I’m not sure why it should be the job of feminists to see more women prosecuted or more men report domestic violence against them. Should more women be prosecuted - well, if they are committing crimes, yes. I don’t know much about it. I know that when a women does get prosecuted for a violent crime, you don’t get many feminists stating she SHOULDN’T be prosecuted or declaring her innocence without evidence. I didn’t hear a lot of my feminist friends even expressing an opinion on Jodi Arais, for example. Should men report domestic violence against them, yep. But it isn’t my job as a feminist to make out posters to that effect (hell, I don’t make posters about the mainstream feminist issues I care about). The issues feminists work on are the ones that they feel oppress women, you aren’t going to hear them, as a single voice, talk about the issues that oppress men (hell, we can’t talk as a single voice about anything). Women don’t have the oppression issue that black men have in this country, of the justice system being set up against them, so the justice system, as it pertains to criminal prosecution, is really not on the radar for most of them.
As to men doing riskier jobs, yep. Currently women are trying very hard to make the elite corps in the Army and Marines - and they are finding it very difficult to pass the physical requirements to do so. Women have had the same problem with being fireman. If few women want to take on these roles, and the physical restrictions are such that very few of THOSE will pass, then you’ll get very few women in dangerous jobs. Some feminists would like to see standards lowered. I’d like a fireman who can carry my 230 husband out of a burning house. If the standards are part of a valid requirement, they need to be kept, but it is worthwhile to say “why do we have this requirement.” A ten mile run with a sixty pound pack sounds like something an Army ranger might need to do to do her job. Women have been working to get into male dominated roles for years, and have had significant barriers - not only physical barriers, but being a woman on a construction site can be very discouraging. I spent a good twenty years of my career in a male dominated world (a relatively safe one) and got raped at work by a coworker.
Do you have any examples? I mean, I can easily find examples of the kind of cartoonishly unpleasant feminists that effortlessly live up to LinusK’s “straw man fantasy” in mainstream publications. Just say the word and I could probably dig up 50 in an hour. Could you show us some reasonable ones to counterbalance this?
And is a patchwork of fringe feminists. You aren’t likely to find any one feminist who espouses all of them.
But feminism does empower women (and men!) to think for themselves. We don’t all believe the same thing. I know pro-life feminists and stay at home mom feminists.
The other thing is a persons individual feminism will likely evolve over time. I have a fifteen year old daughter who is a strident idealistic naive fifteen year old feminist - interested in the topics that concern her. That’s different that my “I’ve been a feminist since the 1980s” flavor of feminism - pragmatic, experienced, and interested in a different set of issues. No one has to tell me not to get drunk with a stranger, my experience has taught me its stupid even to work late because I know better than to be in a near empty office with a man (and do you think that may have caused issues in my career?). But her feminism reminds me of mine 25 years ago.
I don’t need examples of the nuts – I know there are nuts and nutty ideas. Here are some examples of feminists and feminism that I think are much more representative of feminists and feminism in the real world than the OP’s straw men:
I’d also like to add Ozy of Thing of Things, Cliff of Pervocracy to the rolls of vocally reasonable feminists. Hell, Ozy ran for a while a a blog called No, Seriously, What About the Menz?, which covered areas of gender equality which affect men and which weren’t getting a lot of air time in the broader feminist movement.
And then there’s that famous Jezebel article on domestic abuse. To quote:
To claim that Jezebel and anyone who reads it are nuts would not be particularly wrong, in my opinion, but it’s also a very widely-read feminist publication.
Again, I think you really do need to do the surveys and the legwork if you want to talk about who feminists are in a statistical sense. On the other hand…do we need to? Whether or not feminists are 5% nuts or 95% nuts has absolutely no bearing on whether any given feminist policy is a good idea or not. Can’t we just address the policies in isolation?
No, he is wrong. “Women should be able to punch men without consequences” is not anywhere on any feminist’s agenda, nor is it a female-friendly stance.
I don’t think anyone is arguing women aren’t as smart as men on average. Women’s intelligence (and I’d suspect many other traits) has a lower standard deviation though, so there are fewer very smart (and very low-IQ) women then there are very smart men. If you’re selecting a subset of very smart people, it’s almost inevitably going to have more men than women.
Women are clearly less capable than men at some tasks (anything requiring brute physical strength, for example), and more capable at others.
Sorry about that. People are very used to thinking of patriarchy in terms of “something that oppresses women”. So trying to describe the true nature of patriarchy is difficult. This is the elevator version: patriarchy is about putting women first: particularly women’s lives, but also their fears and concerns. The corollary is that men are disposable, particularly men without wives or children.
Feminism has been successful, not in spite of patriarchy, but because of it.
Yes.
No, not unless you mean physically.
Not how I’d put it, but sure.
Those are religions.
Feminism is a political movement.
A fairer comparison would be to liberalism or conservatism.
The same could be said of Democrats or Republicans. It doesn’t insulate them from criticism.
One of the arguments I’m specifically making is that feminism is not about equality.
This is kind of off-topic, but I’d argue that the decline of single-income families is the result of specific economic policies that are designed to benefit the rich, at the expense of people who have to work.
I’d also argue that having a parent at home is generally a good thing for children, and it would be awesome if half the time that parent was the father.
That’s not going to happen though. We like to think we’re consciously in control of ourselves and our decisions. The truth is most what goes on in our brains happens at a subconscious level. We’re not really in control of, for example, what attracts us.
Women have spent the last several million years looking for the strongest, most successful, highest-ranking male they could find. They’re not going to suddenly start finding themselves attracted to house-husbands.
