Yeah, it seems like by this standard it's near impossible not to spend all your time overrationalizing extremes. Would she similarly force herself to describe QAnon as the belief that the world should not be run by pedophiles? Surely she doesn't believe the world *should* be run by pedophiles. But that typically isn't the reason people disagree with QAnon.
This is an excellent response, but I'm going to try to be more Bryan than Bryan.
Female well-being IS more important than male well-being, for obvious reasons. I'm as anti-draft as you are, but the fact that it only applies to men is far more just than having it apply to both men and women. In case I haven't sufficiently offended your casual readers, I'll add that Charles Murray's research on family stability supports this. Children born to and living with their married parents have the best outcomes on average. Children of single mothers (or even divorced and remarried mothers) tend to have worse outcomes, with one exception: if the father dies while the parents are married and the children live at home (if only there were a shorter way to say this, like "stable traditional family"), average children's outcomes barely differ. We matter as fathers, but we're pretty effective whether we're alive or dead. Especially if we have enough life insurance. Men are simply more expendable, and we should embrace that. We are important but expendable. Women are important and essential. What's weird is that's viewed as anti-woman.
Perhaps Bryan's biggest blind spot is sexual assault. By the time she is 20 almost every woman will have at the bare minimum been flashed at by a person capable of physically overpowering her, and suffered a lot of unwanted sexual propositions. Far more sinister is the amount of sexual assault and rape. The vast majority of women I have been very close to (girlfriends, close family) have been sexually assaulted or raped. I don't know of a man I am similarlly close to that has been.
Now, this is anecdotal you may say, but I would respond that none of those women I know have told a stranger this, and my anecdotal evidence leads me to believe this is a huge undiscovered problem.
I don't really understand Murti's disagreement regarding Caplan's definition of feminism. Her preferred definition is that "men and women should be treated equally". Which is a statement only required to be made if someone believes that they are not being treated equally (because if they are already being treated equally then the word "should" would not exist in that definition).
This in turn confirms Caplan's definition of Feminism that it is "The view that our society generally treats men more fairly than women" (i.e. not equally).
I think it's hard for people to admit that in a poor and dangerous world, the restrictions put on women were probably a decent equilibrium in order to protect and provide for them. As the world got less poor and dangerous societal mores updated pretty darn quickly, and I don't see much evidence that it was done so slowly that it constituted the worst crime ever.
I don't think "earnest feminists" can be converted, but if uncommitted normies would stop providing token cover for them they would be a lot less disruptive to the rest of us.
(You could object that the right to vote, though of little value to any woman individually, is of great value to women collectively. If people voted selfishly, this would make sense, but almost all of the evidence says otherwise. The gender gap on abortion, for example, is minimal).
---
I'm not sure this is a good example. Support for abortion is evenly split by gender on most surveys. While agree that some women are really into it, it's not clear to me that abortion law would be significantly different if women couldn't vote or that its in a woman's interest to have maximal abortion freedom. Most of the volunteers I see at crisis pregnancy centers are women.
And of course, about half (or more) of abortions kill a future woman.
A better example might be divorce law or child custody, where women definitely have organized to get the better end of it.
Because men and women have to live together, there aren't that many issues that are uniquely gendered (the less they live together, the bigger the gender gaps get).
There is probably a stronger case for minorities getting the vote being able to use it to secure certain rights (like blacks).
The value of a vote varies with the supply of votes. Under universal suffrage votes are cheap.
Brilliant as always. Her indignation at your success objects rebuttal coupled with her MGTOW/incel smear is quite telling. A thinker approaching a topic in a dispassionate way won't allow argument to slide into guilt by association indictment. Also, that something as obvs true as success objects would provoke it makes it all the stranger (or perhaps makes sense - when there are no good arguments for something, the way to maintain it is to double down on the taboo).
"...are, in fact, issues that modern feminists do identify as problems and have discussed at great length."
The NOW - I think the most prominent feminist organization in the country - actively opposes and lobbies against gender equality in state custody law. And to my knowledge, most feminists support compulsory child support laws, which is a key reason for some of the things she lists. It's not just a matter of how much one emphasize male vs. female issues; most feminists - or at least most activists - support policies that privilege women or redistribute from men to women. They support such policies because they believe it's fair compensation for what they see as society's unfair treatment of women, but whether that's true or not, one can't just sweep all that under the rug when positing that feminists oppose discrimination against males too.
My issue with the definition of feminism as "the belief society treats men more fairly than it treats women," is that it seems to me that whether or not someone is a feminist is a fact about them specifically. It should not change based on what society one lives in. If I get on a plane in Saudi Arabia and fly to Themyscira it sounds weird to say that I was a feminist when I got on the plane, but not a feminist when I got off.
