god, this hurts. words mean things. words mean things! i don’t know why antifems/antiSJs/”critical thinkers” like this ray of sunshine like to write paragraphs on paragraphs about how words are just arbitrary grunts that mean nothing. do us all a favor and stop talking if you’re so fucking against words!!
I didn’t say words don’t have meaning, so you can put the strawman down. I said labels don’t really tell me what I need to know. They don’t actually do what we typically think they do. Why would I be against my primary form of communication? And see there, what you’ve done? You’ve tried to label me as anti-whatever, yet you don’t know what I identify as. And why do you complain about me writing paragraphs then turn around and do the same thing? Did you even think this through before hitting the reblog button?
look, i couldn’t honestly pick a brown-throated thrush out of a lineup. BUT, if you say “hey, that’s a brown-throated thrush” i can at least assume the bird has a brown fucking throat. and if i have a ten-second wikipedia skim’s worth of knowledge of what other birds-we-call-thrushes look and act like, i can make reasonable assumptions about the physiology and behavior of the bird you are pointing at. because you used words to describe it, and words mean things!
As stated above, I never argued that words don’t have meanings. You’re deliberately misrepresenting my argument to make it easier to argue with. But notice how you said you couldn’t pick one bird out from the other, and would still have to look into what the thing is and does despite knowing it’s label? That’s what I said. That’s exactly my point. Labels, at best, prompt dialogue or scrutiny. But they don’t actually tell you anything about the thing itself. That’s the difference between knowing something and merely knowing the name of something. You wouldn’t know what the thing is by its name alone, so you have to look into it. Words have meanings, certainly. And labels can have definitions but definitions are just more words with meanings. It should also be noted that humans are fallible and that things change. And those meanings can be different from person to person. So this is how a bare-bones dialogue between a feminist and non-feminist may go:
A - “I am a feminist.”
B - “What is a feminist?”
A - “A feminist is someone who believes in equality between men and women.”
B - “What is equality?”
A - “Equality? You know, like how women don’t have as many rights as men.”
B - “What are rights?”
Etc. etc. etc.
This conversation could go on at length, but you see how person B has to get down what the feminist means with the words he or she uses before he can even begin talking about the particular issues? How one defines equality, rights, and even feminism changes from individual to individual. The label itself is rendered all but nearly if not entirely irrelevant, because where labels are supposed to provide consistency in what they represent, “feminist” lacks that consistency. Even brown-throated thrushes don’t always behave consistently, but much more consistently than feminists. The difference being one identifies a species and the other identifies someone involved in a social movement, so my analogy ends there, of course.Â
feminism primarily focuses on the needs of women. some feminists use the presence of certain reproductive organs to define womanhood. others use the self-determination of a person’s identifying as a woman or not. and this difference in opinion continues all the way down to inconsistencies between individuals - not because feminism is necessarily an incoherent category, but because people are inherently unique and everyone disagrees with someone on something at some point. so sarah’s feminism might look very different from susan’s feminism.
Which makes feminism inconsistent. Feminism, like any other human-developed concept, cannot exist without humans. It’s not tangible, formed from a mold to ensure everyone’s feminism is the same. You acknowledge this, but do you understand that if everyone’s feminism is different, then there’s no point in calling what one believes feminism at all? If we called every bird a thrush, it would lose whatever consistency the label represented and we may as well call them giraffes for all the good it does us to call it anything at all. Unless feminists establish and maintain a strict sort of “official” definition that is reflected in their beliefs and behaviors, then it means nothing. Not the word - but the use of the word becomes meaningless. That is where I think you got lost.
you know what else? this bird and this bird are both pigeons. but they look so different, you say! but they share certain characteristics (herbivorous diet, a small pointed beak, certain breeding habits, genetic similarities, etc) we group in the category of “pigeon-ness”, so they are both fucking pigeons, you asshole, i say.
I said nothing of the sort, because I’m not stupid enough to think those two are the same breed of pigeon when they display wildly different characteristics. Biologists didn’t come up with the labels according to “pigeon-ness” so what the fuck are you even talking about there? We have different labels for them. The first being a rock pigeon and the second being a goura pigeon. Different labels for different birds due to recognized differences, despite some consistency in biology, you see? All feminists eat, sleep, and shit. Just because they have some biological consistencies, like the birds being named, does not mean they are consistent enough in belief and behavior based on those beliefs for the label “feminist” to carry any significance. As I said above, my analogy highlighted the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something. That’s where it ended. Your analogy doesn’t hold up in defense for the label “feminist” or the feminism movement for these aforementioned reasons.
words mean things. oh my god.
(if you respond please note i am not a woman but consider myself feminism-aligned)
Again, never my argument that they didn’t. And I don’t really give a damn what you call yourself, in case that wasn’t clear.
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