What Do Feminists Believe?
Trudy W. Schuett
There's a good discussion going on at A Woman for Men's Rights on what feminists believe they're about (across several posts, BTW.)
I've stayed out of it, mostly because I've been working & playing catch-up in other areas, and there just hasn't been time. I do want to point out, though, that in the past few months I've been doing some research on feminism in spare moments, and have discovered that inexplicably, the deeper I dig, the less I find.
I've got some time off coming up, so I'll explain that last in greater detail down the road.
I'm using the typical resources generally available to libraries, as well as the internet. Can't imagine what else there would be.
???
sorry, that wasn't meant to be a rhetorical question. I don't know where else you might find resources other than possibly academic journals or small-press books your library might not have access to. All I was saying is that there are several substantive and useful definitions posted up at AWfMR, and I don't see how those could be considered an empty philosophy.
Definitions of feminism are like rectums -- everybody's got one, and all they ever produce is shit.
When you get right down to essentials -- when you finally get rid of all the distractive smoke and mirrors and drag people down to the rock bottom reality -- it turns out that people call themselves 'feminist' simply because they have an emotional attachment to the term. I've been over and over and OVER this ground in the past, and every single time, all it ever boils down to is how it makes people feel to identify themselves with the label. You can prove to them by their own supposed standards that the actual term itself is not just meaningless but actively self-contradictory and counterproductive, and they will still go on using it to describe themselves nevertheless.
So my strong advice to Trudy, KellyMac, and anyone else attempting to map this mammoth-killing tar pit of substandard self-indulgent gender elitism is to stop and ask yourself WHAT you are really trying to accomplish, and HOW establishing a 'definitive' taxonomy of 'feminism' is expectably going to help you achieve that goal.
Because I can pretty much guarantee you, from experience, that the answer to the second question is "Not at all."
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.