> "Dropping sympathy" for the feminist movement as a response a few bad feminists that you've encountered is not really justified, or rational.

When you are made to feel unwanted, excluded, and otherwise not welcome it is natural to go elsewhere in search of inclusiveness. This is a far more common reaction than that of adopting sympathy for those excluding you. No aspect of this should be surprising to a feminist.

> When you are made to feel unwanted, excluded, and otherwise not welcome it is natural to go elsewhere in search of inclusiveness.

Sure, but the GP wasn't talking about a particular group rejecting them, but rather "stop sympathizing with the entire modern feminist movement". That's an extreme reaction to disliking a subset of the movement's followers.

> This is a far more common reaction than that of adopting sympathy for those excluding you. No aspect of this should be surprising to a feminist.

Nobody's asking for personal sympathy or contribution, but rejecting Feminism due to a few bad Feminists is stupid. Especially if you claim to have been aligned with the Equality argument beforehand. How does that even work?

(attempt to reverse engineer a thought process leading to this)

1) thinking "Hey, men are dicks towards women. That ain't right. We need to equalize things as much as possible!" 2) meets bad feminists, receives abuse 3) thinking "Fuck it - Equality, yes, but not for you; I don't like you. NVM on the whole Feminism issue."

Absurd. You didn't really believe in equality in the first place. Demanding and supporting equality should have nothing to do with your personal likes and dislikes.

When a person's entire exposure to a group consists wholly of a few bad members, they are likely to figure that sample representative. They are not likely to keep re-sampling until they find a desirable sample. It's irrational to expect otherwise.

Why do you expect otherwise? Why do you feel compelled to couple it with insults?

> When a person's entire exposure to a group consists wholly of a few bad members, they are likely to figure that sample representative.

But Feminism isn't a group; it is an idea. If some of the followers misbehave, you should still be able to believe and support in the idea.

To me, supporting ideas only when you "like" the (majority of?) people supporting them is akin to supporting free speech but only for the positions that you believe in.

(edit)

> Why do you feel compelled to couple it with insults?

I'm not sure where you're reading that. The "You" at the end was directed at the fictional person that I'm attempting to emulate with the 1/2/3 reasoning, not you.

Feminism is an idea. Feminists, or the people who adhere to that idea, are a group. If every single adherent of an idea you encounter is an abhorrent person, most people will stop and consider if they want to associate with those people. Typically the answer is "No".

Most people will also wonder if something about the idea turns people into abhorrent people or if something about the idea is only attractive to abhorrent people. In either case, it is not something to which our notional person is likely to be attracted.

In short - the people who adhere to an idea are seen as commentary on the idea.

> Feminism is an idea. Feminists, or the people who adhere to that idea, are a group.

I would have thought that everyone who believes in gender equality is implicitly a Feminist..

> If every single adherent of an idea you encounter is an abhorrent person

Are you exaggerating for the sake of argument (perfectly valid), or is it that bad for some people?

> Are you exaggerating for the sake of argument (perfectly valid), or is it that bad for some people?

Both.

Some people aren't going to understand your statement, because they are locked into ideas like 'feminism' == 'desire for equal rights'.

Too many people who call themselves feminists actually do not believe in equal rights, and present feminism as a justification for bad behaviors.

If this is how you experience feminism, this is going to influence your notion of what the word feminism actually means, in practice.

> Is this not the case?

It should be the case. In practice, it is often not the case. If you doubt this, search 'feminist' on youtube, watch a dozen random videos, and try to identify the issues and beliefs which the speaker sees as intrinsically 'feminist' ones, and ask yourself whether those issues and beliefs are really in support of equality. Its a bit of a mixed bag.

I'm not trying to attack feminism, as I strongly believe in equality and we have a lot of work to do. And obviously there are anti-feminists who have always tried to distort the messages of feminists, and fabricate their own. But these days, those manipulators don't have to try very hard.

I don't see how we can fix this, though. The commercial approach to a similar problem would be absurd in this case: creating centralized certification body regulating which 'feminist goals/speakers/blogs/books/lines-of-argument/etc' are deemed 'truly feminist'.

As near as I can tell, the body feminist is continually attempting that kind of effort. Unfortunately, the result resembles a bar-brawl-cum-religious-congress more than it does an effective certification body.

> 'feminism' == 'desire for equal rights'

Is this not the case?

In a world of intellectual purity and abstraction, yes, that is the case.

In the real world, it can be used as a fig leaf to justify a variety of abusive behaviors. For some people, that encompasses the whole of their experiences.

> In the real world, it can be used as a fig leaf to justify a variety of abusive behaviors.

We disagree that this actually changes the meaning of Feminism.

Yes, some horrid people need an excuse to dish out abuse and Feminism often becomes that excuse (I'm thinking about everyone who's ever used the potential-rapist argument).

Does this taint Feminists, the group? Maybe a little, yes.

Does this taint Feminism, the idea that genders should be as equal as possible? Well, IMHO, no.

The Soviet Union wasn't and China isn't really communist or socialist by most sane definitions of those terms, but good luck disassociating yourself from them if you label yourself a communist today.

Feminism was about seeking equal rights and equal opportunities for women. In the West it largely achieved that goal (we're not there yet, but consider where we started). Thanks to tumblr, twitter and the blogosphere echo-chamber, the feminism most people become aware of online is very different from that.

Worse yet, there is no such thing as "the feminist movement" (anymore) by a long shot. It's become a broad term that encompasses everything from egalitarians to misandrists. And any criticism of the later group is always portrayed as a criticism of the former (which is why we end up with this entirely pointless MRA/SJW shitstorm-on-demand situation we have now).

Nobody is forcing egalitarians to call themselves feminists. But clinging to that label and pretending it hasn't changed its meaning is no different from trying to distance your communism from Stalin or your nationalist socialism from the Nazi party.

If an idea consistently creates abusive groups and people, should that not be viewed as a reflection upon the idea?

I accidentally posted my first reply in the wrong place, above.

I prefer that definition, yes. But the important part of my sentence was "locked in". I was referring to people who are incapable of acknowledge that the word feminism is abused, not just by anti-feminists, but also by some self-proclaimed feminists.

If someone really thinks that feminism can only mean 'equal rights', period, end of conversation, talk to the hand - then conversations with people pointing out problems in the feminism movement will suffer from equivocation fallacies.

> I'm not following the reasoning here. Both movements are about equality; one focuses on gender, the other on sexual identity/orientation. They are very much two sides of the same coin (the humanEqualityCent)

I don't follow his reasoning either, as stated, but there is a question of subcultures, subcultural values, specific ideologies within the movement, and most importantly: composition.

There are many ways that these two movements differ. And while both movements attract some unpleasant people who damage the reputation of the movement as a whole, the way this plays out in feminism is a little different from how it plays out with LGBT rights.

So its not surprising to me that some people might (based on their personal experiences) think that one is toxic and the other isn't.