Sexism = Prejudice + ?????
This was originally part of another post generally demolishing someone who was complaining about masculists. However, this particular part deserved its own post as well. This is basically quoted verbatim from the other post, with some minor change of framing.
Sexism = Prejudice +InstitutionalPower
I’ve seen this pop up a few times lately, but haven’t dealt with it for a few reasons. I was finally pushed into taking it on and this is the result. I address the formation, the reasoning and why it’s invalid, plain and simple.For starters, a quote:
“Lastly, there is no such thing as sexism against men. Sexism = Prejudice + Institutional Power. Guess who historically has had all the latter? Sexism is the historical oppression of women by men due to their gender.”
It’s actually hard to decide where to start with this. Normally, I try and start from what’s right, and figure out where it went wrong. I’m actually having trouble with this one (the reason I haven’t dealt with it directly before to my knowledge), because I can’t find a single thing about it’s that’s right.
The first sentence is actually conclusion. It’s a statement, and you expect to back it up. Its veracity, thus, is not a matter of debate because it has no inherent validity. Secondly, you state that “Sexism = Prejudice + Institutional Power.” Unfortunately, you’re treating this as an axiom or at best a premise. This is inappropriate. People do not agree on this, so if you want to use it you have to present evidence that it’s valid in the first place.
The next step is simple. Let’s go look up “Sexism” in the dictionary (MW):
1: prejudice or discrimination based on sex2: behavior, conditions, or attitudes that foster stereotypes of social roles based on sexHmm. Nothing. Let’s try again (Cambridge):
(actions based on) the belief that the members of one sex are less intelligent, able, skilful, etc. than the members of the other sexStill nothing. For a final try, we’ll look at Wikipedia. While notoriously non-scholarly, on topics like this it can be relied on for a) a very left-leaning/liberal description and b) to have been edited by people like you. Thus, if there’s any validity to your definition at all, we’d expect to see it, or something similar there. (Much more likely than in any legitimately scholarly source, at least.)
Sexism, also known as gender discrimination or sex discrimination, is the application of the belief or attitude that there are characteristics implicit to one’s gender that indirectly affect one’s abilities in unrelated areas. It is a form of discrimination or devaluation based on a person’s sex, with such attitudes being based on beliefs in traditional stereotypes of gender roles.
Swing and a miss. (In fact, nothing even remotely resembling your statement shows up anywhere through the whole article.) Now, were I of the opinion that you operate on anything remotely resembling logic, I’d be done at this point. You introduced something as axiom or premise that is not accepted fact, and provided no evidence why it should be taken as fact. After examining two scholarly resources and a non-scholarly one which is known to be more likely to contain such a definition, there is absolutely no evidence to support what you’re saying. If an argument relies on a premise or axiom that is determined to be untrue or unsupported, it is an invalid argument regardless of the truth of any other element.
(Basically, you said something was true and drew a conclusion from it, but your definition was bullshit. If I say that all animals are rats, and all dogs are animals, thus all dogs are rats, I’m right, but only if all animals are really rats. Because they’re not, it doesn’t matter how well I argue, I’m still just bullshitting. Similarly, if I say that all bright things are stars, and the sun is a bright thing, so the sun is a star, my conclusion is even true but because one of my premises is not my argument isn’t sound.) In fact, this definition is a classic example of doublespeak. (Technically it’s also an example of the omnipresent “no true Scotsman” fallacy.) I’ve actually seen the definition shift from “Sexism = Prejudice” to “Sexism = Power + Prejudice” to “Sexism = Institutional Power + Prejudice.” The reasons for this are simple. You wish to control the terms of the debate, and the easiest way to do that is by redefining the words used to conduct it. Ok, I can do that too! *opens my invisible dictionary* Feminist = Man-hating female-supremacist bigot.
See, it doesn’t actually work that way. You can’t simply redefine the words being used. The original definition shift came about when people started pointing out that much of what feminists were advocating for was actually sexist. At this point they had a problem. They had to keep their status of “against sexism” while still pushing the agenda they had. *ding* Lightbulb! We’ll redefine sexism so that it only counts when applied to us! Because feminism is the primary ideology in the gender equity lobby, it has a great deal of control over the terms in use. By attempting to limit the words its opponents can use, it can stifle honest debate. Unfortunately, it works.
