I take issue with the following assertions from the OP and don’t accept that they accurately describe anything more than, at most, fringe portions of feminism and fringe feminists:
And there’s the rub. As a reasonable person, I can’t see feminism as anything but an essential, necessary moral compass to make this world as fair and equitable as possible.
But how much progress can a movement which seeks to improve human nature ever be, when it still resorts to the worst aspects of human nature? Scapegoating, hereditary guilt, “we’re convinced that we are the good people, so they must be the bad people.”
So long as women are faced with murder and rape, or at least with thwarted lives, any concerns such as the demonization of boys or the petty indignities that women are allowed to inflict on men, as well as the rare though severe false rape accusation, can be dismissed as the acceptable casualties in the war on injustice.
Feminism has proved that human beings won’t put up with that kind of shit.
I just Googled “breast cancer is the worst kind of cancer” because I have never heard anyone make this claim before. The search produced a single hit – this thread. Google doesn’t search everything, but it does search a lot, and it couldn’t find anyone other than you who’d ever said this.
I’ve never heard anyone claim breast cancer is the worst; you’d have to picture some kind of uber-insane ultra-feminist who was totally ignorant of science and statistics voicing that.
Lung cancer is worst, actually, followed distantly by breast cancer for women (and prostate cancer for men), then colorectal and pancreatic.
Worse, I’ve BEEN in meetings where it was decided not to promote a woman because she MIGHT have children. Not that they knew, she was single. Maybe she was a lesbian - we really didn’t know anything about her personal life. But she was young and unmarried and maybe she’d get married and have children and then maybe she’d quit, so lets promote the guy who already has a child instead. HE won’t quit his job, he has a family to support.
Career trajectory determined not by eight weeks, but by a societal expectation that might not even apply.
Private donations to and public spending on breast cancer appears to be much higher than on any other form of cancer, so it does seem that there is a widespread opinion that breast cancer is the worst.
That poster is pragmatic. It isn’t fair, but the reality of life is that getting accused of rape is a risk men face, similar to the risk women face of getting raped. To me, its akin to the posters that remind women not to walk alone, to know anyone they get into a car with, to carry their keys between their fingers. Both of those types of posters are patronizing, they treat their audience like children - and try to prevent something by changing the behavior of the prospective victim instead of addressing the behavior of the guilty party -but they might raise awareness (for those that were raised under a box) and they might stop something bad from happening.
That seems to be a strange conclusion from that data. I would have made the conclusion that breast cancer charities have the best marketing.
When it’s not about sex but about class. Middle and upper class women don’t smoke and they can afford to take better care of themselves. But diet and exercise won’t protect against genetic markers for breast cancer. So when Susan Komen died of cancer, her rich family took affront to this injustice by marshaling all the resources of their wealth and position.
Anecdotal, I admit, but I went through both college and the enlisted military. There was a lot more rape in the military. Years later, when the number and profile was higher due to the Afghanistan & Iraq wars, you did hear about the problem of military rape. Somewhat. But the working class women being raped in the military never had the same media coverage and public outrage as the middle class women raped in college.
That’s ridiculous. People don’t donate based on what they think is worst. They donate based on what they have an emotional connection to. Most people have an emotional connection to breast cancer because most people know someone with (and have likely lost someone to) breast cancer.
That is understandable. But I’m nostalgic for the days when rich women like Elenore Roosevelt worked on behalf of the desperately poor, instead of middle class women mailing in yogurt foils for the benefit of other middle class women.
Gonna have to go with Dangerosa on this one. Breast cancer just isn’t the most common (obviously because it’s so rare for men) and only second for women. More people should have an emotional connection to lung cancer.
I’m not the first person to make this observation, but if a company or organization wishes to make a public show of supporting women then breast cancer is probably the least controversial cause they could throw money at. Even misogynists aren’t pro breast cancer.
The problem with lung cancer is that most (albeit not all) sufferers get it as a result of smoking, and the general opinion among the non-smoking public is that that makes it their own damn fault. Whereas breast cancer is far more blame-free.
Anti-smoking campaigns receive and enormous amount of funding, and are pretty successful. Lung cancer is one that is more efficient to fight from the “prevention” side.
Breast cancer is actually by far the most common cancer among women. It’s not the deadliest cancer among women – that is lung cancer – but many more women are diagnosed with breast cancer. (Cite: CDC Cancer Statistics - Women)
If feminism was about equality, you’d expect them to be concerned about sentencing disparities between men and women, the occupational death gap, the disparity of arrests and outcomes in domestic violence cases, the difference in outcomes in custody cases, prison rape (of men), the historical disparity of women being exempt from the draft, or the way the media portrays men’s lives as less valuable than women’s. You might even expect them to be outraged at the scene in Titanic, when Leonardo DiCaprio’s character freezes, and sinks to the bottom of the sea, while Kate Winslet floats away on her raft. (Why was it again that she gets the raft?)
But you don’t see that. Which leads me to the conclusion that “feminism is about equality” is a useful lie, rather than something that’s actually true about feminism.
Here we go again.
YOU don’t see that. In a previous thread, you were shown where feminists talk about these things. You made up reasons that it didn’t count.
YOU don’t see that because YOU refuse to see that, even when it’s pointed out to you.
YOU don’t see that because YOU seem to have some issues bound up with feminism and YOU are incapable of looking beyond that.
YOU don’t see that. YOU.
I freely admit I could be wrong, but I would be absolutely stunned if the number of column inches devoted to, say, the sentencing disparity was even 10% of those devoted to “Manspreading”, or Sansa’s rape scene in Game of Thrones, or sexism at Comic Con, or any one of a hundred other trivial issues.
The internet is pretty big. I could probably find articles by MRA’s decrying “rape culture” if I looked hard enough. That doesn’t mean the MRA movement as a whole considers it a priority.
I think that’s a good question. I don’t have the ability to answer it completely, because part of your question goes beyond what I actually know.
I think a partial answer to your question might be this, though: when a man commits to a woman, and agrees to protect her and her children indefinitely, even at the cost of his own health, safety, and enjoyment - of, for example, the products of his own labor - he’s giving up something. In fact, he may be giving up a lot, depending on how dangerous things get: if there’s conflict with another group, or some danger that needs to be dealt with, or a food supply that’s particularly difficult or dangerous to acquire, he’s may very well wind up risking his own life. (Remember, the death rate of men, historically is twice that of women.)
When somebody agrees to a contract (like the one I outlined above) they ordinarily want something in return. I suspect that (and I don’t know, of course, because I wasn’t there) it was something like this: an agreement that his mate not mate with other men (for obvious reasons), and that she respect him, at least publicly, and defer to his judgment. What that would mean in practice would differ from culture to culture, but I think that, or something like it, was probably the original deal.
Obviously, that deal is now outmoded. Women, decades ago, became unsatisfied with it, and no longer feel they should defer to, or respect men. Which is reasonable.
What’s not reasonable, is that despite opting out of the original deal, feminists want men to continue to uphold their end of it. They are quick to shame any man who attempts to opt out, while simultaneously making relationships with women ever more dangerous for men: If you touch a woman without explicit permission, it’s rape! If you have sex with a woman who’s been drinking, it’s rape! If a woman claims you raped her, even if you didn’t, it’s still rape! (Because doubting a rape victim is the equivalent of shaming a rape victim!) If a woman gets tired of you (or finds a higher-status man), takes your house, your property, your kids, and treats you like a human ATM, well, too bad, sucker!
This dynamic is unsustainable. But it’s where modern feminism is trying to take us.