That’s rather silly since it has already been established in this thread that any talk of a single feminism is meaningless as there is no common ground on a definition. I’m sure there are feminists out there who talk about prison rape, as there are feminists who talk about UFO abductions being a feminist issue, and 9/11 being a feminist issue, and what not.
So perhaps a more meaningful approach would be to set out to identify the types of feminism we do not like and can agree to be anti on.
Like for instance, can we agree that deliberately withholding information from cuckolded men, or holding on to the paternity uncertainty and holding it over the heads of men as a weapon in a power struggle and calling that feminism, is bad feminism we all should be anti-feminism on?
Can we agree that calling all men rapists and saying that is a feminist agenda is bad feminism we all should be anti-feminism on?
Can we agree that a feminist who states that men being thrown in prison and dragged through court on a false rape accusation is a kind of feminist that we should be anti-feminism on?
Can we agree that the mattress girl represents a kind of feminism which is despicable?
Can we agree that the feminist claim of 77 to the dollar is bogus and represents a sort of feminism which should be opposed?
Can we agree that the feminist 1/4 rape statistics is bogus and represents a sort of feminism which should be opposed?
Can we agree that all the nonsense about the patriarch is, well silly nonsense, and represent a kind of feminism which is nonsense?
Wrong. The observed disparity is between what a man and a woman get paid for the same job, not just averaged over all men and all women. Women get paid less than men for the same jobs.
Sure (not that I’ll use your weird use of “anti-feminism” for specific issues). I’m unaware of any significant number of feminists who do this (or indeed any feminists at all), but this sounds bad.
Fine with this too, and unaware that any significant number of feminists do this.
Uhh sure, with the same caveat.
No, or at least not necessarily. I’m against false accusations of rape and I’m for true accusations of rape. If she was really raped I’m very glad she spoke out. I’m unable to determine if she was or wasn’t, and therefore I’m unable to judge whether her actions were acceptable or not.
No. Many of the factors that go into this may be due in part to sexism in culture and society.
She has absolutely no proof, her subsequent acts were extremely dubious, he was cleared by the school and she couldn’t be bothered to show up for police investigation. But why don’t we subject him to a multitude of harms, make his school year a hell, destroy any chance of a professional life in the USA, public shame and drag his name through the mud anyway.
Here’s her take on: “When people demand proof of an act of sexual violence, ask yourself why they want to frame this as a science. … When a person claims that their theory is a science, they disqualify other types of knowledge.” – Mattress Girl. That’s a person who actually went to university. Coming up with such complete rubbish. Not even just unscientific (like most of third-wave feminists nonsense), but apparently anti-scientific.
And that’s exactly the problem with feminism, because on the face of it, it is quite reasonable. Of course we all support feminists advocating the “radical notion” that women are people, get to vote and whatever. But then they turn around and spew such unfathomable nonsense that one is forced to either consider them deliberately manipulative or downright retarded.
A) I’m a thingamabobist: we have the radical belief that puppies are cute, the earth is round and the mind can bend metal spoons. B) That’s stupid, the mind can’t bend metal. I guess that makes me an anti-thingamabobist. A) You horrible person! You hate puppies and are one of those throw back conservatives that think the earth is flat!
Her subsequent acts weren’t “dubious”, they were just weird. And many accusations of rape, true or false, have no proof because there were no witnesses and very often the victim is so traumatized that they immediately clean off any physical evidence.
So it’s entirely possible that she was raped, and I am in no position to say that she wasn’t. If she wasn’t then her accusations were very wrong. If she was then they were very appropriate.
I’m against unfathomable nonsense. Fortunately most feminists I know and have read about don’t spew it.
Yes, by about 5%. Which is significant, when multiplied over a large, employed population, but which isn’t that 23% number which does not take those disparities into account.
Plus, you can get some odd cohort effects when you do the numbers the other way, and look instead at the total sums of money earned by men and women in particular areas.
For me, the overall lesson is that if someone’s shouting statistics at you to support a social cause, the first step is always to triple-check their math and the next few steps are always to review the studies that generated the statistics.
Short of physically ripping the shirt off him, or making it illegal for him to wear it, the only way to keep Matt and other men from wearing that kind of shirt was to attack him personally and publicly.
So yes, I think the criticism was an attempt to control his choice of clothes. And it worked.
