No, Jack didn’t provide it.
Whether feminism is about equality is the least important? I’d think it was fundamental.
When you say it’s “subjective,” do you mean some feminists think it is, and some don’t, or something else?
The full answer is long, and I think most of it’s in the OP, but…
…for whose benefit were women protected in this way?
The benefits were enjoyed both by the groups that successfully protected women, and by those of us who are now living.
We are descended from those humans who succeeded in protecting women. Those who failed to do so, became extinct.
What form did this protection take?
It took a wide variety of forms. One is that it is almost exclusively men who went to battle. Whether the battle was over territory, resources, or something else, it was the men who went to fight and die, not the women.
Another example revolves around pair bonding. The general rule, before modern times, was that a man had a duty to provide for his wife and children, even after a divorce.
[Bolding mine.] Link.
Link. [Bolding mine.]
Under traditional Jewish law, one of the duties of the husband (the first one, I think, was to protect and provide for his wife and children.
In Genesis, God punished Eve by making childbirth painful. He punished Adam, on the other hand, by making him obtain sustenance from the “sweat of his brow”.
How many fairy tales revolve around chivalrous men saving princesses or fair maidens?
You see the same thing in modern entertainment as well. People seem to hate the reference to “Titanic”, for some reason, so how about “The Princess Bride,” or “The Terminator”? Kyle Reese dies saving Sarah Connor. Wesley doesn’t die, but he certainly risks his life (and thereby proves himself worthy).
Of course not. If you look at 3rd world countries or failed states you’ll see plenty of examples of oppressed women. And plenty of examples of oppressed men, as well.
Surprise!
Will you at least acknowledge your mistakes? Here is a still unacknowledged post by Lamia pointing out that you used your own words from another thread and attributed it to another poster (not dishonestly, but if you’re confused about your own arguments, how can you keep claiming they’re coherent?).
You also cited data about domestic violence that was also debunked, and I provided you with a link to the actual study you claimed it came from (the CDC study).
Yes, some other posters use dishonest debating tactics in GD. What’s your point? That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. How has it worked out for you so far?
How about you actually prove them first? You’re the one making these claims. So far, anyone challenging them (in absence of proof by you) has been ignored.
My friends? 
Do you really think this is some kind of conspiracy to gang up on you? You appear to have a few people supporting your view of feminism here. Are they your friends?
Generally speaking that is correct. But if enough people you are trying to debate have a problem with your approach, do you think it makes your argument stronger? That’s a common tactic: “I make feminists really angry, it must mean what I’m saying is true!” Can you really not think of another reason why people would have a negative reaction to someone’s arguments? Are you going to use the reaction to your OP to convince yourself you are correct? Will you continue to ignore the valid critiques about your arguments and the accuracy of your cites in order to avoid reconsidering your claims?
You have been given specific examples that you continue to ignore. I took the time to read and vet your posts and some of your cites and posted my replies to them. I don’t feel like wasting any more of my time until you decide to acknowledge your errors.
And Jesus died for your sins, you’ll have heard that too, I expect.
Quite early on I linked to a mass of citations from a female anti-feminist, covering that topic, the predominance of the fringe over the uncritical ‘moderate’ centre, the violence and hatred and prejudice and ignorance of feminism, the inequality inherent in feminism’s ‘definition’ of ‘equality’, and so on. I don’t feel the need to repeat myself for each individual who shows up trying to save my soul - and as I’ve just mentioned elsewhere, if you cared about reaching a conclusion by weighing up reliable citations and taking pains to avoid confirmation bias or closed echo chambers , you’d have done your own homework and you’d be subjected to the same aggressive absence of argument that I’m engaged with here.
So, to the specific question, you got nothin’.
Least important to the discussion, because of the subjectivity: what a movement is “about”, in some ineffable way, is much harder to define in some concrete way than specific, factual issues. Those are the issues I’d prefer to discuss, but of course that doesn’t bar you from talking about whatever you’d like.
So, not the women themselves, is what you’re saying?
I don’t know about “almost exclusively”, women have fought in wars for as long as there have been wars.
Further, only a subset of those wars - ones waged to repel an invader - could be characterized as “protecting women”, and those weren’t just about protecting women, but all the other male property as well.
Given the lack of economic opportunity available to women at the time, the alternative was abandoned wives starving to death. I suppose it’s laudable that Jewish law forbade this, given that alternative, but the same laws were responsible for the lack of opportunity so…call it a wash? One is reminded of George Bernard Shaw’s remark, that Americans “first prevent Negroes from following any occupation but that of the bootblack or the waiter, then proclaim as evidence of the intellectual inferiority of the Negroes, that they are only bootblacks or waiters.” That is, it’s easy to characterize men as protecting women, when women are made dependent on men by laws against property ownership and the like.
What you mainly see are female characters that are passive objects to be won, a reward given to the hero for his moral worth. In this we see the poison of traditional gender norms: a man shows his moral worth by killing, and a woman is a thing that exists to please a man.
