Look not to Feminism but to Science Redux

I am making this video to flesh out some of the points, address some of the inaccuracies and answer a lot of the common criticisms of my video “look not to feminism but to science”.

The original video was interesting, it is a very general idea spoken in a short time. I could make many videos about some of the issues that got raised. Some people made interesting and valid points that I will try to include here. As a matter of fact the points that people raised helped me revaluate what I think.

The overall point of the original video is one that I still agree with. And this point is that most of our progress as a race, including that of women, is gained by our species unique skill for discovering out the secrets of nature and creating tools, as life gets better and better then the divisions in society will degrade. I believe that the real liberating factors for women are those that free them from their inherently limiting biology. Biology is a scientific field and I have a news story here that demonstrates the point I made very poignantly [1].

I can’t say this strongly enough. This kind of change is something that we humans can do that puts us apart completely from nature. Our science and our tools can Improve out own lives in unimaginable ways. When I first read this article I was genuinely glad that women pained by periods (which I’ve always though were a genuinely tough aspect of being a woman) can get rid of it. And the very real monthly bleeding of women is, I think, a far greater pain in all women’s lives then the patriarchal spectres that feminists supposedly fight. Science frees you from a pain that feminism couldn’t.

Now to stress. Feminism has achieved a lot, but a lot of women’s progress can be attributed to science as well, and feminism seems to have taken, or been given all of the credit.

I talk like this because I’m a bit of a science nut. But scientism – the practice of looking at all of life’s problems through a scientific lense does not work for all things. And there are things in gender issues that science cannot touch on. It is in this are where criticisms of my own points become valid. I did put in the clause of not saying all the factors are gained through science, but maybe I did not discuss them in enough detail. Which is part of the purpose of this video.

People will always be people however. We will always be bigoted and ignorant and superstitious as long as, as Christopher Hitchins puts it, our prefrontal lobes are too small, and our adrenaline glands are too big, and we’re afraid of the dark and we’re afraid to die. I think our morality comes in part from what Richard Dawkins defines as an ever changing moral zeitgeist, another way to look at this is to say that our morals are created by society. I agree with this theory.

And how does the moral zeitgeist change? Well a number of things can do this, it is a complicated matter, but one of the main ways is an advocacy group of people push their point of view and help to change attitudes. In we look at the writings of many intelligent men of the past, we may be surprised from a modern viewpoint about their casually racist attitudes. You can find examples of this in the bible, in the writings of Charles Darwin and in the views of Mahatmas Ghandi.

Now, you might be saying that I have created a noose to hang myself here by talking about advocacy groups pushing the moral zeitgeist. Feminists are an advocacy group that do just that.

And indeed they are. But I never stated that feminists didn’t achieve any useful things. In fact my current view is not that feminism as a movement should be destroyed or disbanded. To my knowledge I have never stated this, and I have categorically stated in recent times that feminism should continue to exist to represent a certain point of view. But, alongside it should be a men’s rights movement to represent the views of men.

This sounds like it goes against the comments I made in the original video to the effects of “if feminism didn’t exist then women would have be in the same position of rights as they are today”. I wanted to comment on what I meant by this but ended up writing so much that it was bloating an already long document. So all I’ll say is that whatever we can say on the subject is academic, feminism is here and did happen. So hypothesising on what would have happened if it didn’t exists is pointless and also a waste of time. Given my previous statement that I support the existence of feminism, I rescind this view.

I would like to end. By commenting on some common points that were raised.

1) Where did the quote at the beginning come from? I can’t find it.

You can’t find it because it doesn’t exist. It turns out that I made a mistake here and misremembered a portion of an article written by Carey Roberts [2] which I had read a long time ago. The section from this article is a follows:

Ironically, those same women forgot to tell us that leading feminists thinkers were actually discouraging women from thinking logically. The reason: gender feminists have long regarded logic and rationality as patriarchal tools for the baleful oppression of women.

No, this is not a joke.

Feminist Elizabeth Minnich scornfully traces the source of rationality to a "few privileged males.who are usually called 'The Greeks.'" Historian Gerda Lerner denigrates the great liberal tradition of sound thinking as "the rape of our minds." And here's my favorite: Charlotte Bunch concludes feminists must attack the problem of "phallocentrism" by "reconstructing the world from the standpoint of women."

This is where the idea came from, just so you can see that it was not made up out of whole cloth. The reason I am mentioning this first is so that people can’t claim that I am trying to hide. If I make a mistake then I will say it.

I might also mention that the original video was made back in the dark ages of my youtube days. I had a crappy little webcam and I essentially recorded myself ranting for ten minutes. All my videos now are in essence read from scripts that I write before hand and then upload with references to my own website which I link from the video.

2) Feminism started before the 60s, e.g. the suffragettes.

Yes it did and I was aware of this. Perhaps I should have made it more clear that the main types of feminism I criticise is modern feminism. The dictionary defines the year of the origin of the word feminism as 1890-95 [4].

3) You said that feminists haven’t done any good, but look at this example...

This is a bit of a straw man argument as in the original video I never stated that feminism had accomplished nothing. But some of the examples given were well taken. I shall read one of them now. This if from lmwoods84 who sent me a link [3].

Margaret Sanger was a lifelong advocate of women's rights and the use of birth control. During the 1930s, it was discovered that hormones prevented ovulation in rabbits. In 1950, while in her 80s, Sanger underwrote the research necessary to create the first human birth control pill. Sanger raised $150,000 for the project.

So thumbs up for Margaret Sanger there.

Sources
[1] Bloodless Revolution: The abolition of menstruation.
http://www.slate.com/id/2166983

[2] Feminist Head-Games at the United Nations
http://www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2005/0302roberts.html

[3] Oral Contraceptive History - Birth Control Pills
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blthepill.htm

[4] Origins of the word feminism
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/feminism