In and of itself, I see no problem with feminism if it is just meant to be anti-sexism, a subset of sentiocentrism, similar to anti-racism or anti-speciesism.
Rights should be granted based on suffering-capacity. I think the problem is whenever someone identifies anything except sentience/consciousness as the characteristic worthy of ethical consideration, whether that is race, nationality, sex, species, family membership, etc.
I know I want rights to be granted to me based on the fact that I can suffer, if I couldn’t, it’d be irrelevant, I won’t have any use for rights once I’m permanently braindead and can’t feel anything.
So once I accept ”I have rights because I’m sentient” and people with different skin colors, genitals, from different countries or families, and of course also farm animals and all animals in the wild are also sentient – I have to put them into the same category of organisms that have rights – they’re also sentient, and sentience is the category based on which I grant myself rights.
If I say I have a right not to be tortured only because I have brown eyes, then if that’s the case, I ought to look out for everyone that has brown eyes, that is simply consistent. If I don’t, I’m a hypocrite. But I know it’s not my brown eyes, it’s the fact that I can suffer.
Human females can suffer, so I think it is perfectly reasonable to include them in the category of organisms that have rights. Why not?
But many of those who call themselves feminists would not accept this type of reasoning, most of them have some kind of problem with a purely consequentialist stance and tend more into the dogmatic direction of sex-negative feminism or plain misandry, female-supremacy. By the vast majority of these people, you wouldn’t be considered a feminist if you simply accepted the viewpoint that rights should be granted based on suffering-capacity.
This similarly happens in the vegan community, a purely consequentialist stance is sometimes rejected as insulting or objectifying of animals, and instead of only focusing on the real issue of animal suffering, some of them are against things that don’t even cause harm, like eating leftover animal remains from a dumpster. And I’d argue in the feminist community, this type of irrationality is even more widespread, the vast majority of them care about things that don’t matter and it simply becomes an anti-male club.
- List of disagreements to follow.
1: I’m not against prostitution.
They frequently believe that it’s wrong to fuck a whore because if you didn’t pay her to fuck her, she wouldn’t do it anymore, which means that it is unwanted sex, i.e rape. By this ”logic” I could just as easily argue that if I didn’t give a baker money to bake bread for me, he likely wouldn’t do it in his freetime anymore out of pure willingness to bake bread for me, so therefore, if I go to a bakery, I support slavery.
See? A buzzword. ”Slavery”, immediately makes it sound much more dramatic than it is, painting the picture of me holding a gun to someone’s head and forcing them to bake bread for me, that is how sex-negative gynocentrists love to present all prostitution as. Ban all work, it’s slavery.
Ultimately, there’s a little kernel of truth to it, you could say it would indeed be better if we could just get whatever we want without having to endure any discomfort for it in a perfect utopian scenario obviously and the baker wouldn’t have to bake bread either, but I don’t see how you can judge prostitution as inherently worse than any other job just because it involves sex, it’s clearly a double standard.
Similarly, they think that it objectifies women, and means that you can buy women. It does not, you are buying a temporary sexual encounter, not the prostitute. It is similar how when you receive a professional massage, you are not ”buying someone’s hands”, yes, you are renting a massage, but it’s not as though you can now just chop their hands off, put them in your bag and take them home with you.
But again, that is the picture sex-negative gynocentrists want to paint of all prostitution. If you’re willing to have sex for a self-determined amount of money, you’re always a slave.
2: I’m not opposed to sexual relationships between minors and adults.
I am against rape and other than that truly reject all notions of a true sacred age as an irrational religion. If sex is wanted, regardless of age, I see no problem with it. It is bad to manipulate and force children/minors to have sex, that harms them, yes, but the problem in that case is the use of manipulation and force, the aspect of involuntariness, not the sex itself.
If the sex isn’t against their will (as in, no manipulation or false pretense used to make the minor do it), I see zero problem with it, the only problem here is that delusional feminists live in a fantasy world where even a 17 year old one day under the true holy age is seen as an ”innocent” (sex=guilt somehow?) infant that only puts the dick in her mouth because the evil pro-rape society has fooled her into believing it’s candy.
