why feminism?

Yeah, it is an interesting issue, for sure: Is feminist epistemology (the aspect of feminism I am interested in) to be concerned with mens’s issues, or just with those of women? Can it, on a practical level, ever be concerned with how men experience the world? I think that there are two different issues here. One is the issue of feminist epistemology and how that has to function if it is to have any meaning. The other is a moral issue about how we treat other people. They are not the same things at all — or ought not to be (although I understand that the nastier seeming feminists may tend to conflate the two).

Feminist epistemology has to be concerned with how women experience the world. If, for instance, I am deemed irrational when I try to get social help for a very antagonising situation, then it probably doesn’t help me to go looking for how men are treated as irrational — at least not in the first instance. The reason that I would not look to humanity in general is that there are already signs that the issue is a female issue. The signs presented to me may include such things as: My abuser determined, upon my reaching puberty, that I had become irrational, and that I had come to represent to him the realm of FEELINGS (but not the realm of logic, reason, or of ethical human relations). The realm of feelings is considered in the academic literature to be a definitively FEMININE realm. // 2. My abuser was highly irrational in his thought processes — for instance, he thought that reading a philosophy book in a room in which I had not opened the curtains fully was a sign that I was communing with Satan. He got an elder from his Church in, to check me out. He also chased me out of the house in one instance for refusing to discuss his state of sexual arousal with him, whilst he was watching Basic Instinct. In chasing me out of the house (after I politely refused to continue his line of conversation), he accused me of “being afraid of everything” (not true). //3. When I mentioned my father’s behaviour to others, including what he had said to me, others acted towards me as if I were the irrational one. This said something to me about patiarchy and how the authority of fathers is based upon the political and cognitive divide between public and private realms. Nobody would touch this situation because my father was deemed to be acting rationally within the preserves of patriarchy. //4. Other signs that I was dealing with an issue of patriarchal power and values were that I have never been successful in raising this issue (whilst being even partially understood) in an other than feminist forum. So the signs are that I have interpreted the power dynamics correctly, in terms of general feminist critiques regarding patriarchal power.

If I had gone to look for my answers in terms of the suffering of men in general, I would have found what I did actually find — that men in general simply cannot relate to a situation of someone being deemed irrational because they are being bullied in the home. Some men might relate peripherally to the situation of being deemed irrational when complaining about bullying at work. (There is also a power dynamic here, of dominance and submission.) However, I was deemed irrational by my father upon puberty — and it was at that point that the bullying started and has continued ever since. Also, those in particular who deem themselves really good and proper citizens are the least likely to understand what I have told them. Their inability to attend with any seriousness to the examples I give them indicates to me that what I have to say is not understandable by “people in general”. However, feminists do understand it.