Gullscorer wrote:As for the Scouts and Guides, if the situation is as you suggest, that doesn't sound like sexism to me; more a lack of ambition on the part of the Guides, resulting in the typical feminist attitude: to want what the men have got without having to work for it themselves. There's actually a kind of reverse sexism in play here. However, thinking back to my time in the Scouts, many years ago, I'd have been quite happy to see girls in the troop, though I'd have drawn the line at sharing tents. These days, it only takes one teenage girl to falsely cry 'rape' for young men's lives to be ruined (see the relevant thread on this forum)..
The bolded here suggests that you don't understand feminism and you do not even possess a cursory knowledge of history as to why feminism exists.
The Guides developed primarily because girls attempted to join the Scouts all the way back in 1908 and often couldn't. They weren't part of some devious
"pack of whining, c***ty shrews" (as your opening post's article describes) looking to ruin the fun of the boys. They just wanted to have fun of their own and for some reason weren't allowed unless they conformed to being segregated along the lines of gender. See, here's the thing. I'm a feminist and a man. I do sympathise with the modern man and his encounter with modern feminism. I appreciate that there are certain nuances that do not translate well. I can imagine that seeing some of the common feminist rhetoric comes across as an attack on men. And sometimes it does, truly. I don't like to be victimised because of my gender. So it's easy for me to imagine what it's like for a woman. I can imagine it would be pretty darn upsetting for a woman to read a man say that he doesn't want to share a tent with her because
"it only takes one girl to falsely cry 'rape' for young men's lives to be ruined".
At the same time, I think you'd have to be extremely unintelligent if you couldn't recognise that as recently as the early part of the 20th century, women had far less rights than men. Perhaps you are unaware of what truly sparked the first wave of feminism. In the late 1800s, the world was a pretty crap place for most people, but it was especially bad for women. Contrary to the modern misogynist who imagines that a woman's place was always the kitchen, back then their "place" was often some grotty factory doing hard manual labour with next to no rights. It wasn't until 1882 that married women were recognised as individual people being able to own their own property. Before, the marriage meant that all their possessions became that of the man's and they began to share a single identity, that of the man.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverture And that's just one of the issues. The worst thing about all this is that these laws and social norms persisted for many years before women were even allowed to vote. It took them until 1918 to gain that right. Up until then, their rights were at the mercy of an all-male parliament elected by an all-male electorate. Yes, indeed, the feminists of the early 1900s were indeed trying to get what men had. But they were most assuredly trying to work for it themselves! People like you certainly weren't going to help them, were they?
But sure enough 1918 was not the moment sexism was defeated forever. In fact, women had to be 30 to vote until 1928. Things were still unequal heading into the 1960s crossing into what we now know as second-wave feminism. The objectives then were to allow women sexual rights, reproductive rights, education rights, workplace rights and so on. A whole pantheon of issues unresolved to give women equity in the world. And in addition, to bring attention to the issues of domestic violence and marital rape. Would you believe that in the 60s, it was believed that a husband could not rape his wife? Well, it wasn't just believed, there was simply no mechanism in law to do anything about it. Marriage as it was defined in the 1800s meant that the man effectively owned his wife as her legal rights were subsumed by her husbands. Thus the marriage gave the man conjugal rights and as a result meant the woman could not legally revoke consent to sexual intercourse at any point. This is regardless of whether she wanted to have sex. Even with various amendments to the laws on marriage, marital rape did not become a criminal act until the 1990s for many European countries. The right to abortion is a complicated issue that still persists politically today. It took until 1967 for women in the UK (sans Northern Ireland) to be allowed to have an abortion even when there were risks to the life of the pregnant woman! Feminism had to work hard to gain these rights. It's not difficult to imagine why your attempts to discredit the movement come across as anti-woman to many people. There were anti-feminists in the 1960s and they too liked to discredit the work of the feminists, who were fighting to achieve rights for women, by conflating their efforts with hatred for men (among other specious things).
It's easy with the benefit of hindsight to say the above were all necessary changes and that all woman deserve equal treatment. But if you held those views in the early 1900s, you'd have been...shock horror.... a feminist! Third wave (and fourth wave) feminism has admittedly given rise to a much more divisive form of feminism as it ultimately was born out of intrafeminist disputes over sexuality and pornography, and many other things. We feminists, as I explained to you before, are not all singing from the same song sheet, we all have different ideas as to how the movement can move forward. This is why it makes you look silly to ascribe the views of a couple of feminists as that of all of us. We are not a monolithic group. There are sex negative feminists and there are sex positive feminists. There are those that embrace femininity and there are those who wish not to be defined by femininity. There are, in more simple terms, conservative feminists and progressive feminists. Fortunately most of these differing views can be incorporated neatly in society with the help of choice and freedom of expression, as can that of the views of those who prefer not to identify as feminists and even those who wish to be anti-feminist (though you still have failed spectacularly to explain why anyone would want to be one of those). The beauty of the modern world is that we are increasingly more open to a marketplace of ideas. We can accept some and reject others. I've noticed that anti-feminists like yourself do not like this and I suspect it is because you're afraid that feminists may actually win in the marketplace of ideas. Well, because they often do! Hence why you often smear those ideas as "lies" and "propaganda" and "myths" and are overly liberal in your use of the word "totalitarian". You're desperate to hold up the latest smoking gun that proves feminism is out to boot men off the planet.
Unfortunately for you, a few feminists talking about a golf course is not much of a smoking gun. And rather humorously, you've exposed yourself by endorsing a blog post that commits all the crimes you personally claimed undermines the strength of one's argument:
Gullscorer wrote:Directed against an opponent in debate rather than against his or her arguments, it simply reveals the paucity and immaturity of your ideas and the weakness of your position, mired as it is in your own ideology.
Gullscorer wrote:When opponents in debate or in politics attempt to slur, slander, vilify, and demonise, rather than present reasoned and cogent arguments of their own, then I know their position is a weak one.
Perhaps most damning of all comes in this paragraph:
Gullscorer's article wrote:My guess is Laura is too f***** lazy to hit the gym every day, and finds it easier to sulk about men ogling her. Quite frankly, I don’t even believe her. ‘He looked at my ass’ sounds an awful lot like ‘I’m hitting the wall hard, but I’m still so hot, men harass me’. File that under ‘s*** that didn’t happen’.
The take away here is that the Guardian author who dared to express an opinion about a golf course simply must be a liar and out-of-shape and shouldn't be allowed an opinion. Or, "Shut the f*** up," as your article later goes on to put it so eloquently. It's curious given your apparent deep regard for free speech, and your conscience against the ad hominem, that you've championed the words of someone actively looking to suppress the speech of others with a series of wild invective!
