By David Futrelle
I found the meme above on the front page of the Men’s Rights subreddit today, with 82 upvotes (and counting). It’s a pretty good illustration of the standard story MRAs tell themselves about feminism: Once upon a time there was Good Feminism, it was modest and polite and didn’t ask for much. But then along came Tumblr feminists with their purple hair and they ruined everything!
While some MRAs in the Men’s Rights subreddit thread do take issue with the blatant historical inaccuracies of this meme, the enormous popularity in MRA circles of this narrative about feminism — which bears about as much resemblance to actual feminist history as the Men’s Rights movement does to a legitimate civil rights movement, which is to say none — reveals how little the typical MRAs actually know about the movement they pretty much devote all their time to denouncing. Not that their complete ignorance of feminism keeps them from having many very strong opinions about it, which they would like to tell you about at length.
Of all the dumb things in the above meme, their weird sanitized fantasy version of 2nd wave feminism amuses me the most. Hey MRAs, go take a look at Sisterhood is Powerful or the Redstockings online archive, or something.
@mildlymagnificent
I’m always discouraged by the number of young feminists that are hypercritical about the foremothers of the “second wave” without having the slightest idea of what struggles were going on at the time. They raise Monday-morning quarterbacking to a high art form.
As an example, everyone today fashionably hates Betty Friedan for being lesbian-exclusive, without understanding that one of the first battles the feminist movement had to win was to defeat the charge that they were just a bunch of lesbians who were bitter because they couldn’t get a man. (At that time, there were very few out lesbians who were willing to explain that that wasn’t the reason they were lesbians.) There were plenty of people who wanted to strangle feminism in its crib, and the women who fought for its survival were very brave people. Yes, they made mistakes — they were human beings, unfortunately.
The first group of feminists were mostly young well-educated women who wanted to have careers. (At the time, it was common for a young woman to apply for a management-track job but be told, “All our girls start in the typing pool.”) Their concerns were inevitably skewed to the particular problems they had. And whenever they did try to broaden the movement, people went around telling working-class black women that “those rich white girls don’t care about you.” Divide and conquer.
As to the trans issue, there wasn’t one back then. The only really visible trans person was Renee Richards, and the big issue was whether she (who had been a large, powerful man but a mediocre male tennis player) should be allowed to compete as a woman pro tennis player, where her testosterone-engendered muscles would give her a significant advantage. Trans is always going to be a problem for traditional feminists, since mainstream feminist thought has always regarded gender as a social construct with little or no biological reality, whereas trans theory is based on the belief that gender is so real that you need to change your body to conform with your personality. (I personally regard myself as not having a gender at all, since I choose not to conform to either traditional pattern.) In any case, discrimination or violence against trans people is totally indefensible and despicable.
I think it is also possible to believe (as many feminists have traditionally believed) that sex work is almost always exploitative of women, but to understand that under the present economic system it may well be the best choice available to many women. People (mostly men) who profit off sex work should be censured, but not the women who do the work.
Mildlymagnificent,
But we do know what she thinks now. We have her words.
And they are toxic.
@ Citizen Rat, Re Punk, Alt, Glam and what have you –
Yes, us too 🙂
Me and my usual drinking buddy, and we were just listening to some tunes and I remembered –
Debbie Harry.
Thought of this song –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_WLw_0DFQQ
There are no words, to describe this.
FANTASTIC!
@ Tov01
In general, a Japanese school name will have three parts:
-the first part indicates whether it’s public or private.
-the second part is the actual name, commonly based on location.
-the third part indicates the type of school (elementary, junior/senior high, college, vocational or specialized, etc)
For example:
Tōkyō Toritsu Mizuho Nōgei Kōtōgakkō
-Tōkyō Toritsu means the school is run (ritsu) by the Tokyo Metropolitan government (Tōkyō To).
