Not really. She was as viable a candidate as anyone and if she had not voted for the invasion of Iraq, she would have won. You think Obama beat her because he was a man?
A woman get as many votes as a man, all power in our democracy derives from that.
I don’t know what your life experience has been but my neices are growing up inn a world where they are more likely to attend and graduate college, where they are more likely to receive an advanced degree, where they are more likely to be employed, where they are more likely to win an election for which they are the nominee of one of the major parties.
Women live longer, are happier and healthier than men.
Economically speaking. much of the disparity between men and women have to do with single motherhood and almost all the rest is due to the low wages that have historically been paid to professions with high female participation but unless you can prove that there is currently a higher hurdle for women to become doctors (more women in med school than men), lawyers (more women than men in law school), or other high income professions, the economic argument loses much of its persuasiveness. With taht said, if you want higher pay for teachers, I’ll sign your petition.
Its more like being against taking antibiotics when you no longer have an infection.
Wait, so there are courses geared towards women that teach women how to understand men and all WE get are beer commercials? I sense a conspiracy.
I’m not sure Women’s Studies courses are meant to be all about men.
I did stumble on the below, which is no doubt related to the higher rate of unemployment amongst men:
Is not a privilege for women. Many bars (and certainly any bar that advertises this) make their money by being a place for people to meet potential lovers. A heterosexual bar can quickly lose its male clientele if the male to female ratio is too skewed.
I think this falls under a truism that I learned recently: “if you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold”
That only represents a small percentage of power, even in a fairly pure democracy. Power also comes from money. Power comes from being high enough in a company’s organization chart to influence corporate policy. Power comes from being famous. Power comes from being active in a politics, and being active in the running of organizations such as churches or activist organizations.
And those are just the formal acknowledged forms of power.
And they live in a world where there are still people, even women, who would like to take that all away, and aren’t laughed at. [1] [2]
Married men are happier and live longer than single men, whereas married women are unhappier and don’t live as long as single women.
It’s also worth noting that the the gap between men’s and women’s life expectancy has been shortened as women have picked up bad habits that were seen as un-ladylike.
I doubt there is one reason for the disparity - it reflects a lot of different trends.
I have a couple of real problems with this statistic, and I’d like to see some breakdowns on the data.
My biggest problem with this statistic is that it only valuates a person’s and/or job’s worth in terms of flat dollars and cents. Granted, it’s the easiest metric to obtain, but there are any number of other factors that go into people’s actual valuation of a job. And what of these might be treated differently by men and women?
For instance, is a woman more likely to take a lower paying job at a company with more flex time, or better health care benefits? Every management job I’ve ever seen had an implicit requirement of working at least 50-60 hours a week bare minimum - are men more likely to be willing to put in the extra time? The pay for experienced salaried jobs are usually negotiated - do women have the skills to do this negotiation? Are they as likely as men to value themselves?
In a job-to-job comparison, if the woman makes less money, but the man is working much longer hours, who really did make the better deal?
The other problem I have with this statistic is that it is often used stand-alone. “There’s still a disparity, so we are still being oppressed” instead of “What factors are playing into this disparity, and what can we do to change them” ERA can only get women 80% of the way to equality. That is how feminism benefits both men and women - by making sure that the other 20% is addressed.
Please list some privileges that women enjoy?
blindboyard:
So the gist of your argument is that feminism is a movement calling for female supremacy and in that way is comparable to Ku Klux Klan or national socialism. I think this belief is mistake and is more the result of your own definition of feminism as priviledged and antagonistic to your own views.
I hope you would have replied more openly to my text, instead of sniping at separate parts of it, because now I’m at a loss whether this means that you agree with the things you didn’t comment on directly or not. I’ll answer as I can.