It also doesn't match the usage of the word by the people Bryan describes who believe in equality but don't describe themselves as feminists. They believe that feminism is "no longer necessary" because of how society advances. If feminism was a belief that society treats men more fairly than women it wouldn't be "no longer neccessary," it would be "no longer true."
Maybe "activism directed at making society treat women as fairly as it treats men" would be more accurate?
What strikes me about the counter arguments against feminism here and otherwise, is how thematically masculine they tend to be. At the end of your essay you say “doers over talkers”, isn’t that a metaphorical way of saying men over women? Statistically speaking who “does” more and who “talks” more? I think women tend to be more analyzing the metaphorical world and men the surface world. I think figuring it out really takes the back and forth between both.
Surely 'advocating for women's interests' is a better definition than an equality based definition. Equality depends on the conditions of men and no feminist would advocate for worse outcomes for women just because male outcomes had fallen. Likewise generally advocating for better conditions for all doesn't count as feminist for obvious reasons. Why would any group not have an interest in advocating for itself? It is almost tautologically true that any group of people will tend to advocate for their own interests.
> If you just want to say that feminism inspired women to try harder, that hardly counts as “helping women obtain access to markets.” It counts, rather, as helping women take advantage of access they already had.
I think it inspired women to do things they had previously been told they can not or should not do, and inspired men to see women as equals and refrain from trying to stop them from doing those things. In that aspect, I think feminism should be given credit from making the world a much better place and liberating many people from arbitrary and harmful social and cultural restraints.
I don't really think one can describe "feminist" views, because there are so many different kinds of feminism. A classically liberal feminist and a marxist feminist would probably both believe that women are treated less fairly than men, but they would have drastically different views on the root causes, the ideal world, what fairness means and maybe even what a woman is. Which is why I think Bryan's definition is good.
I have read a bit about feminism and I really want to understand it, but it is really hard to figure out which part of the movement believes in what and how it all fits together.
Yeah, it seems like by this standard it's near impossible not to spend all your time overrationalizing extremes. Would she similarly force herself to describe QAnon as the belief that the world should not be run by pedophiles? Surely she doesn't believe the world *should* be run by pedophiles. But that typically isn't the reason people disagree with QAnon.
This is an excellent response, but I'm going to try to be more Bryan than Bryan.
Female well-being IS more important than male well-being, for obvious reasons. I'm as anti-draft as you are, but the fact that it only applies to men is far more just than having it apply to both men and women. In case I haven't sufficiently offended your casual readers, I'll add that Charles Murray's research on family stability supports this. Children born to and living with their married parents have the best outcomes on average. Children of single mothers (or even divorced and remarried mothers) tend to have worse outcomes, with one exception: if the father dies while the parents are married and the children live at home (if only there were a shorter way to say this, like "stable traditional family"), average children's outcomes barely differ. We matter as fathers, but we're pretty effective whether we're alive or dead. Especially if we have enough life insurance. Men are simply more expendable, and we should embrace that. We are important but expendable. Women are important and essential. What's weird is that's viewed as anti-woman.
Perhaps Bryan's biggest blind spot is sexual assault. By the time she is 20 almost every woman will have at the bare minimum been flashed at by a person capable of physically overpowering her, and suffered a lot of unwanted sexual propositions. Far more sinister is the amount of sexual assault and rape. The vast majority of women I have been very close to (girlfriends, close family) have been sexually assaulted or raped. I don't know of a man I am similarlly close to that has been.
Now, this is anecdotal you may say, but I would respond that none of those women I know have told a stranger this, and my anecdotal evidence leads me to believe this is a huge undiscovered problem.
I don't really understand Murti's disagreement regarding Caplan's definition of feminism. Her preferred definition is that "men and women should be treated equally". Which is a statement only required to be made if someone believes that they are not being treated equally (because if they are already being treated equally then the word "should" would not exist in that definition).
This in turn confirms Caplan's definition of Feminism that it is "The view that our society generally treats men more fairly than women" (i.e. not equally).
How exactly did feminism “help women obtain the same access to markets as men enjoyed”?
The ability to open a bank account or take out a loan or credit card is a pretty big gap in market access
"The problem is not that I misunderstand feminism, but that I understand it all too well.'
Of course you do. The well-off straight white dude is the only one who has a clear vision of what women in society face.
Bravo.
Great post.
