Men’s Rights Redditors agree: “It was empathy not misogyny that kept women from having careers.”
Girl totally protected from the harsh world of work by nice men.
Once upon a time, you may recall, women were denied the right to vote, couldn’t own property, were prevented from having careers of their own. Well, it turns out that all of these pesky “restrictions” weren’t really restrictions at all! They were protections that men provided women out of the goodness of their hearts. Men protected women from the terrible burdens of voting and property-owning and so forth, because they just cared about women so much.
Or at least that’s what a lot of Men’s Rights Activists seem to think, judging from this highly edifying discussion in the Men’s Rights subreddit.
![rogersmith25 325 points 1 day ago As I read /r/mensrights[1] more and more, it is becoming increasingly clear to me that the primary female privilege is empathy. If a woman or girl is hurt, people care. If women are kidnapped, there is international media attention. If women are killed, their deaths are highlighted. If there is a conflict between a man and a woman, then people will jump in to defend the woman. If women are under-represented in an area, people want to take action to make things "equal". If a man is hurt, it's funny. If men are kidnapped, we hear silence. If men are killed, their deaths are glossed over. If there is a conflict between a man and a woman, people will attack the man. If men are under-represented in an area, the president will call it a "victory" (as he did regarding the female majority in colleges). Basically, people are programmed to have more empathy for women than men. 200 years ago, that empathy manifested itself in keeping women safe from harm by having them stay home to raise the family rather than die on battlefields or toil in mines. It was empathy not misogyny that kept women from having careers. Present-day, work is safe in offices, so today we have campaigns for women to earn more money and yet have more "balanced" lives where they can both raise a family and earn an "equal" career and, in other words, "have it all". permalink save report give gold reply [–]sierranevadamike 82 points 23 hours ago wow... as a history major, I never looked at the "repression" of women throughout history as empathy rather than misogyny. I NEVER considered this option.. blew my mind.. thank you](http://manboobz.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/empathy1.png?w=604)
It wasn’t just sierranevadamike who was “blown away” by rogersmith25’s comment: the Men’s Rights mods were so impressed that they reposted it and pinned it as the top post in their subreddit.
Apparently every day is “Opposite Day” on the Men’s Rights subreddit.
EDIT: Here, courtesy of Cloudiah, some more pictures of girls and women protected from that big nasty world out there.
Posted on August 17, 2014, in antifeminism, empathy deficit, hundreds of upvotes, imaginary backwards land, mansplaining, men who should not ever be with women ever, misogyny, MRA, oppressed men, reddit, that's completely wrong and tagged anti-feminism, antifeminism, bad history, men's rights, misogyny, MRA, reddit. Bookmark the permalink. 495 Comments.
I know I should be used to it by now, but nevertheless … it never fails to flabbergast me that these dudes think that women aren’t harmed and killed in war. It’s such a US-centric view. Do they think that women weren’t killed in France during the Nazi invasion, occupation, and removal? Do they think the thousands of women who were raped and killed in the Congo don’t exist, or maybe don’t count because they weren’t white? Were Iraqi and Afghan women immune to bullets and bombs?
It takes a special kind of self-centeredness to think that the American experience is the experience of the world.
They also ignore working class women. Especially working class women of color. They have been working since goddamn forever but…somehow….that doesn’t count? The idea of a woman doing nothing but leisure activities was reserved for the very wealthy. Staying at home and caring for the kids was also middle/upper class. But apparently working class and poor women don’t exist in the minds of these fuck faces.
What blows my mind is that this can happen when there are protests because of a male death, when there are people tweeting about suicide and talking about men’s mental health issues! Do these dudes only pay attention and seethe and moan and bitch if they see one of teh wimminz in the news, but if it’s another dude, they just don’t register it? Because I do see attention paid to men, empathy for men in predicaments, like journalists abducted, men killed including soldiers, worries about addiction problems when this problem arises in a male celebrity… do I need to go on?
Oh, and do they not know about the women who worked in coal mines and in factories?
The amount of willful ignorance is painful.
As icing on the cake, I bet none of these fucking fools have EVER had a hazardous job. Or joined the military.
Do women of color even exist in MRALand?
Fucking liar…
Also, that sierranevadamike guy? Is a fucking disgrace to history and all history majors.
@policy– No. I don’t think black women exist in MRAland. If they were ever to exist, it would be to insult them and abuse them along racist AND misogynistic lines.
@saintnick86, he didn’t say he was a good history major.
