Around my neck of the woods, there’s a huge imbalance in the numbers of male vs. female teachers in favor of the latter, yet male teachers are seen as an important ingredient in the school system ( as male role models for the kids in need of it, as providers of sheer physical presence for disciplinary action etc.). So, men are encouraged in every possible way to become teachers, whereas women turn to teaching without any such prodding.
I’m totally behind the FBI on this one, except for the case of being drugged against one’s will or without one’s knowledge.
Because it’s 100% unadulterated bullshit to hold a woman responsible for drinking and driving, but hold HIM responsible for her drinking and fucking.
We are talking about people so incapacitated that they are unconscious, unable to form words, and unable to coordinate their movements enough to move away.
There is no car analogy, because someone that drunk would not be able to work a pair of keys.
Yeah, it seems women do not have the power of voice here but instead have their insights discounted as hysterical, what a novel concept right. Men really do hold a lot of power in the cultural conversation, because when someone with a XY chromosome says that men have to take responsibility for men’s violence, suddenly it is a lot harder to kill the messenger, and it sounds pretty silly to call him an anti-male or male-basher. Is Joe Torre, manager of the NY Yankees and founder of a program for battered women and supporter of various other domestic violence programs, a self-hating man? Is former NFL quarterback and anti-rape educator Don McPherson, who critiques gender roles and cultural constructions of masculinity & femininity in leading to gendered violence, a self-serving hysterical person only looking out to further his own interests? Is Victor Rivers, the former football player, actor and national spokesperson for the National Network to End Domestic Violence, an anti-male? Are business leaders like Gateway Computer founder Ted Waitt and Homegoods president Jerome Rossi wimpy guys who fund gender violence prevention initiatives under the spell of domineering and manipulative women? One consequence of men’s increasing participation in rape, gender violence prevention efforts is the diminished power of terms like hysterics and male-basher to silence women.
In some parts of the world, the overwhelming majority of women ARE raped. 76% of the little girls in Haiti have been raped in the last 15 months alone because there is no rule of law, or protection, or even concept that there should be someone trying to do something to stop it. 1 in 3 men in South Africa openly admit to having raped someone. 1 in 3.
So you know, if the only thing that’s keeping those statistics from being true where I live is some bizarre notion that failure to curb obvious instincts might actually result in jail time (statistically untrue) or public shaming (unless they’re famous, in which case anything goes) well then I’m pretty damn fine with that.
The issue is consent.
If someone is unconscious and another person has sex with them, then of course that’s rape, because consent is impossible.
If she conscious then her degree of sobriety or lack of it is irrelevant. She may regret saying yes the next day when she’s sober, but if she said yes the night before when she was shitfaced, oh well: that’s why getting shitfaced is not such a great idea. Makes you make bad decisions. Doesn’t make your bad decisions someone else’s fault.
So we, as a society, have managed to make it so that women do not get randomly raped every time they go outside.
Seems like a good argument that society can do a lot to make life better for both sexes.
It’s a good argument that men are not the monsters some people are claiming, since half of society is male. Public shaming wouldn’t work if men are that evil. Making rape illegal wouldn’t work either, since most police are still male; they’d just join in the rape. For that matter, the very governments that pass such laws are male dominated.
And of course, all this argument is doing is underlining my point about how sexism against men is acceptable; demonizing women like this would get a much harsher response, not people nodding along and saying “Yup, women are all evil alright”.
I don’t believe women have always enjoyed equal status, although I don’t really think they’ve ever been oppressed. Disadvantaged, perhaps, may be a better word. But I’m poor and I think in terms of poor people, for whom things like women not being able to vote and being excluded from the professions weren’t really relevant.
As for when things changed, well, that’s been a continuous process. Legal matters, like allowing women access to professions, allowing women the vote and so on were certainly rectified before I was born, quite a number of years before I was born. Cultural issues which may have kept women back while at the same time offering extra privileges and protection, and which provide the privileges with little if any of the restrictions to this day, that’s a more nebulous matter. I mean I could point you to injustices against men form before the first world war, the potential for a man to be imprisoned for breaking off an engagement, for example, or the common practice of “vitriol throwing”, as I could probably point to injustices against women today. To pinpoint the exact point when the aggregate position of women went from equitable to privileged would be impossible. I can just say that it wasn’t so in, say, 1950, and is so today.
That’s more of an issue of cultural integration, something which surpasses gender issues in its scope.
“…credit innate biological tendencies. Research on color preference in monkeys has shown females prefer warmer colors like pink and red — supposedly an infant primate’s pink face brings out its mother’s nurturing instincts. A color preference study of Caucasian and Chinese men and women showed both Caucasian and Chinese women strongly preferred red and pink, while Caucasian men strongly preferred blue and green.”
Well…the first thing that comes to my mind to to thank you for doing some research for my side of the debate.
