bogarde73 wrote on Jul 1
st, 2013 at 3:02pm:
I heard this radio journalist today say she was a feminist and a liberal. Which got me to thinking, I don't actually know what a feminist is.
Dictionary: one who believes that women should be allowed the same rights, power, and opportunities as men and be treated in the same way.
OK. On rights, I guess women have the same legal rights, here anyway, as men. Are there other kinds of rights in question?
Power. Now power is a wide field for discussion. For a start I think many, many women are oppressed, in the work place, in marriage or relationships. So to the extent they are oppressed, their power is diminished.
And of course in many parts of the world the oppression is absolute and the power is zero.
Opportunities. Well no doubt there is the glass ceiling and it's still a male dominated economy etc.
But a lot of people would believe all these issues should be addressed and wouldn't call themselves feminists. Men for a start.
So maybe there's more meaning in the term than the dictionary says. Can a woman be a feminist and be a conservative?
Julie Bishop no doubt believes all those issues should be tackled but would she want to be called a feminist?
Maybe there has to be an element of activism in it.
Maybe they have to burn their bras and be uncomfortable, some of them anyway.
The feminism we have today is a type of neo-Marxism. Marx, we may recall, claimed "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed." (To be fair, a very similar idea can be found in Hegel before Marx; yet Marx was a 'young Hegelian' at one stage so it makes sense that he adopted Hegel's ideas).
Around the time of WW1, the international socialists could not understand why the "oppressed" classes voluntarily went off to war to fight for their nation. So Marxists in the Frankfurt School claimed they were brainwashed by their fathers and bourgeoisie propaganda. What occurs here in the Frankfurt School is one of the most fundamental transitions of thought of the 20th century: Marx's class and economic distinctions were then turned into cultural distinctions: the oppressor was now to include males, the oppressed were the females, the white nations were the oppressors, the non-white nations the oppressed; in short, authority is bad and equality is the holy grail of morality.
Anything that is not equal is bad. This is how they justify all their rage. Claim something isn't equal, and then throw expletives at it or whoever upholds it.
Equality of opportunity in the West has been achieved - their historical goal has now been completed. But not satisfied with that, they now see inequality of outcome as the next goal to rectify. This is why they attack pay inequality, (even though men and women get paid the same for the same job). This is why they attack men in power, (even though women have the same opportunities as men to achieve power).