Any thoughts on fifth wave feminism?

[WhyThatsDelightful]

Just that…

That makes a lot of sense.

I've always thought that gender inequality is felt hardest by the poorest families in society, being poor almost forces families into traditional gender roles due to not being able to afford things like nursery fees and after school clubs that liberates parents to have their own lives and careers, and it usually is the woman who gets stuck at home unable to have her own independence. I do wish there was less stigma against stay at home dad's so it isn't necessarily always the mother that gets trapped at home. That being said most women would rather stay at home with their children than go to work in my experience.

Shared parental leave sucks for that reason, for dads to have the shared parental leave mum has to give up some of her maternity leave and most women don't want to give it up. SPL needs to be as well as not instead of in my opinion. I genuinely believe that lack of financial support and lack of support from companies for parents and parental leave us the root of the majority of inequality between the sexes. For the motherhood penalty to be reduced fathers need more financial support through work to be equal parenting, a lot of fathers I know want to be more equal parents but they can't afford the financial hit to work less to help more, a lot of the fathers I know also couldn't afford to take the unpaid SPL.

it’s anti vipers.

Seems to be just a stomach-turning combination of "Be Kind" and "Won't somebody think about the poor menz". If I wanted to outsource my thinking I wouldn't be utilising something that sounded like it was formulated by India Willoughby.

and there it is.

Yeah, I agree, the idea of the "wave" is really not that differernt than within other ideological or political movements. They always have different factions, schools of thought, and change over time. Some of that variation is small, but sometimes maybe there is a really significant change that occurs because some new ideas or principle becomes important. So you can retroactively identify these big changes and maybe it could be useful to label them.

I suspect though there aren't really men who care much about how they fit into it or whether they are included as such. But many feminists do spend time thinking about what the appropriate attitude towards men is, both theoretically (is there a immaterial thing called the patriarchy and how does it function) and practically (should women all be lesbians and live apart from men?)

The internet has and is having significant effects on many parts of society, so I am sure it affects feminist thought and action as well, but I think that is still very much emerging.

Gentility?

All for it, I'm obsessed with genteel. But suspect that may not be what the author really meant.

How to make MRAs look progressive
Go all out and pretend it's feminism and being arrogant enough to assume that there's enough dipsticks out there who haven't the foggiest that feminism is all about liberating women from men and centring women instead of men and say it's cool and the latest trend.

Depressingly it appears to actually work.

I think this is absolutely true in many cases. Very often the interests of women who are working class, middle class, elites, or members of some kind of underclass, will be almost completely divergent.

In so far as they are united, it will tend to be around things very attached to the body, such as maternity care, women's health issues, etc.

Even when we look at things like breastfeeding or nursery care, which you'd think are very concrete, you start to see interests diverge where there are economic class fractures. The model that prioritizes women in the workplace and childcare provision has always been more attuned to upper middle class women's interests, for example.

This is a why, IMO, identity politics are bound to fail. Even with women, who have real, unique, physical needs as a group, other things hugely impact how they affect us. It's been more exaggerated with other identity groupings where sometimes it seems like there are almost no significant interests in common across the group, apart from the interest in not being defined legally and socially by whatever their "identity group" marker is.

@TempestTost I agree with what you say, this does not prevent me from respecting other women’ beliefs and lifestyle choices, so for example i would not go around criticising a stay at home mum or a career woman.

I used to deliver DVA services and we supported women from all back grounds. And we were clear we were a service for and by women.

I would say I have a shared interest and affinity to women and women's rights.

I call myself a feminist but not of the academic sort.

Very interesting thoughts.

I was born in the 1950s, therefore I must be "of the second wave".

Trying to find clear, unbiased writing about feminism on the internet is a task designed to send me mad. The quote at the top of the thread - where feminism is something to do with the Divine Feminine and Gentle Masculinity - is a prime example of useless drivel masquerading as Big Important Themes. Mostly, the information I found was muddled and badly written, and/or unreadable waffle about "middle class cis women".

@Bannedontherun pointed out that not all feminism has to be academic and I'm extremely grateful - as soon as people start droning on about their pet subject in great long words that normal folk have to look up in a dictionary, we're all doomed.

So I think second wave feminism is roughly my era, but I don't think there are any "waves". Someone made the concept of "feminist waves" up to back up their own half-arsed analysis of fast-changing women's social movements, so that they could claim expertise and argue with people and prove themselves right.

Tell you what, though. Feminism, whether it's in a "wave" or not, is a women's movement, demanding equal rights and equal value in society for women. It's not about any kind of masculinity.

Thank you for quoting your source, @spannasaurus.

It's a terrible piece of writing - I mean thank goodness "we" are now aiming to "heal" poor men from the "harm done" to them. How they must have suffered.

... but really ... lamentable behaviours? Lamentable?? Are we weeping and wailing and covering our head in ashes? because of the constant threat of male violence against women, something we learn at a very young age, we must protect ourselves, every day, all the time, subconsciously aware, we're saying "lamentable"?