This is a topic we had in debate in high school one time: The pursuit of feminst ideals is detrimental to the achievement of gender equality. What do you think of this topic?
define "feminist ideals" and "gender equality" what a person means by those two things makes all the difference in the world.
Feminist ideals promote gender equality. Extreme feminist ideals do not. Feminism, in my opinion, is necessary if women ever want to be socially equal to men (workplace, societal beliefs, norms, etc.), but that's just me. I'm a women's studies minor, so I got three more years of studying this kind of stuff. I'm taking a course next semester - Gender in Society. I'll probably post something that we discuss in class. Particularly because my teacher is wonderful.
What my sexist, racist, elderly neighbor thinks of as "feminist ideals" is totally different than what I think of as "feminist ideals". Same goes for "gender equality". These concepts have changed radically just since the 70's and 80's. Used to be, "gender equality" meant women trying to be like men, doing things men are good at, and totally shunning anything feminine. It still means that to some women, and that's okay, for them, but not for me it isn't. And for a while, in the 80's, when I was a teen, I did think that feminism meant being more like a man. I did think that anything feminine or typically associated with women was a bad thing, undesirable, somehow second rate. But see, that was just a result of living in a male-dominated world, brought up in government run schools and attending church every sunday. Those things taught me that female equals darkness equals bad equals evil. And in that case, yes, feminist ideals did totally feed into our misogynistic society. Today's feminists realize that women and men are inherently different, and what we mean by the terms feminism and gender equality are totally different than what we meant by it twenty or thirty years ago. But there is still much confusion on what exactly "feminism" is anymore. This is why I did not take womens studies in college, the prof that taught those classes was butch, and didn't see things from my perspective. I knew I'd simply disagree with her and end up making poor grades. If we can first agree upon what "feminism" means, then we can debate your question. But there can be no meaningful debate where there is no basic understanding of the original premise.
I believe one of the first modern femists put it properly, (I don't remember if it was Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Susan B Anthony) when she said, "Feminism is the radical notion that womyn are human beings." That is what it means to me.