For another example of this, let us look at rape. (Two examples, actually.) For starters, did you know that up until relatively recently it wasn’t actually possible for a man to be raped? (In many countries it’s still not possible.) See, rape was explicitly depicted in laws using terms that could only be applied to women. Thus, even if a man were forcibly violated, the charge would be “sexual assault” as opposed to rape. (This lends an interesting spin to feminist “facts” from the period showing how rape was a problem that only women dealt with.) Secondly, let us look a “marital rape.” This is a perfect example of this kind of tactic as used by the opposite side. See, rape was defined as something that simply couldn’t happen to a married woman from her husband. No, it was explicitly decreed as something that couldn’t happen in a marriage. This made it incredibly difficult to lobby against it, and for laws that would prevent it, because you couldn’t actually call it what it was. Feminist advocates would bring it up as a problem, that women were being raped by their husbands, and they were told “no, that can’t happen, look here, the law says that it’s only rape if the man isn’t married to her. Now go away.” See the problem?
Thus, sexism was redefined. It now had the word “power” attached to it. Thus, any claim of sexism by women could be ignored, because women didn’t have power. (They’re weak, you see, totally powerless. Far too powerless to go fight in wars or that kind of stuff, and far too powerless to- wait, what, they want equality? How can that work if they’re too weak to- oh, well, I wasn’t expecting logic. Anyways….) This became a problem even quicker than the last one, for two totally different reasons.
On one hand, people started to actually think about this and realized that any time sexism harmed it was due to power. See, power is about the ability to hurt in the first place. To use an example from the race debate, it doesn’t matter if the president, the rest of the government and everyone with any political power or money is white when you’re stuck in an alley with a very large black guy. Regardless of racial power overall, in that situation, he has the power, and if he acts out of racial prejudice that would be racism. (Please don’t try and construe me as a racist, it’s a thought experiment, nothing more.) Thus, any time a woman’s prejudice actually harms a man, it’s still sexism because she couldn’t harm him if she didn’t have the power to do so. (This doesn’t validate the “Power + Prejudice” definition of sexism, it’s still completely invalid. Rather, it points out that even if we assume its validity it still doesn’t render the desired result of absolving the sexism of women.)
On the other hand, the feminist movement was pushing harder on the whole “women are strong and powerful” thing. The problem with this was that you couldn’t use a definition that relied on women not having any power when most of your movement was running around yelling at the top of their lungs “we are women, hear us roar, we’re so powerfuuuul!” That was hypocritical even for them, and even the most brainwashed of the rest of us were starting to call them out on it.
Thus a new definition was needed, one that would successfully obfuscate the terms of the debate and stifle any accusation of feminist prejudice. They finally hit on it: “We’ll add the word “institutional” to it!” “It doesn’t matter that it makes no sense whatsoever, we’ll just go with it.”
See, the problem with this definition is very simple. What exactly is “institutional power”? I assume that this is something about “patriarchy” again, and I’m not willing to start up with that ridiculousness. While I don’t agree with the assertion that such a thing as “institutional power” exists or that men have it, I’ll accept it as premise for now. However, even if this power exists, and men have it, it’s only valid to consider it if it is being used to benefit men in general and to further sexism and there’s really no evidence of this. (Lots of evidence against it, though, but I know you lot aren’t great on the whole “backing up what you say” thing.)
Thus, the concept of “Sexism = Power + Institutional Privilege” is an example of doublespeak, pure and simple. It’s used by unscrupulous feminists to avoid honest debate, and is basically a dishonest, hypocritical and idiotic sham.
This is not a particularly focused debunking, because it was done with a view to proving a particular quote wrong. If there’s any interest (I kind of doubt it) I’d be happy to write up a more pure debunking which addresses more aspects in a cleaner and more concise way. No matter, this more than adequately addresses the obvious concerns. Anyone who wants to pull this silly redefinition crap anywhere near me needs to properly invalidate this debunking beforehand, which frankly isn’t going to happen. As such, I think this is pretty much a moratorium on this particular misdefinition.
(Source: permutationofninjasarchive)
