Feminism, whats the goal?

One day every girl born in any part of the world will be able to look forward to a free and fulfilling life. That's the aim and we are getting there

That's the key goal now, as far as I can see. Creating the same equality laws in other countries and cultures. some may call that cultural imperialism, but if 'a movement' means anything it means moving towards a goal.

genuinely think the sort of feminism which has sought to position biology and the roles which have arisen from it, as due always to 'patriarchal oppression' is in part what has led us to transgenderism as an ideology.If you are really arguing in favour of a form of transhumanism - of detaching yourself from biology and the natural world, then you might well find yourself in a similar place

So embrace that so-called difference. Accept that men are what they are because of 'nature'. Accept that male-violence, prostitution, and porn will always exist because of 'nature'. Because this is where you position leads you.

I don't believe it because I've seen enough social difference and variation and I've seen enough social conditioning to know it is a product of social and not biological conditioning. That's not 'transhumanism' because gender roles are social and not biological.

I think we're getting there! 100 years ago we couldn't vote or engage in public life. Fifty years ago we couldn't get a mortgage or a car loan. Nowadays we have almost equal rights under the law. We still have some areas of inequality but we should feel joyous about how far we've come!

I think the massive and vicious backlash we're going through now is actually a good indication of how powerful women are becoming. Right now the fight is to hold on to the rights we have achieved. I think one part of that is acknowledging how far we have come in a short time.

As far as biological differences go, we can certainly build a society that respects mothers and grandmothers and the generative power of women. Why not? And women are free in this country to choose to be mothers or not, to work in whatever career they choose, to live and live how they please. I think it's wrong to be despondent and pessimistic. We are making amazing progress. One day every girl born in any part of the world will be able to look forward to a free and fulfilling life. That's the aim and we are getting there.

Yeah. Whatever. Why not also assume that men, higamous hogamous and all that, will fuck around, that women will be left for younger models, that porn and prostitution are here to stay and everything else that is 'against nature'? Because all those things have been defended as being natural too. So has rape

Yes, much of pornography and prostitution is inherently exploitative of women - because it is predicated on a male model of sexual response and behaviour. That model has its origins in the male sexual drive, which I think operates differently in males and females.

I genuinely think the sort of feminism which has sought to position biology and the roles which have arisen from it, as due always to 'patriarchal oppression' is in part what has led us to transgenderism as an ideology.If you are really arguing in favour of a form of transhumanism - of detaching yourself from biology and the natural world, then you might well find yourself in a similar place.

Once equal legal and civil rights are in place, then differences between people and groups become more evident. From asserting sameness, equality and similarity, we come full circle to recognising individual differences once again.

In a contemporary, pluralistic society we have the security of a equal rights framework as a safety net. It assures us that we could make different choices if we so wished. That's why Denmark has witnessed, perhaps, a marked difference in career, and other choices, between the sexes. the sexes have not become identical in choice or preference at all. Generally speaking.

Totally agree Kit19, although currently mourning a male member of my family who bucked this trend and who was a magnificant human being.

I think women tend to look at it from the perspective of the weaker class. So much is out of our control.

A major question is ‘Given that men as a class have a physical advantage over women as a class and control the wealth, power and sex in a patriarchal society, how can we move towards a society where men simply don’t take what they want from women?’

Care is not just about child rearing though because at the other end of live women also do more of the caring for older people both paid & unpaid

There is no biological reason for that to be the case. Older people can be equally well cared for by men or women and yet somehow it’s the women who do it.

Successive Governments entire approach To care for older people is that family - by which they mean primarily wives, daughters & DIL - will step in & do most of it

This is pure ideology, divorced from reality and from human nature

Yeah. Whatever. Why not also assume that men, higamous hogamous and all that, will fuck around, that women will be left for younger models, that porn and prostitution are here to stay and everything else that is 'against nature'? Because all those things have been defended as being natural too. So has rape.

Men should do 50% of the child-related labour (and 50% of domestic labour more generally) past the stage where the child is weaned, earlier if the child is bottle-fed or the Mother can express

This is pure ideology, divorced from reality and from human nature.

@NonnyMouse1337 in your long discourse on the merits of a certain type of child rearing I found the key item to be I don't have children

I do have children, and now a grandchild and I agree with every word spoken by Nonny mouse. Biology is not oppression. It is our attitude towards it which is the issue.

It's what Sheryl Sandberg said in her book "Lean In". It's not luck that you get a 'supportive' partner, you have to choose him. As long as we marry and/or get pregnant by men whose attitudes are 100 years old, we're done for. Our daughters need to know what they want and what to look for and how to distinguish the genuine from the ones making the noises they think women want to hear.

The problem is that they are not, in any culture, and the physical necessity of giving birth as well as men’s strength advantage is used to extract labour and suppress women’s agency and power.

Whether women are better suited to nurturing is neither here nor there really.

Men should do 50% of the child-related labour (and 50% of domestic labour more generally) past the stage where the child is weaned, earlier if the child is bottle-fed or the Mother can express.

Although hunter gatherers are more egalitarian (based on the ones that exist today), men still use the advantage of their strength and propensity towards violence to extract labour from women. The power imbalance is usually reinforced by keeping them out of politics, as is the case in all types of human society.

