[a sign reads FEMINIST CONFERENCE next to a closed door, a blue character shrugs and says…]
I don’t care
[next to the same door, the sign now says RESTRICTED FEMINIST CONFERENCE WOMEN ONLY, there are now four blue characters desperately banging on the door, one is reduced to tears on the floor, they are shouting]
DISCRIMINATION
SO UNFAIR!!!
LET US IINN!!
MISANDRY
Is it not more about dicussing their problem, in a space they created for it? Black Lifes Matter is a good example of this. Black people want to discuss their issues, and suddenly all lives matter and what about this and that group?
This is not saying that other problem does not exists or are any less real or problematic, but instead they someone should be able to talk about their perceived problem without being forced to include someone else’s problem. Those people with those other problems are just as welcome to have their own discussions.
Not quite. Black Lives Matter wasn’t excluding any supporters based on skin color, last I checked. There might have been a small subset who had some twisted racial theories but, for the most part, it was just people looking to fight racism in the police and happy to accept attendants of any color as long as they were aligned with that main goal. While it would be reasonable to not allow people who wanted to come into a meeting and either digress by focusing on the climate effects of police cruisers, or disrupt by trying to refocus the group around how the police treat some other ethnic group, if BLM had said ‘no whites allowed,’ I think it would have been far less effective, far more divisive, and ultimately promoted racism.
That’s why it seems counterproductive to exclude men. From an idealist view, if you believe being a man has some effect that means you can’t have something relevant to add to a conversation, or perhaps more importantly, can’t learn from hearing the words of others, that’s already sex essentialism, the thing feminists have been fighting for longer than feminist has been a word. And from a pragmatic view, the ones who MOST need to learn about the problems of sexism are the men who are so often blind to it as the beneficiaries of it. If you kick out the mysogynists, you have no mysogynists. If you kick out the men, you leave the men who could be allies standing outside with the mysogynists, who will be only too happy to tell them all about how men and women ‘should’ be.