FAQ: Some feminist said/did something offensive/stupid/crazy/evil, so isn’t feminism a failure?

A: No. No one person represents the whole feminist movement, or all feminisms. Not this feminist, not any other feminist.

Often both the people asking this sort of question and the responses conflate two separate arguments:

1. Did the person actually commit the alleged offensive/stupid/crazy/evil action?
2. Does committing that offensive/stupid/crazy/evil action reflect badly on feminism?

Trying to turn those two separate debates into one single argument is sloppy.

Argument 1 can rage on indefinitely, contradictions and speculations can multiply on and on. But no matter what conclusions are eventually reached in Argument 1, they are still separate from Argument 2. People can do wrong things while still doing other right things. The right things don’t cancel out the wrong things, and vice versa. They are separate acts, separate aspects of people’s characters, because people are complex.

Some feminists may defend another feminist accused of offensive/stupid/crazy/evil actions because they don’t accept the allegations against them. If the allegations are later proven, that still means nothing about the feminism movement as a whole, or any particular branch of the feminist movement that the accused might have self-identified as.

Feminists don’t have to defend any alleged offensive/stupid/crazy/evil actions of someone in order to defend the positive social movement of feminism.

Or should we conclude that every offensive/stupid/crazy/evil act done by Fred Phelps reflects badly on all one-time civil rights lawyers, or that every offensive/stupid/crazy/evil act of Dick Cheney reflects badly on every father of a lesbian, or that every offensive/stupid/crazy/evil song of James Blunt reflects badly on all one-time officers of the Household Cavalry Life Guards Regiment?