I've never rasied same-aged kids. To find my son and daughter playing together at any point in their childhood was a rare thing.
I mentioned the toys because that was the typical example fems would drag out to support their arguiments that gender roles were assigned by a patriarchal society. Give boys tea sets to play with, they said, and boys will be less violent, more pliable, more...like girls. Give girls toy guns, and they will learn to be more competitive, more aggressive, more capable of taking on patriarchal society.
Regarding male and female differences, they believed it was limited to the physical. The plumbing is a little different, they would argue, but internally all is the same. It was societal conditioning, they said, that made us falsely believe there were any real differences between men and women.
And you don't think those or similar claims had to be made, right or wrong, in order to shake up the old accepted "truths" and make both men and women look at gender roles and stereotyping in a new light? After all, we are where we are for a reason. Maybe even if the premise was somewhat flawed it made people think outside the usual box...and that's what was really needed?
Now, that surprises me.
No, I don't. It's the old "the end justifies the means" thing. It says to hell with truth, I want change. It is intellectually dishonest on it's face and it serves no worthwhile purpose. It leads only to more confusion and it has finally led to a new definition of the term feminist that is essentially meaningless, as many of the posts on this thread attest. If you think women should not be treated like shit, you're a feminist.
And if the movement fems knew what they were saying was bullshit even as they were saying it then they were not only stupid, they were liars.
I don't see it that way at all. I see it as an experiment, some of which seems to have caught on and worked and some was proven wrong. Yes, the ideas were radical. But without the experiment, would we have had the results we do? I think not, personally.
What's dishonest about it?
And there's quite a bit more to feminism even today than thinking a woman shouldn't be treated like shit. There are people who treat servants and the hired help very well, thank you. But treating an inferior well isn't the same as equality.