Jon Stewart FTW. Just a shame hardly anyone outside of the US has really heard of him.

I'm not even sure what the ultimate goal of feminism is. Absolute gender equality? But wouldn't that mean abandoning gender? Or the reinforcement of womanhood, basically the opposite?

I find myself agreeing with many theories by (hardcore) feminists, but I have no idea if I'm one myself.

I presume it means different things to different people. I personally consider it simply as a pro-women movement. It doesn't make it a bad movement or anything, anymore like it isn't wrong that "railway workers' union" is interested only in the rights of railway workers, not e.g. nurses.

If I was a woman, I wouldn't be surprised if I was a feminist too. So I am not really holding it against women if they want to be feminists. It is only natural to be most interested in things that affect you the most. Like, I don't like DRM. :) (I hope I was the first one to mention DRM or Steam in this thread)

How sexist of her... True. This comes obviously from primal instrincts. I don't know why average voter seems to like celebrities like Obama or Clinton to be elected but it seems that people do not think much over it.

Attractive people are more likely to have a successful career. My friend didn't get the job despite having better qualifications only because he was a male, and the other candidate had boobs :P

Also, a more serious matter. Men are disrciminated by courts, especially "family courts", especially when it comes to children custody. Women are 70% more likely to "get" the child even if they are obviously worse choice

Also, men raped or abused by their bosses for example, are much less likely (almost not likely at all) to get any help from authorities or even friends. He'll get mocked in most cases.

Strictly speaking, feminism is an ideology which advocates that women are the equals of men. It was a much more relevant ideology 40, 50, 100 years ago when there was no universal suffrage, when it was thought that a woman's place was the stove. These days, women can vote and work in the same way as men, although we in Europe - and especially in Germany - are kidding ourselves if we believe that women are truly treated equally by society.

(slightly off-topic: Germany's a strange case where private enterprise and society at large is notorious for discriminating against women, while public authorities are notorious for discriminating against men)

The problem is this: as genuine feminism has lost some of its relevance over the years following the achievement of many of its goals, it has been hijacked by militants who see women not as equals, but rather superior to men, who in their eyes are incapable of the feats of women - the "man haters" as it were, the feminine chauvinists.

It's a shame really, because the real feminists are more subtle, more sensible, working behind the scenes to ensure that women do have equal rights, in society and in government. Look at Ursula von der Leyen, who in spite of her rather uninformed opinions about gaming in the past, is someone I respect on the whole. Not all feminists are women.

I mean, we have a woman in the Kanzleramt now, and since she was elected nobody gives a shit that she's a woman. That's what it should be like.

That does make sense. Being pretty much as white, middle-class, heterosexual as it gets, I don't actually know many people of colour or LGBT people very well. Racism and homophobia are more theoretical concerns for me than personal circumstances I have to deal with on a regular basis. I however do know many women, of course. Relatives, friends, lovers... gender politics are simply much more of a real issue for me, which is probably part of why I take such an interest in them.

I would say he is the best know "late night political comedian" outside of the US. They used pictures of him (and Colbert) for party flyers at my university.

And what do you guys think about positive discrimination?

I mean, giving extra points for being black, being a woman, forcing employers to employ significant amount of people of specific race, gender, etc.

Sometimes those "perks" are getting more important than actual skills and credentials. Like "we gonna need to fire somebody, but we're not going to fire a black person or a woman, because unions will kill us", so they fire an average worker who has the bad luck to be white heterosexual male.

Yes there is. Private people rant at me all the time for, ahem, "supporting [racial slur] who rape our white children" and object to e.g. Tatar news anchors - "This is Russia, how do they dare to allow a Tatar to read news on a federal channel! Might as well sign up a [n-word] tomorrow! We're all doomed!". Corporations roll with these sentiments, saying "Errr, we'd really love to hire you as a salesperson, we're not at all racist, but our customers are, and as a private enterprise we can't really afford to lose money, so it's either janitor or GTFO". Now, I don't really see s problem with categorization per se. We need some words to describe people, and there are distinct ways that people can look. Now if only the labels we assign to these ways were accurate and inoffensive. Feminism is winning, on average. Discrimination at the workplace, essentialism and the master key theory are very much alive. Lucky you. Here is it celebrated. Mass media can't stop pushing the idea that women are stupid and should find joy in their unique stupidity. At the superficial level, as in, "pollution is bad". Beyond those three words, opinions diverge like crazy. Organic fangirls are worse than... ahem... Apple fanboys. (See, I made an effort!) The "all-natural" trend does not benefit the environment at all.

(Now, this is not to say that artificial flavors are not shit. They are.) Lucky you.

