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Elisabella -> RE: Feminism (11/7/2009 6:25:33 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: xssve
What you are referring to here, and what I suspect Shakti may be finding so objectionable, is infantilization - which, like it or not, is a rider on paternal politics, just as male infantilization is a rider on maternal politics - both sides essentially object to it, as if it were all a question of who get to be infantilized from a strict institutional, social policy perspective.
Shakti's arguement holds more water, from an empirical basis: there is more empirical evidence of feminine infanitilization historically, and more current attempts to shape institutional policy in this direction, whereas your more conservative (paternal) fears tend not to hold up well under scrutiny, i.e., regulation, PC, which they tend to characterize as infantilizing and react to violently as a class of restriction (the "nanny" state), although in most cases, these are simply prudent and progressive social-economic policies, as a class.
i.e., conservative/paternal oppression fantasies tend to be more emotional than real, the "damage" abstract, whereas feminist fears of oppression have very distinct and well documented antecedents, the consequences very much corporeal, the damage empirically assessable.
I do agree, that the thought of going back to a time where women were property of their husbands or weren't allowed to vote is a horrifying proposition, but I think right now what we have is a false "either/or" dichotomy. Either we keep on pushing up this hill (feminism) or we will automatically start to roll back down it.
The problem with my position, at least relating to feminism, is that I don't have an easy answer. I can't say "we need to do this, this, and this, and then society will be totally wonderful for both men and women." I don't have a ten step plan that will lead to utopia, all I can say is hey, wait a second, let's look where we're going before we keep sprinting toward it.
Decisions have consequences. Take the pill for example. It was lauded as a great advance for the feminist movement, now women had control over when and if they got pregnant. Right?
Well, not so much.
I'm using UK stats because they were a lot easier to find so please correct me if there's a huge disparity between them and US statistics which I've been using up to this point.
In 1961 the birth control pill was made available to all UK women. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/december/4/newsid_3228000/3228207.stm
In 1960 the percentage of out of wedlock babies was 5.2% http://demoblography.blogspot.com/2007/06/percentage-of-out-of-wedlock-births-in.html
In 2005, 42.3% of babies were born out of wedlock http://www.soompi.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=40024&mode=threaded&pid=1842093
I know that there are quite a few financially successful women who are reaching an age where they want to have a child, and as they don't have a husband they choose to do it on their own. But those women are the minority - the majority of out of wedlock babies weren't planned.
Repeat - since the birth control was made public, and lauded as a way to give women more control over whether or not they become pregnant, the percentage of *unplanned* births has increased nearly eightfold.
Now please don't take this as me saying "the pill should be banned' because I don't think it should be. What I do think however is that we do need to look back at the past, compare it to the present, and incorporate elements of both into our future. Blindly pushing forward and uprooting everything we think is bad is not working. Our gains are matched, and sometimes bettered, by our losses.
If I had a simple bulletpointed plan of action saying what we should do it would be easier for me to argue this, but I really don't. My game plan is just fix what we have before pushing forward. We don't have to go back to the dark ages...but we also don't have to discount everything they did right just because they were the ones who did it.
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