Contrast that to remark a cop in Canada made (paraphrasing) “Women shouldn’t dress slutty.” Which in turned sparked the slutwalk phenomenon, in which thousands of women showed up in organized protest events, wearing little or nothing.
Feminists are saying two things: (1.) Men shouldn’t wear shirts that feature scantily clad women, and (2.) Women should be able to dress as slutty as they want.
You mention “slut-shaming” as something feminism is against. Isn’t it hypocritical for feminists to both shame a man for wearing a shirt depicting “slutty” women, while encouraging women to dress “slutty” themselves?
And further, do you think that “I don’t care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet, your shirt is sexist and ostracizing,” is a sort of silly thing to complain about?
Sure. Feminism says patriarchy hurts men. In the sense of: “It keeps them from acting more like us (women).”
But it doesn’t stop them from using patriarchal tropes to attack men who criticize feminism: “They’re basement-dwelling whiny virgins who can’t get any.”
If slut-shaming is wrong, what about virgin-shaming? Is that also wrong?
I’m making criticisms of feminism based on the feminism that I see. If you think those are not true feminists, say so. Or articulate exactly what kind of feminism you do believe (which to your credit, you’ve done - but you are among the few.)
Ok.
The point is that lots of groups make more or less than other groups. To automatically ascribe any difference in income to discrimination is problematic.
There may be some of that. Some men may be less likely to admit to being “abused” by women, because it’s not “manly”. It may be that to some men getting slapped by a woman is such a non-event, that after a few years they forget about it.
I think the bigger problem is that domestic abuse is politicized. For some feminists, research (including academic feminists who are doing research themselves) results that show women are as likely to engage in domestic violence, is an attack on women, and they react accordingly.
According to CNN, 12 million people are victims of intimate partner abuse each year. Which means 0.016% of domestic violence incidents end in death.
The link says “health care costs associated with each incident of domestic violence were $948 in cases where women were the victims and $387 in cases where men were the victims.”
I don’t doubt that, overall, when men assault women the injuries are more severe. Having said that, upthread a man reported his own story of domestic abuse, in which he said his then-wife kicked him in the chest while he was asleep, breaking his ribs. When he went to the doctor, he said he’d fallen off his bike. That’s just one story, of course. But it wouldn’t be surprising if men were less likely to report intimate partner abuse. (I think they are.)
I think that’s utterly ridiculous. “You shouldn’t wear that shirt on TV” is not an attempt at control – it’s a criticism. Criticism is not control, at least not most of the time.
You’re just choosing to interpret it in the way that confirms your beliefs on feminism. I think that Taylor’s apology was sincere, that he’s a good guy who recognizes that the shirt is seen as disrespectful to women by some, and made the right decision. I see no evidence that Taylor was forced to apologize – he chose to apologize. The right choice, in my view.
So what? Men (or anyone) were free to respond to the criticism of Taylor in the same way, but they chose not to. I think this is because many or most recognize that it actually was reasonable criticism. There are reasonable and unreasonable sorts of criticism – I don’t feel “women shouldn’t dress slutty” is a reasonable criticism, because “slut” is a misogynistic slur (among other reasons). I think a slutwalk was a reasonable and appropriate response by those who felt the criticism was unreasonable.
Some feminists are saying that men shouldn’t wear shirts with imagery that is disrespectful (due to objectification) to women, any more than they should wear shirts with imagery disrespectful to black people or Jews (such as Confederate flags or swastikas), and they are also saying that women should be free to choose how much of their bodies to reveal.
I’ve never heard an argument against dressing in revealing clothing that asserts that revealing lots of skin is “disrespectful” to men, so I don’t believe these two things are at all comparable. Feminists would and should similarly criticize a woman who choose to wear Confederate flag imagery, swastika symbols, or other bigoted imagery on their clothing.
It’s a minor little thing, and sometimes it’s fine to criticize minor little things. Taylor apologized and it’s over. Taylor’s a good guy, it seems to me, who made a little mistake, was criticized for it, and apologized. Good for him. I have no problem with people speaking up, even for little things, if they think it’s wrong.
No. Not according to this feminist or most feminists I know and read about.
Yes, virgin-shaming is wrong. This sort of thing is bad and I (and most feminists I know and read about) oppose it.
But we’re not automatically doing so – it’s based on evidence. No, I don’t believe every penny of the gender pay gap is due to discrimination. But I think it’s very likely that some of it is, and this is a big problem that should be corrected.
