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Jill Filipovic's Answer to the "No True Scotsfeminist" Fallacy

Mon, 2009-12-07 01:30 — figleaf

I hinted at this in a previous post a week ago but it’s worth calling out again. Jill Filipovic of Feministe said

I get that the point of the article is that feminism shouldn’t focus on purity — you can still be a feminist and do things that seem counterintuitive to feminism. I agree! But emphasizing all the stereotypically feminine things that women can do while still calling themselves feminists only seems to lend credence to the idea that the stereoptical feminist — who is “masculine” and queer and mouthy and not conventionally attractive — is not the kind of woman we want to be. And that’s a problem.

She said it here.

You probably don’t need to follow the link to figure out the context. It’s a great reply to the general problem of “I’m not a feminist but…”

Lately I’ve been trying to more directly engage with MRA- and other anti-feminist attitudes in other on the web and in the world and I gotta say that wall to wall it’s like the “No True Scotsman” fallacy out there.

What’s weird is a lot (though definitely not all) of those guys are willing to agree with a lot of in-all-but-name feminist principles, from anti-sexism, to anti-rape, to equal pay, to respect for decisions, to acknowledgment of the right to choice. And yet… they’ll end up, over and over, saying “but Teh Real Feminists are men-hating menaces.”

So it’s not making the job of engagement any easier when effectively the same sentiment shows up on our side too.

Mon, 2009-12-07 08:19 — chingona (not verified) #permalink

So it’s not making the job of engagement any easier when effectively the same sentiment shows up on our side too.

Which “same sentiment”?

That feminists are ugly, mouthy man-haters?

Or that all (the vast majority) of MRAs are misogynists even if they pay lip service to principles feminists would recognize as their own (even as they deny those principles are feminist principles)?

[Sort of, yes, but with a completely different spin. Jill said “emphasizing all the stereotypically feminine things that women can do while still calling themselves feminists only seems to lend credence to the idea that the stereotypical feminist — who is ‘masculine’ and queer and mouthy and not conventionally attractive — is not the kind of woman we want to be.” I was just adding that that sort of reflex self-justification reinforces the same archetypes MRAs are able to exploit in their fellow travelers. As for the stereotype itself, why the heck do people assume that if someone’s an “ugly, mouthy man-hater” they’re an emblematic feminist? Or a feminist, period? There are people like that in churches and nobody says they’re emblematic Christians or Confucians or Maoists. There are people like that in politics but nobody says they’re emblematic anti-choicers or libertarians or neocons. More to the point — my contention — they’re not all women either. See, for instance, Rush Limbaugh or Fred Phelps. And yet it’s only feminism where one points to one particular collection of attributes and says “yup, all true feminists are like that.”

Anyway, I’m trying to find ways to bring anti-anti-feminism to some men who I think could really use it, and a particular article-of-faith archetype keeps coming back and really getting in the way. And after seeing heavy stereotyping one place it makes sense to call it out anywhere. Thanks, Chingona. —fl]

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