Pros and Cons of Feminism; There are Always Two Sides To A Story

Editor: Vlad Rothstein | Tactical Investor

Pros and Cons of Feminism; Independent Viewpoints

The U.K. will soon have a trio of new statues in its streets, each celebrating inspiring female figures throughout British history.

The monuments will adorn cities across England, with Manchester set to honour pioneering suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst and late comedian Victoria Wood, while Middlesbrough, in the northeast of England, will commemorate wartime politician Ellen Wilkinson.

Construction is expected to begin in 2017.

The pledge comes as statistics show the number of statues of women pales in comparison to the number of men honoured in stone throughout the country.

This article is a Good Pro Article on Feminism

Research conducted by campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez in 2016 found that out of a total 925 public statues, only 158 are of solo women.

A meagre 48 of these portray real-life women, with 29 dedicated to Queen Victoria.

Manchester’s statue of Pankhurst will be the city’s first to portray a woman beyond a bust of the late monarch located in Albert Square. The leader of the suffragette movement, who was born in the city in 1858, convincingly beat five other women to top the WoManchester Statue Project poll—securing 56 per cent of the 5,301 public votes cast.

Councillor Andrew Simcock, who started the project, assured the BBC that none of the £200,000 ($240,000) funding for the memorial would be public money. The second statue is to be erected in Bury, Greater Manchester in memory of Victoria Wood, who died of cancer on April 2016. Full Story

Pros and Cons of Feminism: This Supports the Pro viewpoint.

If 2018 has been “the year of the woman”, it has also proved to be the year of the female statue. A century after the first British women got the right to vote, the UK’s lack of public monuments to women has come under renewed scrutiny: while up-to-date statistics are hard to come by, it’s believed that public statues of men outnumber women by 16 to one, a ratio that would be significantly worse if you discounted statues of Queen Victoria.

In an attempt to redress this imbalance, several new statues of influential British women have been commissioned and unveiled over the last nine months. The much-anticipated monument to Millicent Fawcett took up residency in Westminster’s Parliament Square in April; a month later, it was revealed that artist Maggi Hambling is working on a sculptural tribute to the “foremother of feminism” Mary Wollstonecraft, while plans are also underway for the UK’s first full statue of Virginia Woolf.

A memorial to suffragette Emily Wilding Davison was unveiled in Northumberland in September – and an Emmeline Pankhurst statue is due to be made public in Manchester by the end of the year.
The locations of existing statues of women have also been the subject of discussion and controversy. On 16 September, it was announced that a statue of Emmeline Pankhurst would not be moved from its original spot in Westminster, following a campaign led by Caroline Criado-Perez (who also spearheaded the campaign for a statue of suffragist Fawcett in Parliament Square). Full Story

Pros and Cons of Feminism; Psychology today covers the issue well

Women have faced countless brutal forms of institutionalized discriminationsince time immemorial and in all sorts of cultural settings. This is an undeniable and morally reprehensible truth. Accordingly, feminism as a movement, in seeking to create equality for women in the social, political, economic, and occupational spheres (to name a few domains), is laudable. There is no moral reason that a woman should not be allowed to vote, should not have equal access to education and health care, should not make the same amount of money as a man performing the same job, etc. Feminism has been singularly responsible for redressing these deeply sexist social injustices. This is what I would call benevolent feminism

The non-benovalent form of Feminism

From the onset of the movement, many radical feminists rapidly converged on the erroneous idea that if women are to be treated equally in all walks of life, it is important to demonstrate that men and women are indistinguishable beings. Hence, all sex differences short of one’s genitalia were attributed to socialization. See Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women’s Studies by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge for endless examples

Some forms of feminism have been harmful in that they have built an ideological foundation that is anti-male. Apparently, misogyny is reprehensible and evil but misandry is virtuous and laudable. I am sure that most readers are familiar with the words of Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon to the effect that all men are rapists, and that heterosexual sex is nothing short of rape. And according to many feminists, men who consume pornography are at the very least “rapists-in-training.” I wonder how we might go about reproducing given that heterosexual mating is apparently “violently penetrative.”

The feminist movement has created confusion regarding the permissible dynamics between the sexes. Men and women no longer trust their Darwinian instincts; instead, they seek to adhere to new “feminist” rules of intersexual conduct, as they are highly fearful of being accused of being “sexist pigs” or “tools of the patriarchy.” Psychology Today