Quote Originally Posted by Subotan View Post
So. A while back somebody on this here internet forum said that they not only do not consider themselves feminists, but consider it "BS" that contains "notions of racial and sexual superiority". This is pretty clearly wrong, and sadly it was offtopic in the thread it appeared, and it was tragically locked soon after. The sentiment stuck in my mind though, and given that recently discussions in the backroom have mainly been uber-manly debates about the power and strength of various long and hard gun barrels, I've decided to open this thread to balance out the tone of the threads here, and to let the backroom engage in its feminine side.

The motion:

The work of feminism and feminists in changing social attitudes, eroding gendered privilege as manifested by the Patriarchy and achieving equality between the genders is not complete.

Nice and broad, as we can see.

Some super cool links that you may wish to refer to before commenting:

Feminist FAQs

What is Privilege and how do I check it?

What about teh menz?!?!?
I reject the concept of the "Patriarchy" as an imposition by men upon women. I reject the assertion that men and women are comparable in all fields. I also reject, out of hand, that women are of less value than men, or less inately deserving of respect.

Here's an example: Marriage

Imposed by the Patriarchy, right?

How stupid do you think this "Patriarchy" is?

Marriage is a social contract, it's not inately about love, or even about sex, it's a liscence to have children (historically), and what it actually does is find a man, who would be otherwise free to roam, to a woman and the children he sires upon her. Now, obviously there have been many periods throughout history where the political balance between the sexes has, in legal and procedural terms, favoured men but this does not make these societies simply unequal. Consider the story of Agamemnon, the king of Mycene, who defeated Priam and toppled Troy only to be murdered in his bath by his wife and her lover on his return home.

Equality of rights between the sexes is fine, but after that men will still be men and women will still be women, babies will still need their mothers and mother's milk for the first year of their life, their mother will still be laid up before and after the birth and it will still make sense for the father to become the main breadwinner, because he won't be encumbered by the pregnancy and it's aftermath, and it especially still makes sense for the woman to insist on marriage before the child is born, because otherwise the man can still slope off early and find someone else.

So, I reject the motion, there is no more useful work for feminism and feminists to do, in fact if you look at the increasing objectification of women (compare a rap video from 2000 to one in 2010) we can see that the feminist revolution has already produced a dark underswell by breaking down manners between the sexes and turning almost everything involving women in mass culture into a kind of meat market.