Shouldn’t you revise point 3, then? I’ll certainly stipulate that Western women aren’t oppressed, but they are a minority.
He may be misremembering a real problem that some suffragists had with race: some examples:
Now, the idea that they were asking white women to have a right that they wanted to deny to most people is a questionable assertion, and I have no cite for that. It’s also true that many folks agitating for women’s rights to vote were also prominent abolitionists or otherwise engaged in the struggle for equal rights. So overall his point is quite shoddy.
But it’s true that one of the arguments repeatedly (and in some states successfully) raised in support of women’s suffrage was the idea that it would promote white supremacy.
Lest someone jump on those quotes and say something idiotic like, “SEE! SEE! SUFFRAGETTES WERE ALL RACISTS!” I give you Ida Wells:
History is complicated. Some feminists were white supremacists. Some weren’t. Some civil rights leaders were misogynists. Some weren’t. Dismissing the suffragism movement because of assholes like Rebecca Felton would be like dismissing the civil rights movement because Malcolm X was an asshole to women.
You mean that tumblr post you linked to earlier? Great, yeah, I’ll wade through that blog to try to find the cites that support your statement. Let me get right on that.
Indeed. Jack of Words, look at my two posts above to see how (IMO) cites should be offered:
- Address a specific claim, preferably one claim per post and no more.
- Offer a specific link to the cite.
- Quote a paragraph or two from the cite that you believe supports your claim (or refutes someone else’s or whatever).
- After the quote, offer commentary–preferably concise commentary.
This model gives maximum signal, minimum noise.
Do you believe you’ve used this model? If not, do you believe your model leads to more productive discussion?
LHoD, thank you for the cites! It’s unfortunate that some of the individuals involved with the suffrage movement were assholes. It’s not surprising – there are assholes everywhere.
Hi camille.
As an aside, I want to say that I have limited free time. Often I choose to use it to post on SDMB. I do that because it’s fun for me. But I don’t use SDMB as a place to make friends, or a virtual social club. I do it because I like debating ideas, and learning from people who respond, with logic and evidence, either to me or to others. While there have been some exceptions, those attributes have been notably lacking in this thread.
This particular thread has been a drain on my time. As I’ve said earlier, I barely have time to keep up with it, and certainly don’t have time to respond to every single post. I’ve been neglecting other threads I’d like to participate in, in order to try to keep up with this one. Having said that, (1) this thread is now so long, I doubt anyone who’s not already invested in it is paying any attention anymore, and (2) my own patience is wearing thin. This thread probably should have died a natural death a while ago, and I anticipate I’ll probably be paying less attention to it in the future. Having said that, there’s at least one post of yours I want to respond to, when I get time. (You posted again, before I had time, so that’s why I’m responding to this one.)
I’m happy to acknowledge mistakes when I make them. In this particular case, I was not “asking “feminists” to push for more women to be charged and arrested”.
I was pointing out the hypocrisy of some feminists pushing for “drunk sex is rape” while ignoring often it’s the guy who’s drunk, and even more often: both are.
If they were consistent, they’d be pushing for women who have sex with drunk guys to be arrested. They’re not. In at least one case, cited upthread somewhere, a woman openly admitted to having sex - stone cold sober - with a guy who was passing-out drunk, in a feminist-sponsored event. They applauded. Now, if feminism is about equality, feminists would condemn women for having sex with drunk men. They don’t. Instead, some feminists go out of their way to see women as perpetual victims, regardless of the circumstances, and men as perpetual victimizers, regardless of the circumstances.
In other words, I was condemning some feminists for being hypocritical. I was not endorsing their position.
My own position, as I said earlier, is that drunk sex is not rape. It might be really shitty sex, or sex you regret later, or even a really bad idea. But it’s not rape.
Yeah, I did get mixed up about that. My bad. [This me, acknowledging I made a mistake.] My memory doesn’t always serve me well, which is why, when I’m relying on my memory, I usually make an explicit point of saying so.
That was the post I was talking about. I don’t have time right now to respond to that post, but I’ll respond when I can. If memory serves, I posted five or six studies, and you debunked one or two. Which I appreciate, by the way. If I’m relying on sources I shouldn’t be, I like to know.
Generally, when I post a thread, my goal is to get replies. My general expectation is that some significant portion of them will be substantive.
“How has it worked out for you so far?”
In terms of number of responses, it’s been off the charts.
In terms of substantive responses, not so great.
I disagree. I’ve done as much as I can to reply to substantive responses (including yours).
“How about you actually prove them first?”
Much of what I have to say, in terms of supporting evidence, is in the OP. I’ve come to suspect that many people didn’t read it, or didn’t read it all the way through. But if you read the OP, and have substantive issues with it, I’m happy to reply to them.
If you’re talking about Jack of Words, if memory serves, I don’t remember seeing him in any thread before.
As I said earlier, I don’t use SDMB as a place to make friends. While there are certainly some posters I like more than others, I don’t consider anyone here a “friend”. My friends are in real life, not on the internet.