They often believe that sexual relations between children and adults are wrong, because there is an unequal power dynamic present in such relations in (I would say some), they would say all cases. A 30 year old man has authority and power over a 15 year old girl, so if they have sex, it’s rape, it’s abuse of his power. Power=abuse. Always! Inherently somehow!
What they completely neglect to take into account is that the fact that power exists does not mean that it has been abused to force the other party to do a certain thing. Power imbalances exist in all areas of life, that does not mean an encounter was non-consensual just because there were different levels of power between the two parties.
For example, if a minor does garden work for a little extra pocket money for an adult, and then some guy came around the corner and accused the adult of forcing a child to perform slave labor, you can’t just believe that, you’d ask for evidence for such an assertion.
Did the adult threaten the minor? And if not…why exactly is a minor doing garden work for some extra pocket money an issue? If someone told me ”he’s forcing children to hug him” I wouldn’t understand it as ”the child agrees to hug him, it’s just that he is stronger, so therefore it is NEVER consensual, period!”…I would imagine someone forcing a child to hug him.
Now when it comes to sex, sex-negative pedophobe gynocentrist imbeciles do not ask for evidence, they simply assume that obviously, if a young girl were to have sex with her teacher, it must be the result of the teacher having said ”suck my dick or you get a worse math grade”, can’t be any other way.
3: I don’t support banning the free usage of any type of pornography, including pornography depicting real rape.
Some believe we shouldn’t legalize watching freely available child/underage pornography, because ”children have to be abused to make it”, ”children cannot consent”, ”it depicts sexual violence”, etc. I would say this is not true in all cases across the board of course, but even if it were true in all cases, this is still a completely hypocritical argument.
If porn depicting sexual violence is banned on the basis that children (or anyone) cannot consent and have to be abused for it, then so should holocaust pictures, 9/11 footage, gore videos, like ISIS decapitation, infant genital mutilation or shaking videos also be banned and penalized the same way as the viewership of such pornography is.
I compare this to the freeganism debate in the vegan community, more dogmatic people are opposed to the idea of picking leftover animal products from a dumpster and eating them, although you did not pay anyone to harm a cow for you, so you didn’t really harm anyone, it’s just gross.
Sex fascists think even if someone did not financially support the production of rape porn, they should still go to jail for viewing it, although we never see anyone protesting against the continued legality of gore videos or holocaust pictures, and I think this is sometimes again simply because they hate male sexuality.
I believe they often simply have a subconscious bias against men who are attracted to young girls, they hate heterosexual male desire to fuck young girls in particular, meanwhile they barely spend any time thinking about a necrophile jacking off to a picture of a non-consensually decapitated cadaver, it’s not even on their radar that such people exist.
4: I don’t think female circumcision is inherently worse than male circumcision, I think both can be pretty bad.
It depends on how and what you’re cutting. Some cultures cut off the foreskin, some cultures cut the entire vagina open. Some cultures cut off some skin around the clitoris, some cultures cut the entire penis open and then stick their penises in that cut open penis.
If we’re talking about cutting off a foreskin in the western world vs. some kind of female circumcision ritual in Africa, it’s true, male circumcision is less bad than your entire vagina being destroyed – it depends on what is done.
However, we don’t want to fall victim to the fallacy of relative privation, to ”not as bad as” argumentation. Fact is, it’s still painful, and has the chance of desensitizing the glans, making it harder for the male to find sexual relief – something feminists of course think is a joke, any suffering that is of a sexual nature is to be ignored and downplayed.
But let’s put it like this: most feminists are against both vaginal and anal rape.
I would argue if you randomly raped a girl anally, it would be worse than doing it vaginally, because anus is probably tighter so it’s more painful.
Does this mean vaginal rape is now perfectly fine? It’s less bad than anal rape, so it’s fine. Getting your foreskin cut off with unnecessarily with some anesthesia involved is less painful than getting your entire vagina hacked off with no anesthesia involved, so there, getting foreskin cut off is perfectly fine.
Or take rape vs. sexual harassment as an example, rape is worse than sexual harassment, but this doesn’t make sexual harassment good.
5: I’m not pro-choice, I think abortion is ultimately an ethical obligation (antinatalism).
