That’s right, you didn’t quote anything acknowledging that DeCrow had done things you have repeatedly claimed that feminists never do. You didn’t quote anything that acknowledged that DeCrow even existed.
Why didn’t you quote it? It was your cite. Why did you edit the material you did quote to remove all reference to DeCrow even though she was the subject of the article? Or did you get the already edited quotes from somewhere else?
But since you brought it up, it is interesting that feminist journalist Cathy Young feels that today’s feminist discourse needs more voices like DeCrow’s. That seems like more evidence against you. I’m not really familiar with Young’s work, but looking at her Wikipedia entry it looks like she’s spent plenty of time talking about the kinds of things you keep saying feminists don’t talk about. Then there are the feminist fathers’ rights advocates mentioned in the Salon article you cited…an article that I just noticed was also written by Cathy Young.
So to sum up, your evidence that feminists are “notably absent” when it comes to advocating for fathers’ rights includes two articles about feminists advocating for fathers’ rights that were written by a feminist who is apparently herself concerned about this issue. You presented deceptively edited quotes from these articles to make it look like they supported your claim, and you still have no explanation or excuse for why you did this. You have also failed to honor your promise about when you’d admit that you were wrong about feminism. You’ve been shown what you asked to be shown, not only by other posters but by your own cites.
Yes. A/C is sexist. Because in professional settings men are required to wear suits and ties. Women often choose to wear skirts and blouses, although they could choose to dress more warmly if they wanted. (Fuck, they could wear wool suits, if they wanted - although, who the hell would do that, if they didn’t have to?) The woman in the video is wearing a sleeveless blouse, and complains about having to take a “jumper” to work (I have not idea what a jumper is - why can’t English people speak English?).
Hospitals take extreme precautions to make sure the right baby goes home with the right mother, and are subject to lawsuits if they fuck it up. They make no effort to make sure the right father goes home with the right baby.
We don’t need to provide evidence for all of our assertions. Certain assertions (true or not) function as common knowledge–it takes a statement of doubt from the other party to make it conversationally necessary to provide evidence, in these cases.
“In China (and several other places throughout history), girl babies were more often killed than boy babies” functions as common knowledge. It doesn’t make sense for you to ask for evidence right now unless you are actually saying you doubt that it’s true.
Do you doubt that it’s true?
If so, that’s fine, I just want to be clear on this.
Why does OP only consider “equal parenting responsibilities” in terms of custody after divorce? Has OP discussed efforts that encourage or allow men to do more parenting, such as paid paternity leaves and changing tables in men’s bathrooms, which have overwhelming support among feminists? Why is OP not concerned that (in 2011) men who live with their children spend about half as much time with them as their mothers? After all, (in 2010) 73% of all children live with their fathers.
I’m glad you and js agree with me. I would think any sane person would.
Unfortunately, The Guardian and Jezebel feminists don’t.
Anyway, I’m curious if you have a response to some questions:
1.) Can you imagine a newspaper like the Guardian publishing a piece asking whether a male attacker was “drunk, frustrated about [his] career, sticking up for [his] sister”?
2.) Can you imagine a popular well-known web-site asserting that a female victim of an assault “must have deserved it, because of the viciousness of the attack”?
3.) What do you think the response would be, if the either the Guardian or a website like Jezebel published those kinds of articles?
By this you mean a single writer at each publication may not agree, right? Not that every single feminist that works at those places feels the same way, right? It’s not clear to me when you’re making sweeping statements and when you’re critiquing a single writer.
For 1 and 2, maybe. I don’t know – there are tons of crappy publications out there that have had articles that have said stupid things.
For 3, I think there would be lots of criticism (just like there seems to be lots of criticism in these cases).
For 4, I imagine he didn’t hit back because he didn’t want to hurt Solange, and he didn’t think he was in enough danger to justify risking hurting her.
Some questions for you:
Do you think it might be possible that there are lots of feminists who worry and advocate against a lot of these things (prison rape and other unfair things) that harm men in patriarchal culture? That your criticisms of feminism may only apply to some feminists and not nearly all? Is it possible that domestic abuse really does disproportionately harm women? Is it possible that far too many young men (from 6% to 1/3rd, depending on the study) in society are okay with rape if it’s not called rape?
I don’t think people expect men to be aggressive or angry. If anything the expectation is the reverse: men are not supposed to be aggressive or angry. If they are, they’re likely to be condemned for it.
I agree that men are not expected to show emotions: or at the very least, be very selective about which emotions to show.
I agree they’re treated worse in prison - and more likely to be put there in the first place.
I agree there’s more social pressure on men to make money.
