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From: mydog!gcf@hombre.masa.com
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Feminism and simplification
Message-ID: <1990Nov16.024148.8164@ora.com>
Date: 16 Nov 90 02:41:48 GMT
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Judy Leedom Tyrer:
|  [commenting on radical feminist stuff]  This is a prime example of
| the "everything evil is caused by men" diatribe which I think is so
| detrimental to the feminist movement.  It is sexist, patently false,
| and overly simplistic.

| Gordon Fitch:
|         [A]ggression and domination were associated with men and were
| highly valued, and the values of cooperation and care were considered
| second-rate, if not despised, and were associated with women.  This
| system of values obtained for many centuries, and much of the ruin of
| the earth, as well as an enormous amount of human suffering, seems to
| derive from it.
| 
| Feminists...would have to confront this set of facts in working out
| their feminism...

mpmst7@unix.cis.pitt.EDU (Mark P Mccullagh):
| The kind of frustration *I* feel is not about the truth or falsity of
| the claims, but rather about how vague and useless they are.  If
| feminists have to choose which values to adopt (how this makes them
| different from anyone else, I don't know), and all they are offered is
| an *extremely* simplistic menu of bad, macho, aggressive stuff vs.
| nice, kind, sweet stuff, the choice is clear: pick Curtain No. 2.
| 
| But, if we are not to hide under some conceptual rug the existence of
| men who have many of the qualities on your "female" list, and women
| who have many of the qualities on your "male" list, we must move
| beyond this binary outlook altogether.  *All together*, too -- surely
| if feminism is the business of rethinking values that have
| demonstrably caused misery and environmental damage, it's something
| men should want to do too.

There have been several related threads in this newsgroup centering
around the question, "What is feminism?"  There are several answers to
the question, but the leading one as far as popularity goes is "to
secure equal rights for women."  This is generally called "reformist"
feminism, because it does not, _per_se_, question the status quo as a
whole, merely the position of women within it.  "Rethinking values
that have ...  caused ... damage" is not part of it.  In fact, if you
accept the reformist position generally, it's hard to say just what
this rethinking is to be called, politically speaking, since it's
excluded from feminism and all other equal-rights movements.

I think this poses a particular problem for feminists because many of
the traditional roles and attributes of women embody the values that,
in the paragraph above, might be seen as the object of the rethinking
of values.  Such despised activities as home-making, for example, are
an excellent paradigm for the management of whole countries, or so
some people think.  The pure form of the reformist philosophy would
apparently simply drop the promulgation of the values, perhaps
expecting some other movement to pick them up.  But there is no other
movement, is there?  If so, what is it?

| One could, of course, say that there are reasons for women to adopt a
| certain set of values that are *not* also reasons for men to adopt the
| same set.  But in that case, one is coming close to the claim that men
| *should* have the set that you characterized them as having (macho,
| bad stuff).  And the closer one gets to that, the more one loses any
| ground for criticizing men who hold that set of values.  

As far as I know, only a very small minority of feminists believe that
biology determines mentality.  A great many would agree, however, that
our cultural history has made women the primary bearers of the
non-macho or anti-macho mindset.  Is this a disability to be corrected
by equalization?  If the status quo is good enough as it is, then that
is the case.  If some kind of change is desirable, and the traditional
masculine virtues of aggression and domination have either lost their
value or never had it, then equalization is only part of the solution.
The other part is might be called feminization, and it applies not
only to women, but to men, and to our institutions and enterprises as
well.

--
Gordon Fitch  |  gcf@mydog.UUCP  |  uunet!hombre!mydog!gcf