Hide table of contents

Alt. title: "If EA isn't feminist, let me out of it"

TW / CW: discussion of sexual violence, assault

Written in a state of: Hurry. Anger. A high degree of expertise. 

This post does not include a sufficient discussion of the uniqueness of gender identity, and tends to oversimplify what it means to be a woman. I also would like to see an EA community-based discussion about supporting and caring for nonbinary people, as well as one that more carefully centers trans experiences. Even more crucially, it terrifies me to think about the poor quality of discussion that might result from addressing intersectionality

I am so, so tired. I haven't even been here that long and I am so, so tired. I can't imagine how other people feel. 

I would be extremely surprised to meet a woman who does not go through her life fearing violence from men, or that violence will be perpetrated against them because of some aspect of their gender, at least some of the time.

This should not cause controversy. This should not even remotely surprise you. This should not elicit any thought that is in any way related to "but what about-".  I'm not saying it does; if it doesn't, that would be great. We (everyone) are allowed to say things that aren't surprising. And I shouldn't have to clarify that. 

But apparently, it is surprising to some people. Therein lies the problem. 

Usually, I try to make men feel better by saying things like "oh, well I know you're not like that," or "I'm sure that's not what you meant," or "I'm sure he just forgot," or by making jokes. I'm not doing that today. I don't know that you're not like that. I actually do know what you mean, because you said it. Because you forgot half the world's population, half your family and friends and coworkers and classmates (roughly, potentially) exist in a state of constant fear. 

 

This attitude absolutely disgusts me. 

If you're not aware of the backlash against feminism by now, you have been intentionally ignoring it. If you are intentionally ignoring the fight for gender liberation, in the context of my life you are a malicious actor, and I'm tired of pretending you're not. 

Besides that, it's not about this one tweet. It's about seeing gender liberation as somehow anything other than completely integral. I don't understand it, and I don't want to. 

Believe me, I would love to be able to trust men and assume that 99.9% of them/you actually wish me no harm and move through the world relatively unencumbered by the power differential that characterizes society, but I can't. Because I'm confident someone is going to openly relate this problem to the animal rights movement and not see a problem with that. 

This is very clearly a high-pitched wail given words. You have to understand. One of you has to understand. One more person has to understand. I want to scream. I've wanted to scream for years, and I haven't, and this is as close as I've ever gotten. 

I want to cry. I want to cry every time I see a story about a missing woman, or a missing girl. I want to cry every time I hear about women impregnated with sperm from their OB/GYN and not their partner or chosen donor. I want to cry every time someone sends me a news article that a woman in the middle of a C-section has been raped by her anesthesiologist. 

I want to cry every day. 

This discussion needs to be in the open. And you need to have it right now. 

-12

0
0

Reactions

0
0

More posts like this

Comments9


Sorted by Click to highlight new comments since:

I'm confused. What are you trying to say here? You linked a proposal to prioritize violence against women and girls as an EA cause area (which I assume you don't object to?) and a tweet by some person unknown to me saying that critics of EA hold it to a standard they don't apply to feminism (which probably depends a lot on what kind of critics, and on their political background in particular). What do you expect the readers to learn from this or do about it?

The link to the post on VAWG was my mistake - I intended to link to the comments specifically, which got noticeably heated after someone followed up what I thought was an incredibly well-researched and persuasive post with "but what about men's rights." What I thought were pretty charitable responses explaining how that's not actually relevant to the discussion got downvoted beyond belief. In my (limited, yet colorful) experience, EA seems to have a recurring problem allowing gender issues to be prioritized.

Thanks for this clarification - I had the same response to the comments on that post. 

I'm very sympathetic to your feelings, but I also don't understand what you're asking for from your post.

Are all posts asking for something explicitly? (A real question.) To the extent that they are, I think the takeaway is a greater commitment to understanding gender-based violence, including the everyday, as a goal with its own end. I was hoping someone could really help me figure out what exactly isn't clicking here, because clearly there is a recurring problem. 

