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From: gcf@mydog.UUCP
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Feminism's ill effects on men?
Message-ID: <88735@aerospace.AERO.ORG>
Date: 16 Oct 90 23:37:02 GMT
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>[This is drifting off the subject.  Followups should probably go to somewhere
>else, maybe talk.politics.misc.                                         - MHN]

It seems to me that the question of what rights are, and how they
are worked out, are directly on the subject; the supposed ill effects
of feminism on men have been mainly discussed here in terms of 
conflicts of rights.  

[I think it's relevant, but we need to be careful to avoid drifting into a
mire of philosophy without the application, which could go beyond the charter
of this newsgroup.  In general, I try to give a liberal interpretation to
relevance to feminism.                                             - MHN]


In regard to "ill effects" I notice with relief the disappearance 
of the theory that feminism, by encouraging women to be more assertive 
sexually and otherwise, has destroyed men's sexuality.  (This was the 
theme of _Sexual_Suicide_, was it not?)  Onward....

In <87443@aerospace.AERO.ORG>, gcf@mydog.UUCP (Gordon Fitch) writes:
> 
> Does feminism oppress men?
> 
> Well, what is oppression?  We might say that it is the reduction
> of the victim's freedom -- freedom being the ability to do what
> one wants.  Perfect freedom would be the ability to do anything
> one wanted, but such freedom runs into a problem on the social
> plane: people's wills impinge upon one another, and often 
> conflict.  Those who prevail impose upon, oppress, those who
> don't.

dwp@willett.pgh.pa.us (Doug Philips):
>I think your definition is too general to be very useful.  My working
>definition of Oppression does not speak merely of the dominance of one
>individual over another.  It speaks to the systematic domination of
>groups of people by other groups, explicitly for the advantage of
>those "oppressing" groups and the detriment of the "oppressed" groups.
>One reason your definition "the reduction of freedom" is too general
>is that in encompasses non-human restrictions ...
>             ...  It also fails to distinguish between situations in
>which there is and in which there is not a benefitting subgroup. ...

I believe I mentioned groups as well as individuals competing for
rights, and I thought it was clear that I was speaking about social
or political relationships.[1]

I'm assuming by "systematic" you mean "organized as a system."
If we insist that oppression mean "systematic domination by 
groups imposed for profit on other groups", we run into 
problems analyzing, for example, class oppression.  The members 
of an oppressing class often act in an unorganized way, and 
often to their own disadvantage, in perpetuating oppression.  It 
is very hard for some people to understand that the class of 
(for example) whites may oppress the class of blacks, because 
they know many whites who do not personally oppress blacks and 
they know of no conspiracy against blacks among white people, as 
systematic oppression would require.  (Sometimes the analogy of 
cellular automata, where many small, unrelated actions add up to 
large patterns, may explain this kind of situation to the 
unbeliever.)

Another problem with _oppression_ in a context of rights conflict
is that it is a pejorative, and therefore we must find a kind of
ideal judge to determine whose rights are oppressive (bad), and 
whose aren't.  An ideological struggle then ensues for the 
possession of this judge, and that is how people can seriously 
assert that feminism oppresses men -- it is competing for the 
right to determine what is oppression and what isn't.  Instead 
of getting rid of domination, we have only extended the arena 
of conflict.

I think this is especially important to the feminist perspective
because if, as Engels hypothesized, the saturation of human
society with domination-relationships began with the enslavement
of women, then we might look for a dissolution of that burden in
the reestablishment of freedom and dignity for the feminine side
of humanity (whether you think this means the female human beings
or the female _in_ human beings).  This means going deeper and
further than naming one or another _the_oppressor_, although
certainly those who are being leaned on must lean back enough to
get their balance.
--
[1] Although it is possible to regard Nature as an oppressed
political class.  See the article on ecofeminism.
--
Gordon Fitch  |  uunet!hombre!mydog!gcf