I pretty much agree with her general principles. Of course, that doesn't nessarly mean I would agree with any specific agenda or policy based on them but the ideas themselves seem ok to me. Edit - Removed verbiage that wasn't really important