Comments on: To my fellow sisters-in-arms:

By: Feminist In-Fighting « One Woman Army

Feminist In-Fighting « One Woman Army — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:46:30 +0000

[...] Tekjani has a good little rant about this on Shrub.com: [...]

By: Winter

Winter — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 15:58:48 +0000

I do suspect that feminism’s progress has been deeply hindered by all the infighting. I don’t know how you get beyond it though.

By: tekanji

tekanji — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 23:11:45 +0000

Canâ€™t we just try to agree on the most important thing, which is that we all want to fight for some of the same basic principles? We can have differing opinions beyond that.

I think so, too. It seems like such a simple thing to engage with an argument rather than a person, yanno? But I guess when it’s personal, it’s not so simple. *sigh*

I just wish we could all sit back and remember that feminism is about equality for women, and that equality comes at the price that sometimes women will do things that we don’t like. Our job is not to demolish them, but rather to call into question the reasoning behind those choices - as well as the reasoning behind our dislike for those choices.

By: earlbecke

earlbecke — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 23:01:01 +0000

Exactly. How will we ever, as a movement, manage to accomplish anything if we’re too busy putting other women down to focus on achieving social and economic equality? Can’t we just try to agree on the most important thing, which is that we all want to fight for some of the same basic principles? We can have differing opinions beyond that. I think that far too often the real purpose and meaning of feminism (the rights of women) is lost within all the internal attacks and misunderstandings.

By: Darth Sidhe

Darth Sidhe — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 21:55:12 +0000

It’s surprising and dispiriting how it’s just the same shit, different pile, when it comes to you doing things that members of a group don’t like. You’ll always be the “bad feminist,” you’ll always “cater to the patriarchy,” you’ll always be a “gender traitor,” you’ll always “betray feminism by acting like a man” — the insult depends on the particular subset of feminism you piss off. Once I came over my initial leeriness about joining an on-line feminist group, I thought that feminism was about accepting equality-minded women without reservations. Unfortunately, lately it’s been proved to me that my reservations were right; the loudest voices are the quickest to condemn rather than support the women they claim to fight for.

A couple of days ago I made the comment that I’m far more likely to be unquestioningly accepted in an childfree forum than a feminist forum, which is seventeen different kinds of fucked up because without feminism, women wouldn’t have the option to be childfree.