I’m not criticising the extremists, but the mainstream. The leaders of feminist organisations, their official policies, the concerns of womens’ studies departments and feminists in government and so on.
The disproportionate level of concern for violence against women, for example, is a main feminist position. The rape hysteria while sexual assault of men considered humourous. The issues raised in the OP in general. Some feminists may focus on certain aspects, but the feminist movement as a whole simply acts to make these injustices worse.
And if you want to redefine feminism into a movement not just aimed at the putative interests of women, you might want to rename it too.
Not so fast. Did you even bother to read what you linked? Contrary to your assertion, the most recent study says that the gap is narrower, not gone, and only for women under age 25, where relative lack of experience and our (much) higher rate of college graduation are equalizing factors. But even for women under 25, and even with our higher attainment of undergrad degrees, men are still outearning. And for a woman of my age, men are outearning me by 23 cents on the dollar. For my mother, it’s even worse.
Rape hysteria? When 1 in 4 women in America face sexual violence in their lifetime? (Much of which isn’t classified as rape by the FBI in their statistics because of the antiquated definition that is in use.) When fewer than 6% of rapes end up with a conviction? When judges in developed nations (more than one) have ruled that women weren’t raped based on the tightness of their blue jeans? When the chief “crime prevention” officer of the largest city in Canada said, not two months ago, that the best advice he can give to prevent rape is “don’t dress like a slut?” When an estimated 76% of girls under 18 (and roughly 15% of adult women) have been sexually assaulted in Haiti in just the last 15 months, since the earthquake (opportunity enabling predation)? When rape is seen as a proper “punishment” for gender variance and lesbianism according to a judge in North Carolina? When sexual violence is still being used as a weapon of war and political oppression as I type, in Egypt, Syria, Sudan?
You don’t think that it is reasonable to see this as a crisis which requires strong countermeasures and every possible deterrent? You think it’s overstating the case to say that this is an omnipresent issue for all women, and a daily grave danger for certain women and in certain places? You think it’s disproportionate to be concerned when we’re submerged 24/7 in rape culture?
And don’t think that the use of the word “hysteria” and its coding went unnoticed. Silly women, making mountains out of molehills again, wanting bodily autonomy. Yeah, that was about as slick as sandpaper.
You don’t know what you’re talking about. Insights about the way men are mistreated due to gender expectations originate (in an academic context at least) from the feminists.
Feminism: sex-based narrow tribal thinking plus blank slate ideology. There’s the kernel of some good ideas in there - I would be on board, for example with a movement to make sexual attractiveness less socially important and accomplishments more important for both men and women. But these ideas require consistent application that may harm some groups of women (the ones trading on attractiveness) and benefit some groups of men (unattractive accomplished men). And somehow whenever feminism does politics, it is *always *a net transfer towards women away from men. Tribal interests > ideological coherence.
I don’t consider sexual assault of men humorous and I don’t know anyone who does. In fact it’s a big issue with me, particularly in the context of prisons.
Even granting that statistic, aren’t you presuming that they were actual rapes and not false or mistaken accusations? Assuming that men are automatically guilty just because they are accused is just as bigoted as claiming that women were “just asking for it” because of how they were dressed.
:rolleyes: Please. Men are just as hysterical on the matter as women, and people use the term “hysteria” to refer to both genders. And ranting about how rape and “rape culture” is this overwhelming all pervasive threat is fairly hysterical, and an example of how hostile to men feminism is. We are not some legion of slavering rapists, no matter how much believing that appeals to the egos of many women. You complain about a supposed implication that women are hysterical, and in almost the same breath all but say that men are a collection of monsters.
That was exactly why I quoted those numbers. When all factors are equal, women and men make roughly the exact same wage. Comparing the genders in their 40s, 50s and 60s is a fools game due to the fact that nothing about them is equal.
I admit that I don’t know whether they are more or less successful than the men placed in the same roles and I don’t really know how I’d measure that anyways. I just wanted to point out that some countries have reached a different conclusion, and have allowed women in these roles.
