What is Feminism?

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And why does it constantly get a bad rap? Mind you I believe men should have the same rights as women and I'm all against women who go to the extreme in espousing hatred toward men. But why is feminism in general seen as a bad concept, it almost gets the same comparison to racism.

I had a talk with a guy about feminism. He's against feminism and claims that it's caused a good deal of misandry. The more I asked the more defensive he'd get by using the reference you women.

Here's one argument he made: "Almost all of these feminists transformations of history to exaggerate the living conditions of women have been debunked.
My fav is the "rule of thumb". Feminists claim that in 1600's england men could beat their wives legally with a rod no thicker than their thumb. "Keep spinning your silly fairy tales. Maybe some-day you will find somebody willing to listen." I couldn't find references regarding this myth and I didn't get a reply after asking where he got this "fact". I'm still looking up of most of the things him and his comrades dismissed historically.

So my question is this, what is feminism?

Why is it commonly seen in the same light as racism or sexism?

And is feminism a thing of the past?

What in your opinion defines feminism?

It seems like a vague concept understood differently
by different people.

I would assume that feminism emerged from the World
War times, when millions of men and boys went to Europe
from the USA (don't know about elsewhere) and the ladies
worked in mens jobs, and also jobs from emerging
technology such as telephone operator voices and
television/cinema acting, and when the guys came home
they didn't want to have to go home, because they proved
that they could be breadwinners.

I would assume that this upset the traditional role of men
and made them feel less like men (traditionally), or that
women were no longer dependent on men and therefore
men feel like they lost something when women became
more like them and more independent.

I will just mention this but I have never thought about it
this way until now, nor do I feel it now, but maybe
the reason those of us who have aspie parents had parents
that needed each other more, and maybe some men
feel more unwanted and unneeded than in the past.

Now on a different point of view, I have heard so called
feminist slogans such as "all men are rapists" which I
am innocent of, and I find it to be a frightening thing to
hear women say while having a lot of memory of the
opposite sex being mostly mean to myself, and I am
not thinking of rejection of dates, but of the majority
of my classmates in school; and of the remainder, zero
members of the opposite sex were my friends then.

I wrote these things in a neutral mood, recalling past
things that are no longer relevant to me and how I feel
about women in general. I don't know if others agree
or disagree with what I wrote, but I will submit to the
fact that I am otherwise totally ignorant of this topic,
and anyone else is more qualified than myself to
comment, so let their opinions have priority over
this post of mine.

To my knowledge it started with the sufferagette movement. I would guess feminism got a bad rep for a few possible reasons.

One possible reason is that it went further than people were comfortable with.

Another possible reason is that some men were raised to believe that women shouldn't/couldn't do certian things and were lesser in some way because of it.

There are other possible reasons but I can't think of them at the moment.

Though, the way a person is raised is sometimes hard for them to learn to question in part because they probably have to question themselves somewhat. If someone is raised in a house where certian things are considered to be right and true, it is hard the person to change the belief.

About the 1600's in England, men were permitted to beat their wives. There was also a device that was to punish a woman for nagging, it was leather strapped around the head with a metal peice secured in the mouth, holding the toungue down. It wasn't used regularly (as far as I know) but such a device is awful anyways.

I think the guys you were talking to don't want to believe that women ever had it that bad because it would make them feel bad. Feminism seems to be used as an insult by some men these days because they don't seem to understand that women didn't always have rights. It was something hard fought for and sometimes it can make people uncomfortable.

Did you ask him how he felt about women being equal? It's lightly he would have said something more positive about that but has been possibly misinformed about feminism.

I believe most feminists want equality for men and women - I think the idea that all feminists want more rights for women then for men is usually used by anti-feminist people to discredit feminists as a whole - I very rarely come across opinions from actual feminists who want men to have less rights than women. I think, like with the term "liberal," there has been a concerted and organised movement to discredit the word "feminism" and make it into a bad word of sorts. The patriarchy has been the status quo for thousands of years, mostly because labour and power used to be determined by physical strength so that men had a physical advantage (also weren't constantly being crippled by pregnancy). Now we are in an era where one's intellect matters more, so that women can succeed at the same level as men, and it threatens those that benefit from it so they fight against it. Now that it is a political liability to say that women are inferior, they use arguments like "feminists are all man-hating harpies" and so on.