The evidence given in that article only ever states that certain magazines of the 19th century suggested certain colors for different baby genders. That would be like people one hundred years from now looking through a magazine of Martha Stewart and citing it as evidence of what the social tendencies of Americans were when they ate and put up drapes in the early 21st century.
The most important gist of what I had been saying, is the highlighting of the biological reality that females are more attracted to softer colors…like pink.
Really? Maybe to prove that sexual intercourse took place, but to prove lack of consent? He said, she said cases are the norm with rape, and that won’t convince anyone beyond a reasonable doubt, or shouldn’t.
[QUOTE=wikipedia]
In her work, “The Legacy of the Prompt Complaint Requirement, Corroboration Requirement, and Cautionary Instructions on Campus Sexual Assault”, Michelle J. Anderson of the Villanova University School of Law states: “As a scientific matter, the frequency of false rape complaints to police or other legal authorities remains unknown.”.[10] The FBI’s 1996 Uniform Crime Report states that 8% of reports of forcible rape were determined to be unfounded upon investigation,[11] but that percentage does not include cases where an accuser fails or refuses to cooperate in an investigation or drops the charges. A British study using a similar methodology that does not include the accusers who drop out of the justice process found a false reporting rate of 8% as well.[12]
[/QUOTE]
I disagree. The questioning may be traumatic for a rape victim, but not a malicious accuser. A forensic exam can’t be compelled. And, even if you can’t get someone convicted and imprisoned, you can have a man arrested in front of his co-workers, maybe a teacher in front of his students, have him dragged off, interrogated, his name permanently smeared, his entire life could easily be ruined without her name even being in the paper. And, in this country, she could collect a big cheque from the government too. None of that requires a conviction.
They’re outrageous, but they’re individuals. I’d certainly like to see them all dealt with, dismissed for misconduct as so forth, but it doesn’t show a rape culture. I could show just as many Nifong-alikes who have purposely pushed false allegations to have innocent men punished.
Well, heart disease is the leading cause of death in women. Also, annual rapes in America c.90,000, annual heart disease deaths >300,000.
Maybe I didn’t find the most restrictive statistics.
I found a documentary which may interest people, from Sweden.
I’m not going to accept any “studies” that then provide just-so-story explanations. You might as well argue that female monkeys prefer red because when Zeus seduced Leda a monkey wandered by, saw Leda blushing, and liked it. What you have provided is equally plausible mythology, which is about on par with the dreck so many otherwise skeptical people will swallow if you manage to end it with “because that’s what cavemen did.”
I imagine adult color preferences are informed by the sheer absoluteness of gendered color coding pervasive in our society. Can you picture a man saying he prefers pink without laughing? More importantly, do you think it would that hard to create a society where women prefer blues and men prefer pink? If the colors at the toy stores were switched around, do you think our “innate biological preference” would rule the day? I’d say almost certainly not. It’d be trivial (assuming no outside influence) to raise a boy who loved pink.
After all, pink comes from red which is an agressive color associated with blood. Blue comes from nice calm stuff like the sky and the sea. If boys were given blue stuff and girls were given pink stuff, this is no doubt the “evolutionary” explanation people would come up with.
…Then maybe you shouldn’t have quoted the article in the first place.
Again, color association isn’t some labyrinth like conspiracy to trick girls into thinking they like pink and boys into thinking they like blue. Lets just say that, for the most part, your completely right, and color specific-ness was in fact pressed upon younger generations by older generations. That would mean at some point all the older men realized they liked blue and so pressed it on the boys, and women pressed pink on the girls. Though you will see we still have the same thing I have been asserting, only it happens in later stages of life. Even if you want to say it was just the men who did it, then we still have at least one gender realizing that they like a specific color over another, of which is due to the basic biological differences between the two sexes.
Say what?
Or at some point that toy marketers found they could make more profits by encouraging multi-child families to buy new sets of pink and blue baby stuff for their differently gendered kids. You can’t hand down the princess tricycle to your new baby boy.Ever notice that toy stores are the most gendered places around?
Anyway, the most immediate explanation for our gender roles is not cavemen, but rather farmers. A farmer needs a certain sized plot to survive, and if a plot gets divided beyond that point it ends up being to small to be worth anything to anyone. You’ll starve on a quarter acre as surely as you’ll starve on no land. So inheritance of land became extremely important, and with that comes with obsession with making sure your offspring are really your own. This brings along a whole host of institutions (female seclusion, virginity obsessions, child marriage, FGM, footbinding, etc.) designed to control female sexuality to create a sure line of succession. As people became wealthier, they were able to enforce this more effectively. Keeping women veiled and shut out is an affectation of those who can afford to keep their women out of the fields.
Of course to justify this (just like people justified slavery, the holocaust, homophobia and any number of evils) people trotted out “biological” explanations. Before science was in vogue, people went with religious explanations.