How they’d no this is empathy when hey don’t have any, I don’t know. I’m no farmer, but this smells like free-range organic bullshit.
Were the only two jobs available to men in Ye Olde Days mining and soldiering? To hear the misters that’s all men ever did before 1945.
“How they’d no?” Oy, reading them makes you dumber.
Yeah, but that was a black man. We know from a couple posts ago that the MHRM is only interested in helping white men. There are apparently too few black men for them to give a shit about.
If you want to see what actual historians thought of this, you might want to read the pretty funny thread on /r/badhistory:
http://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2dru5b/apparently_women_never_worked_in_dangerous_jobs/
katz will be glad that someone even mentions the night witches. XD
Also known in MRAland as “a small subset of men.”
Has the MRM even noticed the protests going on in Ferguson?
Yepp. Empathy. When you’re flat out told you can’t do this or that, and you have to stay at home, which includes having a socially inferior role to your husband – that’s just empathy, don’t you know?
Unfortunately, not necessarily. Having a degree in history unfortunately doesn’t prevent some people from holding some very… pelicular beleifs about history.
For anyone who really wants to know – and most of us really, really don’t – just look at the wiki list of WW2 casualties. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties
Most importantly, go to the bottom of the main list and look at the totals. The total deaths by military action are almost the same for armed forces and for civilians. (Then there’s the add on for civilian deaths by indirect effects.) There are gigantic differences in individual countries between military and civilian deaths by military action, look at Australia and the USA then look at Poland, Netherlands and Greece for examples of this.
It’s far too easy for Oz/US/NZ/Canadian people who’ve suffered very few civilian casualties in the wars we’ve fought in various parts of the world to overlook the tremendous impact of war on civilians where war is fought over, or troops and materiel travel through, their own backyards.
Oh. My. This is just…I’m seriously at a loss for words.
What insanity. I mean, to be so blind as to how history works and the suppositions of various men in the past as to the supposed deficiencies of women (and PoC as well) that you can actually delude yourself into thinking this, among so many MRA false facts. It’s really a staggering thing.
Whoops. That was in response to Policy of Madness.
It’s how semantics work. Women weren’t allowed many “careers” but of course most women were forced to have shitty jobs. Women were usually not allowed to “fight” in wars (but sometimes were allowed), but that really didn’t stop countless from dying or being taken in them. But to them they just hear about a lack of career opportunity and not fighting in wars, so they think that’s the end of it. Women must’ve just been safe all the time. Empathy!
Let’s forget that the lack of careers was about not wanting educated women (when they were allowed to be educated) in competition with men, so they got the lower quality careers. And let’s also forget that in many wars, women are reduced to “spoils”. Empathy!
When I was growing up, a young woman who worked on her family’s farm not far from us had her long hair get caught in a sod-cutting machine and was killed. Right now, just down the road from us, lives a woman with one arm; the other was mangled in a corn-picker and amputated. Farms are notoriously dangerous places and women have suffered their share of accidents.
Also, Triangle Shirtwaist fire, anyone? Women who worked in textile mills in New England? And all that?
WTF is wrong with these dipshits?
Please don’t use “insanity. MRAs have a very deliberate fucked-up worldview.
@deniseelisa – true dat! Black men as a subset of men really don’t count!
You know, I get that this rant is about something other than empathy for women (loss of privilege anyone?), but it is really annoying that when there is a reason to be empathetic toward men (the death in Ferguson, Robin Williams’ suicide), they don’t show any empathy at all because of some other affiliation.
I can still remember the feeling of loss when the lead singer of INXS committed suicide or when Freddy Mercury died…. and that’s been a while! Empathy – you either have it or you don’t.
In fact, for the turn-of-the-20th-century robber barons and robber baron wannabes, having an ostentatiously useless and expensive wife was a status symbol. It meant you were so rich that you didn’t NEED the unpaid labour provided by your spouse, which everybody knew about but didn’t really acknowledge.
…The degree of craniorectal insertion they’ve collectively achieved is on the same or greater level as holocaust deniers.
I have a little story. My (now deceased) grandmother was a schoolteacher in a one-room schoolhouse in a small town in Missouri when she was a young woman. According to her sister and cousins, she was a highly intelligent woman, but back then, young women didn’t have a lot of career choices. One they did have was teaching school.