I agree that a stay at home dad is likely to get at least a little disrespect thrown his way. (Though not enough to stop him, if that’s what he wants to do - and his wife agrees with it.)
“Toughness” is a tricky one. I was a sensitive child, and I learned the hard way the value of being tough. It’s a valuable and important attribute. I would argue - and this of course is just my opinion - that most men want to be tough. They see it as a strength, not a weakness.
Anyway, out of the 6, I agree with 4. Are you sure you’re a feminist?
Why do you keep questioning this? Is it really that hard for you to accept that many feminists have different ideas about what feminism is than you do?
Yes, I’m a feminist. I’m going to trust my own counsel and the counsel of other feminists for what feminism is. Non-feminists telling feminists what feminism is about is going to be as effective as non-Muslims telling Muslims what Islam is about.
While we’re all waiting for **LinusK **to acknowledge how he’s misrepresented his sources, I thought I’d take a look at one of the articles he quoted from in an attempt to change the subject.
(Bolding is LinusK’s.)
First of all, the author of this piece is another feminist journalist, Hanna Rosin. And she’s not just any feminist, she’s one of the feminists who participated in the “Are Men Obsolete?” debate that LinusKclaimed that someone else had linked to in this thread when actually he was the one to link to it in a different thread. (Rosin was on the “pro” side.) Given what a big impression this debate made on him, it’s strange that LinusK apparently did not recognize Rosin’s name or realize that she’s a feminist.
In the quoted passage above, LinusK’s use of ellipses allows him to skip over most reference to Lara Stemple, who is pretty prominent in the original article. She is director of the UCLA Health and Human Rights Law Project, and has done a lot of work on prison rape and sexual victimization of men. I don’t know if Stemple identifies as a feminist, but she did publish a piece titled “HBO’s Oz and the Fight Against Prison Rape” in a book titled Third Wave Feminism and Television. But to be fair, LinusK’s selected quotes do at least mention Stemple’s name, which is more than he did for Karen DeCrow when quoting from an article that was a memorial piece about DeCrow.
However, LinusK did not quote the sentence immediately before the one beginning “The final outrage in Stemple and Meyer’s paper…”, which is odd since this sentence deals directly with his stated topic, the question of how much sexual assault is committed by women:
The linked study is behind a paywall, but I have access to the full text and I’ll quote from it here:
Now, the point both Rosin and Weiss are making is that a non-negligible number of sexual assaults are committed by women, and that this challenges stereotypes about sexual assault. Perhaps this was LinusK’s point as well – it’s difficult to tell, since (as usual) he said very little before posting a lengthy quote copied from somewhere else. But if his point was just that some significant number of sexual assaults are committed by women – something I don’t think anyone here has denied – why didn’t he include this number? Why did he instead choose to quote (and bold!) the passage about how a large majority of sexual assaults reported by inmates in juvenile detention facilities involved female staff members? It sure looks to me like this was selective quoting intended to give the impression that women are at least as likely to commit sexual assault as men, when the article actually only says this of some specific types of sexual assault. According to the cited Weiss study, most sexual assaults in general are committed by men, with men making up the vast majority of assailants when the victim is female and a small majority when the victim is male.
If LinusK bothers to respond to this post at all then I suspect it will consist mostly of a bunch of quotes from somewhere else with some brief claim that he was just providing evidence that women do commit sexual assault. Perhaps that was truly his intention, although personally I doubt it. But I have an even stronger suspicion that he will never acknowledge that his own cite is also evidence that feminists such as Hanna Rosin do indeed talk about prison rape and other sexual violence against men and are willing to recognize that women commit sexual assault.
Depends on what you mean by “lots”. What I see is slutwalks and shirtgate and feminists who conflate the bad behavior of a minority of men with men in general - while simultaneously ignoring or even suppressing evidence of women behaving badly. The agenda seems to be “women are good - men are bad.”
Now it’s entirely possible that part of what I see is filtered through the media. Obviously, thousands of women slutwalking is going to get more media attention than however many feminists are advocating against prison rape - and I agree some feminists are advocating against it. Something I didn’t know when I started this thread. (Although some of them seem to think prison rape has something to do with “patriarchy” - which is bullshit. It happens because nobody gives a shit about men who are in prison.)
I certainly agree that not all criticisms I’ve made apply to all feminists. The problem is that feminism is a movement that refuses to agree about what they agree about. If you want to say that feminism is about whatever anyone who calls him/herself a feminist says it’s about, that’s fine. But you shouldn’t expect that to stop people from calling out feminists who claim to be about equality, when they’re not. Or to feminists who are privilege-blind when it comes to their own privileges, but are constantly on the look-out for any little thing to complain about. Or to feminists who are openly hostile towards men, but hyper-sensitive about any criticism of women. Or to feminists who immediately react to any criticism of feminism with the shameful practice of labeling critics as people “who can’t get laid.” Blah blah blah. I’ve already been over this a thousand times. Anyway, the point is the fact that some feminists are not like that is not a reason to not criticize feminist who are.
