Do you think it is necessary to have good analytical and critical thinking skills be a feminist?

As to the bars of the prison - becoming a radical as opposed to mainstream feminist (which I had been since childhood) over the past 2 years has been soul-crushing for me. I have to convince myself to get out of bed because it all just looks so hopeless: as long as human males possess their superior muscle mass and freedom from the reproductive burden - they will exploit it. Only the degree to which they do this varies across the world. It's how most male mammals behave, and ours haven't evolved enough moral conscience to override the programming. The rare one that do are a pleasant surprise, but they're just exceptions that prove the rule.

For example, I used to be passionate about political science which I have 2 degrees in. But all I see now are boys and their big, scary toys
destroying the world in a giant sand-pit. And they won't stop until it all burns.

Yes, love and of course the labrys.

Oh yes, yay for you DF too, of course!!

Thanks for your anecdote, Beyond. That must have built such a bond between your nan and your mum. Yay for your female role models (and my DF).

Me too.

YY ^ to self love and love of other women.

Doesn't sound corny to me, Beachcomber. That's exactly how I feel about it too.

This will sound corny but I also think feminism is about love. About self love and love for other women.

When we tell another woman to LTB it is an act of woman love. Same goes for seemingly superficial things like not complying with beauty practices and deeper issues like being anti prostitution. They are acts of rebellious woman loving. Feminism is the opposite of misogyny and misogyny is woman hating.

"Women aren't encouraged to examine our place in society - being a feminist IMO involves being rebellious and resistant."

This. Absolutely. It's amazing how incredibly angry many women still get at any suggestion of consciousness raising. There are many, many threads in Mumsnet that bear testament to this.

Very interesting posts about your dad, prawn :)

Vaguely related story... My nan had an abortion shortly after they were legalised. It's not common chat or anything, but has never been a secret. My mum (teenage gf of her son, not her daughter) helped convince her it was okay, as she had nearly died multiple times of eclampsia. Yay for my female role models :)

I would more say that feminism is more about what second wavers call "consciousness raising" than about critical thinking skills.

How one's consciousness is raised will vary from woman to woman. For some it might be through reading and critical thinking for others it won't be. Feminism is a grass roots movement about women's real lives and experiences - the lives are what make the theory but you don't need to have read the theory because by being a woman you have lived it.

I think it was Catharine MacKinnon who said (something like) feminist theory being an observation of women's lives in society and not a theory about those lives. The theory isn't there to tell women about their lives but as a tool to tell men and society about our lives from a perspective that does not comply with status quo thinking (AKA women as lesser/other).

Women aren't encouraged to examine our place in society - being a feminist IMO involves being rebellious and resistant. Book learning and critical thinking can be useful tools in that rebellion but I think righteous anger is key and that comes from within and in sharing with other women, which to me, is what consciousness raising is about.

Thanks vestal, that has really helped me to clarify my thinking on this issue. I work with disabled children, and have at times has to defend my stance on this.

Yes, I'm in that strange group too........

It is especially strange as pro-choice feminists actually aim to abolish the discrimination against children with disabilities.

In many countries, there is an explicit exemption made from the illegality of abortions if a child would be disabled - not just a lethal disability, but something like Down syndrome, too.

That gives a very clear message that disabled children are considered to be of lesser worth.

Just acknowledging a woman's right to her own body, on the other hand, does not make any distinction between fetuses, and enables any women to give birth to a disabled child if she so chooses.

You're not alone, Morris, if that's any comfort. Most second wave feminists take both of the same positions. I can never understand why parents of children with disabilities condemn pro-choice beliefs. Their children aren't harmed, surely? We all make different choices, choices that make sense to us.

Strange bedfellows indeed. Not only am I on the side of the Christian right wing on trans issues, I've had a kicking from parents of children with disabilities on here because I support abortion rights for absolutely any reason whatsoever. So my feminism makes me disablist.

The second was a trophy wife who wanted an abortion because she and her husband had booked a very expensive holiday and she didn't want to spoil her figure

I guess I don't have a problem with this. Either you are pro-choice or you aren't and if you don't want children then you don't want them...

Who said she was a trophy wife?

There's a book about weird statistics one of my DS read which said that, I think it was in the 1980s, there was a sudden drop in youth crime in American inner cities. All sorts of theories were proposed, but one likely cause was that it was roughly 20 years since Roe v Wade, when abortion became legal. This idea was given weight by the fact that the youth crime rate dropped earlier in states that legalized abortion a couple of years earlier.

If true, this is an illustration of the wisdom of women seeking abortion. They knew they were in no position to have a child, and they were right.

The second was a trophy wife who wanted an abortion because she and her husband had booked a very expensive holiday and she didn't want to spoil her figure. He referred her not because her reason for wanting an abortion was serious but because he felt she would make an absolutely dreadful mother to that poor child.

