I came across Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog a little while back, which discusses among other things:
- What is feminism?
- Why “feminism” and not just “humanism”? or “equalism”? Isn’t “feminism” exclusionary?
- What’s wrong with suggesting that women take precautions to prevent being raped?
I suggested a few more, although frankly some of these I see mainly used disingenuously (in particular I meant it as a compliment
is often used to mean I knew that she or other women or their supporters would object to this, and I specifically said it to piss them off and hopefully win a fight with them, because in my ideal world anything positive I said to a woman would be lapped up with joy
):
- Why is calling women ’sexy’ problematic? (“We need more women in our gaming/coding/business circle, because they’re sexy!”)
- Why can’t she just take my comments on her as a sexual being as they were meant, as a compliment?
- Isn’t it a public/moral good to say whatever the hell I want and challenge the mainstream politically correct dogma?
- Isn’t it better for sexual liberty if I make sexual possibilities explicit wherever possible?
- Aren’t you just trying to cut down on all the fun bits of our circle and make us behave like stuffy business people?
The last one is frankly the most interesting to me in these discussions. Having friendly sex positive social circles is kind of fun (I said social, when getting work done, it’s nice to have the option of not needing to so much as declare my hand on being sex positive or not) if they don’t also require that women do all the legwork of embodying everyone’s sexual needs and desires. I don’t find that kind of balance online very often at all. If there’s talk of sex at all in online geeky circles, there’s going to be talk of how women are mysterious and ineffable and frustrating and essential and sexy and frigid and stupid and slutty by turns. (This is always odd to be part of as a known woman: one isn’t accused to be one of the mysterious etc set, but one’s expertise is downgraded. Women can never fully understand how sacred and contemptible other women are.)