so there’s this article arguing that feminists ought to focus some energy and effort on interventions in developing countries, as small allocations of resources can do a lot to improve the lives of women (and fight gender inequality) there, and that it’s a shortcoming of current feminist praxis that those problems are neglected in favor of attention-grabbing but much less tractable ones that mostly affect wealthy women.
the first response:
The author does not seem to understand the point of feminism. The reason that “tractable and important problems affecting poor women in poor countries” are not on the feminist agenda, is that they generally affect men to a similar degree. <…> Feminism is not simply about harm suffered by women, it about harm caused by an oppressive relationship of men to women. So feminists don’t protest against earthquakes, which kill thousands of women every year, because there is nothing gender-specific in an earthquake. Pornography, on the other hand, is very strongly gender-specific: most of it depicts women, in a way that feminists consider to be a harm, and it is largely made by men, for the benefit of men
The response is some of the deepest bullshit I’ve seen in quite some time. Even working from the assumption that feminism means reducing inequality instead of harm, material improvement in poor people’s situations tends to be really good at resulting in such effects. Also, #notmyfeminism on the pornography argument; it’s nowhere near that simple, especially when access to porn seems to be pretty good in reducing many harms feminists care about.
Also, Paul sounds like a person who’s male with a quite high probability. A male person is using intersectionality to argue that feminists shouldn’t focus on people with a lot of intersecting oppressions and instead do all kinds of wrong-headed stuff that’s way less effective and focuses on women with fewer intersecting oppressions. That’s about as fractally wrong as one can get and I can’t even
(via sdhs-rationalist)
3 months ago · tagged #steel feminism #i don't even know which specific genre of bullshit this falls into · 130 notes · source: theunitofcaring · .permalink