Angel: I really don’t think that in the modern world we need a label for “someone who believes in equal rights for men and women” any more than we need a label for “someone who thinks that we shouldn’t have slavery” outside of the Muslim world. Abolitionist was once a mark of distinction, now it isn’t. A more useful definition but extremely generous definition of feminism, one that would make me very tentatively feminist, would be something like “someone who believes that many/most cultural institutions and basic assumptions need to be critically reevaluated with attention to the fact that women have historically been denied adequate input into their creation”. A hostile definition of feminism, but one that I think based on your posts seems to describe you, is a person who believes that the historical oppression of women provides a general-purpose excuse for condemning anyone a feminist wishes to condemn and for reaching any conclusion a feminist wishes to reach. It’s a variant of the general problem of knowing about biases and using that knowledge to absolve you from the necessity of engaging with people’s arguments, choosing instead to simply point out that they could be biased. Really, this range of possible interpretations of the word, which only scratches the surface of possibilities, further suggests that the word doesn’t convey enough signal to justify the confusion it causes.
Angel: I really don’t think that in the modern world we need a label for “someone who believes in equal rights for men and women” any more than we need a label for “someone who thinks that we shouldn’t have slavery” outside of the Muslim world. Abolitionist was once a mark of distinction, now it isn’t. A more useful definition but extremely generous definition of feminism, one that would make me very tentatively feminist, would be something like “someone who believes that many/most cultural institutions and basic assumptions need to be critically reevaluated with attention to the fact that women have historically been denied adequate input into their creation”. A hostile definition of feminism, but one that I think based on your posts seems to describe you, is a person who believes that the historical oppression of women provides a general-purpose excuse for condemning anyone a feminist wishes to condemn and for reaching any conclusion a feminist wishes to reach. It’s a variant of the general problem of knowing about biases and using that knowledge to absolve you from the necessity of engaging with people’s arguments, choosing instead to simply point out that they could be biased. Really, this range of possible interpretations of the word, which only scratches the surface of possibilities, further suggests that the word doesn’t convey enough signal to justify the confusion it causes.