As I wrote there, your position seems depedent on your view of feminism as some sort of unified political movement, where people describing themselves as feminists subscribe automatically to certain radical and malevolent beliefs, thus creating a malevolent feminism for you to oppose. But you saying so does not make it so. I have said many times that feminism as such does not deserve its fair share of criticism, but it is quite arrogant of you to just decide what people can think. The common definition for feminism is: the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men. At least in dictionary.com. You might notice that this definition differs from your own. That is the idea that people describing themselves as feminists actually subscribe to. There is no roster or anything that you need to have to be a feminist, it is a loose intellectual as well as political movement. Because I see it as such, it is easy for me to see that I can disagree with some feminists as I would disagree with a anyone else and still remain a feminist. For example, if an egalitarian would try to argue that the best way for everyone to be equal is to take power away from everyone instead of giving people power, I would be able to disagree with them and still remain an egalitarian since I agree with the basic idea of equality. This however is not how it would go with your Ku Klux Klan example, since the whole idea is rotten from the conception.
Some women are priviledged, some are not, some feminists are misandrists and the majority is not. I mentioned womanism, which is a brand of feminism focusing entirely on not white people. And while many feminist objectives are now reached, why should people move away from feminism? The rights have to be safeguarded right? So why not by the people who have an interest in keeping them? Who else would care? Egalitarism isn’t really a political movement you know. And this would be true even if women as a group were equal in any way, which is another discussion.
In your opening post you contrasted the achievements of the women’s movement to the unfortunate state of affairs of men. Domestic abuse against men is not taken seriously or men tend to lose in family disputes and male rape, for example in prisons is ignored and even joked about. These are real problems which should be taken care of. But how is ti, that if the situation is managed better for women actually translate into systematic effort to make things worse for men? How do these wrog sentiments of men needing help or manly vulnerability actually come from feminism? The kind of prejudices which cause these things are hardly caused by feminism. Did not the kids go to the mother almost by default before? Were not men hobos before feminism’s success? Did not men get raped in prisons without anyone caring before feminism’s success? Its not a zero-sum game, men have been screwed before too and the success of one political movement is not necessarily bad for others, which the historical links between feminism, socialism and gay-rights show.
If you’re interested in improving these issues, it might be from a purely pragmatic and political point of view better to get the moderate feminism crowd on your side, as they do have some power nowadays, instead of wasing time with these sort of strawman ideological battles.
And by the way on can say feminism has generated a study or a way of thinking, if the scholar is clearly influenced by the movement and describes one self as such, without it having to be anything more concrete or monolithic for you to dislike.
I agree with you that this is how it should be.
What I don’t agree with is that rape is handled exactly the same way as other crimes in terms of proving that a crime was committed.
First, it’s the prosecutor, not the accusor who has to prove that a crime was committed.
Rape is treated differently because any action by the victim can be and has been used to argue that consent was implicitly given, even when all other evidence says otherwise. Can you imagine a defence attorney for a car thief stating that “The car owner must have wanted to give away his car because he left the keys in it”? Or a judge letting a mugger off because “the victim shouldn’t have been walking down that street at night”? How about someone who attempted murder being let off because “the victim should have known better to go to a virtual stranger’s house”? Yet, in effect, these excuses have shown up in court cases and have not been treated with the sort of disgust that such statements would engender in any other court case.
The stigma of being accused of any major crime is enough to damage someone’s reputation, but how many crimes are there where the victim’s reputation is damaged?
So your position is that, yes, women do have it better in pretty much every measurable way, but they still need a massive movement driving for greater privileges just in case one day it’s different.
A statement which contains within it the assumption that the difference between the positions of men and women a) benefits men more than women, and b) is being reduced by feminism.
The prosecutor has a duty to establish that there is a case to answer before proceeding to trial, therefore the accuser must convince the prosecutor that a crime has been committed and the police must accumulate enough evidence for a reasonable chance of conviction.
People rarely want their cars taken off by total strangers, so leaving keys in it would be presumed to be a mistake. On the other hand people allowing their genitalia to be ridden around by total strangers is a common occurence.
I could see a judge saying an accuser was unwise in their conduct, but I can’t see any rapist being let off because the alleged victim was walking down the wrong street, and hence deserved it.
I think I did that in the OP.
Just based on feminist actions.
Surely fair is exactly that share of criticism which it does deserve?
Anyway, I don’t decide what they think. There is a feminist movement, with prominent leaders and defining works and a set of goals and a sexist name. If people choose to affiliate themselves with this then they have announced what they think.