I think it is fundamentally bad/irresponsible to create desire. I think it would bad to force someone to become addicted to heroin by injecting them with it in their sleep, now think of a hypothetical scenario in which it were possible to inject other random desires into organisms, desire serum.
I have a fountain spraying desire serum, any possible desire I cannot see beforehand, from the desire to stare at a red painted wall to the desire to brutally rape hamsters. I take the serum and non-consensually inject it into people’s veins in their sleep. Is this action ethically permissible? I would argue no, and from there on you should be able to understand why I oppose procreation, you are creating a crazed pleasure addict with no guarantee that they will be able to get their fix, a desire machine.
Eat or hunger, drink or thirst, shit or constipate, breathe or suffocate, etc. The basic mechanism of sentient existence is pleasure/relief must be obtained or you will be subjected to continued suffering, and when you create the addict, you have no guarantee they will be able to always find relief, this is irresponsible, creating need with no guarantee of fulfillment.
Procreation is just the creation of a desire machine, it’s not too different from injecting this hypothetical serum into people.
No guarantee how tormenting the desires will be, no guarantee how long lasting the fulfillment will be, no guarantee that the desires can be adequately fulfilled, no guarantee that they can be fulfilled without harming someone else in the process.
And even if a given victim of procreation succeeded at always fulfill all their desires, the fulfillment of their desires still would not have been missed by them if you never created/reproduced them in the first place, there is no evidence for the existence of an unborn purgatory where all these non-existent people are bothered by their non-existence, so I fail to see why their happiness should justify the suffering of others.
The deliriously happy child receiving their christmas gifts wouldn’t have missed those gifts if their parents didn’t create them, so their happiness doesn’t justify the other unlucky child dying of leukemia before christmas, I don’t think you have a right to create torture victims for happiness that is impossible to miss.
- This is also a rather great disagreement about the problem of involuntary celibacy/loneliness between feminists and me.
Feminists generally think sexless men who dare to speak up about their frustrations are in all cases evil rape supporters and are quick to tell them something along the lines of:
”You’re not entitled to sex!!! Even if the girl says she would have sex with you for money because then she doesn’t want the sex, just the money, UNWANTED sex is rape, so if you go to a bakery and buy bread you support slavery because the baker wouldn’t bake the bread for free!!! So prostitution should be illegal too because I simply hate sexually unsuccesful men and want them to suffer as much as possible!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Whereas I’m saying that yes, it shouldn’t be allowed to rape, in that sense you’re not entitled to sex, but you’re still an asshole for supporting the creation of the desire to have sex with no guarantee of fulfillment, which is what you’re doing when you don’t identify as antinatalist, but pro-choice instead, you think injecting the tormenting need for connection and sex into someone with no guarantee of fulfillment is justifiable, so you’re pro-harm, somewhat similar to how some puritan conservative might think non-sentient fetuses must not be killed, but they have no right to not live in poverty afterwards, you’re only entitled to desire not to be poor.
The rest is on you, we inject you with the desire liquid and then you can go fuck yourself.
If you know that when you create a desire machine, there’s a chance they will not be able to fulfill their desires and that there would be no harm if grievances on their part if you just didn’t create them, then you’re an irresponsible cruel asshole for still creating it, it’s better not create that desire, or you are basically admitting to being pro-torture, ”I impose burdens on others, I don’t care, it’s on them to solve those burdens I impose on them”.
Let’s say someone desperately wanted ten arms, that wouldn’t justify them cutting everyone’s arms off and attaching them to him, but if I had a liquid that made it so that if I inject it into you, you will crave having ten arms, then I would be an asshole for injecting it into you.
In conclusion, if feminism just meant anti-sexism, I’m on board with that, but the vast majority of people who call themselves feminists would not accept that, they think I’d have be a bigoted nazi who discriminates against prostitutes, children, minors, pedophiles, viewers of whatever porn it may be (I don’t care as long as it’s for free in case it is abusive porn, so you don’t create demand for new abusive porn, if it’s not abusive you can pay for it too), think genital mutilation isn’t a big deal and support pro-natalist, pro-suffering policies like women’s supposed right to create suffering by creating conscious lifeforms in order to be a feminist, so for the most part I simply just say I’m a sentiocentrist and negative utilitarian at this point.