I think it's hard for people to admit that in a poor and dangerous world, the restrictions put on women were probably a decent equilibrium in order to protect and provide for them. As the world got less poor and dangerous societal mores updated pretty darn quickly, and I don't see much evidence that it was done so slowly that it constituted the worst crime ever.
I don't think "earnest feminists" can be converted, but if uncommitted normies would stop providing token cover for them they would be a lot less disruptive to the rest of us.
(You could object that the right to vote, though of little value to any woman individually, is of great value to women collectively. If people voted selfishly, this would make sense, but almost all of the evidence says otherwise. The gender gap on abortion, for example, is minimal).
---
I'm not sure this is a good example. Support for abortion is evenly split by gender on most surveys. While agree that some women are really into it, it's not clear to me that abortion law would be significantly different if women couldn't vote or that its in a woman's interest to have maximal abortion freedom. Most of the volunteers I see at crisis pregnancy centers are women.
And of course, about half (or more) of abortions kill a future woman.
A better example might be divorce law or child custody, where women definitely have organized to get the better end of it.
Because men and women have to live together, there aren't that many issues that are uniquely gendered (the less they live together, the bigger the gender gaps get).
There is probably a stronger case for minorities getting the vote being able to use it to secure certain rights (like blacks).
The value of a vote varies with the supply of votes. Under universal suffrage votes are cheap.
Brilliant as always. Her indignation at your success objects rebuttal coupled with her MGTOW/incel smear is quite telling. A thinker approaching a topic in a dispassionate way won't allow argument to slide into guilt by association indictment. Also, that something as obvs true as success objects would provoke it makes it all the stranger (or perhaps makes sense - when there are no good arguments for something, the way to maintain it is to double down on the taboo).
"...are, in fact, issues that modern feminists do identify as problems and have discussed at great length."
The NOW - I think the most prominent feminist organization in the country - actively opposes and lobbies against gender equality in state custody law. And to my knowledge, most feminists support compulsory child support laws, which is a key reason for some of the things she lists. It's not just a matter of how much one emphasize male vs. female issues; most feminists - or at least most activists - support policies that privilege women or redistribute from men to women. They support such policies because they believe it's fair compensation for what they see as society's unfair treatment of women, but whether that's true or not, one can't just sweep all that under the rug when positing that feminists oppose discrimination against males too.
My issue with the definition of feminism as "the belief society treats men more fairly than it treats women," is that it seems to me that whether or not someone is a feminist is a fact about them specifically. It should not change based on what society one lives in. If I get on a plane in Saudi Arabia and fly to Themyscira it sounds weird to say that I was a feminist when I got on the plane, but not a feminist when I got off.
It also doesn't match the usage of the word by the people Bryan describes who believe in equality but don't describe themselves as feminists. They believe that feminism is "no longer necessary" because of how society advances. If feminism was a belief that society treats men more fairly than women it wouldn't be "no longer neccessary," it would be "no longer true."
Maybe "activism directed at making society treat women as fairly as it treats men" would be more accurate?
What strikes me about the counter arguments against feminism here and otherwise, is how thematically masculine they tend to be. At the end of your essay you say “doers over talkers”, isn’t that a metaphorical way of saying men over women? Statistically speaking who “does” more and who “talks” more? I think women tend to be more analyzing the metaphorical world and men the surface world. I think figuring it out really takes the back and forth between both.
Surely 'advocating for women's interests' is a better definition than an equality based definition. Equality depends on the conditions of men and no feminist would advocate for worse outcomes for women just because male outcomes had fallen. Likewise generally advocating for better conditions for all doesn't count as feminist for obvious reasons. Why would any group not have an interest in advocating for itself? It is almost tautologically true that any group of people will tend to advocate for their own interests.
> If you just want to say that feminism inspired women to try harder, that hardly counts as “helping women obtain access to markets.” It counts, rather, as helping women take advantage of access they already had.
I think it inspired women to do things they had previously been told they can not or should not do, and inspired men to see women as equals and refrain from trying to stop them from doing those things. In that aspect, I think feminism should be given credit from making the world a much better place and liberating many people from arbitrary and harmful social and cultural restraints.
If you've never read any work of feminism, Carol Hay's Think Like A Feminist is an excellent place to start. https://www.harvard.com/book/9781324020271_think_like_a_feminist/
I don't really think one can describe "feminist" views, because there are so many different kinds of feminism. A classically liberal feminist and a marxist feminist would probably both believe that women are treated less fairly than men, but they would have drastically different views on the root causes, the ideal world, what fairness means and maybe even what a woman is. Which is why I think Bryan's definition is good.
I have read a bit about feminism and I really want to understand it, but it is really hard to figure out which part of the movement believes in what and how it all fits together.