[ante]

Originally Posted by Ronin4hire

Really? When studying feminism in relation to International politics we never used the term humanist to refer to some of the well known feminists throughout the past couple of centuries nor was the term considered derogatory or "tainted" by any means.

I was never talking about going back trough the past couple of centuries, I am talk about now, in my country. I'm just saying what is happening here, in the debate that I have been following and been a part of for years now. It's not something that you would be likely to learn in International Politics, or at any foreign university.

Originally Posted by Ronin4hire

I simply don't believe you when you say feminists are so ashamed of feminism that they term themselves humanist. If that is the case then they misunderstand the definition of feminism as I've pointed out earlier in the thread. Ironically the social stigmatising of the terms feminist and feminism would be a concern for feminists. Many of the people who have commented in this thread alone, including women see it as a pro-female movement when in fact it is a gender equality and awareness movement.

I couldn't give a toss about what you believe, it's the way it is. A few rotten apples have used the feminist movement to voice some very unfeminist opinions. Like Enkidu22 said, Sweden has come very far when it comes to the gender gap, some people are now pushing it too far, where it turns into a pro-female movement, and are therefor giving it a bad name. I'm not saying I like it, but it's the way it is, and it's probably going to happen in other places as well. Feminism is still used, and the fight for equality is still going on, but everyone here is assumed to be a feminist now, in the sense that you want equal rights. Anyone openly calling themselves feminists, is more likely to be pro-women.

Originally Posted by Ronin4hire

As do I.. but the term humanist has too broad a definition. Feminist and feminism are more convenient in the right contexts.

Perhaps, I still prefer when you don't divide prejudice into different categories. That is automatically going to mean that the different labels are valued differently. A white guy who doesn't know any black guys, but has a little daughter could be interested in the gender question, and would be more likely to not care about the race question. If he has to understand prejudice as a whole to help understand the prejudice against his daughter, I believe that would be better.

Originally Posted by Ronin4hire

That's the thing though. It's not based on race/gender over merit. You have to be qualified for the job regardless of your skin colour. To assume you lost out to a black guy because of AA is racist because you're assuming that the only reason the black guy could get a job ahead of you is BECAUSE of AA. The black guy got the job because he was qualified.

That might be what you want it to be, it's not. It's not about making sure that two equally qualified people have the same chance regardless of gender. It's about having a fairer distribution of women and different races, in higher positions(any position), so it isn't just a bunch of old white guys calling all the shots. What you are talking about is fighting discrimination, that's not what affirmative action is.

Originally Posted by Enkidu22

I have to agree with Ronin on this. I learned about feminism in national university (I study political science) and I assure everyone that feminism isn't viewed as tainted or corrupted in academic circles.

That might be the case in other countries and some academic circles, I don't know. I can really only speak about Sweden, and here people have been pushing it too far. Just an example:

A famous Swedish journalist/author wrote a book about 15 years ago, describing what she called a true story, about a man who was abusing his wife. In recent months, it has come out that most of the story was made up(similar to the James Frey-story). What happened then was that the author came out, she and a few other feminists claimed that this was only a witch hunt because the author was a blond woman. When, in fact, it was a woman who outed her, and most of her harshest critics were women.

This is an example of how some people are using feminism to victimize themselves, and hide behind. "If something goes wrong, it's the big bad men who are out to get me". This gives feminism bad a rep.

Originally Posted by Enkidu22

And about Sweden, it's one of the fev countries where feminism really reached all or almost all of it's goals (Sweden is ranked 1th in Gender Gap index for fev years straight). So maybe it's really not needed there anymore.

A fight for equality is constant fight, that is always needed. Some people have just lost track of what they are fighting for, and have started kicking in open doors to find a reason.