Approximately three generations or so ago, farming stopped being a major force in the west. Like most major cultural changes, it took a generation or two to catch up (look at immigrants- the first and second generation may hold on to the language- the third rarely does.) Almost immediately, gender roles began to change to reflect the new material reality. If our gender roles are so ingrained, why did they change so damn quickly once the pill was introduced? Go to any college campus. Things have changed.
Our (now largely outdated) gender roles seem universal because farming has made up the vast majority of recorded history, and most human societies. Among non-farming people, including pastoralists and hunter-gatherers, as well as farmers on unusual land, you find a much wider variety of practices. Some practice gender roles we would recognize. Other practice polyandry (which is actually a way to keep intact land holdings in a family by having a woman marry a set of brothers.) Some allow women to choose their mates in male beautify contests. Other prefer women who have proven their fertility by bearing children.
For just about every human practice, you can find a society who practices the opposite. THe difference is not “human nature,” but rather the environment.
This does not mean that nature counts for nothing. There are basic human impulses, and some real difference between sexes. But these are foundations that are molded and filtered in complex ways that often do not trace a straight line from one end to another. Even less likely than a straight line is a cute explanation. Do you fall for every cute “it makes sense” pop word origin story? Then why do you accept so many human behavior stories on scant evidence?
See, the thing is, no one is claiming that. No one has used this overheated rhetoric or the word “monsters” or attempted to suggest that all men are rapists except you. You keep saying that we’re demonizing men by being adamantly anti-rape and refusing to downplay the facts and figures surrounding it, when in fact the only thing being demonized is rape and the people who commit it.
I wouldn’t even call rapists “monsters” because that insulates us all from the very flawed, damaged humanity from which the impulse to rape is borne, and suggests that rape, a all too common occurrence, is the sole province of people well outside the norm of every day life, while the evidence says exactly the opposite.
I also don’t demonize rape culture, because I, like everyone else in the western world, am a part of it. I abhor it, and try to change it. The first step toward changing it is to point it out, shine a light on it, and ask why we’re supporting its elements.
You can get on board with that, or you can continue to whine about how oppressed* you* are because other men rape.
It’s very relevant. If someone is incapable of weighing the merits and consequences of their actions, then they’re not giving informed, affirmative, free consent.
We recognize that intoxication removes a person’s ability to legally agree to a contract, because it impairs cognitive function. We recognize that intoxication removes a person’s ability to safely, adequately and accurately perform job functions, because of impairments to both cognition and motor function.
We know that there is a point in intoxication where people cannot safely drive a car, parent a child or cook a meal with knives and fire, and we know that point occurs well before people realize that they’re there, and well before people are even close to losing consciousness.
It’s beyond bizarre to me that people would posit that there’s a point of intoxication where we recognize that someone is too impaired to consent to getting a tattoo – because it carries lifelong ramifications – but not one at which someone is too impaired to consent to sex, which also can have lifelong ramifications (some of which are identical to those of tattoos).
A Said/B Said circumstances arise in other sorts of crime, and no one suggests that those circumstances can’t be judged on the merits of each side’s story. Perhaps we should never prosecute in a case of “she stole that from me/no he gave it as a gift” ever again?
And that justifies, what, exactly?
Individuals whose beliefs are a product of the culture in which they live and operate. They did not come to these conclusions in a vacuum, but as a product of living in a world that says many of the things said in this very thread, that false rape claims are common, that despite statutes saying just the opposite the conduct of the complainant is relevant to whether their victimization is real, that women who are insufficiently virtuous just cannot be raped. They are individuals whose beliefs are widespread enough that they’re insulated from repercussions for the things that they’ve said and injustices flowing from those beliefs. And they are widespread, geographically, culturally and timewise, not isolated incidents.
Go for it. You asked for examples, I gave them, now it’s your turn to do likewise. Show as many Nifong-alikes. I want a list. At least six.
I didn’t say heart disease, I said heart attacks. Pay attention, please.
If the genders are now treated equally, why hasn’t the Equal Rights Amendment passed? It isn’t about promoting women to a superior position. It is about equal rights for both genders. That is what feminists, both male and female, have tried to pass.
I think some of you forget that a lot of feminists are men. And a lot of the women who are feminists are also concerned about discrimination against men – or any group that is singled out and treated unfairly. We are not just one issue people.
I’ve been a feminist for forty years, but I did not support Hillary Clinton in the 2008 campaign.
Does the Equal Rights Amendment include any provisions that aren’t covered by the dozens of other equality statutes out there? It’s pointless in 2011.
:rolleyes: My, we can’t even go more than a page before the blatant historical revisionism sets in.
The vast majority of one night stands occur under the influence of alcohol. Are you suggesting these are all rapes? Because that’s what it sounds like.
Actually, never mind, don’t wanna hijack this thread & make it into another rape one. .