-Mizuho is the name of the school, in this case for the town it’s located in (Mizuho, in western Tokyo)
-Nōgei Kōtōgakkō indicates an agricultural (Nōgei) high school (Kōtōgakkō), which in Japan covers US grades 10-12 or Fifth and Sixth Forms in the UK.
This is not an absolute rule. Many private high schools, especially those that combine junior and senior high school or are affiliated with a university, will use different patterns, and of course name shortenings abound. However, it is a fairly standard form.
As for Mahoutokoro, given its location on South Iwo Jima (Minami-Iōtō in Japanese), it would likely be named something like Kokuritsu Minami-Iōtō Mahō Gakuen (Kokuristu meaning a public school run by the national government, or in this case the Japanese Ministry of Magic; Minami-Iōtō for the location; and Mahō Gakuen for Magic (Mahō) Academy (Gakuen)).
As another older lurker here I have to support the criticism of Germaine Greer. I belong to the generation following her who were strongly influenced by her work.
She hasn’t made transphobic remarks once in passing. It’s persistent and widely reported in Australian media at the least.
I admire her early work but her recent contributions to public conversations have been hugely problematic. From telling our female Prime Minister to wear different clothes to disguise her “big arse” to repeated statements that trans women are “not real women” All live on our national broadcaster.
I understand the respect her work has garnered but I need to balance that with the lack of respect she shows others.
@KindaSortaHarmless
Thanks for indulging me. I always find this kind of stuff fascinating.
Kereea:
“–Tend to get angry if a man calls himself a feminist since only women can be feminists (no, really, several say this) and thus men should have to identify as “feminist allies” only”
I mean, I’m a pro feminist dude and I don’t entirely disagree with this. I do think that men who want equality face very different (and often smaller) struggles.
GrumpyOld SocialJusticeMangina,
Yyyyyes, Trans WAS an issue in the days of Second Wave Feminism. It would have been ‘an issue’ whether or not it was engaged by feminists. However, it certainly was. It was typically answered with various degrees of hostility, from Gloria Steinem’s accusations of “surgical mutilation” to Janice Raymond’s “The Transsexual Empire: The Making Of The She-Male” where she says “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies” and accuse trans people of being Frankensteinian creations of patriarchal surgeons intended to colonize women’s identity. It was a hot topic, and the Second Wave, by and large, was very strongly in opposition to transgender. Mind, as early as 1970, there was an enormous where the lesbian and gay communities were forcing trans people out. There’s a lot of history there of the period that you’re missing. Start with reading the work of Susan Stryker. There was a lot of good work done in the second wave. However, some of that ground was gained at the expense of the more marginalized. I’ll leave it to each individual to decide the good or bad of this.
Further, your characterization of transgender theory is so reductive as to be poppycock. Certainly, you can find those who believe, as you say, that gender is so real they need to surgically alter their bodies. Others choose not to, recognizing gender as a social construct, while others adhere to the notion of the construct, but alter their bodies for their own comfort. Some deal with it, as surgery is beyond their means. There is so much of the transgender experience, historically and today, that you’re unaware of, if not ignoring. If it’s the former, good news! You can still educate yourself!
Tov01 says:
(Disclaimer: I’m a fan of Japanese fantasy, but I’m not in any way Japanese, so take this with a grain of salt.)
Mahoutokoro is supposed to be a particularly ancient school, but the name seems to sound like it’s from the Edo period to a lot of Japanese people. Typical Edo period schools were named for something of local or moral significance, or they just stated what you’d learn there (so I guess “mahō” works in this instance). Then it would end in a suffix that identified it as an institution of some sort. Common ones were “-kan”, “-dō”, and “-jo”. I’m not sure of the particular connotations of each suffix, though.
Note that “-jo” is the Chinese derived way to pronounce “tokoro.” So if you just change the “tokoro” to “-jo” to match the Chinese-derived pronunciation of “mahō”, “Mahō-jo” could fit the conventions of that time period. It wouldn’t really work for anything older. On the other hand, schools were regularly renamed, so an older school could have been given a more modern name at some point.
