And yeah, if you are disagreeing with women (or men, frankly) are telling you about your sexist behavior, you're pretty certainly a sexist.

Out of curiosity, Oggy, where do you stand on the issue of abortion and feminism? Is it possible for a woman who is on the pro-life side of the argument to be considered a feminist?

Let say that isn't a position that supports the autonomy and value of women. Ultimately, the anti-choice movement is all about subjugating women and has its roots inpatriarchical religions seeking to control female sexuality ever since the Stone Age. It has zero to do with concern about "life" are embryos. That's just an utterly fake smokescreen


That said, one can certainly be committed to equality on every other issue , so yes. Feminists don't all agree with each other on every issue, but we are all ultimately committed to the same goal even if there are disagreements on exactly what that looks like or how to get there.

I was trying to be satirical with the suggestion of femtruthspeak.
Truthspeak is someone else's idea. George Orwell used it in his novel 1984. I just added the fem.
Clearly ( being serious now ) many human frailties are gender irrelevant, individuals from all sexes will have these frailties, poor behaviours, just as many or all human virtues and good behaviours are gender irrelevant. Eg individuals from all sexes can be compassionate, or cruel.
Personally I like the term mansplaining, but I interpret it in my own way. Additionally the meaning of words, how they are to be interpreted depends often on context

"@Smokey, i think labeling thinks is very useful, so even if men have been mansplaining for hundreds of years (ie assuming they knew better and talked over women/ignored their expertise), now that feminists have invented a word for it, they can use that word to very explain the problematic behaviour - and hopefully correct it."

We have a word for it. The word is "condescending," as in "you are being condescending and you need to stop."

Calling it "mansplaining" just makes the conversation toxic because it tries to guilt men for being born male. It adds nothing constructive to the process of trying to correct bad behavior.

It would be like if we had a cultural perception that black people were loud and aggressive in arguing with other people, and instead of telling a black person you felt was being unreasonably loud and aggressive that they are being unreasonably loud and aggressive and need to stop, you told them they "need to stop blaxplaining." How do you think that would go?

We understand very easily that criticizing someone's behavior based on a stereotypical perception of a demographic to which that someone belongs both is unethical and makes for unconstructive discussion, if that demographic is "women" or "racial minorities" or "nonnormative sexualities" or any number of other divisions. Why then do y'all persist in failing to extend this lesson to men?

Lol, Ogion and his conspiracy theories again.

Anyway, in theory feminism is an awesome thing. There's just a lot of political movements that use feminism as a cover to do and say some really stupid things.

What conspiracy theory? it's just the reality if you understand the history of the anti-choice movement.

The number of glaring inconsistencies in the rhetoric are what show that the proffered explanations are hogwash. You might remember the thought experiment I introduced here. Not a single person just said, "leave the kid, take the embryos" like you would if you believed that they were equivalent. The catholic church teaches that embryos are people, but refused to baptize them or bury stillborn or miscarriages in hallowed cemeteries. People say they're "pro-life" and then turn around promote war, guns, and all manner of killer policies. If people were genuinely concerned about preventing abortions they'd be 110% behind sex ed and free birth control since those are the two things that are bombproof ways to prevent abortions, yet the anti-choice folks are almost invariably against those because "it'll promote sex" which by itself shows you what the real agenda is. Over and over they trot out arguments about how women "deserve it for having sex" which is a glaring admission of what the real objections are.

The anti-choice movement is so incredibly hypocritical that there's no credibility left.

Don't tell me what you believe. Show me what you do and I'll telll you what you believe. The anti-choice movement's actions scream volumes. Sorry, but that's just the reality.

"And yeah, if you are disagreeing with women (or men, frankly) are telling you about your sexist behavior, you're pretty certainly a sexist."

This is Kafkatrap nonsense. If you disagree with accusations levied against you, you're guilty of what you're being accused of doing. If you agree, you're agreeing to your own guilt and are thus guilty.

Where is the room for innocence? Are those who accuse others of sexism in your world literally never wrong?

"You might remember the thought experiment I introduced here. Not a single person just said, "leave the kid, take the embryos" like you would if you believed that they were equivalent."

You were told by multiple self-identified pro-life respondents that your question had the flawed assumption that all life has exactly equal value. Triage is an extremely common medical practice where some life is prioritized above other life in order to ration limited medical attention as efficiently as possible. It's the exact same principle in this case, and you were told as much, you just chose to ignore them all.

"The catholic church teaches that embryos are people, but refused to baptize them or bury stillborn or miscarriages in hallowed cemeteries."

