Mike Sturm
1 min readMar 10, 2016

I think you’re missing the mark a bit here in a few key ways:

  1. Even if your argument that some feminists are paternalistic is true, that doesn’t mean the label of feminist doesn’t apply to you. Everything else you said seems to mesh with feminist principles.
  2. Your point that we shouldn’t be focusing only on women’s issues and/or only on sexism in stock photography falls flat. There are huge problems in the world, like the plight of the Syrian refugees, for instance. But that doesn’t mean that no one should fight on behalf of blacks being unjustly treated by the police, or women being unfairly treated in the workplace.
  3. You make a point about women in the first world not knowing what happiness or oppression is for women in the third world. I wish you had more to say on that, because I’m unsure where you were trying to go with that. Clearly, oppression is a simple concept: it involves being actively kept from being able to do simple activities that the rest of a society enjoys. What society one is in does not matter, because the notion of oppression is relative to each society in this case. Can everyone else in your society own property, but you are systematically kept from doing so? That’s oppression. And so on.

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Mike Sturm

Creator: https://TheTodaySystem.com — A simpler personal productivity system. Writing about productivity, self-improvement, business, and life.