It seemed like you were asking for something, some urgent action, because you ended your post by saying, "This discussion needs to be in the open. And you need to have it right now."

It made me feel like you were in distress and asking for help, or maybe demanding change, but I couldn't really tell what it was you needed. I guess from your comment you don't know either.

I have some thoughts that I think are better to share privately - DMing you.

Lots of strong downvotes for not a lot of explanation. 

[comment deleted]1
0
0
Curated and popular this week
 ·  · 38m read
 · 
In recent months, the CEOs of leading AI companies have grown increasingly confident about rapid progress: * OpenAI's Sam Altman: Shifted from saying in November "the rate of progress continues" to declaring in January "we are now confident we know how to build AGI" * Anthropic's Dario Amodei: Stated in January "I'm more confident than I've ever been that we're close to powerful capabilities... in the next 2-3 years" * Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis: Changed from "as soon as 10 years" in autumn to "probably three to five years away" by January. What explains the shift? Is it just hype? Or could we really have Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)[1] by 2028? In this article, I look at what's driven recent progress, estimate how far those drivers can continue, and explain why they're likely to continue for at least four more years. In particular, while in 2024 progress in LLM chatbots seemed to slow, a new approach started to work: teaching the models to reason using reinforcement learning. In just a year, this let them surpass human PhDs at answering difficult scientific reasoning questions, and achieve expert-level performance on one-hour coding tasks. We don't know how capable AGI will become, but extrapolating the recent rate of progress suggests that, by 2028, we could reach AI models with beyond-human reasoning abilities, expert-level knowledge in every domain, and that can autonomously complete multi-week projects, and progress would likely continue from there.  On this set of software engineering & computer use tasks, in 2020 AI was only able to do tasks that would typically take a human expert a couple of seconds. By 2024, that had risen to almost an hour. If the trend continues, by 2028 it'll reach several weeks.  No longer mere chatbots, these 'agent' models might soon satisfy many people's definitions of AGI — roughly, AI systems that match human performance at most knowledge work (see definition in footnote). This means that, while the compa
 ·  · 4m read
 · 
SUMMARY:  ALLFED is launching an emergency appeal on the EA Forum due to a serious funding shortfall. Without new support, ALLFED will be forced to cut half our budget in the coming months, drastically reducing our capacity to help build global food system resilience for catastrophic scenarios like nuclear winter, a severe pandemic, or infrastructure breakdown. ALLFED is seeking $800,000 over the course of 2025 to sustain its team, continue policy-relevant research, and move forward with pilot projects that could save lives in a catastrophe. As funding priorities shift toward AI safety, we believe resilient food solutions remain a highly cost-effective way to protect the future. If you’re able to support or share this appeal, please visit allfed.info/donate. Donate to ALLFED FULL ARTICLE: I (David Denkenberger) am writing alongside two of my team-mates, as ALLFED’s co-founder, to ask for your support. This is the first time in Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disaster’s (ALLFED’s) 8 year existence that we have reached out on the EA Forum with a direct funding appeal outside of Marginal Funding Week/our annual updates. I am doing so because ALLFED’s funding situation is serious, and because so much of ALLFED’s progress to date has been made possible through the support, feedback, and collaboration of the EA community.  Read our funding appeal At ALLFED, we are deeply grateful to all our supporters, including the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which has provided the majority of our funding for years. At the end of 2024, we learned we would be receiving far less support than expected due to a shift in SFF’s strategic priorities toward AI safety. Without additional funding, ALLFED will need to shrink. I believe the marginal cost effectiveness for improving the future and saving lives of resilience is competitive with AI Safety, even if timelines are short, because of potential AI-induced catastrophes. That is why we are asking people to donate to this emergency appeal
Recent opportunities in Building effective altruism
49
Ivan Burduk
· · 2m read