I think years ago feminism was a reaction to the idea that you had to stay home. They were saying, no, you have a choice. But somehow it got twisted into you have a choice so stop complaining!

nonnymouse I'm a mother of 3 and I agree with you. I don't think mothers should have to choose between money, social connection and time with their children when the children are very young. We should get all three! It's always framed as if you CHOOSE to have children and CHOOSE to spend time with them you can't complain about dying in poverty and being excluded from all power structures. But giving birth is important. It's not a frivolous lifestyle choice, so I don't know why it's like that.

It always comes back to bodily autonomy for me. At the most basic level i want all women to chose who they sleep with, when and if they reproduce. In order for those chouces to be 'free' i need education, economic freedom, good maternity laws, no sexual violence etc.

OhamIreally Yes, which is why I mentioned that I didn't have children and was open to hearing what other women thought, especially those who do have children.

Every form of child rearing has its pros and cons. As I've gotten older, I've learned to appreciate that there are merits in the sort of methods I described and, crucially, there are women do want or wish to be the primary caregiver in the early years of their children's lives and this is also the norm in several other cultures. The desire to maintain a close mother-child bond seems perfectly understandable to me. While some women seem happy to share the childrearing, others don't wish to. I don't think women should be made to feel guilty for not wanting to delegate such things to their partners.

If you're lucky enough to have a supportive partner and extended family to enable you to pursue this, it is a great position to be in. The downside, as you mention, is that women can find themselves financially dependent and hence more susceptible to control and coercion if a male partner isn't supportive or is even abusive.

Maintaining financial independence is important, but I also wonder how feminism might be able to help those women who prefer more traditional roles in family life, especially around motherhood.

Even your op is framing things from a patriarchal perspective.
Men are also reliant on us. To give them children and to ensure humanity Carrie's on.
Humans are reliant on each other. We can't survive alone.
My aim is for women to be respected and treated equally to men (that's what liberation from patriarchy means to us). Yes,,men will always be physically stronger than women and so more able to rape and murder us. In an equal society though, this would be totally unacceptable. As opposed to what we have now, where its acceptable as long as the man can suggest the woman wanted it.

I think on a historical scale it's not so long since we got contraception. As women start to choose not to have children, or get married, thatcould drive changes in mens behaviour in the longer term.
www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/stories-45201725

Of course, first we have to get through the current backlash where contraception just means women are expected to have porn-star sex at the drop of a hat.

It wasn't always this way though. From what I've read about pre-history, in more primitive, pre-patriarchial societies, matriarchies were common and gods were often female. We were actually revered for our ability to birth life, not oppressed for it. As I understand it this shifted when we turned to farming, and abandoned hunter gathering, where women's contribution to the family diet, foraging for nuts, berries, etc, was equally as important as hunting.

That said, I've no idea how society might return to that kind of equality without an apocalypse that destroys civilisation. And even then women would still be worse off than men.

@NonnyMouse1337 in your long discourse on the merits of a certain type of child rearing I found the key item to be I don't have children.

It's fine of course to have an opinion, but you may be embarrassed further down the line when biological reality kicks in and you are living with the source of your oppression.

I agree that the goal of feminism is to free women from the oppression of the patriarchy.

Continued economic independence from men is a key part of this and should be considered at each life stage in my opinion.

Liberation.

Women need to feel less guilty when their baby cries and the husband has to get up in the night.

Sorry for the derail... I agree with most of what you said in your post, but I've always found this aspect of childrearing in Western cultures a bit odd. I guess it is due to significant cultural differences. I don't have children, but I come from South Asian culture where the mother-child bond is considered to be very important. The mother tends to be the primary, if not exclusive, caregiver in the early years of a child's life. Babies always sleep with the mother i.e. usually in a cot right next to the bed that the couple shares so she can breastfeed as often as required, or the man might sleep in the main bedroom and the woman sleeps with the baby in another room. This arrangement can carry on for several years until the child is maybe 4 or 5, usually sleeping between parents as the child gets older. Eventually children move into their own beds or rooms, but the idea is that it is perfectly normal and natural for mothers and their children to have a very close physical relationship in the early years.

In theory if I were to have a baby, I would have deep reservations about the notion that this close mother-child bond should be superseded in an effort to force some sort of 'equality' between the sexes. If mums are feeling a lot of guilt when their baby cries and they are refraining from responding, surely this is because they are enforcing what seems to me to be an 'unnatural' state i.e. not engaging in what is a very instinctive process of mother-child closeness in terms of feeding and caring?

That doesn't mean a man should not help with childrearing. In fact, the need for mothers to be the primary caregiver means other members of the family, including the partner, should be doing other household tasks like cooking, cleaning, laundry, looking after any other children etc because most of her attention and focus is on the baby.

I think you can have equality between women and men, without forcing each side to behave in exactly the same manner or to engage in exactly the same activities. I feel there are genuine evolutionary and biological differences between the sexes that are most apparent in the mother and father roles during the early years of a child's life. They don't seem interchangeable to me.

It would be interesting to hear other women's perspectives, especially mothers, as I've read posts here before from some about how much they preferred to be at home with their baby rather than rush back to work (which seems like a perfectly unsurprising and natural response to me). But maybe that's best left for a different thread rather than derailing the conversations in this one. Anyway just felt like I had to comment on that point as I thought the cultural differences in the role of motherhood were interesting.