I see a lot of “I think” in the OP. Not a whole lot of consideration of what women think who feel differently. With all due respect, perhaps he should do some reading on the concept of privilege, what it is and what it is not; what equality and freedom are and are not; before blithely concluding that he has none of the former, women have plenty of the latter, and feminism is a bad thing. Maybe that will change his opinions, maybe not. I’ll be satisfied if it as least stops from presuming to lecture an audience that includes women on what we do or do not need in the modern world. How about letting us be the arbiters of that, eh? What a novel concept.
There are biological and physiological differences in men and women. Some of which prohibit or inhibit ones ability to do a function the other can do just fine.
Well theres more to not letting women join the infantry then the strength factor …like relationships that could form within a particular unit, and not to mention that rape is always a problem when dealing with men who would be active during a war…the enemies, that is.
I understand the basic gist of what your saying, and to a degree I..agree. Case and point, a friend of mine just recently became a police officer. He told of us how the instructors took it really easy…like really easy..on the women who were at the police training camp. I have no problem with women joining the police force, but they should be held to strict physical requirements, in the same way that a really fat man should, or a really small man.
You see, the problem, as my friend pointed out, is that if the police instructors did hold the women responsible for the same strength requirements, pretty much all of them would have failed. When these sort of issues are dealt with by policy makers, we can’t expect them to be making these laws that require a complete overhaul of the system to accommodate the 5% that might make it through. Especially when considering the infantry…if its something like the police force, its much simpler to make these sort of accommodations, and so they should be made.
Again though, this is exactly the sort of thing that I had mentioned in the earlier post–in the name of some pie in the sky called equal rights, we want to just try to forget, or deny, the simple biological differences that in many ways separates what is best and proper for men and women. If there was any sort of question about what I’m saying, all we have to do is take a look back on pretty much all history prior to ninety years ago, and find that men were in control the whole time. Men are naturally stronger, naturally more aggressive and naturally more ambitious. That doesn’t make men inherently better then women, or mean that men in any way deserve better treatment. On the contrary, the people who have been conceived as a stronger gender should, in the way of physical things, make an attempt to treat better those weaker then themselves. For whatever reasons, because men have had the upper hand in physical strength, they also have always had the upper hand in the policy making scene.
Now of course today we can change the way things have gone for the past thousands of years due to our greater technology and at least somewhat improved social beliefs. We are able to give women much more social mobility, and rightfully so.
Think about it like this. Pretend that some scientist made a thousand robots, and decided that he would tell them that half of the robots were made for fighting, and the other half isn’t. Then we might have five robots from the other version decide that they want to fight to, and perhaps it just so happens that this five of the non-fighting versions had a glitch while being made, and so are able to fight just as well as the fighting ones. Now it would be absurd to say that, in order that all the robots can be the same, we’re going to allow the other version to fight too…they would all be massacred. Now this isn’t a perfect example that hits all the gender hot topics, but either way, you get the idea.
When I was in college, a woman at Harvard College was even more of an anomaly - in that there was no such thing. They were beginning to merge with Radcliffe, but the Cliffies I met did not think of themselves as Harvard students.
Harvard Law did get around to admitting women in 1952. Women from my high school graduating class were in the first class or two of Princeton and Yale where women were allowed. Alumni were far from unanimous that this was a good idea- and would have been outraged if anyone suggested that black male students should be treated the same way.
Simple physics - as we move to a state where gender and race don’t affect hiring and pay decisions, those of us who did well under the old system will lose out under the new.
Whatever the level of equality is today, it is a hell of a lot better than it was 40 years ago, and much better than it was 60 years ago. Bias toward sexually attractive people operates for both sexes, though for men the attraction if often based on the size of the …wallet. I’ve never seen a request other than to treat all women like people. When I was in high school, IIRC, there was a supposed study claiming that a woman’s intelligence was inversely proportional to breast size. This was actually taken seriously at the time.
Anyone who doesn’t think there was a need for feminism never lived through the time.
