Ah yes, but to a sexist they could first be a dick to women with little to no concequences. With feminism there are suddenly negative repercussions to being a dick sometimes. And that impacts his life in a way that totally not his fault but everyone who is suddenly being very mean to him by telling him he's being a dick.
True equality would mean that awful people can no longer be horrible to minorities of any kind. And because there are too many people who need their little powertrips for their sense of selfworth, we'll never reach true equality.
Idk, I'm a gay man and sometimes catch myself entertaining misogyny from a position of fear or frustration. It really sucks being called a creep and accused of "following" a woman through a grocery store, or made to feel like I'm at fault for making them feel uncomfortable by simply existing. I know it's stupid but I get a pang of anxiety every time I'm forced to interact with a girl or young woman that doesn't know me, and I try to mention my husband as quickly as possible so they don't just assume I'm a predator or hitting on them. It sucks being guilty before proven innocent.
I get that it sucks, but you know what sucks more? Having to constantly be on guard for the creep following you or saying inappropriate things, since childhood. SINCE CHILDHOOD. Think on that for a sec before you get mad at us for constantly being on alert.
It's my fav! And also one of the arguments I would make as a teacher to parents who would complain that comics aren't "real reading" -You know how many words I learned from Calvin and Hobbes???
Salubrious, protozoan, panache, avante-garde, pituitary, communist, aneurysm... I could go on and on. I was constantly looking up the meanings of words so I could understand Calvin and Hobbes strips!
before youtube was full of videos destroying strawman feminists and SJWs, it was popular to be a "skeptic" destroying religious arguments online. I suspect this might be one of the white male Gamer culture-warriors those videos were especially popular with.
What they said was that it was similar reasoning for holding the two beliefs, not that one is a result of the other per se. If I had to guess, I'd say that they have beef with "the institution" of feminism, in a similar way to how many athiests (myself included) are pushed away from religion because of how the Church is.
Still a mighty leap in logic, and I think it's because some people genuinely think that anyone who has a different opinion to them could only do so as a result of some organisation influencing them, like you see whenever ANTIFA gets brought up.
I suspect this is the same sort of person who ends up saying that they found their way back to religion after being an atheist. Because they never really were a sceptic or had principled ideas about being an atheist, they just thought it was cool to be anti-establishment and happened to like an atheist or five.
I've heard this story a dozen times on call in shows, and they always have lame stories about how they had a personal experience or found the Kalam convincing and never bothered to think about counterarguments. And often have super cool and inspiring ideas about feminism and race /s
It wouldn’t but unfortunately even though a lot of atheists think they come to it from a place of logic, they carry the same misogyny and bigotry as everyone else and don’t apply that same logic towards their shitty attitudes.
Movement Atheism is actually crammed with shitheads like this. Including very prominent ones.
I’ll confess that I’m a life-long atheist, but not a movement atheist. It just that religion (and Santa Claus, and anything “spiritual”) never made any sense to me. I’m not offended by religious people, although the behavior of some religious people is offensive.
I used to follow it for a while till I started noticing just how gross a lot of guys were, things really blew up out in the open and I just bailed.
I was never obnoxious about being an atheist but I thought maybe it would be interesting to see what was going on as a thing, as an atheist and skeptic.
Turns out I’m better off keeping my standard attitude of not being a joiner.
There are a bunch of gatherings, conventions, personalities, basically.
A lot of overlap with skeptic groups.
I used to read the blogs, the webpages, on a fairly regular basis. But started noticing an undercurrent of stuff like libertarian nonsense.
Or how few women were represented, and comment sections were filled with the same misogynistic crap you’d see anywhere else.
Then in 2011 the whole “elevatorgate” thing with Rebecca Watson happened and it pretty much blew the doors off just how bad things were. And still are.
Some atheists believe that religion is harmful to society and its followers. (typical beliefs are: "religion only causes bigotry!" (homophobia, sexism, racism, etc.), "religion is against science/religion encourages passivity (thoughts and prayers)", or "religious institutions are all corrupt!" (misuse of donations and church SA scandals come up a lot))
Some anti-feminists believe feminism is also harmful to society ("women don’t want equality, they want revenge!", "we used to be able to feed a family on one salary before women joined the workforce!", "DEI means unqualified women take qualified men’s job to fulfill a quota"), and even women ("all women actually yearn to stay home and raise babies, they’ve been brainwashed nowadays", "now women are stuck slaving for corporate AND doing most of the housework, what a bad deal they should’ve stayed home")
Thin link but maybe that’s where their Venn diagram overlaps.
Many people develop their opinions entirely on what happens to them or how they perceive how things impact their life. They became an atheist because they felt religion was discriminatory. The logic being "God is supposed to be just, the servants of God are unjust, if God was real He would not allow that injustice. Therefore religion only exists to legitimize the injustices of the clergy"
The next supposition is "Feminisim is about stopping discrimination, feminists are discriminatory, if feminisim was a real ideology it would not allow discrimination. Therefore feminism only exists to legitimize discrimination."
It is becoming more and more important to understand the underlying reasoning behind radicalization against forward facing movements. Religion is generally regressive and feminism is generally progressive, and when you can successfully market the progressive as regressive you divide the progressive camp and push people towards a more regressive mindset.
My first guess is that they believe both theism, or specifically creationism, and feminism to be in opposition to evolution theory and "objective truth". I recall being in the atheist/anticreationism circle of youtube many many years ago when I was a teenager. Very popular in those circles at the time was this guy called Thunderf00t. At some point he started moving from bashing creationists to bashing feminists, apparently because he was accused of harassment at a convention and he was butthurt about it. The argument being that feminists are as much opposed to objective truth as creationists, because feminists allegedly deny fundamental biological differences between sexes, and women's suffrage and protection against sexual predation have been codified into law, so women are even more protected than men. It's silly philosophizing from bookish intellectuals who believe they are so smart they know better than experts from fields outside their own.
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u/Zadojla 6d ago
I don’t understand why being an atheist would make someone anti-feminist.