Moreover, working so your husband could stay home and take care of the kids would be pretty fucking stupid.
Consider this: suppose you did go out and work every single day, to support a man and your children.
Then something happens. He changes his mind, finds someone else, whatever.
The next thing you know, he has the house, the children, and half the stuff you’ve worked for. Meanwhile you’re seeing your children every other weekend, paying child support, and desperately clinging to your job so you don’t go to jail for getting behind on your child support.
Knowing the possible consequences, you’d have to be pretty stupid to willing enter that deal, wouldn’t you?
I have a daughter too. One I’d take a bullet for, in a heartbeat. I teach her, for example, to be careful of cars. Cars kill roughly 40,000 people every year in the US.
But I think you’re falling for media-induced hype about stranger-danger.
In a quick google search, I wasn’t able to find a reliable figure for the actual number of children abducted by strangers. I was about to find this, however:
There are a vast number of things that can be dangerous to children: swimming pools, bathtubs, spiders, lightening storms, heart attacks… but you have to put things in perspective.
I would humble suggest that teaching your daughter to be mindlessly scared of all men, is perhaps, counter-productive.
Got it. I thought you were saying it’s funny that he’s right about one thing–that differential treatment is patriarchal. He just goes in a bizarre direction with this idea.
Well, I’d need a cite that says that breast cancer kills women when they’re “fairly young”. I actually don’t believe that’s true. There’s a lot of controversy about breast cancer, the actual benefits of mammography (some argue it causes more harm than good, for women under 40 or 50), and how, when and whether it should be treated.
There’s some pretty good evidence that the harder you look, the more likely you’re going to find “cancerous” or “pre-cancerous” cells, that would never actually develop into cancer, if left alone, but which nevertheless lead to dangerous and debilitating treatments, which riskier than the cells themselves. Basically: it’s the aggressive cancers you need to worry about, not the non-aggressive ones. Most of us - perhaps all of us - have cancerous or pre-cancerous cells somewhere in our bodies. If you have a cancer that’s going to kill you (maybe) when you’re 110, it’s not a cancer you need to worry about. It’s certainly not a cancer you need to have parts of your body sliced off for, or to undergo chemotherapy.
Anyway, the thread’s not really about that, and I’m not trying to derail my own thread.
I do want to say though, out of the interest of clarity, that I’m anti-breast cancer. I’m pro-breast cancer research, and I don’t want any woman to die from breast cancer.
The reason I brought it up was not because I’m pro-breast cancer, but simply as an example of the way that society pays special attention to dangers that especially effect women.
Deary IJ, Irwing P, Der G, Bates, TC. 2007. “Brother–sister differences in the g factor in intelligence: Analysis of full, opposite-sex siblings from the NLSY1979”. Intelligence 35 (5): 451–6.
How do you arrive at this? How are you determining what is and is not an example of patriarchy, and how are you coming to this conclusion concerning what patriarchy is about?
Pretty literally, I’m asking you, “what are you talking about?” I recognize the word your using, but I don’t know what you mean by it. If you are saying you mean the same thing feminists mean by it, then I’d need you to explain what you think feminists mean by it at least. And if you don’t intend to mean the same thing as they, then what do you mean, and why is it okay to use this word in a different sense than the established one in a conversation like this?
Dude, we have lots of examples of what life without feminism looks like-- and it sucks. I lived for a bit in a patriarchal West African village. Girls got married off at 12 against their will. Unmarried women had no way to support themselves besides prostitution or begging. Women couldn’t leave the house unaccompanied. It sucked.
Then I lived in China, where my students witnessed newborn girls being drowned.
Or the U.S., where we couldn’t vote (!!!) until 1920. So please, keep telling me about how the patriarchy is just for our benefit. That we get murdered, have our sex organs cut off, imprisoned, denied suffrage, cut out of the economy, etc. because the patriarchy is just trying to give us a hug.
Now let’s look at the countries that suck the least. What do they have in common? Especially compared to the countries that suck the most? Do you really not see a coronation?
It’s funny, because I’m about to do exactly that- enter a situation where my husband probably won’t work, and where he would likely get the children and at least half the house is a contested divorce.
Of course there is some risk. But if God forbid I end up in a divorce, I know my daughter is in good hands and frankly child support would be the least of my worries, especially considering the time+expenses I put in to raising my kid now. The child support formula here doesn’t even pay for half of her day care-- it’s crazy.
(Also-- joint custody is the norm in the vast majority of states. The scenario you describe is not likely to happen unless it’s voluntarily entered in to.)
I’ve heard this before, but I’m not convinced that it tells us anything about any differences between the sexes (perhaps largely because I’m unconvinced that IQ tests are unbiased and objective measures of intelligence).
I wanted to address the bolded part, because I want to explicitly point out to you that men are also faced with murder and rape and thwarted lives. According to the FBI, for example, 77.4% of murder victims were men. Men are also raped (although reliable figures are hard to come by, for various reasons), and there are certainly vast numbers of men leading “thwarted lives”. Most men lead lives of quiet desperation. -Henry David Thoreau.
If you want to ignore “worst aspects” of feminism as long as crime and thwarted lives exist, you’ll be ignoring them forever. Because crime and thwarted lives will always exist.
This also means that there are many more low iq and socially dysfunctional men than women. No call for equality of outcomes in this area by feminists. Clearly, we need to put more women in jail.
Men are much more likely to be murdered than women, and much more likely to be killed or injured on the job. Again, no calls for equality on this front.