Grandmother taught school for approximately 6 years then suddenly stopped. “Why?” you may ask? Well, she got married to my grandfather, you see. Back then, when a woman married, it was considered proper for her to quit whatever silly little job she might have, like teaching.* I mean, it wasn’t like she was doing anything important, right? So ended my grandmother’s career. Could she have continued to teach? Yeah, in theory. I don’t think there were any laws against it, but if she would have tried, she would find that no one would hire such a scandalous woman as she to teach impressionable children. She should be at home, tending to her husband, as a godly woman should do, dagnabit!
So when I see MRAs say the shit they do about women in the workplace, I really want to upend a port-a-potty over their heads.
*I don’t know if this was common in other areas of the country, but it apparently happened in this area of the Midwest.
“As a history major…”
Speaking as someone who regularly marks undergrad history papers, I can just imagine the hot mess this clown would give me, considering that he finds the OP’s thesis mind-blowing. While new interpretations drive history as a discipline, they generally they need to be backed up with some kind of archival or oral evidence, which this argument isn’t. Women were hardly pampered on settler frontiers, they were expected not only handle domestic chores, cooking, having children, and look after children, they were also expected to help keep farms running, which is physically taxing work. Not just taking care of gardens, chickens, and cows but ploughing, harvesting, and threshing. Women were also well represented in early nineteenth-century factories, just look up the Lowell Mill Girls. Women worked hard in places like Canada, the U.S., and Australia.
My mother always claimed to be single when looking for jobs in the early 30s, because businesses didn’t want to hire married women. She had to ‘fess up — like many thousands (millions?) of other working women when Social Security came along and you had to tell the truth about your marital status to register for it.
@theladyzombie, Yes that was common out West too.
It’s still kind of true that women are expected to leave their jobs when they get married, even in the US. A young woman who gets married is expected by the business world to start having children shortly thereafter, which means maternity leave, and a lot of time off to take the kids to the doctor or scramble if daycare evaporates for the day, etc. Some companies will subtly force such women out.
“Women were hardly pampered on settler frontiers.” Many women didn’t mange to change out of their day clothes for a week or more because there was so much worth they could only afford to lie down for a few hours when the reached total exhaustion. There is a story about the Rosebrooks, the first settlers in the upper Connecticut Valley near present-day Colebrook, NH. Their cow wandered off across the Connecticut River (which is wide and shallow during the summer) and the woman had to lock her two-year-old in their cabin, throw the baby in a sling, and wade across the river to get the cow back. Just a little sliver of daily life.
One of the best things on this subject is Robert Frost’s poem “A Servant to Servants,” which is a monologue spoken by a severely overworked farm woman who suffers from severe depression.
@theladyzombie
Same for my grandmother. Before she was married she was a secretary. I have seen some of her shorthand books and they are sooooo cool! :)
However, when she got married she had to quit. I don’t know exactly what type of pressure it was though, but I do know that she didn’t have much choice.
This was Australia in the 40s and 50s.
My ex MIL was going to go to college on a scholarship, I *believe* this was the early to mid 1960’s.
Well, she got married. So the college withdrew the scholarship money.
My husband had maiden aunts who never married because they wanted to keep teaching. Teachers were often “spinsters”. They were sisters who lived together their whole lives. considering what being married in rural Kentucky might have meant for them, I’d say they made a wise choice.
If…women were never permitted to do dangerous roles, there would be no human race. The historical level of maternal deaths was about one in a hundred births. In maternity institutions, in the 1800s (which seems to be about when half of these guys are placing their theories), it was forty percent.
Forty percent!
And even if it did not directly kill you, it certainly led to the usual issues which were not as easy to deal with when you were also working to maintain a household.
Mostly I am reminded of an old Scottish book my partner has where the farmers are musing over a suitable wife for their sons, and listing the required attributes – looks came a long way down on the list compared to ‘able to lift a newborn calf up’ and ‘can run up and down the hills after a lost sheep’.
Empathy? Empathy kept women from pursuing an education, a career, vote, own property, etc. That’s…not empathy. I think the word they’re looking for is sexism.
But then, these guys wouldn’t know empathy if it bit them in the ass.
sparky: Empathy? Empathy kept women from pursuing an education, a career, vote, own property, etc.
Wait – whatever happened to “women are unfeeling heartless bitches”?
sparky
<Snooty>Weeeeell, if it bit them in the ass, it wouldn’t really be empthy…</Snooty>
Phoenician in a time of Romans
No, it’s men’s empathy for women. They feel soooo much empathy for women, they must prevent them from being touched by dangerous jobs and wars (in fantasy MRA history that is).