However, the biggest problem is that Rowling’s choice lacks any kind of whimsy. Why would Japanese wizard society follow the most stolid, literal-minded conventions of Japanese muggle society? Surely they would name the school after something mystical. There are already places all over Japan named after mystical things.
The school could take the suffix “-an” which indicates a hermitage or tea-house. That would have the right mystical, reclusive, and traditional flavors and would be ironically understated for a larger institution. (Heck, the entrance to the school could be a little tea house which magically opens up into a massive school grounds.)
If this school is supposed to be on a remote island in the southern seas, perhaps a name like Shiranui-an would work well. Shiranui are ghost lights appearing over the sea in the folklore of Kyushu. It would mean something like Hermitage of the Mysterious Lights. It would be amusingly self-referential, since everyone at the school would know they themselves are the source of the mysterious lights.
I wonder if they’re aware of just how exclusionary First and Second Wave feminism was, given many of those involved cared more about benefiting white cis-gendered women than just about anyone else. That’s not to say either movement was illegitimate or failed to accomplish anything – far from it – but it’s always rather telling to me that it’s the Third Wave, easily the most inclusive and intersectional of the bunch, that is rabidly demonized.
It’s more telling given how hostile those same MRAs are towards racial justice or acknowledging that transgender individuals legitimately exist. They’re fine as long as white cis-gendered individuals feel comfortable and aren’t called out for their bigotry, which only proves that – despite the lip service they may pay – they couldn’t give less of a shit about beneficial social changes. They like the status quo and would rather no one ever rocked the boat to get shit done.
I’ve had a lot of annoying conversation with such people, who claim they’re all for social change – only to then dismiss all the methods to enact such. They seem to assume such changes just happen naturally over time, even though I’m pretty sure no social issue just went away after a period of time. Official slavery didn’t simply cease to exist one day out of the goodness of the slaver-owners’ hearts, but because people actively tried to abolish it and kept doing so until it happened.
BTW, KindaSortaHarmless & A. Noyd:
Love your posts on Japanese nomenclature – hard not to, as something of a Japanophile. As Tov01 said, it’s very fascinating.
@mildlymagnificent
The link is to things she said in 2015. If that’s her current attitude, I cannot imagine that it was different in the 70s or would have been in an alternate 70s with more trans visibility.
@Jesalin
This.
@Grumpy
Two Thousand Fifteen, asshole.
@ A. Noyd
I really like the name Shiranui-an, and the idea of the entrance to the school being a teahouse. It’s kind of like how the entrance to Diagon Alley is that quintessentially English institution, the pub.
@Roberta Loblaw
As best we can tell, even in a “genderless” utopia, there would still be people suffering from dysphoria/body dysmorphia in relation to their sexed bodily characteristics and which would require surgery/HRT to alleviate. Recognition of gender as a social construct doesn’t remove some people’s need to physically transition, just as recognition of biological sex as a social construct doesn’t mean individual body parts/aspects of biology aren’t sexed in objectively measurable ways.
So I’d shy away from assuming transness is always gender-enforcing or necessarily requires gender to be inherently biological.
PeeVee the (Perpetually Ignored, Invisible but Noice) Sarcastic
Absolutely.
And it’s totally bloody aggravating, infuriating, that someone as intelligent and talented as she is now, and has always been, is so resistant to perfectly reasonable and sensible development of knowledge and attitudes.
Does she really think that attitudes that formed on the basis of _seriously_ limited knowledge when she was less than 30 should remain firmly in cast iron (stone’s not tough enough, it can be carved and sculpted) all the way to death 60 or more years later? She’d be the first to criticise others for remaining ignorant, for clinging to prejudice and bigotry, for not learning and developing over several decades.
Apparently she feels immune to any such necessity within herself. (Perhaps that’s the problem. Maybe she can’t allow herself to admit – to herself – that she was ever ignorant. Which is a prime failing for an academic, I’d say.)