Pink Brain, Blue Brain makes a compelling argument that brain differences are not as important as they are cracked up to be. They are there, but their effect on everyday life is greatly magnified by society. Society, after all, has a great ability to keep us from doing all kinds of things that come naturally. If nature ruled, a guy would probably kill his wife’s previous offspring when they remarried. We don’t do that. We built a society that allows us to rise above that.
Personally, I find it kind of…interesting…that are insistence that nature trumps nurture seems to follow exactly the same old lines of oppression found anywhere. Even today you will find people arguing that black people are just naturally inferior and doomed to be ruled by white. We’ve mostly moved past that, but in many ways we haven’t with women. What I mean is, go look at a country with a huge sex power differential, where women are obviously oppressed, like Saudi Arabia. The sexism women complain about here is not something entirely different than there. It’s the same premise, we just get a lighter shade. Somehow I don’t think our society and our society alone has neatly shed the old power dynamics that have kept women oppressed through history, and now just screw them based on entirely natural causes. And it just happens to look like a watered-down version of the old power thing. It doesn’t add up.
The fact remains- if I want to have a full career, I will probably have to choose not to have a family. Men do not have to make that choice.
I call bullshit on the “but women LOVE staying at home with the kids” thing. Staying at home with the kids is nice, but for most women it’s not as nice as a rewarding and challenging career. If women loved it so much, they wouldn’t be complaining so loud about how having a kid ruins their career- they’d be fine with it. But spending all day playing patty cakes with toddlers suck. We’d generally rather be with the adults. Since the work of raising kids has to be done, we’d rather find some way to share that burden. But, because of these power differentials, it often makes most sense for us to stay home. It’s a stupid system that denies people on both sides the chance to reach their full human potential, and it’s time to dismantle it.
As “what [women] need” will also effect men, so it would be inappropriate to deem women the sole arbiters of what is right. Also, very impractical. I mean, further up the thread we were being told that feminism isn’t monolithic and so on, but people who choose to label themselves feminists at least have some core ideas in common, women are a massive and diverse group without any set of ideas or policies in common, so it would be impossible to determine what women think they need.
Have you heard of the glass escalator? There is a social stigma associated with going into certain jobs for men, but is expressed differently. In most female dominated careers, men who entered are pushed up instead of held down. Teachers may be skewed females, but principals are skewed male, for example. Males also tend to move up to the higher grades faster than their female counterparts.
There are currently two main drivers of the wage gap. One is that women have tended to pick feel good careers like teaching and social work over finance and engineering. Second, when comparing men and women doing the same job, the women are more likely to take time away from career for family.
Is this good or bad? These are social issues that are not related to direct discrimination. In the educated, liberal, SF Bay area circles I socialize in, the fathers are still less involved in day care and less likely to take time off work for the kids. I am one of the few fathers I know that took advantage of California’s bonding leave policy. Even those that wanted to felt that they couldn’t because of their jobs. So most of the responsibility, and the associated career setback falls on the mother.
I personally don’t have a problem if the majority of two parent homes choose to have the female parent take the primary parent role while the male takes the primary earning role. But there should be no stigma or penalty if it is the other way around.
…Believe it or not, man doesn’t inherently adhere to the habits of a couple of animal species…and we never needed to build a society that “allowed” us to rise above that.
…You’re basically saying the same thing the stay-at-homers are, only in reverse.
People nowadays hate the status quo, but believe it or not, it didn’t become that way because of some conspiracy men devised in a dark corner. More times than not, girls are gonna like the colors pink and yellow over black and blue. More often then not, their gonna find pleasure in something like a flower, moreso then a boy would. And moreso then not, women are going to be more nurturing to the offspring they conceived. Now before we jump to conclusions, I know full well that there are exceptions to these perceptions. Some men can be way better at nurturing a child then the mother, and he can even enjoy it more. Some little girl might think flowers and lighter colors are stupid, and want to play with toy planes and go to monster truck shows. But pretending that the general perceptions of these things are some plot or societal travesty, is really just absurd.