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Originally Posted by knox
its kind of the same thing tho, being a humanist.
i mean you cannot deny there are specific relevant groups of people you have to defend in order to promote human rights. Women, poor, immigrants, homosexuals, mentally ill etc.
none of the specific movements to defend their rights is irrelevant or implies that it is more important than the other.
but if you don't focus on their needs, the whole humanism thing is just an utopic ideal, it would be even harder to make any progress come true, specially if you realize what we need the most is the creation of specific laws.
ultimately, feminism is not saying that women rights are more important than anybody else's rights, but it is pretty obvious that there won't be any equality or respect for human rights if half of humanity is still being somehow opressed.
if you tackle women rights, you're directly interfering with poverty, education and the like.
for example, everybody knows women make less money on average, and a lot of women in this world are single mothers, so dealing with that would be dealing with poverty as a whole.
creating mechanisms to defend these groups is not favoritism, any improvement benefits all.
getting equality for women is crucial for any idea of humanism.
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exactly. the thing is that human rights discourse often ignores women's rights. culture is transmitted on women's bodies. cultural relativism is total crap when you are talking about fgm, honor killings and even more minor stuff like women stripping for rap videos. saying that something is just "the way of the culture" is a total cop out. then again, saying anything gets tricky because it is also really not cool to go in and try to colonize different cultures to purier/whiter/more christian ways. and that's what is usually comes come to.
so yeah, it's complicated shit. saying that you are just a feminist or just a humanist is not enough. the two concepts work together. there are some good books written on the topic. the tittles are currently escaping me. sorry!