Facts aren’t an attack on women. Saying something to the effect of “we shouldn’t worry so much about domestic violence”, or “men are abused just as much as women” might be – combining incidents of murder, serious injury, and all other forms of abuse, it seems pretty clear to me that women are hurt a lot more than men by domestic violence. I think it’s reasonable to classify assertions that are intended to dismiss or downplay the disparate affect of domestic violence on women as rhetorical attacks on women.
And there’s more to the health-care cost numbers than just the ones you mentioned. Per incident, it appears to cost women about 3 times more than men, in health cost. But “The average medical cost for women victimized by physical domestic violence was $483 compared to $83 for men” – which is a disparity of about 6 times. This indicates to me that there are significantly more incidents (or at least more incidents of a serious enough nature to cause injury) in which women are the victim.
Good to see you’re all getting along perfectly well without me. Here’s something that’s been troubling me for a while [these were culled from the first 15 pages, but since I have a couple of posters on ignore now, there may be more examples. I really wasn’t expecting so many of them to be from one poster, and I don’t expect him to take responsibility for the rest of you. All bolding mine]:
So, everyone pretty much seems to agree that feminism has led to some “nutty” people doing or saying things that All Right-Minded Folk deplore. Now let’s have some numbers, rather than bald claims. How have any of you reached the conclusion that the stuff that drives anti-feminism is a “fringe” of “loony” “extremists”?
Perhaps a crude diagram would help?
FFF
FmF
FFF
That’s (F)ringe and (m)oderate, by the way Look at the size of that fringe, which shouldn’t be taken as representative of the tiny moderate centre…
Perhaps he wasn’t referring to attacks directed at himself? Though these two posts certainly seem to count [again, my bolding]
Here’s some more from you, directed at me (and a couple from another source):
And for balance, I did at one point say this:
To which Andros (who would later stalk me in a different thread) replied:
Some people do need things spelled out in very simple terms. That’s not a personal attack - or it’s at least considerably more defensible than any of the personal attacks noted above. Oh, and while I’m looking at it again, I certainly didn’t say “poor posting behavior” at any point, anywhere, despite the (deliberate?) misuse of quotation marks [the big clue is that I would have referred to 'poor posting behaviour].
I haven’t reached that conclusion. My conclusion is that anti-feminists seek out the most radical, trifling, or ill-expressed feminist ideas they can find, as easy targets for their general war on feminism*. If the “loony” feminist fringe didn’t exist, anti-feminism still would.
A common tactic, hardly unique to anti-feminism.
Comparing the two alleged personal attacks of mine with these from you:
…yours seem less defensible, and certainly more vicious.
No, why would we? So far your characterization of feminism has in general had very little to do with my feminism, or the feminism of most feminists I know and read about.
In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. I must wade into this thread.
LinusK, you’ve mentioned several times your hypothesis that human beings are inherently prone to see men as less valuable and more expendable than women. Tomndebb debunked that claim with a single word back on page 6, but you didn’t notice, so I’ll expand.
The single word was “infanticide”. When people can’t or won’t raise all their children, the ones they kill will be those they consider least valuable. The victims of infanticide are by definition expendable. If your hypothesis was correct, we’d expect more boys than girls to be victims of infanticide. But what we see is the opposite: When there’s a sex difference in infanticide, it’s almost always in disfavour of girls. And we’re not talking about obscure customs among tiny populations: In both China and India, there’s a measurable lack of women due to sex-selective infanticide and abortion.
So, either we have no inherent tendency to see males as less valuable than females, or if we have such a bias, it’s so weak that it can be overridden by culture.
I trust you’ll reexamine the evidence that lead you to your hypothesis, and decide if you were mistaken about the existence of this bias, or if you believe it’s a cultural trait instead of a biological one – and if so which cultures you think are affected.
“No true feminist objects to mocking the sex lives of MRAs like me!”
“jsgoddess and iiandyii objected to mocking the sex lives of MRAs like you.”
“Then they must not be true feminists!”
It’s literally the clearest example of the fallacy I’ve ever seen in my life.
I mean is this self-parody? Are you doing this on purpose?
I briefly thought what you just said would make a great example to include on a quiz in my critical thinking course but then I thought better of it because what you just said telegraphs the relevant fallacy so transparently it’d be too easy.
Look at the size of that fringe, which shouldn’t be taken as representative of the tiny moderate centre…