re: T/F: Feminists are, by and large, joyless and bitter and...

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I've not seen one offered and this thread is inconsistent as hell.

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There doesn't need to be one offered, and all words are highly dynamic. Human activity is also highly dynamic, labels applied there will necessarily be even more so. The same phenomenon would occur in a thread about liberals, conservatives, Louisianans, Latinos, fat people, and Zoroastrians. That's the magic of linguistics. If "feminist" has no single unified set of connotations, and its meaning is varied by situation or context or personal epistemology, that only makes it like every other word.

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For instance, you said "most feminism up to and including The Feminist Mystique [sic] (60s-70s)" which is not very useful in that it uses the word in its own definition, two decades is not a particularly useful demarcation, there was stuff being produced even then which was "social and anthropological,"

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Without question.

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and the stuff on either side is hardly a unified voice, there are feminists on either side I can think of that you would likely want to push back and forth. I'm especially unsure why you would want to include The Feminine Mystique in your definition since it's like the ur-text in pushing the boundaries of feminism beyond simple legal equality (there's an entire chapter devoted to how 1950s-style consumerism reinforces the patriarchy, for instance).

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Good thing I used the word "most."

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Discussing labels that act as a shorthand for baskets of ideas instead of the individual ideas

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We've discussed the ideas.

In my view, the label-over-idea phenomenon tends to occur when the ideologists are perceived as more influential, in a sense of both personal experience and the larger culture, than the ideology itself. Makes sense, right? We can see this with any group. Now feminism is no longer as clear an ideology as it once was, or perhaps (granted) as we now perceive it was. Other evolving ideas (including Marxism, socialism, liberalism) are not perceived to have this degree of divergence and "branching." You have some education on the matter and you can't explain fully what feminism is. No one can. So what are we left with? Feminists.

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In my view, the label-over-idea phenomenon tends to occur when the ideologists are perceived as more influential, in a sense of both personal experience and the larger culture, than the ideology itself. Makes sense, right?

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Not really. There aren't any overwhelmingly influential "feminist ideologists." There's a massive school of professors (with some big fish like hooks and Curry) and a more massive swarm of bloggers, each with their own view on what feminism is. There's no real push and pull to discern. You can try to find some the most common areas of ground, but there's always exceptions and it's a tricky thing to measure influence. In general, there are just as many feminisms as feminists. This allows free and easy cherry-picking among people already disinclined to favor feminism.

For instance, two cherries in this thread are "feminists hate domesticity even when freely chosen" or "feminists don't care about Muslim oppression." I have no doubt these are provable in the sense that someone, somewhere in the bowels of academia or the Internet labels as a "feminist" and says these things. But I'm pretty confident saying they're both minority views among self-described feminists.

(And man, feminism is clear as crystal compared to Marxism or liberalism. Liberalism has been diverged and branched longer than feminism has even been a thing.)

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There aren't any overwhelmingly influential "feminist ideologists." There's a massive school of professors (with some big fish like hooks and Curry) and a more massive swarm of bloggers, each with their own view on what feminism is. There's no real push and pull to discern. You can try to find some the most common areas of ground, but there's always exceptions and it's a tricky thing to measure influence. In general, there are just as many feminisms as feminists. This allows free and easy cherry-picking among people already disinclined to favor feminism.

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Not everyone's perception of a group is based in political and academic influence. Why should it be? That's a very lawyer-centric response. Perhaps I didn't explain fully, but "personal experience" covers a far wider gamut. Again, apply this to any group. Are you claiming interpersonal perceptions should only be shaped by academia? Any talk of blacks outside African-American studies and lobbying groups is wrong? Or racist? Or dumb? Or... what?

Ah, but a shitty OP can [d]evolve into a worthwhile discussion. Not everyone is a troglodyte. You could ignore the cretins, who apparently constantly conform to your perceived tropes of the paleolithic era, and simply advance the discussion yourself. And man, if we're talking about the utility of discussion pertaining to threads on this (or any) board, you're fighting an uphill battle. Or I guess you're not fighting a battle. There's an infinite amount of laughter to be had, as it were.

I stopped reading this thread a long time ago.

Anyone care to give me cliffs on these tl;dr posts? TIA.

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Anyone care to give me cliffs on these tl;dr posts? TIA.

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Everything is good except Iosh is an Idiot. Everything he opposes is 'not useful.' That's called anti critical thinking. The Jesse Jackson school of rhetoric.

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Everything is good except Iosh is an Idiot. Everything he opposes is 'not useful.' That's called anti critical thinking. The Jesse Jackson school of rhetoric.

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Gotcha.


Thanks.

Thank you to those participating in this thread.

There was a request for a feminist definition for the purpose of the question, any one of the following:

a) women's studies professor/instructor

b) Gloria Steinem

c) "Pay for my birth control" Flake

Hey, who do I have to frick to get a goddamn sammich around here?