@GrumpyOld SocialJusticeMangina
You and I have had this conversation before. I’ve already told you that you are significantly misunderstanding what being transgender is. It has nothing to do with personality, and most trans people do not think it is necessary to medically transition.
I value your experience and thoughts, but if you are going to continue to hold with this complete misapprehension of what it means to be transgender, I might suggest you leave alone the topic since you aren’t making any attempt to understand it. You don’t see me trying to teach astrophysics to anyone, I leave that to the astrophysicists.
Are you bloody serious? So she’s only a vile, toxic terf due to limited information, (relative) youth and personal stubbornness?
I have no words. Or rather, I have lots of words, it’s just that very few of them, right now, are very polite.
Going back to the original graphic for a moment…is that figure in black supposed to be Darth Vader (as some here have already suggested), or a dormant volcano god(dess)/spirit? Because that’s what that last pic reminds me of – a mountain with eyes.
Maybe this gal as Darth Volcana? XD
@ Redsilkphoenix
I rather like the idea of the “4th wave feminist” being the volcano goddess from Moana.
@ Jesalin
I forget what it’s called, but there’s a kind of cognitive bias where people tend to favor the first bit of information they learn about something over later bits. I think it was described to me as a variant of confirmation bias: the first bit sets the baseline, and primes the mind to favor data that supports it and disregard data that does not.
Not to mention people who fail to understand how science works using the argument that “science was wrong before” to justify ignoring new data that would challenge existing viewpoints.
Do you wonder if misrepresenting the history of feminism makes them feel safer? Feminists can be dangerous!
@ kindasortaharmless
That’s “primary regency effect”.
Must confess only know that because Scildfreja just told me about it in another thread.
@Roberta Loblaw
Thanks for that rebuttal, yours is a much calmer tone than mine would have been.
This is why I try to avoid labels like “toxic” for individual people who haven’t grossed physical boundries — someone will feel challenged by association with their school of thought and the conversation will likely become a quarrel that only widens the ideological gulf.
I’d prefer to say that people got it wrong in all the usual ways they do when there’s a lot of high tension politics involved. Doesn’t make them either saints or sinners, but their works should be read with an ever increasing dosage of salt or eventually be kept to footnotes.
One thing I really resented about @GrumpyOld s post was the victim blaming on trans folks. With the famous shoe throw by a trans person in stonewall street 1969 as a result of continued repression, ones has to wonder how much more “out there” trans folks would have to have been to avoid criticism of hiding in a closet. Also there was Lili Elbe and the first (fatal) “sex reassigment” in Germany 1930, who had even writen a book prior to her death. Around the same time there where drag balls in harlem. Compare source, especially regarding Christine Jorgensen 1952 . So yeah, I can accept that some activists might have overlooked trans people, but I do believe that it was a willfull exclusion (not neccesarily from malice but from ideological purity) on the part of the larger movement. It definetly didn’t need tumblr or Caitlyn Jenner to become aware of trans folks.
I’ve tried to learn trans theory but yet to really see any I was able to follow – it can be confusing because different people seem to use terms like ‘gender’ in different ways. Having asked a few trans folks about it and got differing replies, I think it seems like some disagreement is reasonable?
@NickNameNick
I don’t find third wave any better at intersectionality, worse often enough as theory is less unified. It too frequently fails by leaving class, even race, out of the equation, or treating it as though it justifies an injustice (eg. poor brown people join in the army as a defence of the military, rather than looking at the circumstances behind having few good job options and the impacts of American imperialism) rather than something to change in itself. I absolutely do not trust any wave on disability rights issues. When there is an issue, it’s usually down to weak analysis rather than any one specific time period, though.
@Leo
How about you let trans* folk tell you their experiences and believe them? Why the fuck do you need to agree with someone on what their life is?
*reads rest of Leo’s reply*
Ohhhh, you’re an anti-feminist. Why should we give a fuck what you think?