I’m so sorry that your daughters were denied justice, and that other women in your life suffered similarly. I’m unlucky enough to say that I’m not unfamiliar with being in that position. I understand. Sometimes the injustice and cruelty of it takes your breath away.

I don’t know if you have heard of this but there’s a book that I use as a guide in my life that I often ask people to read when they feel that they’re being asked too much. It is called ‘The boy who was raised as a dog’ written by two child psychiatrists.

Thank you for considering my words kindly. I definitely agree that humanism and feminism are not the same. Neither humanism or feminism are perfect, which is why we need scholarship, discussion and lived experience. Most people sadly try to reach not even one.

They fulfill different purposes. Lived experiences and the day to day fight for justice is different from judicial or feminist scholarship and is no less valid. At the same time frameworks for fighting for individual justice and equity are different from those for the same at the systemic level.

It is also truly connected to the no true Scotsman fallacy as you pointed out. I arrived at humanist umbrella because it encompasses a broader set of intersectionalities that aren’t necessarily the focus of feminist movement or scholarship until recently such as race (which has changed a lot), language, disabilities, neurodivergence, colonialism, religious oppression and other things that are personal to my experience.

I also arrived at it because I found that the feminist social movement, in parts, as a way to maintain cohesion and structure framed the struggle partly as a conflict with an out group and individual moral failing, often implicitly, which is antithesis to the decidedly non-western moral ethos that I come from. This is not necessarily reflected in the scholarship or formal frameworks. The sad reality is that people took labels and analysis that were supposed to be descriptive and started using them in a prescriptive fashion, which caught on, and as you said very few people cared to look at the original sources.

The lack of categorisation and acknowledgement of universal worthiness is what attracted me towards humanism. To me it is valuable because there is no humanist tribe.

It all circles back to the Scotsman, is fighting for justice and equity for women feminism if you don’t necessarily believe in parts of feminist scholarship and organizations? Whether it comes from the drive to ease the suffering of women around you or from the humanist idea that all beings are of equal worth and deserving of having their suffering eased?

Firstly I’m so sorry that your children experienced sexual assault. I wish them both justice and healing.

I typed up a long reply with references that I ended up deleting because it didn’t seem appropriate right now.

I have multiple genuine criticisms of feminism that come from actual feminist scholars about its interaction with the class and power structure, embedding of western imperialistic epistemology in it and others. None of it is because I’m opposed to equity or women’s rights. At the end of the day no philosophy is perfect and the actual practitioners are even less so. That is why it makes sense to talk about it and work on it.

I want to ask are you doing okay friend? It seems like you’re not.

I still have made only a singular point, that someone can prefer the label humanist over feminist despite agreeing with everything feminism might say without being a ‘chud’. You have created strawman after strawman through this conversation, accusing me of conflating man haters with feminists, defending the sexual assault and genocide of Genghis Khan, diagnosing me as being ignorant of what humanism or feminism is, of not caring enough to study either, agreeing with white mansplaining, diagnosing me as having a litany of problems with women and being full of red flags and so on. I’ve tried to engage you from a place of good faith, even after the cruel remark of asking if I were sexually assaulted by women and trying to use that to frame me as a woman hater. You’re fighting something that isn’t there.

I left the original comment because I thought it might make you think that there are real people who don’t fit the categories that have become drivers of the culture war. It pays to listen to each other. Instead it seems like my comments have caused you unnecessary distress and I apologize for that.

I get the general defensiveness because of the prevalence of trolls.

There seems to some confusion. I’m not saying the cartoon is right. Just explaining why someone might prefer the term humanist over feminist even if they were not a ‘chud’. Is that so hard to see?

I’m absolutely not saying that someone like Genghis Khan could be rehabilitated. I’m not unaware of what he did and the contentious rehabilitation following Weatherford’s book and how perspectives have changed with later incorporation of historical narratives from China and Mongolia itself.

Let me be absolutely clear, I do not condone taking someone’s life or cutting off their balls as a way to punish in a justice system. We have Geneva convention now. Again I’m curious why is it anti-feminist to say that didn’t Someone is not okay with inhumane punishment. I definitely do not want my own abusers to walk around free but I’m not advocating for them to be tortured using their reproductive organs or killed off.

I never said that anyone else should make peace or be okay with their abusers. You’re filling in some blanks here. Though at least I thought that an idea of justice that is outside personal revenge, but exists as a societal value to rehabilitate or punish justly without violating human rights would be accepted now.

I’m curious as to why you can authoritatively say I’m not aligned with feminism or that I have a laundry list of issues with women from two short pieces of text without knowing anything about me?

I am not sure why the humanist label is being treated as some kind of anti-feminist thing by you or the author of the cartoon. Is it one of those ‘All lives matter’ vs ‘Black lives matter’ situation in the US cultural context? In my cultural context, humanist is a label that is in the same category as atheist or agnostic without any negative connotations.

In fact it was seen as a superset that included feminist ideals and other intersectionalities such as disabilities, race and religion. Which was again why I said I agree with everything feminism says on paper but would like to use a broader term that covers intersectionalities that aren’t included in feminism but are relevant to me and because of my personal experiences with some well intentioned but misguided people wearing that label.

At the end of the day, what I’m getting from your comments is that people like me should not be participating in these discussions or are not welcome here.

Tiber and Xinjiag too

I’m going to be honest with you this comment sounds so condescending and patronizing. I’m not trying to pigeonhole feminism into anything. I’m trying to tell you what my specific experiences were with the disclaimer that it is not representative. I’m not from the US either.

Irrespective of who Genghis Khan is, I’ve never supported death penalty, much less torture. It made me uncomfortable to see how much people were willing to accommodate if it was against people who thought were the other. I’ve had a lot of violence visited on me unfortunately and I’m proud of the fact that even for people who abused me I would choose restorative justice rather than torture. Believe me it took a lot of work to get there.

It seems like you missed my whole point which was that based on what is described on paper I would be a feminist but I identify with a broader label because of my individual bad experience with a minority of people who opted to use the term. You don’t need to explain it to as if I’m an idiot?

Overall comes off as having no empathy for my experience or reality while shoehorning me into what appears to be very limited model of who you think I am? Feels kind of sad.

I gravitate towards humanism instead of feminism even though I align with his the latter would be defined by many people.

In my younger years many feminists groups I ended up participating it, often from working together on protests or other issues under the progressive banner very violently anti-men.

Many actively thought all men were inherently bad and had no place in shared spaces. I remember walking out when one member whom I had worked along with for years and thought of as a close friend spoke of how she had heard a theory of how Genghis Khan was castrated by his wife and died. She thought this was a fitting end for a man and some others chimed in, in agreement. There was a general sense of othering men as an out group responsible for evil, rather than seeing most men and women as suffering under the system.

I don’t think most people are like this, I’m just illustrating why someone might think differently without being a ‘chud’.

It’s kind of funny how Adam Smith saw the need for moral philosophy to constrain greed in the economics of capitalism yet for most modern capitalists, capitalism is their moral philosophy 🤣

I would push back and say that he’s trying to implement the mandate he got elected on using the levers he has. In an ideal system the legislature should set the boundaries but that isn’t the US right now.

Good point. The difference between wisdom and intelligence. You don’t need high IQ to be wise.

I’m already feeling like 30 is the new 60 🤣 Worrying about everything going tits up and white knuckling the wheel.