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From: dgross@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (Dave Gross)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Why I Am Not a Feminist
Message-ID: <2813a1d5.40eb@petunia.CalPoly.EDU>
Date: 23 Apr 91 17:44:24 GMT
References: <2805efd1.34d0@petunia.CalPoly.EDU> <1991Apr14.222759.13730@casbah.acns.nwu.edu> <14423@ccncsu.ColoState.EDU>
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	Since I'm the fool that started this thread, I think it's about
	time I clarify some of my remarks and hopefully move this discussion
	along a more constructive path.  As an initial clarifying point,
	let me say that I'm one of those people who would LIKE to be a
	feminist -- my criticism of feminism is not that of an antifeminist
	trying to prove the movement wrong, but of an egalitarian conscience
	trying to understand where a once-egalitarian movement went wrong.

According to handel!farmerl@ccncsu.ColoState.EDU (lisa ann farmer):
>Reading this thread and having dealt with this issue in some depth I see an
>attitude that does not please me.  All these people criticize the works of
>feminists - especially if they are at all tinged with "man-hating".  Has
>anyone heard of process?

	Anybody can excerpt some of the more outrageous fringe literature
	from a group in an attempt to slander that group.  It's a cheap
	game to play, and I was consciously trying to avoid playing that
	game.  My objections are not directly with the works of Solanis,
	et al., since I know that any group as large and diverse as
	feminism can expect to attract some wackos with access to type-
	writers.

	My objection is to the fact that these wackos, no matter how
	anti-male they get, are not seen as the reprehensible bigots that
	they are by the so-called "mainstream" of feminism.

	I would like to see a feminism in which approvingly quoting Valerie
	Solanis in the concluding paragraph of one's essay is treated with
	the same amount of disgust as would quoting Charlie Manson.

	Instead, mainstream feminists like my Women's Studies professor
	(who complains constantly that her feminist friends think she
	is not radical enough), call essays like these "great."

	As an aside, I turned in the "Why I Am Not A Feminist" essay in
	my women's studies class.  The professor read aloud from two
	essays which were written in response to an excerpt from Susan
	Brownmiller's "Against Our Will."

	One was from a woman who wrote a vivid and horrifying account
	of how she and her family felt when an 8-year-old cousin of hers
	was kidnapped and raped.  There wasn't a dry eye in the room
	when the reading was finished.

	The professor introduced my essay by saying something along the
	lines of "And here's something from the other side of the
	issue..."

	Chew on the implications of that for a moment...

>Women are/were angry.  The literature that has come out of that anger is
>angry too.  I think that women's studies should allow the anger along with the
>loving.

	I can understand the psychology behind this angry literature.
	I can try to sympathize with the people who write it and with
	their state of mind.

	But I don't think, as it seems many feminists do, that I should
	give any special credibility to these works because of the
	emotion behind them, or spare them from criticism because of the
	intensity of feeling of the author.

	Surely David Duke was angry when he marched around in a Nazi
	uniform several years back.  This does not mean that I can quote
	David Duke approvingly in an essay and avoid being thought of
	as a nutcase out of some sort of idea that the anger behind
	Duke's actions insulates me from any criticism for taking his
	views seriously.

> Literature needs to be read with its context in mind.  Reading a work
>from the 70's is going to have, in most cases, a different focus than that of
>the 90's. But the process of how and what makes feminism of today is important
>in understanding feminism.

	If this were the focus of these articles in feminist textbooks,
	I would have little or no complaint.  Surely Valerie Solanis
	has her place in the annals of the women's movement, just as
	John Wilkes Booth has his place in American history.

	But the feminist textbooks place Brownmiller not in the chapter
	about the history of feminism, but in the chapter discussing
	theories about how gender roles began (Brownmiller credits rape).

	This to me would be like a civil rights textbook being written
	with the far-out views of Leonard Jeffries (who says that whites
	suffer from an inadequate supply of melanin, making them unable
	to function as well as other groups, and that deformation of
	white genes during the Ice Ages causes whites to commit terrible
	crimes of genocide, while black genes were enhanced by "the
	value system of the sun") or David Duke included not as examples
	of bizarre racism, but included right alongside of, and given
	equal respect to, legitimate writing on civil rights.

	The Republicans consider David Duke an embarassment, and are doing
	their damnedest to distance themselves from him.  The Democrats
	do the same to Lyndon LaRouche.  If the feminists would do the same
	to lunatics like Brownmiller, Solanis, Griffin, et cetera (or at
	least tell them to clean up their act), it would do much to restore
	my confidence (and probably many other people's) in feminism.

--
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- dgross@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
"If men are going to destroy the planet Earth and all its inhabitants with
 violence and wars, all men should be killed, to preserve the rest of human
 kind"						--Betsy Warrior