"Words are on top. What is under them -- their meaning -- is what is important."I've spent some years trying to figure out how to effectively communicate about housing issues. One of the problems I've run into is that standard terminology, like affordable housing, doesn't mean the same thing to everyone and comes with boatloads of baggage such that people talk past each other a great deal.
Meanwhile, trying to come up with new catch phrases also typically fails to communicate effectively. Being "creative" reads as a manipulative game to others because catchphrases exist as shorthand for some kind of shared understanding.
The reality is there is no quick and dirty way to shed the cultural baggage associated with such terms. The world renames economic slumps on a regular basis to try to do so and the new word soon becomes a synonym for all the old words for it.
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.As noted previously (and repeatedly) on this blog, I do not self identify as a feminist.
Albert Einstein
That doesn't mean I'm not pro women's rights. It means I think feminist doesn't say something I agree with.
I have had self-proclaimed feminists be really ugly to me. Jessamyn West of Metafilter actively encouraged members to bully me while I was an active member and created a hostile climate for me that helped lead to me being unjustly banned.
She was a childless career woman. I was a former full-time mother.
Women routinely feel forced to choose between career and motherhood, as well as between many other things that roughly fall on one side of that dichotomy or the other. Power or love. Agency or a pleasant personal life.
I'm not exempt from feeling like life had a gun to my head and wanted to force me to choose between keeping "my left arm or my right." I just felt that feminism asks women the same question and dictates that "a serious career" is the only right answer.
I would like to not have either of my arms cut off, thank you very much.
I think the term feminist is a bit like the Reddit sub r/fuckcars: It's a term railing against a system it hates while loudly announcing the opinion that it's not really fixable. It is a word that expresses the belief that this is the only system there is and choosing "the least worst option" and still hating it is as good as it will ever get.
And I don't believe that. So I don't use that term.
To me, the word feminist does not mean "I want women's lives to be better and I think more rights for women is how you achieve that."
To me, it's a word that agrees that serious careers can only occur in the currently accepted format designed to give serious jobs to a male breadwinner with a wife and children to support with the wife being de facto his personal servant so he can focus exclusively on his all consuming job.
It's a word that says "The current system is such a bad deal for individual women that we think it is better to throw our children under a bus or simply refuse to have any rather than agree to be the de facto property of some man who, in practice, is not obligated to treat us at all decently."
In the words of my mother railing at my father: "If I had worked for a COMPANY for 40 years, I would have a retirement account."
I read some book years ago that said the same thing: Even good men are only good to their women while it serves HIS needs. They don't plan for how to provide for her after he dies and at the time 90 percent of people burying a deceased spouse were women burying their husband. (This was before same sex marriage was legalized in the US.)
This was true in part because men are typically a few years older than their wife AND women live on average a few years longer than men. If men are roughly 4 years older than their wives on average and women live roughly six years longer, most women will outlive their husband by about a decade.
Additional stats from that book and others:
1. Most poor people in the US are women and their children.
2. Most of those women were solidly middle class until they got unexpectedly pregnant, got divorced or their spouse died.
Today, women can do everything "right" in the eyes of society and still end up a poor little old woman living on a meager budget and alone. In fact, odds are very high she will do exactly that, career or no career, children or no children, good husband or bad or none at all.
No, she may not be able to remarry after her husband dies. Men her age are mostly dating women younger than her and past a certain age women begin outnumbering men as well.
To me, feminist also means "Women who fundamentally agree that only men have real power, believe men are intentionally shafting them and only men can really fix this."
I don't see it that way. I think men are also being shafted and I see no reason why a woman can't come up with better answers than THIS garbage system.
To me, feminist means a woman who is even more guilty than men of seeing homemakers and moms as not really people and not really deserving of human rights. They routinely act like they are angry at me for having had a man pay my bills, jealous that I got to be home with my kids and raise them and they seem to see women like me as fundamentally their enemies, people undermining their agenda of "Let's give all women careers of the current heteronormative male breadwinner type while it breaks everyone and our children be damned should we fuck up and accidentally have any."
I can't agree with a system that looks to me like one ruining the future for all of humanity because we can't be arsed to figure out how to deal with this mess AND try to adequately care for and raise our children.
Rape culture is another problematic term. I think it suggests friction between the old societal norms and the future people are trying to imagine and create, which points to the term feminist suffering from the same problem.
People who speak of rape culture also routinely act like only men can fix this and women are all helpless victims who need to beg men to change.
A culture is the sum of its parts. It's not something only men have a say in. We all participate in creating culture every minute of every day.
But I am routinely accused of blaming the victim for trying to empower women and tell them what they can proactively do to protect themselves in the face of this mess.
Women do themselves no favors to assume that only men have any power to fix this and men are intentionally victimizing them and happy with things. It looks wrong and stupid on the face of it and it is an attitude that entrenched the problem.
Women run around screaming essentially "You men get all the benefits! You did this to me! I hate you! I wouldn't fuck you if you were the last man on the planet. FIX this, you asshole!"
If your idiotic point of view is correct, why in the hell would you expect to get results from asking someone intentionally victimizing you, getting all the benefits and holding all the cards to "fix" it?
I'm apparently the highest ranked woman on Hacker News. I seem to be the only woman to have ever made the leader board and I've done it twice under two different handles.
I don't know how much value that has but I'm certain I wouldn't be on the leader board if I were a (man hating, man blaming, learned helplessness) "feminist."
I don't know how we fix this but I'm absolutely certain that "feminism" -- blaming men, shafting any women who have kids instead of "serious careers" -- is not it.
I'm tolerated -- or was at one time -- because I think the system is broken and it's broken for everyone, not just women. And I am interested in figuring out a better system, not in attacking men and insisting they are my enemy and did this to me intentionally on purpose with malice aforethought while claiming only they can make it right and "should" for presumably nebulous "ideals" or some shit rather than because this isn't really working for them either and maybe some other answer would be a net positive for everyone, individually and collectively.