Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!aero!djo@PacBell.COM From: djo@PacBell.COM (Dan'l DanehyOakes) Newsgroups: soc.feminism Subject: Re: More on AA Message-ID: <1475@pbhyc.PacBell.COM> Date: 5 Jul 89 16:00:18 GMT Sender: nadel@aerospace.aero.org Reply-To: djo@PacBell.COM (Dan'l DanehyOakes) Organization: Pacific * Bell, San Ramon, CA Lines: 46 Approved: nadel@aerospace.aero.org Status: R In article <6750@sdcsvax.UCSD.Edu> Steve Bloch writes: >djo@PacBell.COM (Dan'l DanehyOakes) writes: >>I'm not a feminist, by the way; I'm a peopleist. > >There's a definite problem with this word. Isn't it supposed to be >inclusive? Isn't it supposed to liberate men as much as it liberates >women? Isn't it supposed to be fair, rather than just reversing old >unfairness? In an ideal world, we could use words to mean what they are "supposed to" mean, what their coiners or major proponents would like them to mean. Unfortunately, we live in a real world and words get glommed onto by the mass media and the mass mind and take on meanings that, will-we nil-we, differ from the intentional meaning. Generally, this seems to imply that the populace-at- large find the word so useful for describing something that we/they needed to describe, that we/they chose to accrete this description as a new meaning. One can protest that in technical discussions a word should be used in its technical meaning - but I reply: First, this is not a technical forum; Second, this is not a "technical" subject; Third, that if a word has been given a mass meaning then a different technical meaning is useful only in an extremely formal context, e.g., the scientific meanings of words like "virtual" which differ in important ways from the manner in which Jo Onthestreet would use them. Sigh. So "feminism" has come in the popular mind to mean a movement which advocates the rights of women and only women; further, there is a subset of people calling themselves feminists who actually take this position. Rather than throw the baby out with the bath water, it seems to me easier to avoid the issue entirely. Also: while "feminism" in its intentional sense does indeed liberate men as well as women, it is still too exclusive for my purposes in that it concentrates only on sexual-political issues. To separate these from other issues is not only narrow-minded but quixotic; the cultural matrix is a whole, not a collection of separable parts. Dan'l