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"are we pulling women up (the conference in question being a great example of that), or are we dragging everyone else down"

"everyone else" happens to be men, and plenty of self-identified feminists believe that men need to have power and privilege taken from them, because no one should have the kind of power we do, by nature of the gender caste system. I recommend the first essay, first. "feminism" isn't a monolithic "movement," it's kind of like saying "I love conservatism!"




That's a good point; the way I see it, the general social justice movement is largely a movement against hierarchy, and for valuing all people equally. It is naturally allied with feminism in the sense that both see the elimination of the gender gap as desirable.

I personally consider the SJ concepts destructive and anti-progressive: hierarchy can often be efficient, there is nothing fundamentally immoral about it, and since people's contributions to society are not equal, treating them equally is neither efficient nor just -- similarly to how treating them unequally based on superficial criteria such as gender is inefficient and unfair as well. But, we probably have a philosophical disagreement on this, which is really fine -- I wish the anti-efficiency and anti-growth people would stop calling themselves "progressives" though, but that's quite another topic...

I would have absolutely no problem with the feminism/SJ alliance, except for the empirical observation that when you hear someone proclaiming themselves as a feminist, most of the time it's a SJW in disguise, and then we have an unfortunate situation when a valid position is supported by entirely unacceptable arguments... Which is pretty much the reason I felt I had to comment on this, as I don't want people to consider the two concepts as identical.




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