The stupidity and historical inaccuracy of the claims that women didn’t do difficult and dangerous has already been covered. So I’ll move on to the other false claim. That women and girls get tons of news coverage when they are killed and abducted.
That’s true. If they are white, attractive and middle or upper class. Preferably blonde. Then they’ll get plenty of coverage. Poor women? Women of color? Not so much.
I vividly remember that right around the time the murder of JonBenet Ramsey there was a little four year old black girl that was shot and killed while caught in the crossfire during a drive by in my metro area. I remember thinking that the little minute long blurb on the local news was all that child would get. Nobody would remember her name but the people who knew her. Yet JonBenet Ramsey was the lead news story for weeks, maybe months and people still remember her. Would that be the case if she was poor and black? Hell no.
Fuck these guys. Women and girls are killed or go missing without many people noticing or caring all the fucking time. Particularly those that are the descendants of the people (men and women, boys and girls) who built the US without any credit, recognition, payment or even choice in the matter. The white guy with the gun sure doesn’t look like the oppressed one in this picture.
Then there’s all the violence that happens to Native America women on reservations – some of it from outsiders that take advantage of jurisdictional issues to freely commit sex crimes against women- that goes mostly unremarked upon.
Also, how many sex workers are killed in this country without anyone giving a shit? I’m not sure anyone is even bothering to keep track.
This rant is getting long now so I’ll stop for a bit.
The level of empathy I feel coming off the MRA’s is… underwhelming.
Dudes, mining and military aren’t the only two dangerous fields. Try being a canary in the TNT factories during WW1 (not as cute and feathery as it sounds), childbirth prior to antibiotics and sterilization techniques, and…
There are a lot of dangerous jobs.
How the heck does empathy and wanting to protect people from danger make denying people the right to vote and own property make any sense?
“Here! Work with these toxic chemicals ’til your skin turns yellow, but don’t go getting any ideas about voting into your pretty little head.”
Also, can I second WWTH?
Same empathy that’s now taking the responsibility of managing their reproductive choices out of the hands of the women in the USA? So they don’t have to worry their pretty little heads about whether or not they’re doing the right thing using their health insurance to obtain contraception, or deciding if and when they want to have a family?
Strange, I’m not familiar with this alternate meaning of “empathy” to denote “self-serving idiocy spun to sugar-coat centuries of reducing women’s agency”.
These guys took Hamlet’s line “I am cruel only to be kind” just a LITTLE too seriously and globally, y’all.
I can’t wait to see this guy’s face when he gets an F or gets dropped out. “Feminist conspiracy!” He’ll be thinking.
It seems like “dangerous job” is defined by MRA as “any job that (we think) is done mostly by men that has a risk of death or injury”–which lets them ignore female-dominated fields as dangerous jobs. Like clothing manufacturing–besides the sweatshop conditions, sometimes the buildings collapse, like so: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324874204578441912031665482
Or sex work, which I don’t think anyone can dispute has a high risk of violence.
Or nursing, which–besides the violence–often requires lifting grown adults, exposure to bodily fluids, exposure to people with nasty infectious diseases.
Nail salons–there is a reason the workers wear masks.
Vet tech–you get bit. A lot.
Historically, both cooking and laundry were dangerous jobs almost exclusively done by women, with harsh chemicals, boiling water, and open flames (and dresses, which didn’t help).
Actually, in the US, most job-related mortality, especially for common jobs, comes from transportation–i.e., the most dangerous job in the US is driving for your job. (Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelynsmith/2013/08/22/americas-10-deadliest-jobs-2/) The second highest cause of mortality was violence.
Also, my job requires me to work with concentrated acids (in fairly large quantities, in a hood), a known carcinogen (in very low quantities, on the bench) and a suspected inhalation carcinogen (in medium quantities, and usually in a bio-safety cabinet). I wouldn’t classify it as particularly dangerous, though.
Actually, the only injury I’ve received on this job is ergonomic–something about pipetting in the biosafety cabinet (especially for several hours at a time in the first couple weeks of work) fucked my shoulder up so badly I spent all weekend with a heating pad on it. I only get twinges now, but goddamn it, that hurt. I think it was the confined space–I had to wrench my shoulder up to be able to use my elbow to get a full range of motion in the cabinet.
