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2026-02-07

My views on feminism

Disclaimer

• Quick Note
• target audience - literally all women
• trigger warning - rape

Where I am coming from

• I am not directly working on anything to do with feminism myself, but I do think women's safety and freedom is one of the most important issues in the world, and atleast some people should work on it full-time.
• It's possible you'll get better views on this from someone who is actually working on this full-time. But I thought to add my two cents anyway.

My views

• Libertarianism
  • I am not a libertarian, but I am biased towards fairly libertarian-leaning solutions on this topic. I basically want women across all countries to acquire more money, acquire stronger legal rights and acquire guns.
  • (There are nuances to all this I haven't figured out myself, or spent time on.)
  • I would be happy in a world with more women who are self-made billionaires and politicians. Right now this is an extremely male-coded profession. There are obvious benefits, like they might change the law or successfully persuade the public to treat women better. My guess is there might be lots of positive second-order effects apart this, and these might actually be comparable magnitude to the obvious ones.
  • I am aware that this set of solutions itself might be somewhat male-coded, and some women might prefer different solutions.
• Persuasion
  • Persuading men to not be rapists is worth doing in parallel with the above solutions, but also, there seem to be limits to how persuasive most people actually are. I think you should basically take for granted that there will always be a significant fraction of rapists in society, and build a world to protect yourself from them. I would love if someone succeeds at persuasion here, I'm just saying empirically most people seem to have failed.
  • Maybe persuasion is a bit more effective at people who are not literal rapists, but have poor boundaries and end up abusing you anyway. Maybe persuasion is a bit more effective at parents who control their daughters (but may also have some genuine love for them). I haven't actually measured how effective persuasion is, in any of these situations.
• Focus on the actual rapists
  • I have focussed on actual rapists, because I think they're probably the biggest source of harm. Also, like, if you don't have good solutions to deal with the actual rapists, I'm also not sure how you'll figure out solutions to deal with everyone else. (I'm not sure about this, and will need to think more.)
  • There's definitely a lot of other topics I haven't covered here, be it abortion or porn or freedom to marry or workplace rights or so on, for this reason.
• Base rates
  • I think the number of men who would rape you if they could get away with it is pretty high (atleast 5 percent), even inside groups run by women putting significant full-time effort to filter such men out.
  • I think the actual rate of rapes that happen in these spaces is also pretty high, but obviously lower than the rate of men who only want to rape you in theory.
  • The rate is higher if you expand the definition of rape, to include various forms of pressuring women to have sex.
  • The rate is higher for general population of different countries.
  • The rate is unfortunately even higher for groups that claim to protect women, including the police, any company's HR department and various non-profit orgs. Such places systematically attract men who want to abuse you.
  • I think getting unbiased numbers here is hard, but really important, and also my numbers are bad. (Maybe I should put more effort into getting good numbers?)
• Changing language and discourse norms
  • I am generally not a fan of any solution that requires entire society to change how they use language, in order to be more considerate to women.
  • This includes trigger warnings, using he/she pronouns (#), and a number of other solutions I honestly don't even keep track of anymore.
  • (#) I think using pronouns for transgender people is important, but that's a separate topic from (cis, straight) women.
  • I generally think it's a good idea for you to specify what language you want used in conversations with you.
  • If I personally want a conversation with you, I'll probably just go with whatever language or discourse norms you prefer. Obviously I will go with your suggestion if my opinion on your suggestion is positive or neutral. But like, there's a fair chance I'll try to accomodate your suggestion even if I dislike it.
  • But also, I don't think every group in society should cater to the average women's wants and needs, or to your individual wants and needs.
  • I also think that if you are a women and you dislike the words someone used to share their opinion on this topic, there's a high probability you have a problem with the opinion itself, not the words they used. If they rephrased the same opinion in different words, you'd probably still dislike it.
  • I am open to changing my view on this topic. I haven't thought a lot about it.
  • It's possible what I've written above on discourse norms is self-interested. Like, I might be more focussed on how to protect myself from feminists who want to change discource norms, than I am focussed on helping feminists win at their own goals. But also, even if I try to put myself in the shoes of someone who did consider feminism even more important than I did, it's genuinely unclear to me what the case for changing discourse norms is.
• Communism
  • Many feminists also happen to be communists.
  • (I would have preferred for a post on feminism to not talk about something completely different, but unfortunately the correlation between being a feminist and a communist is very high, and I feel the need to address it explicitly.)
  • I think advocating for communism is the same as advocating for the mass murder of tens of millions of people, while (usually) being naive about it.
• Social exclusion
  • to do
• "Feminism" as a word
  • I seem to have a small negative reaction simply to hearing the word "feminism", because of some of the reasons above. When I first wrote this post, I ended up naming it women's safety and freedom, instead of feminism. But I also like enough about the feminist movement to not ultimately abandon the word entirely.

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