No. I don't want to die. I want to be taxed.

You, individually, grew up. People on average don't change their mind, they die out.

As an utilitarian feminist, I have no use for the "ultimate goal". It tends to devolve into the slippery slope fallacy fairly quickly. There are many reasons to argue about definitions (37 is a good estimate), but primary issues should be never shadowed by semantics.

There's a long list of professions that I'm barred from. That sucks, and I want it to change.
Women's retirement age is lower. That sucks, and I want it to change.
Other people try to claim authority over my entrails. That sucks, and I want it to change.
Some companies demand that women paint their faces and nails without imposing any restrictions on the physical appearance of men. That sucks, and I want it to change.

These are all "feminist" stances, since they are aimed at gender equality. So is e.g. teenage boy porn, which I do not support. I do not have to work out a definition of feminism covering every issue that has ever arisen and can arise beforehand and then blindly hold on to it until I die. [Feminism] is a shorthand, a tag on a real issue. Some [feminism] issues are worthy of support, some aren't.

It is absolutely not necessary (and rather harmful) to perform mental gymnastics to define the tag so that only issues you personally support fall under it, because definition-based thinking is not supported by observable reality.

Possibly, but that's not saying much. Generally speaking, only university-educated people in Germany will be aware of him (as an example, noone else in my home village actually speaks English to any great extent, so that excludes all of them), and most of the people in the UK that I know have never heard of him either (although one guy did recognise him as the science teacher from "The Faculty").

Oh, don't worry. You can safely disregard all this as completely moronic. It's true that it takes a bit more work for men to be aware of some of the invisible differences that favourise them and unfavourise women (at various levels, even mere representations), but this can be said of any form of discrimination : you can be firmly antiracist and yet not fully "know" how it really feels to be part of a visible minority because you didn't experience it first hand. It doesn't change much.

You may make a parallel with ethnocentrism : the sets of prejudices that we have incorporated so deeply, during our education and socialisation, that we're not aware of them anymore. It's a perpetual struggle to identify and distancise oneself from them, and these things are so deep that it will never be a fully completed quest. But if, say, your profession is about distancising yourself from them (in order to describe other cultures the most accurately possible), you still do, even knowing that you'll never get rid -or conscous- of all these reflexes.

The point is, if you're feminist, you'll just be attentive, and want to be attentive, to the implicit social asymetries between genders (and the subtly derogatory representations of women compared to men), and you will want to correct them. This alone makes you a feminist. Being a woman makes it a tad easier because some elements are, in practice, automatically more visible to you, but not necessarily much : there's a lot of women who are much less feminists than a lot of men. For both men a and women, it's a work about revealing invisible aspects of gender relations and social differentials.

Imagine some black panther dude in the 60s going "you're not antiracist because you're white and you don't know what it means to be black here". How seriously would you take it ? Of course you're not black and lack first-hand experience of "racial" discrimination (even if you went through Jane Elliot's workshops <- don't worry, the show is in english, only the intro in in spanish). That's not the point. Antiracism and feminism would be pointless if their endorsment were just limited to an "oppressed caste". There would be no possible feminist or antiracist society on the whle, that is, societies with equal opportunities and equal respect regardless of skin colour or gender.

Agreed!

Polish Police made a huge mistake by being politically correct on one case of a missing girl.

The description said "dark hair, brown eyes" etc and her clothes.
They didn't mention she was black.

A thing that would help like hell in Poland where there are pretty few colour people.

Still better than recognizing him from "Who killed Smoochie" ;-).

Anecdote on the gender gap.

The other day I had a tutorial with a mature female PhD student from Libya on statistics and as usual it turned to hypothesis testing and statistical significance. To illustrate that non-significance is as important as significance, I brought up the classical example of the gender gap in salaries:

"if you find a non-significance in salary between gender it would be front page news!" . She asked "why?", I replied "well there would no longer be a gender gap between males and females, they would statistically be paid the same as males", "what? they don't get paid the same here?"


hmmm.......

While I very much agree with the rest of your post, I personally have no experience with these mythical man-haters, nor do I think they have any real influence when it comes to public opinion on... well, anything at all. I've read Andrea Dworkin's Intercourse, for example, which is often treated like the ultimate anti-male manifest, and found nothing that struck me as offensive or misandrist. I just don't feel threatened by feminism in any way at all.

What I do think is a reality is what I earlier called a cold war of genders. Seems to me there is a passive-aggressive, subtle, unconscious... counter-movement, for lack of a better word, that basically says "what you've done to us for so many years we're now giving back". I'm referring to things like exaggerated beauty standards, which are more and more becoming an issue for men.

Then again, that might all be complete bollocks.