annebeeche:

paganatheist:

poppysaide:

dank-potion:split-the-coast:

When you discuss the wage gap, here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Only white women make $0.77 to a man’s dollar.
• Black women make about $0.68 to a man’s dollar.
• Latina women make about $0.58 to a man’s dollar.

Intersectionality matters.

And men of color make less than white women.

#man’s dollar = white man’s dollar btw

All of us need to challenge ourselves and change the way we think because what seem to have become known as ‘intersectionality’ greatly matters (though rather than looking at ‘intersections’ where people are doubly disadvantaged I prefer we talked about uniting struggles with an emphasis on the intersections…) and organisations equally need to challenge and change for the same reasons. However, where is this supposed feminist movement that sets out to exclude other equalities? People and organisations that identify as strongly anti-racist may well need to challenge themselves on gender, and those identifying as feminist need to self-challenge on racism, and both on LGBTQ*, dimensions of ableism, class, … So many posts like this one (though i note the title isn’t just ‘feminists’, assuming we are all white - not quite sure why i’m making these points on this more ‘borderline’ post) can easily be read as ‘we don’t really need feminism’. Not sure why we’re less likely to read posts entitled ‘male anti-racists:…’, by the way. We absolutely do need feminism, anti-racism and every other movement for equality. This struggle is too important to fall into factionalism. We need to robustly challenge each other and ourselves, but not self-destruct. It is not a zero-sum game: those passionate about achieving the changes needed for real equality have to combine, not squabble while the opposition watches on.

Here is a pretty good post showing what’s wrong with the feminism movement.

I had to research a bit as I’m more familiar with UK than US, but if the link in the previous comment is a ‘pretty good’ post for the anti-feminist case then the case is painfully weak. From the linked post:

Margaret Sanger (b. 1879) seems to me clearly to be a racist anti- working class eugenicist. Just because reproductive rights are a feminist issue, it doesn’t mean Planned Parenthood was formed out of feminism when it seems clearly from her point of view to be about something very different….

I’d be very disappointed if she was celebrated by current US feminists. Is she? i’ve not found this yet. I’m wondering if the pro-choice /’pro-life’ issue is so polarised that one side feels they have to deify her. Very sad if so, and if so is this from feminist voices, or just pro-choice?

Susan B. Anthony (b.1820) certainly shows racism in a factional way. Saying that ‘well educated’ white women are ‘more intelligent’ and so more deserving of the vote than black men at that time is totally unacceptable and divisive, even in the context of proposals for black men to get the vote but not black women or white women, which of course is what happened with several decades before this was finally rectified. The campaign for black men to get the vote but not women was also completely unacceptable, though as a notable difference I don’t think Anthony was really arguing for white women to have the vote at the expense of black men and women, was she? Even the Chartists in the UK who were very radical for the time in other ways were demanding universal male suffrage, not universal suffrage.

Note the dates, by the way.

How does the further-above comment ‘And men of color make less than white women’ fit into this ‘not them, just us!’ approach?

Getting positive change through a patriarchal racist capitalist system such as for birth control may well mean that that like with other medical change drugs are tested on Puerto Rican women, so yes there is blood spilled, and feminists and anti-racists should all have been opposing the exploitation involved at the time, and that does not mean not demanding change.

The movement for equal rights for men and women will never be achieved without equality on other fronts, so if you’re not aiming to be anti-racist and anti-cissexist then you’re not a feminist. Discrimination can operate very differently for different groups, and there are strong arguments I’ll not go into here for creating spaces where those with a ‘privileged’ characteristic are excluded. These do exclude people, justifiably, but mistakes have been made in the problematic issue of where the boundary is placed. So many groups including apparently progressive groups are strongly male dominated, so for this and a host of other reasons there is a history of women-only spaces/groups/events. Given what these groups aim to achieve, and that it IS justifiable to have exclusion here by gender, should it be everyone apart from ‘men-born-men’, just ‘women-born-women’ if these are acceptable terms, include trans men but not trans women, or the other way round?- including those self-identifying as non-binary? - in the context of the participants needing it to be a space to be confident and not another repeat of male-dominated space, stoked of course by transphobic misunderstanding. I’ve still got a lot of learning to do in terms of trans/cis awareness (it may show), but it’s clear that feminism has to include trans equality, and that the particular aspect of feminism which is women-only spaces has a lot of work and learning to do in how these are set up.

I totally agree with the linked post on ‘If you do not admit the racism and the anti-trans bigotry in the movement you continue it’

There are powerful people who do not want equality and will do anything possible to discredit and misrepresent movements for equality, try to split the movements internally and divide them against each other, with ‘white rights’ and ‘masculism’ being bizarre examples of this by the way.

Feminism is not optional, but essential: a wide movement which demands and build for gender equality in all its forms, in the context of all equalities, based on an understanding of how the world creates these forms of discrimination.

It’s healthy to challenge and criticise, but we must not, like too many tumblr posts be fellow travellers with those who put out the message ‘misogyny and sexist discrimination are not as important as X’.