Ignoring for a minute the idiocy of political argument by dictionary, this is simply contrary to the facts. Yes, where women allegedly have inferior rights feminists will be calling for more rights for women, as the definition there says, but that will also be the case when women don’t have inferior rights. And of course most feminists won’t openly state that their movement is a female supremacist movement, but if it continues with massive campaigns about violence against women while the far more common violence against men gets no similar treatment, and complains about inequalities in the workplace against women when they mostly effect men and so forth, what does that tell you?
So is the Tea Party, but even that bunch don’t claim you can’t possibly disapprove of the Tea Party because it’s such a diverse movement with no central platform or single membership roll.
But an egalitarian would look at a society in which men get the short end of the stick and would not say “I want to work for women”. A Klanman looks at a society where black get the short end of the stick and says “I want to work for whites”.
Some women are more privileged than others, are privileged on other grounds. The rich are privileged, white people have privileges, women have privileges. A rich white man is more privileged, on aggregate, then a poor black woman. But, all else being equal, women have privileges over men as a class.
That’s not what feminism does, though. IT doesn’t spend it’s time fighting the non-existent push to remove voting rights from women, it spends it’s time on lobbying against joint custody arrangements, fomenting hysteria over rape and lobbying for reduced standards of evidence in rape cases, lobbying for all funding to domestic violence shelters to remain in feminist hands and against any requirement to shelter men in publicly funded shelters and so on.
Once upon a time, no. Of course that was a triumph of first wave feminism.
The greater funding and care provided to women now, as a result of feminist pressure and from which men are excluded, results in such a massive preponderance of male “hobos”.
Debatable.
You seem unable to see how advocacy for a greatly privileged group, with the advantage in every area of modern society may disadvantage others. Obviously there are some areas of direct confrontation, like family courts, where feminist advocacy is the main obstacle to equality and justice, there are some where the is a limited set of resources and where feminists want a greater share of the pie for women, which is necessarily bad for men, like the ever increasing predominance of women in higher education, which no Affirmative Action seeks to redress, and there are areas where feminist advocacy merely distracts from male problems, like the common hysteria about rape and domestic violence and violence against women generally which gets so much attention and special funding and awareness training and slutwalks and so on while the fact that the vast majority of violence is against men, the majority of domestic violence is against men, a similar number of rapes are against men, the majority of child abuse is aimed at boys, and so on, just gets brushed under the carpet because it doesn’t fit into the dominant feminist “haven’t women got it bad” narrative.
Someone on a slutwalk dedicating their acts of political demonstration to the rare threat of rape has already nailed her colours to the mast.
Bullshit.
blindboyard
I see little value in engaging your text in the sort of snipe by sentences you seem to enjoy. And I see little interest in engaging in discussion, where I seem to be the only one interested in a discussion instead of labling, stereotyping and categorizing to fit things into my preconceived vision. And I’m sure you would blame me of the same thing. I have to say though, that your self-righteous outrage at what you’ve decided by “feminist’s actions” to call feminism, does come off as a bit posing, as well as your so banally internet-like aggressiveness, when someone dares to disagree. You might have some points in your arguments as I’ve written before, but I see no value in your hyperboles or your clear prejudices. Your pathos itself would suggest that you would benefit from stepping back and applying a bit of calm thinking to the whole issue, to see who your enemies really are and what actually causes what. But feminists have always been a good target, nowadays even more that before, in that they are not overtly powerful, but powerful enough to be a worthwhile target.
By the way, having a political argument based on dictionary references is only slightly less obtuse than having a political argument, where the definitions are just improvised by the other participant to fit their view of the side they are attacking. Do you know the name of the fallacy in question? Especially when the thing you’re attacking is such a broad and variable flock of ideas, policies and movements, it is important to realize, that any categorization you attempt will not be able to cover the whole thing, so perhaps it might be better to be more precise in which feminist group or thinker you’re attacking at any particular time.
It might be that this is an issue of point of view too, as I am not from the US. The things you see are not obvious though, so I remain skeptical of your assertions. I know too many people describing themselves as feminists and I do so myself, but hey, if you seriously want to be that way, be my guest. I guess we just disagree then.