Mark Ruffalo: My response to the "I am not a feminist" internet phenomenon

Sidenote: I'm not sure why The View was cited

Because it was on reddit recently and seems to be held up as though it's a shining example of empowered women promoting feminism.

Just the entire setup of the show, and the arguing, is painful and unhelpful

I'm glad to hear a voice of reason, thank you, I agree.

Edit: Hey, is this what you mean? (I don't think it is, because it concerns a time when it was appropriate for a man to defend himself in public. I couldn't find the clip you mentioned.)

This appears to be a different clip, however the clip I'm thinking of is also Whoopi Goldberg also saying basically the same thing, but without the context of the video of the man defending himself. Here's the one I was referencing:

http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/30eggm/whoopi_goldberg_if_you_hit_a_man_dont_be/

Whoopi's message is basically "women need to stop hitting men", and that's great, but it's of course inherently sexist. A better message would be "people need to stop hitting people", with a small corollary, "if you hit somebody, don't be surprised when they hit back", regardless of what gender either person happens to be.

The larger issue I have is that the other women's responses to Whoopi are literally on the level of "no way, a man should never hit a woman, not even in self defense, because women are too weak to ever hurt a man, and that's why it's ok to slap men around" which is a completely absurd and shamefully sexist thing for anybody to say.

men also hit other men in movies and TV at absurd times or excessively, so that's also an issue

Yes, I often find myself watching violent movies and thinking "hmm, this scene would be very different if any one of these violent men was a woman." and trying to imagine different combinations of gender-swapped scenarios. I don't really have an answer though, I don't know how to break this socially-accepted violence against men.

BTW, I watched that feminism panel you linked from your first message (I hadn't at the time of my original response). That was really interesting, thank you. I see what you mean about the one anarchist calling herself a woman first, that did strike me as a sexist worldview as well. Other than that though, I agreed with just about everything that was said and found it all very uncontroversial. I also purchased Roxane Gay's book, Bad Femenist, but haven't had a chance to read it yet. She presented herself as a very calm and reasonable person on the panel so I'm hoping her book is equally accessible to me.

One thing that struck me as a bit strange (and again this was mostly from the anarchist, but also a little bit from Anita) was that she wasn't interested in having equality "in the patriarchy" and how we needed to "shatter the system" and "create new systems". I mean, I'm not exactly a huge fan of the system either (too much war and corruption for my tastes), but what really struck me was that none of those women actually put forth any ideas of what a better system could be. Do they just want to subjugate men in a matriarchy? Or is there some middle ground where we can actually have equality in some kind of non-patriarchal society? It's not clear to me what the differences between "equality within the patriarchy" and "equality under some other system" are. It seems to me that these are actually two orthogonal issues that can be pursued independently. Eg, on the one hand we can work to eliminate the inequalities that exist in the current system, but on the other hand we can also work to replace the current system with something else. But until I hear a coherent proposal for an alternate system, there isn't anything to replace the current system with.

/r/TwoXChromosomes Thread Parent Link - markruffalo.tumblr.com