"Lesbian and don't like p*nises, does this make me bad??" TRANSWER: You need therapy to help you like dick.

Kotal · 2020-08-01T10:33:37+00:00

I have no idea what that top-rated comment is trying to say. Maybe somebody can try and steelman the trans psychology for me here because it just sounds like plainly contradictory nonsense.

"You don't have to be attracted to penises, but people with penises should be in your dating pool as equals"

?????????????

Kotal · 2020-07-21T16:58:24+00:00

I'm not misrepresenting anything, I've just provided essentially a charge sheet of accusations to describe my point. I'm glad that you took the time to respond in detail and I think this thread was a productive exercise even if we disagree on some things. I'm 33 so I wasn't around in the 80's and 90's to experience this stuff first hand when I'm talking about the past.

Anyway, I agree with your initial description on the causes of women's oppression. But I suspect there may be something of a "motte and bailey" effect going on here where you describe feminists positions in the most moderate and flattering light, and I'm not persuaded that you necessarily reflect a plural majority of feminists in your understanding of these topics and there's clearly people who take them in a more extreme direction.

Or to use a death-of-the-author type argument, even if a feminist once made a good argument about how masculine language affects society and thought, it may be that the way that point is interpreted by people over time matters more than the original argument. So I'm wary of the risk of these sorts of arguments being a slippery slope into general anti-rationalism, although I accept as you say that's more of a humanities problem than a specifically feminist problem.

Kotal · 2020-07-20T00:33:11+00:00

The political movement Jo Freeman describes is different than that of libertarianism, but I think it shares some of the same pitfalls. I'm rather skeptical of the idea that you can or should decentralize "all things".

1: I think in practice what happens when you remove a visible and centralized hierarchy is you will end up with some informal or invisible heirarchy, as described by Freeman in this article. An informal hierarchy is even less accountable than a formal one. So there's actually the potential for decentralization mania to do real harm in this way and accomplish the opposite of it's ostensible goals.

2: You always need trusted actors somewhere, at some point. If you buy something online with bitcoin, you have to trust that the physical product exists and will be delivered as advertised. You can't personally be an expert on every subject, so you have to trust experts on a lot of topics where you are not an expert. Even in a hypothetical decentralized everything society, you have to trust that your comrades are not plotting to establish centralized control behind your back. If you take any action or system, and try to completely decentralize it and make it 'trustless', you will end up simply shifting the heirarchy and trust to a different location, not eliminating them entirely.

Kotal · 2020-07-14T21:41:02+00:00

Julie Bindel's sexuality is rather ambiguous so I'm not sure if she is legitimately bisexual. Anyway, I gather that she was criticized at the time for muddying the waters and suggesting that sexual preferences were a choice (troublesome at a time when gay conversion therapy was a thing), which is something that the current TRAs would also like to be the case (but they call it "genital preferences"). I'm not saying she is endorsing that view, but once you create a cultural environment that is permissive of categorical ambiguity about your sexuality then it seems like one thing eventually leads to the other.
Sure, but people were saying that mathematical equations are sexist and so on.
Yes I treated feminism as a monolith in my OP, sorry. I agree with you about the autogenophiles that make up most of the TRAs. But if you start the trend of playing word games with well defined English words (even just "to make a point") then you are engaging in sophistry and open yourself to being attacked with sophistry in return. And rhetorically, they are similar categories of statement that I provided: feelings being hurt because normal words and phrases don't fully encapsulate the individual's personal experience.
I don't deny that at all. It's good that womens rights have advanced. Title IX seems to be an expansive topic, but if you are referring to the reforms being proposed by Betsy DeVos then I think they are very necessary and that universities shouldn't be running kangaroo courts where defendants lack access to a fair process. Sexual assault allegations should be handled by the police, anyway.

Kotal · 2020-07-14T21:19:15+00:00

Thanks for your posts, they help clarify various things for me.

Kotal · 2020-07-14T16:48:53+00:00

I don't hate the idea of society changing, personally I think increased tolerance towards homosexuals nowadays and equal rights for for women are good things. I take your point that there were differing opinions among feminists at the time. Furthermore, I'm not just cherry-picking the dumbest things that feminists ever wrote for the purpose of making feminists look crazy. Part of my point is that what you describe as the least defensible proposals have become very popular and sprung out of academia to become the argot of left/liberal activists and politicians all over the place. How did that happen if they were so indefensible? So when we see the likes of Julie Bindel, a woman who was fluent in the radical feminist ideology of her day, become persona non grata among the contemporary activist class then it's worth looking at how she got from A to B.

Kotal · 2020-07-14T13:41:23+00:00

I see, sorry. Okay, I'll delete this and repost it elsewhere.

Kotal