It was quite a lot of shouty people, and they were very very shouty indeed.
I think I would make an analogy with someone who doesn't want to be a socialist because of their concern for the welfare of the poor. The pesants in Russia and China didn't do very well out of socialism, by and large, which was obviously extremely applied in both cases, and obviously mainly designed for industrialized socieities in any case.
The aim of socialism is obviously equality, but (in its unmodified form) it doesn't work very well. Now, I still consider myself a socialist because socialists have helpfully labelled all the variants, like Trotskyites and Maoists and so on, so the basic limited form of socialism still exists as a meaningful concept. But all feminists basically just call themselves feminists, and a lot of the ones I've met also go "we're the real feminists, not like those liberal feminists over there". In any case, though the initial aims of feminism are undoubtedly good, as someone else commented, some are nothing to do with equality (reproductive rights, for example—equipment makes equality a meaningless concept), and there seems to be no level of feminism that doesn't force you to buy into doctrine about not only aims but techniques for achieving them—and currently I feel both aims and techniques are out of kilter.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: Thursday, 11 October 2007 09:30 am (UTC)I think I would make an analogy with someone who doesn't want to be a socialist because of their concern for the welfare of the poor. The pesants in Russia and China didn't do very well out of socialism, by and large, which was obviously extremely applied in both cases, and obviously mainly designed for industrialized socieities in any case.
The aim of socialism is obviously equality, but (in its unmodified form) it doesn't work very well. Now, I still consider myself a socialist because socialists have helpfully labelled all the variants, like Trotskyites and Maoists and so on, so the basic limited form of socialism still exists as a meaningful concept. But all feminists basically just call themselves feminists, and a lot of the ones I've met also go "we're the real feminists, not like those liberal feminists over there". In any case, though the initial aims of feminism are undoubtedly good, as someone else commented, some are nothing to do with equality (reproductive rights, for example—equipment makes equality a meaningless concept), and there seems to be no level of feminism that doesn't force you to buy into doctrine about not only aims but techniques for achieving them—and currently I feel both aims and techniques are out of kilter.