X sansmerci
I advocate for feminism. I also try to be actively anti-racist and support social justice; things that are very much intertwined with feminism, since nobody is *just* female, but that I feel I still need to specifically mention since there is a widespread misconception that being a feminist means only caring about white middle class women, and excluding all other groups from your advocacy.
So that's a thing that I guess bugs me. That there are people who purport to support feminism while holding some really disturbing ideas about class and race and that people will assume that anyone who calls her or him self a feminist is saying "I do not give a s**t about the issues of anyone else" (I can't even estimate the number of times I've personally seen someone respond to the subject of feminism by attacking anyone who says they are feminist that {the feminist} has their priorities wrong because they are not talking about {other, usually "third world", injustice} at that moment.)
And, you know, all this MRA backlash is pretty gross. Like rape culture wasn't enough, we get misogyny masquerading as activism so MRAs can call women harpies with impunity.
I dunno, I'd need some spoons to form a cohesive post, it's such a huge topic.
I think you raise some really good points about intersectionality. Nobody is just female - but unfortunately, in many feminist discourse, it often relates only to white middle class heterosexual female feminists. The white groups don't understand the blacks, the straights distance themselves from the lesbians, the middle class doesn't understand the plight of the working class. Audre Lorde writer on this.
This isn't an issue unique to feminism, though, but of every movement out there. People always end up overlooking or rejecting the issues that they themselves don't experience. I just recently read an article (~1980) by Anna Nietogomez on Chicana feminism, and she was talking about how the Chicano movement often boils down to the Chicano
men's movement because a main focus is in fighting for economic power for men . . . but not for women.
Regarding the men's rights activism . . . I feel conflicted.
On the one hand, I don't want to do what society did to the original women's rights movement, which was to label it radical, man-hating, and deviant. I recognize that men have unique issues facing them and unique inequalities - there's a real problem with boys doing worse and school and more women graduating from college. There's a real problem with women being favored in child custody battles and men paying a disproportionate amount of alimony.
At the same time, what I have read about and by the MRA does not make me comfortable and I don't agree with many of its tenets. Much of the discourse seems to be rejecting not only feminism, but men's own liberation - a rejection of homosexuality, feminine qualities in men, etc.
From what I read on some MRA forums, a lot of what I read is about how awful women are and awful things they've done. I wasn't around for when second-wave feminism was taking off, so I don't know what individual feminists were saying, but I've yet to read any article by a major feminist writer that has torn down men.
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