Please explain how you intend to baptize an embryo. Are we going to pluck it from the womb with a tiny pincer, dip it in some holy water and stick it back in?
And Catholic cemeteries DO inter stillborn fetuses and miscarriages. Did you even bother to do a minute's research before you spoke on this issue?
http://www.catholicstand.com/how-to-bury-your-baby-after-a-miscarriage/

"People say they're "pro-life" and then turn around promote war, guns, and all manner of killer policies."

Similar to the "pro-choice" people who are also in favor of gun control? Stupid argument. The labels on both sides are explicitly tailored to this one particular stance, so applying them to other issues will lead to them being contradicted on other issues. This is a high-school tier argument.
But if you must know, it's not contradictory to consider oneself "pro-life" and also support policies that either incidentally or even deliberately lead to loss of life. Guns are most often bought and used to preserve human life, whether for self-defense or hunting, and while their presence will incidentally lead to loss of life (criminal shootings for instance), they certainly can and usually are used as tools of preserving human life.
War, of course, is a deliberate act to cause loss of life, but war, of course, is something all nations must ready themselves for, in order to preserve their own lives in war against another nation.

"If people were genuinely concerned about preventing abortions they'd be 110% behind sex ed and free birth control since those are the two things that are bombproof ways to prevent abortions, yet the anti-choice folks are almost invariably against those because "it'll promote sex" which by itself shows you what the real agenda is. Over and over they trot out arguments about how women "deserve it for having sex" which is a glaring admission of what the real objections are."

I am going to highlight this because this is the only reasonable thing you said in your entire screed, so I will give you props for this.

I think pro-life people can afford to be more supportive of sex ed measures and education on birth control.

I would still make the following observations:

1) There are societal consequences to the proliferation of low-opportunity-cost sex that people often fail to appreciate. At least speaking for myself, I absolutely loathe the "hookup"/casual sex culture that pervades my generation. I find it strongly disincentivizes loyalty to a relationship -- not simply in terms of reducing barriers to cheating (although this is a real thing), but also in terms of lowering the threshold at which one side in the relationship is willing to try to work things out vs leaving for "greener pastures." Speaking solely from my own experience observing my generation (I'm 25) and not from any empirical data (though I would welcome any on this subject), I find my generation to be a complete wreck when it comes to having stable and truly connecting relationships. You can certainly still find them if you know what you're doing and I don't want to act like these meaningful relationships have vanished, but they are certainly harder to find, from what I can see.

2) There are hormonal consequences to some forms of birth control for women which tend to go ignored in these discussions. This objection is more minor, since you can always use a condom and bypass this concern, but not all people do, and the disruption of a normal menstrual cycle by birth control medicine is a real concern for women.

3) Entrusting sex education to schools takes away from parents' power to influence the education of their children on a highly sensitive subject, which can be a problem in tandem with a lack of school choice available to parents. I think if you have relatively easy access to the schools to which you want to send your children, this objection doesn't hold any water, since the parents can still exercise their responsibility to raise their children on the path they see proper in that way. And after all, we trust our children's education on many other important subjects to schools, so drawing a somewhat arbitrary line on sex ed is of dubious value, I will agree. I still believe this point is relevant enough to raise, but it's a minor consideration if the education system is functioning properly. (And if it's not, I guess we found the real issue, no?)

In regard to your last sentence, the question is never about and never stated as "you deserve to suffer for your poor choice, woman," it is always stated as "the human life inside of you does not deserve to suffer for your poor choice." The "real motivation" you speak to is a fabrication invented by leftists and used to obscure and obfuscate discussion about the core concern that pro-life people have: that there is real human life at stake in every abortion case which the state cannot afford to ignore so disdainfully and dismissively as many pro-choice advocates would have it do.

I mean Eden, we've made it crystal clear why his example doesn't show anything useful at all countless times, but he quite literally plugs his ears and refuses to talk about it.

He always dodges talking with us by going something completely wtf like "but catholics don't baptize embryos!"

Although I do agree pro-lifers should donate a lot more to organizations like the pregnancy care center and the like.

Why is the discussion here again? Why did I read this thread? Why do I hate all of you?

@DO, blame OP.

Also, ban OP.

I've learned to filter out the forum so I didn't actually read most of the thread.
I only really read ogion these days because he's the most entertaining.

The fact of the matter is that if a woman does not want to have a child she will go through whatever means possible to avoid having that child. Instead of advocating for a ban that forces women to go through unsafe avenues to get rid of the fetus, maybe anti-choicers should focus on promoting things like safe sex and alternative choices to abortion and stop shitposting on webdip. Also, it might help to make the anti-choicer stance more credible if they stop preaching that having sex was a mistake and women need to deal with the consequences of that mistake.