In the past women had mostly slave-like status. In the United States, women didn't get property rights until the mid 19th Century, marital rape was still legal in many states as far as 20-30 years ago. Now it's still a problem - you beat up a random stranger, you get charged with assault, go to jail, you beat up your partner - you get a slap on the wrist in a lot of cases. There's still a lot of misogyny - both from religious conservatism which has patriarchy as a built-in concept, and from run of the mill sexists who believe women exist to give men sex and take care of them. Though it has gotten a lot better both legally and in terms of society denouncing the most overt forms of sexism.

The modern history of feminism is actually quite old, as old as the modern age itself. In the 1700s, in Europe, you had Mary Wollstonecraft writing a pamplet on the need for women's rights. In the U.S., the first big feminist movement started a few decades before the Civil War, and many of these women also fought in the Abolitionist and temperance movements. When Sojurner Truth gave her "Ain't I a Woman?" speech, she was talking to an audience that already knew about the fights for women's and African American's rights, though maybe they didn't think too hard about the plight of minority women. In the early 1900s, pre-world wars, Emma Goldman was arrested for distributing information on birth control.

In the 70s, there was a lot of rotten scholarship on things like supposed matriarchal religions of prehistoric times, and a backlash against that is perfectly appropriate. However, it is very unfair to throw out the baby with the bathwater and declare all feminism rotten. Women are still not accorded the same respect that men are and "women's work" is still frequently lower paid or even unpaid.

I was once told by an industrial psychologist that the two original goals were.

1. Equal rights in the workplace (I guess that this extends into the home)

2. Freedom from sexual predation

_________________
Health is a state of physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity I am not a jigsaw, I am a free man !

Diagnosed under the DSM5 rules with autism spectrum disorder, under DSM4 psychologist said would have been AS (299.80) but I suspect that I am somewhere between 299.80 and 299.00 (Autism) under DSM4.

Until there is true impartiality between the sexes, there will always be need for feminism. Gender based discrimination, or more easily to pick out in today's society, favour to the male existence, male privilege, etc, is everywhere, and rather easy to pick out. Ever had someone listen to you just because they want your body rather than your words? How about people listening less attentively to your speech than the guy who spoke on the exact same topic after you? Picture a person making a presentation, who do you envision, most people will either envision themselves, or an idealized male leader, and more leaning to the idealized male leader. I'm guilty of that myself. Think about your family, Which parent manages the household's finances? In most cases, its the father, or a mix of the two, rarely the mother. That comes from the idea of men being better with money.

Feminism seeks not just equality between the sexes, but impartiality between them too. A male applicant being equally considered to a female applicant for a job, a female giving a speech regarded as highly as a male giving the same speech, children not being told not to do something because "little girls don't do that" or "little boys don't do that." While the focus is on women's issues, there are still men's issues that need to be resolved, and within the core beliefs of feminism, those issues are addressed as well, under the goal of impartiality. Men need to stop being held to a higher standard then women, and women should be viewed with an equal standard to men. The standard men are held to makes being gay unacceptable, but being lesbian acceptable, and even attractive in some situations. Boys not being allowed to play with dolls, and being told to play with an action figure instead, which might as well be a doll. The standards people in society hold themselves to are just completely backwards, and feminism seeks to fix this on the issue of gender equality, but there is still a very long way left to go. Feminism isn't against men, its against the ideals surrounding gender in society, it just so happens that in a lot of ways, men have the advantage, and in ways they don't (such as lesbians being more accepted than gays), its because men enjoy or even fetishize those advantages. You can't tell me that a straight man who accepts lesbians, but hates gays, does so because he accepts people for who they are, there is some other motive behind that, and that motive is typically sex. A male friend once told me that part of the appeal of lesbian love scenes (the more explicit type) to men, is because most of the men dream of being invited to join them, and get the attention of two women instead of one. You can't honestly tell me that that is acceptance, it sounds more like a sexual fantasy than acceptance.

Equal rights for men and women.