on the one hand, I hate posts that are like ‘women who aren’t feminists are just selfish people, since they don’t personally benefit from feminism then the suffering of others just doesn’t matter to them’
hate them
because the reason a lot of women don’t identify with feminism is because feminists have royally fucked up intersectionality along an axis they care about (other people have written about this far more eloquently than I could) - because they see the priorities of feminism as being for white women, or abled women, or wealthy women. in other words it’s the exact opposite of ‘just because I don’t personally benefit, I don’t care’. it’s ‘you aren’t addressing the very real suffering that I see in the world and want to change’.
on the other hand, a lot of the women I know who aren’t feminists, it is because we haven’t experienced any of the things that tend to be described as the universal experience of womanhood. I haven’t ever been catcalled. or talked over. or dismissed because of my gender. or told I can’t succeed in a STEM field. or been told not to enforce my boundaries. or been pressured to date a boy I wasn’t interested in. I’ve never felt in danger in the company of men. And that’s a result of class privilege and liberal-upbringing privilege and not-dating-men privilege (seriously! it reduces your rate of intimate partner violence by a lot!) and probably also a consequence of my neurology, since I seem to have totally failed to internalize basically all ‘female socialization’.
I actually became a lot more sympathetic toward feminism after reading and thinking about Generalizing from One Example (Scott Alexander: making people more sympathetic toward feminism since 2009!) because I realized that maybe all the women who said things like “it was hurtful to me when [guy] made [sexist joke]” or “when [guy] made [factual statement about biological gender differences] it made me feel really uncomfortable and excluded from [space]” weren’t just pretending to be offended for attention or something
which is sort of similar to the way feminists use “lived experience,” I think: when someone says they’ve experienced something it’s a good idea to take a stance of epistemic humility since they always know more about their experience than you do, and maybe they’re lying or mistaken but that shouldn’t be your first assumption
except in practice your lived experience often gets ignored if it doesn’t fit with the narrative and you end up with e.g. #yesallwomen