Sigh. I've been deleted and blocked by yet another feminist page on Facebook....

[AnnieLobeseder]

...for daring to disagree with them on something they've posted.

Are they really so bloody-minded that they can't handle debate on their philosophies? I realise they get a lot of nasty trolling spam, but there's a world of difference between MRA nastiness and another feminist wanting to debate feminism!!

Is it just me?

I think if you use phrases like overthrow the patriarchy you are leaning towards a traditional revolutionary approach.

If you said subsume, absorb, replace things might be different?

I think the current system harms both women and men, the harm may be assymetrical but it's there. Whether you frame the current system as "The Patriarchy" or take an intersectional approach and adopt the idea of kyriarchy the harm is apparent.

What I still find less obvious is what will the different system look like, and how we get there.

In other words, not only do I not have a map, I don't know the destination.

I just know I don't want to be here - but I know I have to start from here.

No need the for the sad face PQ, come the revolution sista the fact that huge numbers of people ALL want change will mean that you will exchange freely and with a glad heart some, not all of your privileges. Same as me, same as many men.

BTW, you should get on inlayer and listen to Radio Scotland as the discussion has moved on to how men dominate the work place, it's a very good discussion. Call Kay if your looking.

I player bloody apple auto correct.

Does the dead ant dance ROTFLMAO about 9-5 presenteeism. That's so 80s.

Try 8-6 and 24/7 on the Crackberry.

I notice now a lot of older fathers are going sod it and taking the afternoon off for kids - presumably because they have reached a level where they ain't straining to get ahead.

I think "enough" is a good destination - but I'm told many bankers, for example, use the money as an analogue for winning - cf. the many thousands spent on lunch after bonus days.... sufficient would never be enough for people driven that way. may the banking report will help change that.

I think that is my sort of goal OneMoreChap, a world where dads come home early...in fact, a world where no one is allowed to work full time. Sigh. But them I'm just rather anti-consumerist and I know far, far too many people who value holidays and takeouts and big houses and new clothes too much to ever move over towards my world.

I can pontificate for hours on why working practices should be radically restructured in ways that will prove family-friendly! Trying to summarise the (my) principle succinctly, it reflects the IT concept of 'redundancy'. Every server has at least one twin - in Cloud implementations, each has thousands of potential twins - that will automatically take over when the first goes offline.

Our labour/business practices still base themselves on a scarce-resource model. There is only one right person for each job; things are organised so that all the 'one right' people are in business at the same time. If several 'one right' people are missing, it's a problem. Only it's a fallacy. The principle became dominant in the Industrial Age, when the 'right people' were the entire population of a mill town. Now we have machines doing all that shizz, so there's a far wider choice of human resources. Greater choice should lead to greater flexibility.

"Go yersel Garlic". Sorry that's Scots for I agree.

Context is everything. If I turned up at a party with a load of well behaved children eating nicely and said "children throw food" and then, for example, did not give them anything to eat which might mark the walls if thrown, then I think that those nice children would rightly feel offended. Saying it is a "class description" is meaningless and incorrect. Children (as a class) do not throw food. Some do but most don't.

To continue the analogy, to say that "men rape" or men "search disgusting terms on the internet" would not be remotely fair unless men "as a class" did the above. As it is a small minority of men (at least in the former example), even if you use the excuse it is a "class description", it is an incorrect one and will clearly be offensive to men and to all women who do not believe it is a fair description of most men.

You're talking about restrictive rule-setting, PQW, where it is known that a generality won't be 100% appropriate although a threshold is deemed necessary. The statement "People aged under 16 are too immature for sex" leads to the law, "You may not have sex with anyone under 16". It serves a useful purpose and 16 was the agreed, good-enough, threshold. Another statement, "Young black men are violent thugs", serves no such useful purpose. Neither, in my opinion, do "Men rape" or "Girls love pink".

... thinking about this a bit more, I'd say "Girls love pink" has the power to create the phenomenon it describes. Is that what you meant by language as a constitutive force? In that case, we should be very careful about the negative generalisations we employ ...

Leith, forgot to thank you for the Scots language lesson

garlicnutty may I refer you to www.pinkstinks.org.uk/ if you haven't seen it.

PromQueenWithin How about "Rapists rape". See also (I believe I am meant to say possible triggers) Feminists don't think all men are rapists. Rapists do. and Don't be That Guy

Argh. I keep running into a wall, in feminist discussions, that seems to have "SOCIOLOGY" written on it! I bet this post will offend loads of folks I have no wish to offend. If so - well, I really don't wish to offend; I am musing on why I find some linguistic aspects of feminism so irritating.

Sociology, I seem to find, has an unpleasant habit of perverting the significance of language. It imbues commonplace words & concepts with specific meanings of its own. This is no better than 'businessballs' and more dangerous, since sociology deals with human essence. I first careened into this wall with the discovery that a sociological "minority" is not a mathematical or logical minority, but an oppressed group (eg women), regardless of numerical prevalence. Every time I read that women are a minority in some general population, I understand - because it's been explained to me - but I lose a little bit of respect for feminism.

You just used "objectify", PQW, to mean concretise: a perfectly good word, whose form explains its meaning, which has apparently been rejected by sociology in favour of subverting an existing term for something else.

Twisted language has long been used by elite groups to alienate, "other" () and suppress the excluded masses. No wonder it arouses mistrust. When I hear that women are a minority, or men are rapists, I wonder about the speaker's intelligence - do they not understand the basic rules of proportion? Then I remember it's a linguistic convention among sociologists, which calls to mind the others I've learned such as - now - "objectify" to mean "make real", ie concretise. And I wonder why feminists feel the need to twist language.

Seriously, I think this is a real block to feminism's credibility. I happen to be a language and statistics geek, so discrete examples leap out at me, but I think very many people must be put off by linguistic obfuscation and logical falsehoods such as these.

How about "Rapists rape"

YY. How many times must this be said??

Because that isn't gendered and rape is most definitely gendered.

Why are people so quick in wanting to hide the gendered aspect of violence?

GN, minority is still being used in a mathematical numerical sense in the example you gave. Women are an economic minority in that they hold a minority of wealth compared to the absolute number of women that exist as a proportion of the population. They are a political minority in that they hold a minority of political positions compared to the absolute number of women that exist as a proportion of the population. I don't think that is twisting language and it has to be supported by statistics. If half of politicians and influential civil servants were women then women would not form a political minority. Hence we can say that women are an absolute majority but a political and economic minority and this makes numerical and logical sense.

It has always been the case that words have a different meaning in different contexts. The word theory has a different meaning in Science than it does in everyday speech. The word labour has a different meaning in a maternity ward than it does in an economics class.

What matters is whether or not a word has a meaning that is clear and shared within a context, that it has been defined. What is a problem is if a word has no clear meaning in a context and becomes so vague or disputed as to become meaningless. An example of that would be racism, which had a specific legal internationally defined meaning but which various groups are attempting to destabilise the meaning of in the same context (human rights, social justice). This seems to me to be unethical.

Also, the example you give of the meaning of objectify is one particular meaning of the word that is used in philosophy and the arts. I'm not sure why the social sciences should be expected to use the language of the arts anymore than the arts should be expected to use the language of the social sciences.

People don't generally use the word objectify in everyday speech in the philosophical sense you've given unless they're doing something very specific like visiting an art gallery.