Genderism vs. Individualism, Part 2.
I recently posted a translation of a debate article entitled, 'Men Oppressed by State-Sponsored Feminism.'The newspaper that came from has now published a reply, 'There is a widespread phobia against feminism among Swedish men' written by Inti Chavez Perez (male, editor of Macho and Pride magazine).
The author of the original piece, Pär Ström, has written a rebuttal to the reply. See comments for both.
posted by Matt_J @ 9:12 AM
4 Comments:
There is a widespread phobia against feminism among Swedish men.
by Inti Chavez Perez
Phobia is an inner fear that talks so loudly that the sounds of the world cannot reach in. That is why so many men and women misinterpret the feminist ideology. Pär Ström shares his view of feminism with large parts of the population; according to him feminism has a hidden agenda whose goal is to give women more power than men. According to the same idea, feminists have a negative view of men. Nothing could be more wrong.
Feminists want more female executives and higher wages in female professions. Not because women want to dominate men, but because we need another division of power and money than we have today if we want to life in a just society.
Feminists don't look down on men or think that men 'conspire in the sauna about how women can best be oppressed.' Our starting point is the reality we see.
Anybody who has been to a few workplaces has seen that women's ideas are ignored and that important information is distributed in a strategic way so that certain people, most often women, have a worse starting point for meetings.
If Pär Ström has never seen this injustice then he must have worked at exceptionally equal places, or had his feminist-phobic blinders on. To see that men try to rule over women is painful for a man. There is a large risk that men themselves have been a part of the contempt for women. Therefore it is better not to be aware of their own role.
Pär Ström wishes that society would take care of certain men's problems. Exactly the problems that he mentions have been brought up by Swedish feminists. That fathers should have good relationships with their children, to protect men from violence and to give men knowledge are some examples of questions that brave and cool feminists deal with in activist groups, reading circles, fanzines etc.
Maybe Pär Ström would be pleasantly surprised if he were to shake off his phobia and go to a feminist cafe. Feminists are more like him than he knows. And to his surprise, he would see that the Swedish feminist movement includes many men.
Reply to Inti Chavez Perez
In reply to my debate article on the question of gender, Inti Chavez Perez writes that I misinterpret the feminist ideology, since feminism 'doesn't have a negative view of men.' One wonders what planet he has been living on the last 20 years.
Gudrun Schyman (Swedish politician, head of the (former communist) left party for a decade, head of newly formed feminist party), demands a special extra tax on male citizens, as a penalty for all the pain we men cause. A feminist researcher asserts that Swedish men collaborate in a satanic network that rips fetuses out of the wombs of pregnant women and kills them ritually.
Men are said to be animals. (The head of the Swedish state-supported network of women's shelters said this in a TV interview recently). A fundamental idea in the feminist ideology is that men conspire to oppress women, within the framework of some remarkable thing called the patriarchy.
Feminism continually assigns men a collective guilt for violence in society, even though a vast majority of men never hurt a fly (and on top of that many more men are the victims of violent crime than women).
Inti Chavez Perez continues 'Anybody who has been to a few workplaces has seen that women's ideas are ignored...' Yes, that's true.
But I have also seen many men who have been oppressed at their workplaces. And I have seen female bosses who have treated their employees very poorly.
Just as is the feminists' habit, Inti chooses to see gender instead of the individual, and to give men a collective guilt for bad things that people of both sexes do.
There are male chauvinists, the feminists are right about that. But there are also female chauvinists, which they pretend to ignore.
I have heard many upsetting stories from men about how they have been used, cheated, humiliated and manipulated by women, privately and professionally.
We can never achieve true equality without seeing the whole. Both genders have power, and both genders use their power constructively and destructively. Therefore replace feminism with humanism.
As far as Inti Chavez Perez's advice that I visit a feminist cafe, I do not find it necessary. Anybody living in Sweden has spent the last 20 years in a gigantic feminist cafe.
Okay, my comment on the first post was silly, but this is actually a very complex issue. What is equality among people with different genders, ethnicities and cultures? I don't know. Can there be equality when the genders are very different? It's all very confusing. I am constantly bombarded with all these issues of oppression, and it only confuses me more than my natural state of confusion.
I don't know either. What I do know is that there is a minor industry generating feminist news articles in Sweden. Like that if men drove like women there would be no traffic fatalities. (Do they correct for the amount of driving men vs. women do?) A minister would like to have a special state commission investigate every incident in which a woman is killed by a close male friend. The statistics are that 17 women were killed in such incidents last year AND 4 men were killed by women friends. I am not ready to say that in the interest of equality these men are worth less.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home