I agree, despite your mangling of the quote and link tags. 
But, you know, not worthy of being called “rape”. Because you shouldn’t call something rape when it isn’t.
And you shouldn’t call something “75 cents on the dollar” when it isn’t, even as a “useful beginning to the discussion”, because you’re likely to find the next stage of the discussion involves a figure of speech concerning the eliminatory functions of the male bovine.
Oh, and a callback to your earlier post: You said " in some surveys 1 in 5 women have reported…". You’ll be clear of course that this is not at all the same as saying “It is a fact that 1 in 5 women are…”.
I’ve never insisted that sexual assault should be called rape.
Except that it is (roughly) – working women really do make significantly less money (the specific number seems to vary between ~70 and ~80 cents on the dollar, depending on the study) on average than working men. That’s a fact that no one has tried to deny. That’s not the only fact, and we should include the factors that influence this (differing experience, job fields, etc.)… and these factors might themselves be at least partially influenced by gender bias in society. So this fact is, indeed, an interesting start to a discussion, in my view.
When have I said otherwise?
5% wage gap is equivalent to a $2200 loss per (ETA: full time) woman worker, per year. By comparison, robbery occurs to 1 in 865 people per year in the US and costs on average $1200 each. In terms of direct economic loss to victims, the pay gap is bigger than all crimes combined.
Men disproportionately die in workplace accidents, but pregnancy and childbirth-related deaths occur (almost) exclusively to women. While in the US the number of men who die in workplace accidents exceed the number of maternal deaths plus female occupational deaths (4200 vs 1400), globally the numbers are comparable. (340k occupational deaths, assuming 10% from women, vs 290k maternal deaths) So in terms of dying from necessary work, both sexes are bearing similar loads.
In terms of dying because of unnecessary actions of someone else, no they are not equal. War, violent crimes, and law enforcement are sectors nearly completely dominated by men. And likely not the kind who would listen to feminists. So I don’t know how their actions could be considered the responsibility of feminists?
Note that feminists tend overwhelmingly to be liberals who support improved workplace safety, health care access, gun controls, social safety nets, improved education, etc, all of which would reduce the number of deaths in the various areas above.
Rape is exceedingly difficult to talk about, especially for a young woman.
Consider this scenario: After a medical procedure where a woman was sedated but aware, her boyfriend drove her home. She lied down on the couch. He climbed on top of her and started sexual activity. She said no but he kept going. Because she hadn’t fully recovered her strength – and because he was her boyfriend and not a scary stranger – she didn’t physically fight beyond light pushing.
Was that rape? It happened to me in college and I didn’t call it rape for years. Recalling it now, years later, still turns my stomach in knots.
Exactly. Why are women not getting the jobs that pay more? Part of it is “choice”, but part of it is a lot of teacher and parental bias, social pressure, workplace dynamics, outright discrimination, and distribution of unpaid work, all of which are problematic.
In terms of direct economic loss to victims? So, not counting effects of death, hospitialization, increased taxes to pay for policing, etc.? That seems like a really weird calculation if you’re doing harm. But yeah, a 5% difference applied to a large population adds up to a really big effect in total; that is a very good point.
So, to sum up, if we treat something that’s not work as work, we can get the death ratio by gender to 85%. Or, 3 goddamn times as much as that 5% pay gap you mentioned. You wanna calculate out the QALYs on that?
Yes, the deaths of people by war, violent crimes, and law enforcement are completely dominated by men, and by a gender ratio that blows both workplace death and pay grades out of the water. If feminists are about equality, and they aren’t heavily discounting the lives of men over the ability of middle-and-upper-class women to be free from microaggressions, they would never shut up about it. They don’t. QED.
I think it’s the marginal dollar (or vote) that’s the problem. But we can do a poll; we can ask feminists if they have to cut police presence on or around college campuses versus inner city neighborhoods, and see where they’d vote.
Look, I’m not one of the people here saying that feminism is evil or responsible for all the ills of soceity. It’s done a damn lot of good as a historical social movement. But the claims that it’s about equal treatment for men and women, and champions the causes in which men stereotypically suffer with even a moderate fraction of the causes women stereotypically suffer is laughably, inescapably, obviously, and blatantly wrong.
That makes it rape.
The problem is one of definitions: feminists define patriarchy as a system set up to oppress women.
It’s actually only a recent form of a cultural dynamic - going back to the beginning of our species itself - the purpose of which was to protect women’s lives, health and well-being at the expense of men - up to, and including men’s lives. Because (from an evolutionary pov) men are expendable, and women are not.
