I am forever unsympathetic to feminism so long as it's about forcing the pendulum to the other end.
As someone who sincerely believes in gender equality, any argument (other than something stemming from unchangable facts of biology) that involves "men" or "women" specifically is hogwash. No, it should be for man as in mankind. Everyone deserves to be treated fairly and equally.
I have been discussing this topic many times, in various contexts.
Some argue that some groups are oppressed, and require "help", or "boost". Without it they will not be able to break through. It is true, that some groups were wrongly marginalized. It is also true that some groups do have not integrated well into workforce because of their life decisions. Not everybody has to be CEO of company. It is impossible to make everyone equal. As someone from past-soviet country I know well who wants to make everyone equal.
This topic often returns with actions of corporations, which try to fight inequalities. Corporations do not have morality, but they do have an image, and they want to have a good image. They need to have statistics that show that they are moral. They need equality programs. They need hiring quotas. All just to "appear" moral. It is all about perceived morality. PR.
It is also a difficult discussion that requires a lot knowledge, and requires knowledge about many nuances. People like to shoot comments as bullets, but often these are not their own ideas, but ideas of political parties they align to.
We may force, or bribe more women into work force. We may force, or bribe more marginalized social groups. I wonder how longer it will required, and what will happen if we stopped at some point.
It is also a question about equality and equity, and while the latter is often discussed as more fair, for me it is also a PR engineering. It is all about reaching the right stats to not be attacked by leftist mob, that you do not have the right amount of X group. If you decided to treat equally people, you would not be able to integrate marginalized groups. So that is also a little bit disappointing.
There is no easy answer in that. There need to be social programs to help people, but they should not harm our society. People need to be able to compete, and to do that you need environment based on abilities, not on gender, or skin color.
Equity, sometimes understood as total equality is a totalitarian nightmare. Not saying I don't favor a society where the bar for participation is lowered for all members of society. It should usually be a discussion in society itself, nobody can force any solidarity anyway.
For me these secondary discussions around fairness only showed me political parties as well as companies that probably should not be trusted. I do forgive populism in political campaigns, but the opportunism I saw here hints to something quite ugly.
In software I am thinking of a few companies here, mostly larger ones. They are very vocal about gender or racism issues and I believe it simply is a 100% hit rate to detect a very authoritarian leadership style. Most devs probably go there for the money, but it describes the opposite to a relaxed working environment and instead subjects to to some artificial and dogmatic way of thinking. Less of that please.
And you never will seem tolerant of minority opinions if you cannot even restrain yourself from trying to police language. The equation will never resolve itself sensibly.
I'd say we should strive for equal opportunity, not equal outcome. But a long as equal outcome is the goal, it is insanity that a 65/35 ratio is considered a societal emergency that billions of dollars have to be poured into to fix, but a 35/65 ratio is totally fine.
I do trend libertarian so I'd say, spend another few billions to correct the overcorrection of the past decades, so everyone is on the same starting line in the rat race. Then outlaw any gender discrimination in either direction. Remove regulations for equal distribution in boardrooms or politics or whatever. Let people choose what they want, even if you end up with skewed ratios. And if research shows that after a decade, women or men are disadvantaged, apply small corrective action so that opportunity remains the same.
That reminds me of the argument that feminism is for equality. Hell no, it isn't. Otherwise they'd advocate for mens issues as well, rather than taking any mens advocacy as being inherently misogynistic.
The problem is that a lot of the time, at least online, any ground you give to men's issues is almost immediately overtaken by bad faith misogyny with the original, meaningful discourse drowning in it :/
It could be argued that because the ability to discuss mens issues openly is only in few places, because in other places such discussions are almost immediately overtaken by talk about womens issues, often by accusing the original discussion of being misogynistic, it leads to a certain hostility towards discussing womens issues.
I have personally witnessed it multiple times when a discussion about mens issues was turned into a talk about womens issues via that very method. So I get why people turn hostile towards discussing womens issues at all, but I also get how that can come across as misogynistic.
Its a thinly veiled social powergrab .. and not very different to what came before it. There is always a parade, there is always a priest caste, there is always original sin and martyrs. The ideas claim to be different, but the outcome stays the very same. If you see the world in social contracts, all attempts to fix it become a religion. And this synthetic religion violates the Separation between church and state.
I’m interested what you saw here that I clearly missed when I read it. Were you keying into something with the contemporary effort to replace a lot of language with gender neutral terms?
Yes. "Man" and "mankind" are already low key deprecated terms, because they reinforce a very strong historical bias towards male being the "default" sex. In this worldview, society is made of men, and women are accessories. Modern language prefers more egalitarian terms like "humans" and "humanity". The parent was arguing for "egalitarianism" in favor of so-called "reverse sexism" - a point of view I am very sympathetic with - but went out of their way to avoid contemporary sexually neutral terminology in favor of outdated and overtly sexist terminology. Pushback against the overwhelming backlog of casual male-dominating sexism that they deliberately exemplified is the entire reason for the "pushing the pendulum the other way" that they attack. Hence their point was immediately undermined.
Given the overtness of the rhetorical maneuver and the response of the poster, I have to believe it was intentional and possibly bait.
Interestingly, the bias happened in the opposite direction from the one you're assuming.
We used to have the neutral "man" and masculine "wer-man" and feminine "wo-man". We still see that "wer-" prefix in the word "werewolf".
So it's not that we took the masculine word and started using it as the default, but rather that we took the neutral word and added an assumed masculinity. In that context I see less of an issue with trying to reclaim the neutral-ness of "man" and "mankind".
"late Middle English humaine, from Old French humain(e), from Latin humanus, from homo ‘man, human being’. The present spelling became usual in the 18th century; compare with humane."
and for man:
"Old English man(n), (plural) menn (noun), mannian (verb), of Germanic origin; related to Dutch man, German Mann, and Sanskrit manu ‘mankind’."
Interestingly enough, Manu was "the progenitor of mankind" and in Persian (which shares roots with Sanscrit) after Islam the equivalent "progenitor" Adam [aa-dam] is also commonly used to intend 'mankind'.
You know, that's an interesting question. "Newspeak" in 1984 describes two phenomena welded together: that language influences thought (Sapir-Worf), and that government has levers to influence language (which in the book look quite parochial compared to the modern information age). This casts language itself as a political battleground. Supposing we accept this perspective. Then surely it is imperative that we examine the language that we use very critically? Should we not fear the hidden mind-traps in Oldspeak as much as Newspeak? Might we already be unknowing slaves to some politically expedient worldview?
>In this worldview, society is made of men, and women are accessories.
>Pushback against the overwhelming backlog of casual male-dominating sexism that they deliberately exemplified is the entire reason for the "pushing the pendulum the other way" that they attack. Hence their point was immediately undermined.
The actual bigots are the ones crying bigot.
Also, what the sincere fuck. Please get your head out of the toilet bowl and get some fresh air.
As someone who sincerely believes in gender equality, any argument (other than something stemming from unchangable facts of biology) that involves "men" or "women" specifically is hogwash. No, it should be for man as in mankind. Everyone deserves to be treated fairly and equally.