So says the man with ample leisure time to spend on the Internet complaining about such important and timely issues as how others do not share his outrage over the ending of Titanic.
There’s many things I don’t understand about LinusK’s arguments – chiefly the straw-man assertions about feminists. But it’s also incoherent in other ways, at least to me: for example, I think he’s claiming that men and women really are intrinsically biologically different in many ways that at least partially explains some statistical differences – like men tend to be stronger and more aggressive (according to him), so that might explain why they may be more representative in military roles and other occupations, and why they’re more likely to be involved in violence. But then at the same time he’s complaining that feminists aren’t paying attention to the differences in murder stats, or crime stats, or stuff like that… and I don’t get how he can assert the first and complain about the second. If women really are treated unfairly in many ways, it doesn’t necessarily logically follow that the fact that men are more likely to be murdered is due to some sexist and anti-male bias in society.
Have you ever been to Eastern Europe, LinusK? For most of the 4 decades (and nearly 7 for the case of the USSR proper), women were the minority frequently shuttled into the crappy dangerous jobs. When WWII broke out, they sometimes found themselves on the front lines in some of the crappy positions. The Night Witches (the most famous all-female group of bombers) flew crappy planes (the navigators sometimes had to climb out on the wings and release bombs manually) precisely because they were women and considered expendable. Better planes were given to male pilots. You know what, the women did all these crappy, dangerous jobs quite well and frequently with less bitching then the men.
My favorite part is saying that feminists are trying to start a war with men, while he sits around and says nasty things about women. Because apparently we can’t read what he’s writing or something.
I’m sorry all those women were so mean to you, LinusK. Can you show us on the doll where they didn’t touch you?
Actually, many feminists like myself have been saying for years we need to educate (actually retrain is probably a better word) men about not doing stupid stuff that makes them prime victims for murder and on-the-job death injury. Part of the problem that causes such statistics is that boys are often socialized to take risks, lots of risk, or they are perceived as “not being real men”. Girls are told to think twice and socialized to always consider risk. And quite frankly, calculating risk is something that is engrained in our everyday lives once it becomes obvious who easily we can be victimized. Oh, and which gender is the most likely victimizer? The one with the Y chromosome.
Well, I don’t think it makes sense to say “Oh, let’s try to make sure women are killed equally with men!” If anyone is pushing for that, they are fucking idiots.
But I’ve seen plenty of people trying to make jobs safer, trying to open up some jobs (that often tend to be high paying) to more women, and trying to reduce crime. Equality isn’t about making men the default that women must aspire to.
You’ve missed Slithy Trove’s point completely, since it was more or less the same as yours. And he was responding to my earlier statement, and more or less missed my point.
No one (rational) is saying that the only way to equality is to put the other guy down. Or that the murder of men doesn’t matter. My earlier point, which even sven just made much more eloquently, is that feminism has made tremendous difference to the lives of women (I can vote, own property, earn money, decide when and to whom I marry, etc), but there is still work to be done.
And to everyone on the thread who keeps saying that women don’t care about the fact that more men are murdered than men. I think this is in the national dialogue, just not in the way you want. But let’s look at these murders.
since you’re bringing it up, please break it down, with cites. Top 5 causes of “murder”, because I’m guessing we’re going to see crime-related homicide wayyy up there. Same for women. Who’s killing them? Pretty sure high on that list we’re going to see “partner”/significant other.
For example, looking at the FBI cite that LinusK provided, FBI 2010 data you see that 37.5% of female victims were killed by Husbands or boyfriends. No converse stat is provided. Wives and girlfriends may kill men, but not in such staggeringly high percentages.
From the same source, in fact, ~90% of the overall offenders in 2010 were male.
I did spend some time looking through the data. Other than confirming that most murders are committed by men, and that “gangland violence” and “arguments” lead a long lead of lesser crimes that apparently went wrong, it’s hard to pull much more out without downloading Excel files and really playing with it.
So what equality are you looking for? Clearly feminists care, I just think it’s in a way you don’t “hear” or appreciate. I think the conversations that are already occurring involve a reduction in overall crime, and a reduction in man on woman violence. What else do you suggest?
And I can’t help myself. I reply. bangs head on desk I need to print out that “There’s something wrong on the Internet” cartoon for reference at times like this. Must. Be. Strong.
Why not?
IQ correlates pretty well with things like reaction time to stimuli and the ability to filter out visual information from a background, which I don’t think you could plausibly say are culturally loaded.