Now there are several things you can take from this:
One is that we no longer live in the environment that produced “patriarchy” in the first place. We’re now a species 7 billion strong, and no one’s life is any more expendable than anyone else’s.
Another is that, despite the recent change of circumstances, patriarchy lives on. It’s too deeply rooted in our collective consciousness (and perhaps even in our DNA) to disappear in a few generations.
A third is that rule of patriarchy - that the purpose of men is to protect and meet the needs of women - is not feminism’s enemy: it’s feminism’s best friend. It’s why feminism has such an outsized influence, despite its utter incoherence and often outright silliness.
Now, I know you don’t agree with any of this, but think about it, and see if it explains some of the things that have been brought up in this thread.
Also, I’d like to know how feminists think patriarchy harms men. I’m going to be completely up-front and say I think I already know the answer. The real reason I’m asking is that I don’t think it has anything to do with how men think patriarchy hurts men. You might think if feminists were interested in how patriarchy harms men, they’d ask men. Because plenty of men are talking about it. Feminists aren’t listening.
Is one of them that you’re astoundingly ignorant of history? Because that was my major take away.
This is nonsense to me.
Not really, but that’s most likely still due to your view of feminism, which is (to me, anyway) straw-man fantasy-land stuff.
Right, this is exactly the sort of issue that feminists should be focused on, something that can make a huge improvement in women’s lives. Silly shit like microaggression is just fodder for those who dislike feminism and want to make feminists seem out of touch and pointless.
And gay people have better things to worry about than a kid saying “that’s so gay” on the schoolyard. But equality is the result of a cumulative effort. It’s hard to make the big shifts without the little ones, and the little problems are often a manifestation of the bigger one.
It’s strange that you refer to straw-man fictional version of feminism, when the only thing feminists agree on is they don’t agree on anything, and therefore are invulnerable to criticism.
My main criticism about feminism is that it’s not about equality: it’s about whatever (femininists) think is best for women. I’ve given a number of concrete examples. You can dismiss them or ignore them if you want, but that doesn’t defeat the argument.
I challenge you to quote me saying “women aren’t as smart as men”.
I really hate it when people mischaracterize what I’ve said. I think it’s a small-minded, devious tactic.
I also hate having to say this, but: I do not think men are smarter than women.
Again, I didn’t say women can’t do dirty work. I said men do the most dangerous work: there is a 92% occupational death gap between men and women. I’m sorry if facts hurt your feelings, but it’s just a fact.
Most feminists probably agree on plenty of things, if not nearly everything.
I think your examples are bunk, in general – you repeatedly claimed that feminists don’t care about a certain issue, and many times it was pointed out that some feminists do, in fact, care about that issue, and you ignored it. That’s what defeats most of your arguments – you claimed things that weren’t true.
Here. You say “And frankly, if she’d been a man, he probably wouldn’t have done it in the first place: because it’s such incredibly stupid thing to do.” – directly implying that women would not be smart enough to not do this stupid thing in the first place.
Then you probably shouldn’t say that men wouldn’t make some certain specific stupid decisions that a woman made.
You also said things like this, which is just incredibly silly. You can’t honestly believe that there aren’t any women “truckers or farmers or ranchers or miners or plumbers or sanitation workers or garbage men or engineers”, can you? You must realize that all of these skills exist in the female population, right?
This is an odd view of history. I suspect that rather than an evolutionary process intended to protect the more necessary members of society, it was simply a cultural artifact intended to protect the most valuable possessions. As property, they demonstrated the honor and social ranking of the male.
Your claim might have been slightly persuasive if infanticide was not much more often inflicted on girls than boys. As the reverse is true, claims of evolutionary direction are unsupportable. Men have always been willing to die to defends flags and other objects of honor, as well. Your hypothesis does not seem to have either facts or logic to support it. Since the rest of your argument relies on this claim, I find your whole thesis unpersuasive.
If you’ll look at what I wrote, you’ll see I described him as “man in a baseball cap”. The reason I didn’t identify his hair color was… he was wearing baseball cap.
That’s certainly possible. Personally didn’t know he was black, until you stated it in this post.
Ok.
What a peculiar claim for you to make. I’m curious: what was your path to this rather eccentric conclusion?
I think you’re complimenting the OP. If you are, thank you. If you do unpack it, I’d be curious to see what the unpacking looks like.