On the subject of women leaving work, I know that in England even into the 1930’s and 40’s, women were ‘legally disqualified’ from working upon marriage. In this book ‘Can Any Mother Help Me’ it documents the lives of women who were able to attend university and work but who had to give it all up when they married. Among them were journalists, playwrights,bankers and physicists. One of them earned a lot more than her fiancee. http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2007/mar/04/society
@unimaginative– So, in other words, a bon-bon eating wife who loafs about all day on sofas. I thought MRAs HATED those women? EMPATHY
It seems like in the US and maybe other first-world countries, the ideal that a woman didn’t do any work outside the home developed in the 1800s, but it was only for a few decades in the mid-twentieth century where significant numbers of women could go without paying labor, and it turned out to be a highly unstable situation.
My understanding is the “housework” for most of history was (a) much more time consuming than it is today and (b) often included doing crafts or small-plot agriculture both for home use and, if possible, for sale, and therefore was very much employment–even outside any other employment a woman might have had. In the mid-twentieth century, the standards for housewifery increased, but the sheer physical necessities of feeding and clothing the family were not full-time jobs in themselves, and it didn’t bring in extra cash.
The general rule, so far as I can tell, is that under most conditions, women and men of the same class work basically as hard as each other–i.e., a privileged class of women is usually married to a privileged class of men (lets not forget that keeping up with the social requirements of a rich man’s wife is a job of its own) and down the line.
“Once upon a time, you may recall, women were denied the right to vote, couldn’t own property, were prevented from having careers of their own. Well, it turns out that all of these pesky “restrictions” weren’t really restrictions at all! They were protections that men provided women out of the goodness of their hearts.”
Except for the lower classes. I’m always compelled to point this out because every one of my female ancestors worked, my mother for the phone company, my grandmother in the shipyards, great grandma was a house maid until her death. My family is full of women who had careers, who worked both at home and outside, who built businesses, who sold eggs, who took in laundry.
In the lower classes, men really did provide protection. Not all men of course, some where too busy drinking or hanging themselves to be of much use, but that pair bonding, that male protection has always been far more important and far more evident among the poor than among the elite.
I dislike the perception that promotes this idea that our mothers and grandmothers were just sad oppressed women until feminism came along and freed us, because I think it’s kind of dismissive towards who those women were. Like it or not, feminism has always been an ideology of the upper classes, the elite, who have had a tendency to look down on those they claim to be speaking for.
That was your takeaway from all of this?
Did you read the thread? We’re all aware that women we’re obviously all aware that women worked. There was no need to come along and ‘splain it to us.
Where did you get that idea that being in a marginalized class = being sad all the time? That’s not how it works. People make the best of what they have and find happiness on their own terms. That doesn’t mean oppressive structures weren’t and aren’t in place.
Also, are you under the impression that we’re all members of elite classes here? Do you really think all feminists are upper class white women anymore? Feminism has come a long way since the days of Betty Friedan. Upper class white feminism gets discussed in the media more often because the msm is by and for the elites of our society but that doesn’t mean that represents all of feminism.
insanitybytes22:
Yep. Protected their wives right out of their paychecks, they did.
What? What world do you live in? “Male protection” has always been a code word for benevolent sexism. And what exactly are men protecting women from, eh?
Well, good thing that’s not what’s going on here then.
You don’t know what feminism is, do you?
And please, do not presume to speak for this working-class feminist, thank you very much.
“Upper class white feminism gets discussed in the media more often because the msm is by and for the elites of our society but that doesn’t mean that represents all of feminism.”
Really? When was the last time we had a poor black woman on TV talking about what she thought about women’s rights? When was the last time feminism didn’t look down on the so called “oppressed” and dictate a solution? Where’s the support for stay at home moms, for blue color women, for those who don’t seek higher education as the answer to everything?
The truth is, feminism has become a very elite presence, where even the alleged “oppressive structures” are identified and defined for us. The vast majority of women in the US don’t care about intersectionality, hierarchies, and structures, they worry about militarized police, having their kids shot, and the skyrocketing suicide rate among men.
The other issue, of course, is what happened after the man died or abandoned the women. In NZ, the widow’s benefit was the first social security benefit introduced after the old age pension, see http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/1966/welfare-services/page-2
In order to receive the benefit, I’m pretty sure that the woman had to demonstrate that she was suitable, i.e. wasn’t a prostitute or a drunk. Maori were still heavily rural at that time, the visible issue would have been destitute women in cities where the bulk of the MP voters lived.
So barring women from work also had severe repercussions for women whose relationships broke up, who had relied on a man for income. It’s not like they could replace the man in the workforce even if they had the exact same skills.
