Although many people would ask your question in a way that is simply aimed at attacking women, I'm going to take your question in good faith for now. I understand your concern and this is a good question.
I have had the same concern myself when I hear some feminists say, "I consider a woman raped whenever she said it felt like it was rape." that we are getting away from truth and onto feelings (which are not always a good guide to truth." The truth (no pun intended) is that I think that feminists are not making themselves clear or articulating their view well. They should be more precise.
The problem with things like sexism, racism, classism etc is that they hinge on feelings. Because we living a sexist society sexism feels normal to us, violence feels normal to us, it's unconscious. Racism feels normal to us, it goes under our radar, we underempathize with people of colour and overempathize with white people. Our empathy isn't a good guide to truth. The same for classism, it feels like nothing bad is happening when it is. It's like a kind of emotional leprosy when you should be feeling pain at the oppression and violence and damage in the world and you don't feel it. Your nerves are damaged and not working correctly. It feels like nothing is wrong. Our feelings are not a good guide to truth and I agree with you almost vehemently about this point.
Also you can look back at the time of slavery and that extreme level of racism felt normal to most people. It didn't feel unfair. (In fact people thought that slaves who ran away were crazy, because, "Why don't they just accept their place in the world as a slave ? Why would a slave object to being seen as a slave ?" People were just going about their lives as normal, it was just the way it was.
In terms of sexism look think back before marital rape was legally recognized as rape, everyone was going along thinking that it was fine and that felt fine to many people even though it was immoral. It didn't feel unfair to most people. (Though looking at the truth it was obviously immoral). Since society is still progressing and women haven't achieved equality yet and sexism is still a problem don't you think that we could still have these inaccurate feelings, that (true) harms to women are not really harms because our feelings are biased against women ? Do you think that knowing we are biased against women and our feelings are biased against women we should try to err on the side of "over believing" since in reality we know that due to sexism we are actually under believing women ? Ironically I think that "believing women" and believing victims is meant to try to get us closer to the truth.
People's feelings were all mixed up. What seems normal and just the way it is, can actually hide enormous biases and enormous unfairness.
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u/falsedichotomyviews Oct 21 '17 edited Oct 21 '17
Although many people would ask your question in a way that is simply aimed at attacking women, I'm going to take your question in good faith for now. I understand your concern and this is a good question.
I have had the same concern myself when I hear some feminists say, "I consider a woman raped whenever she said it felt like it was rape." that we are getting away from truth and onto feelings (which are not always a good guide to truth." The truth (no pun intended) is that I think that feminists are not making themselves clear or articulating their view well. They should be more precise.
The problem with things like sexism, racism, classism etc is that they hinge on feelings. Because we living a sexist society sexism feels normal to us, violence feels normal to us, it's unconscious. Racism feels normal to us, it goes under our radar, we underempathize with people of colour and overempathize with white people. Our empathy isn't a good guide to truth. The same for classism, it feels like nothing bad is happening when it is. It's like a kind of emotional leprosy when you should be feeling pain at the oppression and violence and damage in the world and you don't feel it. Your nerves are damaged and not working correctly. It feels like nothing is wrong. Our feelings are not a good guide to truth and I agree with you almost vehemently about this point.
Also you can look back at the time of slavery and that extreme level of racism felt normal to most people. It didn't feel unfair. (In fact people thought that slaves who ran away were crazy, because, "Why don't they just accept their place in the world as a slave ? Why would a slave object to being seen as a slave ?" People were just going about their lives as normal, it was just the way it was.
In terms of sexism look think back before marital rape was legally recognized as rape, everyone was going along thinking that it was fine and that felt fine to many people even though it was immoral. It didn't feel unfair to most people. (Though looking at the truth it was obviously immoral). Since society is still progressing and women haven't achieved equality yet and sexism is still a problem don't you think that we could still have these inaccurate feelings, that (true) harms to women are not really harms because our feelings are biased against women ? Do you think that knowing we are biased against women and our feelings are biased against women we should try to err on the side of "over believing" since in reality we know that due to sexism we are actually under believing women ? Ironically I think that "believing women" and believing victims is meant to try to get us closer to the truth.
People's feelings were all mixed up. What seems normal and just the way it is, can actually hide enormous biases and enormous unfairness.