I attended a discussion a few years ago that talked about how the anti-choice movement gained a lot more credibility and support from women once they started incorporating arguments that didn't alienate or shame women for getting pregnant accidentally. Believe it or not, there are feminist anti-choicers out there.

Also, we need to have a constructive dialogue on feminism on this website because many of you are really uninformed about it. I'll contemplate starting one if I ever feel like ending my life.

∆+1

I'm open to being convinced that abortion isn't killing a life. But if it is, I think it should be avoided if possible.
I can't say I find Ogion's argument that catholics don't baptize fetuses to be all that convincing though.

I don't see anyone here shaming women for having sex other than Ogion saying that's what the other side does. (Unless there are and I muted them a long time ago)

That was @ Eden's comment: "In regard to your last sentence, the question is never about and never stated as "you deserve to suffer for your poor choice, woman," it is always stated as "the human life inside of you does not deserve to suffer for your poor choice.""

I've seen plenty of anti-choicers, here and in real life, that use the argument "your fault, now you have to deal with it"

smash the patriarchy.

also no one should have to have a kid who doesn't want one. it is the hardest thing ever, all stages, with massive social and economic consequences, particularly for the woman.

"

OK, saying "never" was too absolute, sure. That doesn't change the thrust of my point. The idea behind the argument for compelling a woman to carry her pregnancy to term is that there is a second human life involved which doesn't deserve to die for a decision that the woman later regrets. I am sure there are some vindictive people who are pro-life and actively revel in the notion of punishing people for making an unwise decision. I am also very sure that the vast majority of pro-life people do not feel this way and that certainly no one you're talking to in this thread feels this way.

"Also, we need to have a constructive dialogue on feminism on this website because many of you are really uninformed about it."

Don't womansplain to me. ;)
In seriousness, I find this to be a very presumptuous claim Demon. You don't really mean to claim that people posting in here, who almost by definition of that act spend far too much time on the Internet arguing politics, have somehow not been exposed to feminist ideas before, do you? You don't think it's more likely that we've been exposed to feminist ideas on a variety of subjects and rejected them?

"The fact of the matter is that if a woman does not want to have a child she will go through whatever means possible to avoid having that child."

This is a true statement that is also not compelling in the slightest to someone who believes that abortion is immoral. I recognize that you don't see abortion as immoral, but substitute any action you do see as immoral in the place of abortion in this premise and you will see the problem.

"Also, it might help to make the anti-choicer stance more credible if they stop preaching that having sex was a mistake and women need to deal with the consequences of that mistake."

You do understand that the act of seeking an abortion is a concession that the sex which led to conception *was* a mistake, right? If not in totality then at least in the manner in which protection was or was not used.
At least as far as this conversation is concerned, no one is calling safe sex a "mistake." But it is difficult to see how having unsafe sex when one doesn't want to get pregnant is NOT a mistake...

Should people be allowed to do what they want with their own bodies when it comes to vaccines? .....lol

"also no one should have to have a kid who doesn't want one. it is the hardest thing ever, all stages, with massive social and economic consequences, particularly for the woman."

Then don't. Condoms are dirt cheap and are essentially foolproof. There are more expensive options that are even less foolproof, but condoms are more than safe enough in absence of any other protection.
This is the part that mystifies me about this argument, so if I am missing something then please fill me in. Assuming you are not under duress or compulsion, it is mind-numbingly easy to have sex without having unprotected sex. There are certainly some pro-life people who also oppose the use of birth control and oppose sex education, which starts to put people in a bind, that's true. At least as far as I said earlier, I do think the pro-life movement has room to be supportive on these measures, and I think opposing birth control, sex education, and abortion in combination is ineffectual for reducing unwanted pregnancies.
But presuming you have a pro-life position that also incorporates sound sex education and doesn't restrict access to birth control, doesn't that solve the primary concern that pro-choice people have, which is ensuring that women have enough control over their sexual fates to avoid unwanted pregnancies?

I used to have a favourite male feminist YouTube channel: badass guy that spoke like Ogion, taught self defence classes, interviewed both first and third world women to showcase the depredations visited on both. He was known as Russian Deadpool.

Then he killed his girlfriend. Not saying that Ogion is going to kill anyone, but anyone that can so easily evaporate complex interactions between humans to the simplest terms, including oversimplified conspiracy theories that rely on patriarchy and religion and the removal of freedom from their opponents’s motives, is heavily influencable.

