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ShaktiSama -> RE: I am a feminist. (2/3/2008 7:29:10 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Level
When "liberation" takes freedom away from others, then that certainly is horseshit. I did make an overstatement, but the idiocy I was talking about DOES do damage to women. Kidding aside, there is nothing wrong with showing women's orgasms. But there is something wrong with banning the alternative.
*shrug* Laws and social practice are often arranged in a dialectic fashion. Cutting back on the privileged status of male sexuality is not necessarily a bad thing, even if this is done by means of an unenforceable laws. Unenforceable laws are sometimes very useful in ways that go beyond their enforcement. [;)]
One of the little-known facts of the Prohibition era in the USA is that Prohibition of alcohol was originally passed as a women's rights issue. The fact is, during that era of American history, alcoholism was a very serious and very common social problem. It was heavily connected, then as now, with domestic violence. The vast majority of women who spear-headed the Temperance movement supported it as a way to end the cycle in which a large percentage of working-class males would slave at 70-hour a week jobs, spend their paychecks in bars and saloons (often owned by the companies they worked for), and then go home afterward to batter their wives and children.
Eventually an Amendment to the Constitution was passed, and a great many smugglers made a great deal of money while America's law enforcement agencies struggled for a decade to enforce the unenforceable. And eventually the law was rescinded, and Americans were permitted to drink in public again. But...
...the feminists of the Temperance movement still won the battle. From then on, the stereotype of the wife-beating drunk was firmly locked in the public consciousness as a bad thing. The sense of entitlement that men had enjoyed to drink to excess and to abuse their women and children in the home was seriously dented. It was part of the public consciousness from then on that alcoholics and wife-beaters were thugs, brutes, and not the sort of people that you would want to be, would want to marry, or would want to have as neighbors or friends.
Domestic violence was not magically ended, nor did alcoholism disappear--but both were decreased by an order of magnitude in our society.
Since I studied this period in depth, I have had a bit more respect for Quixotic laws, even if they are impossible to really enforce. I'm still a Libertarian at heart, but I know now that pushing a law through is sometimes a very important element of achieving social change. And pushing for laws that limit the overwhelming pattern of male sexual privilege in this society would not necessarily be a bad thing, or "harmful to women"--especially given that the alternatives to the law are already the norm. [;)]
Anyway, this was a completely silly hypothetical example, and not a serious thing. But the "women like you do more damage than misogynists" line of logic is and has always been nonsense, in my opinion. Tthe same sort of false logic argues that unions to protect workers somehow hurt the workers--or that people who fought against segregation in the American South during the Civil Rights movement were somehow hurting African-Americans...[:'(]
People in a position of unjust power may violently resist giving up their privileges, or recognizing the rights of others. But that doesn't mean that the people trying to achieve change, especially by non-violent means, are hurting anyone or doing anything wrong.
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