Conservative
Feminism is a broad term for ideas that appear in a lot of feminist subsets. It was borne primarily of second wave
feminism and extreme examples of it can be found within Radical Feminism. In my opinion it has proliferated within western
society so strongly because it reflects our culture’s inherent Christian
ideological views on sex and sexuality—it is ‘chaste’ feminism.
Conservative Feminism is the main voice behind the idea of
sexual objectification, the thought that women are only valued societally on
their physical appearance and their only value to men is to provide them with
sexual pleasure. Short version, it does a lot to promote sex and sexuality as
tools used by men to dehumanise women; it promotes the idea of female victims
in a male dominated society.
If you were to ask the average Conservative Feminist why
Celebgate happened, they would probably say that women self-objectify (an internalisation of societal sexual objectification
of women) themselves with naked selfies to achieve value in the eyes of men.
Also, if men as part of patriarchy weren’t objectifying women, perpetrators
wouldn’t have felt the need to hack phones to propagate the nude pictures of
female celebrities. The act of hacking
and distributing these pictures is evidence that men view women as sex objects
for their pleasure, rather than actual people.
All of this is just part of the male rape-culture.
As for the male victims—
...insert something here about ‘male
privilege’ and ‘patriarchy’ and why men are therefore irrelevant in this issue.
If you can’t tell, I don’t think much of conservative
feminism. I believe it and its arguments
to be incredibly self-serving. Conservative Feminism focuses only on female
positives and male negatives and all of its arguments are built to reinforce
this position. It does not come from a position of reason; it is negative,
dismissive of men’s basic humanity and degrading of women by promoting them as
victims.
Which perspective would you like to see next?
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