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From: fwy@cs.brown.edu (Felix Yen)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: re: Why I Am Not a Feminist
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Date: 14 Apr 91 19:41:44 GMT
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Dave Gross (dgross@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU) writes:

>  [...]
>  If you ignore the vivid bra-burner image (many now claim that bras
>  were only burned in the minds of certain anti-feminist journalists),
>  what it comes down to is that these non-feminists see a contradiction
>  between their ideal of gender equality, and what they see as
>  feminism's anti-male stance.
>
>  Is this a fair attack on feminism?  Is feminism so anti-male that its
>  doctrine of gender equality is compromised?  I think so.

I think not.  Maybe there are feminists who are anti-male.  Should we
infer that all feminists are anti-male?  Again, I think not.  If this
sort of reasoning is sound, we could do even better.  Some feminists
are lesbians.  I am not a lesbian.  Therefore I am not a feminist?

>  [...]
>  I discovered one of my favorite anti-male feminist quotes when I took
>  "Sociology of Sex Roles" at Cal Poly a few quarters ago.  It's from an
>  article by Susan Griffin called "Rape: The All-American Crime" that
>  was included in one of the textbooks for that course.
>
>          "[I]f the professional rapist is to be separated from the
>           average dominant [male] heterosexual, it may be mainly a
>           quantitative difference."
>
>  Think about the implications of that one for a minute.  That the
>  difference between a heterosexual man and a rapist is only one of
>  degree.

This does seem like a lot to stomach.  But having been in the business
of quantifying things, I have begun to wonder if *all* qualitative
differences can not ultimately be viewed as differences of degree.
For example, there appears to be a qualitative difference between the
colors red and green, but when you think of the visible light spectrum,
it is easy to see their difference as quantitative.

>  [...]
>  And my position, and the positions of other non-feminists, is not
>  likely to change until the "mainstream" feminists start denouncing
>  feminists like Brownmiller and Griffin and Solanis as the hate-filled
>  sexists that they are.

An alternative course of action would be to join the fray and denounce
anti-male statements (as opposed to the people making these statements)
yourself, i.e. change feminism from within.  How does one recognize when
the situation has deteriorated to the point where it warrants abstention?


                                    Felix

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