That's a good point. The anti-choicers never seem to think about the fact that IF there were so many, many women who want abortions for silly, stupid reasons ... then that'd mean that those women would make horrible mothers.

Or perhaps they do think about it and just think of women as walking uteruses who should churn out babies for Christian fundamentalist couples to adopt. Handmaid's Tale style.

P.S. I should add that he had more than 25 years in practice, so he had a very wide experience with a large number of women. He was a junior doctor before the Abortion Act and saw the cost of illegal abortion too. A woman desperate to end a pregnancy will risk her future fertility, even her life. He used to say "I'm a doctor of medicine, not theology".

My DF was a GP and told me that every woman who came to him for an abortion referral had thought long and hard before she came to him. They'd talked to the father, to their friends, to their DM, sometimes all of them. They came expecting condemnation or a fight. He just said yes. In only two cases was this not true. The first was a girl he perceived as being bullied by her mum. He got the mum out of the consultation room and talked to her alone. The second was a trophy wife who wanted an abortion because she and her husband had booked a very expensive holiday and she didn't want to spoil her figure. He referred her not because her reason for wanting an abortion was serious but because he felt she would make an absolutely dreadful mother to that poor child.

Someone I turned down sexually tried to upset me by saying the whole city knew my DF was an abortion monger. I said this was true and that I was very proud of him.

I'm guessing you're not from mainland Britain, *DonkeySkin. Here women have had access to safe, legal abortion since 1967 and, despite intermittent attempts by small groups to stop or limit it, there is no appetite for change. We also have free contraception, available even to under age teenagers. Should a woman wish to continue a pregnancy, lone mothers have access to housing and welfare. I would say that, insofar as it's possible, women in the UK (apart from Northern Ireland) have reproductive autonomy.

The situation in other parts of the world is very different, though most European countries have similar policies to ours. I think it's the Netherlands which has the lowest teen pregnancy rate, thanks to very frank sex ed which includes discussion and examination of consent, plus freely available contraception.

The position in America is dismal. As in so many social issues, religion makes America an outlier in reproductive health.

@Nellooo I liked the simplicity of the article. Reading about Michele Foucault reminded me of my late teens when I hated him for saying feminism will one day become irrelevant. It's a phase in human history.
When I read it, I thought he was demeaning feminism and how could anyone say something like that. Its not a phase. It's part of our life and emancipation of all women.

I then read Angela Davis who put it better. A light bulb moment for me and it made sense what he said. I still laugh at my self every time I come across his name. I would have put in the category of mansplainers if the category existed then.

As Adichie would now put it. You want to get to a point where feminism would be irrelevant because it's not necessary to fight for the rights of women. When we are all equal, politically, socially and financially.

So yes, if it feminism achieved it goal. It should become irrelevant.

@quencher glad you enjoyed it!

I certainly don't agree with everything she's written, but I enjoyed the takedown of faffy pm thought and the possibilities offered to the left for a much needed change of tack.

@DonkeySkin
In doing this they betray that they don't think that women have the moral capacity to be entrusted with deciding what to do with our own bodies and the potential children they can create, when actually, we do, and we demonstrate this not only by regularly deciding to carry dangerous pregnancies to term, but also by prioritising our own wellbeing in deciding, for our own usually very sound reasons, not to carry a pregnancy to term. The decision that one's own life and happiness needn't be subordinate to a potential life is a moral choice - it's one that recognises human female lives as valuable in themselves.
No human being has the right to live off the body of another without that person's permission. In the case of embryos and foetuses, they are not even persons yet. I assign more moral value to the pregnant woman than to the embryo or foetus that lives entirely off her body, therefore she is the highest moral arbiter of the 'rightness' of abortion.
This^I totally agree with.

If you don't want men to decide what that criteria should be then come up with your own. But 'I am a women and therefore whatever involves my body takes place beyond categories of right and wrong' is inadequate, frankly.
One of the biggest reason for infanticide has been due to patriarchy and not women. with China and India dominating in selective breeding. To argue that women should rely on what is morally right, makes a mockery on why women should not hold the right to choose if they want to keep the foetus or not. Your whole basis for the argument is morality, but morality is relative. How I define it could easily be different to yours. How ascribe could be different to yours. Why should the men hold the power to dictate this and individual women can't?
With China, the one child policy not only affects the choices women can have on how many children they want, whether they would love to keep a second pregnancy or not. But also, because culturally, it's a society which favours men. By default, couples are choosing male children over females. Abortion is not the problem. The society which dictates it is.

@user1490125033
Justifying reasons why a parasite is much more important to the host body. If someone came into your house to visit and by law they cannot leave when you want them to. The law would change to make sure you can evict them. Even squatters don't have that much right. For any advantage they take, the law clumps down on it.