Do you think a person with an IQ of 100 or one of 130 would make a better biologist? And would a person with an IQ of 130 or one of 145 make a better physicist? If your answer is the latter, in both cases, then IQ clearly measures something of value (that probably is indicative of g.)
His points and his logic are lousy, but I wish we’d get away from the notion that men turn weird and bitter because they aren’t having sex.
I wanted to revisit adaher’s post, because I finally got around to reading the article. It was a great article. It increased my opinion of Hillary Clinton, because she was quoted explicitly saying something I’ve been wanting to hear a politician say for a long time:
Ok, it’s not exactly what I wish she would have said. I wish she would have said: “Achieving full employment is the single best way to both increase the wages and salaries of working people, and to increase the wealth of the United States overall.” And: “Full employment is not some impossible dream, but something that can be easily achieved, so long as the political will to do it is there.” And: “Full employment will help close the wealth gap and reduce poverty, which are among the most important issues facing the USA.”
But you can’t have everything.
Anyway, to get back on point:
There’s really two kinds of work in the United States. There’s the kind of work highly privileged people do, and there’s the kind of work the vast majority of people do.
It is (I would imagine) pretty fun to be a high-powered executive, a member of the board of a rich corporation, a senior partner at a big law firm, a rock star, a federal judge, or a boss at a Wall Street bank.
Then there’s the work that most people do: stocking shelves, manning cash-registers, driving trucks, fixing cars, working on an assembly line, sitting in a cubicle, crunching numbers, construction work, middle-management, waiting tables, preparing food, and all the other things that have to be done to make the country work.
But thing is, no matter how hard any one person works, or how hard everyone works, not everybody gets to be a rock star, a federal judge, or a boss at a Wall Street bank. Somebody still has to pick up the trash.
Which brings me around to the point: if you’re part of the upper-class in the US, the right to work seems like a pretty big fucking deal, because you’re one of the ones who has a good shot at getting one of the good jobs.
If you’re part of working-class, the poor, or the middle-class, not so much. As somebody said up-thread, most of us would quit our jobs in a heart-beat, if we could.
Which brings me to one of the internal divisions within feminism: many of the leaders of feminism came from the upper-class. But the truth is, other than their gender, they had very little in common with women who were not part of their group. So the “right” to work, looks very different, depending on your perspective. For many women, the “right” to work is really a necessity, and one they’d prefer to avoid, if they could. (Well, for that matter, it’s “right” many men would prefer to avoid, if they could.)
So to answer your question, I’ll answer it the same way I did the first time around. Feminism is an incoherent group of people who don’t agree about anything (as feminists keep pointing out, over and over again).
If you’re a woman from the upper-class, the right to work is a feminist issue.
If you’re a woman not from the upper-class, the right not to work is a feminist issue.
Feminism is whatever is best for women, regardless of the issue.
It probably does measure something of value, but I’m unconvinced that it measures this something objectively and without bias.
…so just that we are clear LinusK, this is a witnessing thread, and you don’t intend to debate?
Yeah I’m kind of wondering if he has me on ignore or something…
Right. I know it doesn’t always come through well in text, but that was sarcasm.
The point was that breast cancer gets more attention than other kinds of cancer, not because it’s the worst kind of cancer, but because it mainly affects women.
Actually…me. I’ve long felt that, for women to be truly equal in our society, they must be equally represented in every population. Not only scientists and corporate executives and members of Congress…but also criminals, suicides, and drug addicts.
Obviously, we all want as few as possible of those. But it isn’t right that far more men than women make up those classes. Real equality means participating fully in society, in the bad parts as well as the good. Otherwise, the equality isn’t real, just an idealized “on a pedestal” variety.
Again, no one should commit suicide. But that three or four times as many men (in the U.S.) die from suicide as women do shows that this particular facet of equality is not realized.
What kind of evidence would convince you otherwise?
There’s nothing illogical about their thinking. If he’s married with a child, he WILL keep working because he HAS to.
If she gets married and/or has children, she might quit. Because that may well be an option for her.
Whether that’s fair is another question. Is it?
Everyone is mostly concerned with people’s ability to CHOOSE. Choose to work. Choose to be a homemaker. Choose to be a Missionary in Fiji. Choose to be a hermit on a mountain. Whatever. The important thing is that you get to choose from the full range of options available to you, rather than having it dictated by your plumbing. Man or woman.