There’s a story that does the rounds in politics about a radicalised council in north London in the 1980s, when the Trotskyite entryists were worming their way inside the local Labour Parties with all the potency of dry rot. It goes like this: if an unsuspecting comrade, new to the area, wanted to join his or her local branch they would be informed that they couldn’t.

    “Sorry,” they would be told as the door was slammed in their face. “No vacancies.”

    Ever tried to engage with feminism on the internet?



zebra2:

Feminism in modern society is a strange thing. Feminism has a long history with discrete waves and motivations, and there's a modern population that largely doesn't understand them.

One of the more progressive ideas to be embraced by (some in) the current wave of feminism is total gender neutrality in society. Things like chivalry couldn't be compatible with this wave, because something like chivalry reinforces notions that femininity comes with certain conditions and expectations. It will be "ladies first" but that is because ladies are weak, helpless, "pure", etc., and will be expected to behave like such in society. It strives to redefine the concept of "feminine" to strip it of it's insidious restraints of women. So the current state of feminism is pretty nuanced and evolved, but a lot of people are clueless to that.

Rather, you have a lot of people who think of feminism in terms of the attitudes of the first wave: marked by anger and rather reactionary. You have people rallying for and against feminism on these terms such that it has become the commonly perceived face of feminism.


posted 4046 days ago