Perhaps he is just being friendly and he is thinking that you are into him but he isn't interested.

Have a heart for us poor guys, we're constantly told that we see women flirting with us when they are not...and then berated for not realising when women have been making their attraction "obvious". If we are so clueless why is it so often left to us to make the first move? SO UNFAIR. FUCK THE MATRIARCHY.

Good for the kid, she just made a decision based on what she found visually appealing without the entire patriarchy/matriarchy telling her what to think...

It won't last, but enjoy it while you can!

Tags for this video have been changed from 'women, feminist, mexico, matriarchy' to 'women, feminist, mexico, matriarchy, werner herzog' - edited by fissionchips

I picked "advancing the rights of women" because the roots of feminism lie in the historical oppression of women in society. Now, certainly the stated goal of feminism has been equal rights for women, but much of the public discussion has centered on the advancement of women's rights as the method for achieving that. I feel this is an important point to consider. With such a goal, how do you know when you've reached it? How do you know when you should stop advancing one group's rights? How do you even define your groups? There is no objective viewpoint to take, subtle oppression is difficult to quantify. The risk of exaggeration is inherent in any attempt to increase the rights of one group of people only.

Now, certainly feminist theory acknowledges, even actively propagates the point that it is not just men who perpetuate restrictive gender roles, and not just women who disavow them. Gender roles, as far as I can tell, are seen in feminist theory as a powerful meme that resides in all our minds, and restricts us all. Men, too, are bound by their roles, although those roles may traditionally grant them more power than the roles of women. I agree with this assessment to a large extent, and that is why I find it disappointing that feminist rhetoric remains so gender-centric.

"Feminism", "patriarchy", "sisterhood", "matriarchy" - these are all terms stuck in an old-fashioned mode of thought. Rhetoric using these terms is likely to be counterproductive now. Like it or not, a lot of people identify with their gender, partly for cultural reason, partly because most of us are hard wired to seek gender roles, whatever they may be in our culture. To say a society is patriarchal may be accurate, but it perpetuates a division that should not exist. A man is likely to take such a claim as an attack on them personally, because it implies that the male sex oppresses the female sex, making anyone identifying with the male sex an oppressor.

There is a paradox here I'm having difficulty putting into words. That gender is not really an either-or thing, but rather a diffuse gradient, or a combination of many gradients, seems to be a fairly widely accepted claim in feminist theory. Humans have a wide variety of attributes, too many to reasonably list, that vary with cultural background and hormonal makeup. Some people are more aggressive, some people better able to empathize with others, both traits likely influenced by nature as well as nurture. Gender affects us; to say that the mind of someone with XX chromosomes is not, on average, influenced by a different set of chemicals than that of someone with XY is foolishness. (For simplicity's sake, let's not get into women with Y chromosomes, men with double-X etc. here.) It is equally foolish to claim that simply based on someone's perceived gender you could tell what their abilities are. Gender matters, but individual variation matters more, so it seems silly to group people into "women" and "men" for purposes of defining what their rights are or should be. Still, this is effectively the division a lot of feminist rhetoric perpetuates by continuing to use gender-specific terms.

If you accept that individual variance trumps gender-based differences, I do not see how you can talk of women's or men's rights. The terms lose meaning. To say anything about women's rights implies that there is, for social purposes, a well-defined group called "women". If your goal is to let people live their lives however they please regardless of their gender, such segregation is counterproductive. There are human rights, and that's all.

In summary, fuck isms. Fuck them hard.

Can I be part of the matriarchy?

Oh please. Cronyx is far from the mark. It's not a serious claim that attempts to collapse the scope of feminist thought to an imaginary "hijacked debate" women are supposed to be having over what may or may not be the acceptable limits of pernicious male behavior. If he's read feminists then he knows these concerns are peripheral to the struggle women advance whenever they question the validity of deep-rooted structural norms that extend from the patriarchal legacy.

Like I said, men are also victims of patriarchy.

I think Greer is problematic on many levels, (specifically she has a remarkable allergy to examinations of class privilege), but she is right to point up that the opposite to patriarchy is not matriarchy but fraternity. I think this is an important point.

The regular impulse of 'power-agents' to silence critics when they feel their entitlement is threatened, like we saw in Maher, is very similar to the predictably scornful, cliched reactions the term "politically correct" commonly engenders:

(from a blog) "The phrase "politically correct" can be used in two distinct ways: either with its original literal meaning, or with the mocking sarcasm that's common these days. I'll get to the former in a moment, but I'll begin with the latter. As it's commonly used, "PC" is a deliberately imprecise expression (just try finding or writing a terse, precise definition) because its objective isn't to communicate a substantive idea, but simply to sneer and snivel about the linguistic and cultural burdens of treating all people with the respect and sensitivity with which they wish to be treated. Thus, the Herculean effort required to call me "Asian American" rather than "chink" is seen as a concession to "the PC police", an unsettling infringement on the free-wheeling conversation of, I suppose, "non-chinks". Having to refer to black folks as "African Americans" rather than various historically-prevalent epithets surely strikes some red-blooded blue-balled white-men as a form of cultural oppression---

---Underlying every complaint of "PC" is the absurd notion that members of dominant mainstream society have been victimized by an arbitrarily hypersensitive prohibition against linguistic and cultural constructions that are considered historical manifestations of bigotry. It's no coincidence that "PC"-snivelers are for the most part white men who are essentially saying, "Who the hell do these marginalized groups think they are to tell me how I should or shouldn't portray them?"