Your tone in this comment is hostile and defensive. This suggests to me that you’ve had discussions with feminists who were very aggressive and possibly unreasonable. If true, I’m sorry that you had to experience that. But please try to keep in mind that not all women/feminists are like that, and that it’s possible to recognize misogyny as a phenomenon without blaming each individual man for all of the the gender inequalities in our society.
Hostile, yes. I reserve my hostility towards those who are aggressive and unreasonable, however. For an example of a self-described feminist who I like, Quizzical Pussy. (Yeah, yeah, I have black friends.) But I wasn’t actually angry about the misandry, although I noted it, and criticized the hypocrisy. I was angry at the -misogyny-.
See:
“this is in part due to women using men’s explanations, with men being less challenging than apologetic”
“the victim’s biological mother (abuser’s wife) and paternal grandmother accepted the abuser’s rationalizations”
(and the bit about the grandmother)
The persistent theme in the post is denying the women involved any agency. There’s patriarchy, they’re just victims, helpless. They’re not complicit, they’re abused. It’s a narrative in which women are -too stupid to know any better-, and must be enlightened. THAT is what pissed me off. I have contempt for feminists who hate men, but they don’t make me angry. Feminists who deride the patriarchy for dictating the lives of women, and demand women live by these other dictates in order to fix it—they piss me off. That’s a betrayal of the basest order.
I agree that that wasn’t substantively about patriarchy. The comment about the older woman having to do all of the household work, however, was.
The entire paragraph was building up to excusing the abuse; she creates a narrative in which patriarchy is responsible for an older woman beating a young male in her care.
Hostile, yes. I reserve my hostility towards those who are aggressive and unreasonable, however. For an example of a self-described feminist who I like, Quizzical Pussy. (Yeah, yeah, I have black friends.) But I wasn’t actually angry about the misandry, although I noted it, and criticized the hypocrisy. I was angry at the -misogyny-.
See:
“this is in part due to women using men’s explanations, with men being less challenging than apologetic” “the victim’s biological mother (abuser’s wife) and paternal grandmother accepted the abuser’s rationalizations” (and the bit about the grandmother)
The persistent theme in the post is denying the women involved any agency. There’s patriarchy, they’re just victims, helpless. They’re not complicit, they’re abused. It’s a narrative in which women are -too stupid to know any better-, and must be enlightened. THAT is what pissed me off. I have contempt for feminists who hate men, but they don’t make me angry. Feminists who deride the patriarchy for dictating the lives of women, and demand women live by these other dictates in order to fix it—they piss me off. That’s a betrayal of the basest order.
The entire paragraph was building up to excusing the abuse; she creates a narrative in which patriarchy is responsible for an older woman beating a young male in her care.