I’m not a feminist. I used to be. My wife never was. She’s a scientist. She weighs claims pretty carefully before lending them any credence and is one of the reasons I abandoned faith in feminism.

As to abortion... geez guys, have you never travelled? Have you never lived in a non Christian place? Have you no conception of history and culture and tradition outside of Christianity? Are your beliefs about the world that rigid?

Or am I stupid to ask? Feminism’s logic has been used to make a single group of people responsible for all the world’s ills no matter their historical genesis. So why not?

Disclaimer: I read feminism and post colonial literature in university. I’m 38 and only in 2014 started to question feminist dogma. It was an atheist by the nickname of Aaron Ra that did it for me. He said that if you believe in equality between the sexes you are -by definition- a feminist. In other words he used to dictionary to dive into and promulgate a belief system. He went full quack from there on, jumping headlong into social issues that have nothing to do with atheism or rationality.

Because that is what feminism is. It is a way of looking a the world that cleaves to belief that power hierarchies between power and powerlessness are what makes the world go round. And or can posit anything from that notion with a straight face. If it took itself seriously it would work falsification into its doctrine. It does not.

Rather it is anchored by the byline: listen and believe.

I won’t. I am no longer a feminiat. I left the church. As such I understand why people are in it. It is a powerful identarian belief system that puts us vs them as seen in this thread.

Apparently I’m a sexist because I disagree with feminism. I wonder what else I am based on what I don’t believe. Such simple beliefs about the world and about people have been seen before. They dominate every totalitarian and murderous belief system from the dawn of time.

Turn another human into the other or remove their humanity through strict doctrine and bam! Gulags. Bam! Holocaust. Bam! Witch trials. Bam! Ethnic cleansing.

What does Christianity have to do with abortion?

"Disclaimer: I read feminism and post colonial literature in university. I’m 38 and only in 2014 started to question feminist dogma. It was an atheist by the nickname of Aaron Ra that did it for me. He said that if you believe in equality between the sexes you are -by definition- a feminist. In other words he used to dictionary to dive into and promulgate a belief system. He went full quack from there on, jumping headlong into social issues that have nothing to do with atheism or rationality. "

So the social issues you call full quack and lacking rationality.

Id kinda like to know what that was, you know; as opposed to taking your informed word for it.

Sorry I meant religion, viz., patriarchal religions mentioned above.

"This is a true statement that is also not compelling in the slightest to someone who believes that abortion is immoral. I recognize that you don't see abortion as immoral, but substitute any action you do see as immoral in the place of abortion in this premise and you will see the problem."

So you would prioritize something like jailing and harming women for performing this action over actually trying to reduce the number of abortions happen? I get your moral position, but I think you need to be a bit more practical when it comes to the law. Think about how you can best achieve the goal that you want PE.

Also, sex isn't the mistake - and *a lot* of the time accidental pregnancies happen because of a lack of sexual education because of a failed school system that doesn't teach these people what is safe and what isn't. Then pointing the finger at women and being like "you made a mistake, deal with it" is NOT constructive what so ever. My point, if you read the next sentence, was about the credibility of the movement.

@Flum
"Should people be allowed to do what they want with their own bodies when it comes to vaccines? .....lol"

The reason we force people to get vaccines isn't for personal safety but the safety of the people around them. This is why we let Jehova's Witnesses not take blood transfusions even if they might die. Very wrong analogy here.

@brainbomb:

Aron Ra took anchannel that was about rationality and science as pivotal in debunking faith claims to feminism and accordant social movements as foundational to atheism in the bat of an eye. It was also right after attending a conference where a feminist merely defined the word feminist- which somehow scooted this rational right along.

Feminism’s biggest trick is convincing people that they are feminists if they believe pretty foundational liberal principles that long preceded it. I’m no longer a feminist. My beliefs about the intrinsic worth of a human have not changed. What has is the belief that feminism posits and advocates for equality of the sexes. No, that’s it’s surface facade. It goes hella deeper from there.

In the various real life instances when male colleagues were careless when they "deposited their semen" & resulting unplanned pregnancies occurred, not one ended well. Maybe I hold an unorthodox view, but I hold men responsible for their semen, and just as responsible, or even more responsible for contraception than the woman/women with whom they have sex.
I remember the howls of protest when I suggested that men who opposed abortion rights for women, who sired children in unwanted pregnancies should have non reversible vasectomies.

Call me a Daffy old fuddy duddy, but I thought that proposition was quite reasonable.. If a man who opposes abortion rights for women is responsible for an unwanted pregnancy, if it occurs in the "casual lovers" situation rather than within an established relationship, then that blighter should be made to have a non reversible vasectomy.