By the way, I’m not condemning people who use the internet to make friends. I’ve done it before. But at this point, in my life, it’s not for me.
I have not, to my knowledge, ignored valid critiques. In fact, I’ve made an effort to respond, to the extent that I can.
“Can you really not think of another reason why people would have a negative reaction to someone’s arguments?”
I can. One is that some people, I suspect, confuse attacks on feminism with attacks on women. Another is that, at some point, some people who usually don’t post in GD came here and started shitting all over the thread.
When I have time, I’ll respond to that post.
Right now, I’m out of time.
I think he’s referring to movements in the UK that would have led to just giving rich women the vote. But who knows? And, honestly, does anyone think he’s going to provide a great cite at this late date? He’s still doing the clown in the dunk tank routine of getting dunked, climbing back on the seat and claiming the one throwing the ball’s got nothin’.
Of course, the whole subject of whether or not the suffragettes’ shit stank was itself a tangential evasion of what was originally at issue, which was: why didn’t women have the right to vote in the first place, if the whole course of human history has inured to the benefit and privilege of women at the expense of men?
Fairly typical of the genre, really.
I remember reading an very conservative woman’s comment once about how it wasn’t sexist for her to be excluded from certain education and decision-making and all of that because it was actually to her benefit not to have so many responsibilities.
In other words, the “don’t you worry your pretty little head” gambit.
I didn’t read the whole thread. I tried, god help me, but the bickery noise combined with incredibly long posts filled with nothing but self-congratulation mixed with petulant complaints about opposition kind of threw me off. But I’ve looked in on the thread occasionally–and, seeing this issue about suffragists not being egalitarian in other ways, thought a few cites might be helpful. If my cites respond to an out-of-context request, my apologies. I couldn’t bear to read the context.
I’ll add something else to the “if men disappeared” hypothetical: the crime rate would drop dramatically. Especially violent crime.
Some people have mentioned the lack of a monolith. If you read feminist blogs you’ll find big fracture points and some vicious circular firing squads. The most widespread disagreement is probably the sex divide, which finds its way into all sorts of issues. At base, is a woman in heels and a short skirt pandering to men, selling out her sisters, lowering standards for an entire gender, and commodifying her own body? Or is she empowered and dressing how she wants and hey it’s none of your business anyway what are you some kind of prude or maybe you’re just jealous? Get out the knives. Another fracture point is minority women complaining that mainstream political feminism in the U.S. is a vehicle for middle to upper class white women to accrue more power.
As for the OP, I think you’ll find your interests might align more with the reddit, 4chan, and particularly the “manopshere” bloc of the internet. Liberal sites are loathe to criticize feminism, even some of the goofier tumblr/SJW types.
Do you remember that cat calling video from awhile back? Remember the mini-backlash of people saying it was racist because it only showed black and hispanic guys? Oh man. I couldn’t tell how much of it was legit outraged libs or MRAs doing some next level concern trolling.
Even today (!) I hear people say that women voting really only has the effect of giving “additional votes” to men who have wives, sisters, mothers, aunts, etc. As if women can’t look at issues and make up their own minds, but will always vote the way some male relative tells them.
(My sister sometimes asks me how I think she should vote…and I sometimes ask the woman who is the local member of the County Democratic Central Committee how she thinks I should vote.)
You asked me where I got the idea, and I quoted the post. But let me modify it for you:
You were criticizing feminists for not pushing for more women to be charged and arrested, right?
It doesn’t change the larger point that followed: They are not pushing for it because it would not solve the problem - NOT because they are hypocrites, or because feminism is not about equality. You yourself agree that it wouldn’t be a solution.
The problem with your argument is that you are starting with the presumption that feminism is bad, and then looking for examples to validate that hypothesis. But your examples are presented devoid of context or complexity, and ascribe ulterior motives without any objective proof of that motivation. That’s confirmation bias.
Memory does not serve.
Of the four cites: One cite was a complete falsification of a study, two were misinterpreted by you as supporting your claim when they do not, and one was a meta analysis that could not be accessed, but has been critiqued for cherry picking study data compiled using the Conflict Tactic Scale (CTS), which, according to the NIJ:
Here’s more from NIJ:
In other words, your claim that men and women are victims of intimate physical violence at equal rates is not supported by the data collected by the CDC, BJS, and NIJ, among others.
Note: This does not mean that men are not or cannot be victims, or are not entitled to the same support services as women.
But once again, your argument ignores context and complexity, and ascribes nefarious motives to feminism without objective proof of that motivation.
I want to add to this, to (hopefully) give a better idea of what I’m saying.
You say: Drunk sex is not rape.
*
This is where complexity comes in. Sometimes drunk sex is* rape. Protecting the incapacitated from sexual predators is what prompted the rule. The Amherst and Occidental cases were the tragic outcomes of the unintended consequences when the rule is misapplied. That isn’t to excuse the decisions in those cases as right, but to emphasize how difficult it is to find a solution to a complex problem.
Why would you first think to blame feminism rather than human fallibility?