What I’ve said is that men and women are approximately equally likely to engage in domestic violence. In the minority of cases that result in severe injury, women are more likely to be injured than men.
I’ve also said, I think, that one of the reasons women hit men, is that they think they can get away with it: the man won’t hit back, the police won’t come, and if they do come, they probably won’t arrest her.
If there was one single thing that would reduce domestic violence, it would be to teach women it’s not ok to hit a man. It’s not funny, it’s not “empowering”: it’s just violent and abusive.
I think any percent of men being OK with rape is too many.
Having said that, I think the 1/3 number is bogus, and even the 6-7% studies were problematic. At least one question was poorly worded, and it was the one that put 80% of them in there.
Similarly any number of people willing to commit any serious crime is too many.
Actually, I was being facetious. I realize it doesn’t translate well, and maybe it was just a bad joke. I probably should have put a after it.
In truth, you’re the most reasonable, and least caustic feminist in the thread - which is why I make a special effort to respond to your posts.
As far as Muslims are concerned, I think it’s perfectly legitimate to criticize Islam (or Christianity, or Scientology, or whatever). That’s not what this thread is about. But I don’t think you have to be a Muslim to criticize Islam, or a Scientologist to criticize Scientology. Furthermore, I’d argue that there are plenty of self-identified Christians who don’t know much about Christianity: “If you think the Pope is too liberal, wait til you meet Jesus.” The difference is there’s a central text for Christianity. There’s no central text for feminism.
Feel free to criticize feminism, or specific aspects of feminism. But that’s not the only thing you’re doing – you’re also trying to tell me what feminism is. I’m not going to just accept that your version of feminism is more accurate than mine. I already know that there are feminists I disagree with on certain issues. That doesn’t mean that their feminism is more true or pure than mine, it just means that we might disagree on the best way to achieve equal treatment by law and by society for women and men.
As far as the broader thread, you’d get very little push-back if you took individual statements from individual people and challenged those assertions without attributing them to feminism as a whole. If you say “this person said this, and I think that is wrong/stupid/false/evil because xyz”, then that might be a good discussion. But you’re saying (or at least this is how I’m understanding you) “this person said this, and this person identifies as a feminist, therefore feminism is wrong/stupid/false/evil…”. That’s not logical, and not rational.
All this chitter-chatter about DV, may I ask, what does it matter (to anyone purportedly interested in equality) what genitalia anybody (attacker, mutual attacker, or pacific victim) has?
‘This study’, ‘that survey’, as if any incident of intimate partner violence wasn’t always appalling for any victim - man, woman, straight, gay, trans, cis.
Who is it who is concerned with the genitalia of the attacker or the presumed social role of the victim? Is it not possible to stand against D.V., as an appalling thing, regardless of gender? It doesn’t strike me as an argument for any kind of equality to concentrate on which gender does it most. Nobody investigates which race or sexual orientation does it most (we’d soon spot you as a bigot if you tried that!). We know that neither gender does it exclusively, so we also know that it’s not a function of biological gender or even of social expectation of gender roles (except insofar as it’s considerably more difficult for a man to report, or be believed, or receive empathy).
So what are you bigots up to, when you insist it’s something men do to women? Whoops, answered my own question there…
In some places there needs to be additional resources in order to provide shelters for male victims of domestic violence AND the notion that real men can’t be victims domestic violence must be fought against as pernicious sexism.
I guess the CDC and the Bureau of Justice are bigoted then, because that information is in their reports, as well as gender. Many other studies include it as well. The links have been posted on this thread more than once.
Well, as pointless as it may be to ‘try again’ to get a point across to a feminist, why do you insist on introducing gender to a situation that applies equally appallingly to any individual regardless of their genitalia or the genitalia of their attacker (DV occurs in lesbian relationships)?
In case you’ve a) forgotten, b) never notice or c) don’t care, I’m not American (amazing how often that happens on the world wide intertubes…), so I can’t begin to answer for the CDC and the BofJ - no, I can begin to answer: most men are the opposite of misogynists. We exist in a gynocentric, gynophilic culture. We all are trained to respond to the commanding voice of our mother (oh, you should have seen the face on the misandrist who tried that on me once). Feminists tell the CDC and the BJ (fnar!) that gender matters, and off they go.
But you tell me (although you didn’t at your first opportunity), if it isn’t only men, and if it’s equally appalling whoever it happens to, why is gender a concern for feminists discussing DV?