And people forget how some recent female jobs like secretary were originally all performed by men.
I also remember a case from a university paper when the printing typesetting shifted from moving type(?) to electronic type, in I think the 1970s. The women in the printing organisations were the only ones who could touchtype. With the printers’ union behind them, the women were all made redundant and replaced by the men who couldn’t touchtype, even though typing was the key task in the new occupation. Empathy my arse.
Oy vey. Yeah, please don’t speak for the working class.
Wow. The unintentional irony is amazing here.
Was insanitybytes22 always a troll?
*working-class feminist is what I meant.
When did feminism become a US-only cause? I missed that memo.
I think insanitybytes is pulling our collective leg — or maybe trying to live up to her moniker, I dunno.
“In the lower classes, men really did provide protection. Not all men of course, some where too busy drinking or hanging themselves to be of much use, but that pair bonding, that male protection has always been far more important and far more evident among the poor than among the elite.”
Yeah, sure — in that imaginary land of the lower class milk and honey.
You’d have to show some evidence that in the lower classes “male protection has always been far more important and far more evident.” Your imagination is not enough.
What exactly do you mean by “male protection” here, anyway? Protection from hardships of labor necessary to sustain the family, which is what these “empathetic” MRA talk about? That most certainly does not apply (and never did) to lower classes, where women’s paid labor, in addition to their domestic duties, was always essential to survival.
“Was insanitybytes22 always a troll?”
There’s a real irony within feminism these days. Anytime a woman attempts to speak for herself, she is immediately shut down. You will not speak or think for yourself, evah!
And that is precisely what I mean about feminism now being a game played by the elite and privileged, who could really give a crap about the issues facing women today.
You’re being criticised for saying things that aren’t backed up by evidence. This isn’t shutting you down, it is calling you out on BS. Learn to tell the difference.
Learn reading comprehension. I already said that the corporate media, being controlled by elites, generally only represent their interests. Of course there aren’t many poor or working class feminists, let alone non-white poor or working class feminists and womanists on TV. The exception being Melissa Harris-Perry. She frequently has working class or poor women of color who are community activists as guests
Just because you ignore feminists who aren’t Sheryl Sandburg types doesn’t mean they aren’t there. You can find many feminists who are non-wealthy, non-white or both right here on this site. I’m white but I’m sure has hell not an economic elite.
You keep claiming feminists are all wealthy white women who look down and whitesplain but you aren’t providing any evidence of this. There are some wealthy white feminists who are clueless and privilege blind. I’ll certainly admit that, but to claim that’s all we are is ridiculous.
If you go back and read those reddit MRA posts and Mammotheers posts you’ll find the former are the group that are condescending, clueless and privilege blind. Not us.
Citation needed for all of this.
Feminism undoubtedly has a history of only focusing on a small subset of women, but you are being either disingenuous or ignorant. Alongside feminism’s history of exclusion is a rich history of marginalized women espousing feminism. In fact, intersectionality itself was a methodology invented by Kimberle Crenshaw, a black woman and a feminist. There have also been plenty of radical feminists who aren’t straight, white, abled, neurotypical, middle-class and cis.
Also, your irony is impressive. You say that feminists tell women what their oppression is, yet you disregard the fact that marginalized women themselves have advocated for their interests in the name of feminism. Again, I don’t deny the oppressive things that have been done by privileged feminist women, but you are just as oppressive as them if you talk about marginalized women as if they never had a voice in feminism or have ever benefited from feminism.
These are… not things that are mutually exclusive, actually. In fact I’d say that they are pretty mutually inclusive. I’d also say that people can totally be talking about intersectionality, hierarchies, and structural oppression without actually saying those specific words. The terms are certainly useful in academic discussion, and have their place in non-academic discussion as well, but you don’t actually have to use the jargon to talk about the concepts or the realities that they bring.
This blog post suggests to me that insanitybytes22 has a combination of beliefs that I would find odd for a feminist to hold:
http://insanitybytes2.wordpress.com/2014/08/11/plain-speaking-about-abortion/
I don’t think they are arguing in good faith.
Who is censoring you? You said some things the rest of us thought were bullshit and so we’re disagreeing with you.
I’m not going to apologize or shut up. If you were too ignorant or lazy to do some basic internet searching so you could find out that there are plenty of working class and poor women who identify as feminist and plenty of women of color who identify as feminist or womanist that’s your own fault.