Feminism

Well I guess I'll give you your first serious post. REAL TALK. I'm a feminist, as most of you know. I was raised in an environment where I learned that abortion is murder, Jesus is the only way to salvation from the lake of fire, and feminists are just whiny bitches who play the victims because they are too ugly to have friends. At 16 I finally admitted to myself that I really didn't believe in any gods anymore, and that was my first adventure in critically thinking about a deeply held belief and changing my mind about it. It was painful, but good for me.

Around the age of 18 I had a discussion with some feminists and realized that my ideas about them were mostly wrong as well. It took a long time because I didn't know anyone who admitted to being a feminist in real life, so most of my exposure to feminism was anti-feminists telling me about all the most crazy things feminists have said, with no context or explanation. "Rape culture" sounded like feminists were accusing every single man of being a rapist for doing any little thing. "Misogyny" sounded like a get out of jail free card to criticize anything feminists didn't like. But in meeting a few feminists, including The Red Snifit whom some of you may know, and taking the time to explore their views and their reasonings, I came to realize that I agreed with the basic ideas of feminism and was simply thrown off by all the sensationalism and the jargon (which still frustrate me today).

Feminism, to me, is about gaining legal and social equality for all genders (and races and sexual orientations, but that's less feminism-specific). Legal equality is easy to look at and say "it's done." In America, the only legal inequalities worth mentioning are usually things like reproductive control, divorce and custody law, the draft, and laws about rape. Many of those inequalities are even weighted against men! I will admit that, and that's totally in-line with feminism. Social inequality is much harder to fully understand, and it's easy for those of us who don't experience much discrimination as a result of gender, race, or sexual orientation to dismiss the strife of others as very rare and not worth bothering with. This is the part that drives people away from feminism. I think it warrants discussion, but I've written enough for right now.

I'm all for making the world a more equal place. I'm just against the people that use their gender as an excuse to be a cunt (male or female)... Regardless of what side they are on.. They are very loud, they spout a lot of shit, and they literally are poison and scum

Basically there's blue waffles on both sides..

So basically you have the white/male privilege, so no you're not gonna come across these things as often as girls will. You won't hear lewd jokes about your body, catcalls in your neighborhood, creepy guys won't try to come on to you over skype, your boyfriend won't try to force you to have sex because "we're supposed to since we're together", etc etc. (Not saying that any of these things happen to me, but I do personally know girls that have had this shit happen to them) Gender inequality is very shitty :/

So as I said before, it's true that sometimes people use their minority status as a "card" to get away with bad behavior. It's true that sometimes innocent men are falsely accused of rape. It's true that people sometimes discriminate against whites. All of these things do happen, sometimes. It happens a non-zero amount. It's important to have a realistic and non-biased idea of how often they do happen, however. Knowing it happens sometimes gives no good information; it could mean they happen practically constantly, or it could be a tiny but well-publicized fringe in terms of frequency. So before we start reacting against "social justice warriors" for accusing us of things we've never done, we should try to look up some facts about these alleged inequalities. We should strive to look at the information we can gather (academically and in real life) from a non-biased viewpoint, and understand that people of other races, genders, and socioeconomic classes can all have vastly different experiences from us. This is what feminists mean when they (sometimes dismissively and unkindly) tell people to "check their privilege." It's about looking into and thinking about the differences in experiences that may result from being a certain race, gender, or class. Instead of reacting against perceived accusations, understand that if any significant portion of society is claiming there is oppression going on, they may have reasons worth looking into a bit harder.

So at this point, maybe I've lost you. I seem to be implying that your experience is so disconnected from those of other people that you. I won't bother telling you how privileged you are or aren't, as I don't know who is reading this right now. But I'll touch on a few things that I, largely thanks to being a white guy, don't worry about much.
1. Firstly, there's rape. Studies like THIS, and other non-biased studies have found that on average 1 in 5 women have been raped. Of the women who have been raped, many have been raped multiple times. These kinds of statistics, combined with society's weird emphasis on girls' sexual "purity" can make many women very aware of the possibility of being raped. When I walk to class, when I walk home from a party, and when I talk with a girl alone in a room, I never worry about being raped. Many women do worry about being raped in comparable situations, and it's not unreasonable for them to do so.
2. Going back to "the race card," it was tempting for me to think of racism as an old and obsolete problem when I was young. I thought all the remaining problems with racism would just be solved if black people all stopped acting like "thugs" and quit committing crimes. In actuality, blacks get pulled over, searched, arrested, and sent to prison more often than whites do, relative to how often they commit crimes. Living with a black friend for a year, I watched him get pulled over by police as many times as I had watched my mother and father combined get pulled over for 20 years of my life. This black friend didn't speed or drive recklessly, while both my parents do, often. Of course, that's an anecdote. So I implore you to think critically and RESEARCH FOR YOURSELF about how these inequalities did not simply disappear since the days of Martin Luther King Jr. (although happily they have gotten better, as have most social issues over time).
3. Being cis and straight (though I loathe to use that first word around some of you since you seem to associate it only with "those crazy SJW's who whine about EVERYTHING,") I don't experience dysphoria, nor do I experience the sanctimonious bullshit from the religious right. LGBT youth have much higher rates of suicide than non LGBT youth, and they are much more likely to be victims of violent crime than I am.

These are just a few pretty clear-cut examples problems that members of other groups have to deal with more than I do. Other less obvious social inequality persists in the way the media portrays gender and race, and in the way people treat each other in general. There are all kinds of things that you won't find hard statistics about, but it would be absurd to assume are just lies on the part of those who say they have experienced them. Now, no reasonable feminist will honestly tell you that the only privileges that matter are those brought by gender, race, or economic class. All those things and more have important effects on the way people are treated. I'm not telling you that just because I'm a white guy, I have had a better life than all blacks or women, because that would be stupid. But it's important to understand correlations. Because although they do not imply correlations in the logical sense, they can and often do imply them in the colloquial or literary sense. I don't expect you to read all this and suddenly decide that you are a feminist, but do begin to think critically about what "SJW"s have to say, and think hard before you simply hand-wave away a claim of societal injustice.

You are absolutely wrong. I won't bother pointing any fingers at other people for the shitstorm that could cause, but I can tell you for sure that I have personally been racist and sexist, and probably every form of bigoted without it being a joke. What's more, making a bigoted joke can actually be bigotry, depending on the context. If I tell jokes that actively perpetuate harmful stereotypes about groups that are already oppressed, then using the old "I was just joking" excuse won't take away from the fact that I've lent a tiny bit of credence to a system that discriminates against those groups. Understand your audience, and understand the joke you are making. Sometimes it being a joke doesn't mean it's not actually bigoted.