A hollow pretense, at this point.
The one who issues the challenge forgoes the right to choose weapons.
I’m don’t know if you’re very dishonest or haven’t been reading the thread. The references to literature were to prove that skimmington wasn’t some obscure historical thing no-one knew about. The mention of the “phenomenon” in the first place was in the context of showing the existence of a history of violence against men being more common and socially acceptable than that against women. No-one seems to have quibbled with any of the other examples, but they did with this which is why it has been mentioned more than in passing.
Sure, there was plenty of violence against men. But there’s an enormous history of oppression, repression, including the use of violence, against women due to their gender. For most of history, and through most of the globe, husbands were allowed (and often expected) to beat their wives. Husbands were allowed to rape their wives. Rape victims were often blamed for their rape, or even forced to marry their rapists.
And for most of history, and through most of the globe, these policies and practices were executed, enforced, and tolerated by leaders who were mostly male.
This doesn’t mean men are bad, or women are better than men, or men are guilty. Those three things are not true. But for most of history, women did not have the same agency and ability to take full part in society and the economy, while men did. Both genders had traditional assigned roles, but the female roles included subservience to men in nearly all cases.
In short, men have been oppressed, repressed, and persecuted, but nowhere near to the degree that women have been.
You would get somewhere with me if you had either evidence or logic on your side.
I gave evidence of the veracity of my claims regarding skimmington. You gave nothing.
And really, what are they teaching you people in school these days if you’ve never heard of Jonathan Swift or Thomas Hardy?
Yes, because I am the head of Womens’ Aid. And/or the Home Secretary.
Yes it is.
Did not God curse man to toil in the fields and live by the sweat of his brow? If you are so servile as to lick the boot of your oppressor, that’s not relevant.
A pussy, then.
It’s only a contradiction if you think I’m presenting myself as a feminist, and if you think the slur “dick” implies masculinity in the same way “pussy” implies a lack thereof. Neither of these things is true.
I’ve seen it argued that rape isn’t a violent crime because its victims may not be hit or otherwise battered. This is bullshit, of course. So is your contention that breaking into a man’s house and dragging him away then tying him to a horse isn’t brutal.
You know, rape is really all about the matriarchy we live in. Women are put up on a pedestal as the ultimate aim of a man’s life, and so the violent use their violence to obtain that aim. If only, as a society, we valued men more and women less.
You might think that’s a stupid argument, and that’s because it is. It’s also your argument.
Why would I believe that? Because that’s what the evidence shows? Historical accounts are quite clear about this, the man was the target. Occasionally the woman would be taken along, sometimes the next door neighbours would be taken, in one of the cases I cited the neighbour was taken because the man they were after had escaped.
You have shown quite clearly that you prefer your prejudices and fantasies to the evidence-based truth, but the truth is still there.
You haven’t called out any bullshit, but you have continuously pretended that the true and real victims of violence committed against men are women. Some people always like the pretend that’s the case, like Hillary Clinton’s infamous statement that women are the real victims of war because their menfolk are dead. In many ways it’s the ultimate in gender prejudice and sterotyping.
The claim made was that death threats against women are more to be feared than those against women because there is a history of cultural violence against women. I gave various examples of criminal, state and cultural violence against women to debunk that claim. No defence of that claim was offered, rather you chose to focus on a wholly misguided effort to fir the skimmington, an example of violence against men solely because they were men who didn’t conform and for which there is no female parallel, was somehow really and truly a victimisation of women and entrenchment of male privilege.
If you’d like to have a discussion about the relative position of men and women, and by extension the overwhelming privilege women have and the biases under which men labour, then start a thread about it. Bricker is wrong about that, and from what I can tell about quite a few other things.
I think a truer interpretation is that on average and overall, death threats made by men, whether against men or against women, tend to be on the whole a more realistic cause for concern than death threats made by women.
And that’s simply because, on average and overall, women have a much lower incidence of actually committing violent acts than men do.
I’m certainly not trying to say that no women commit violence or that having lower rates of violent acts somehow makes women “better” than men in any way. We’re all to some extent the products of historically sexist societies with oppressive gender expectations for both men and women. And it just so happens that the legacy of these gender expectations is that men are “supposed” to be autonomous and dominant and forceful in their personal/family lives, while women are “supposed” to be dependent and acquiescent and gentle.
That’s pretty much a societal recipe for making men on average and overall more likely to commit violence than women. It also means that male-on-female aggression, at least in certain contexts like asserting matrimonial control of one’s wife, is socially condoned in ways that general male-on-male aggression is not.
No examples of women being victims of violence because they are women come to mind. Could you offer some?
The cite I offered above regarding the skimmington also goes into detail over legal efforts to penalise spousal abuse of women, going back at least to the sixteenth century. Even Blackstone, the seventeenth century legal authority, only mentions the legal ability to beat ones wife as something that ended so long ago that he can’t tell you when or give you any examples of its legality. He also explains that it was due to men being legally responsible for their wife’s crimes, and as late as the nineteenth century a man was held responsible for some of his wife’s offences, and all of her debts, without any claim on her property or any legal recourse.
As for rape, yes spousal rape was once not illegal. Rape of men as well as women. It’s different, I’m sure you’ll think, but the main difference to me is that under my country’s law the rape of men by women is still not recognised, whereas rape of women by their husbands has long been illegal. It has certainly always been illegal in England for a woman or man to be forced to marry, at least since the Anglo-Saxon period. Not to say it didn’t happen, but it was hardly something considered legally or culturally acceptable.
Had they been enforced by women, would that have made them right? Why are so many feminists so obsessed with the top of society?
No, they didn’t. Women and men both had their roles, and at some times the roles of some women involved subservience. Not most women, as most men and women were at the bottom of society and had to struggle to survive with women being somewhat more likely to survive endemic violence and poverty. At the top things were different but, for example, Anglo-Saxon abbeys were always run by a woman.
Women have been repressed for being women, such as once upon a time being forbidden from becoming doctors and members of the other professions. Women have never for a day in any English-speaking country been oppressed or persecuted for being women, and less often and less harshly for other reasons than have men.
A valid point with only two utterly fatal flaws:
- we are talking about death threats on the internet which can’t be traced to an individual with a verifiable sex, hence we don’t know if they’re male or female
- while women commit less murders, they are also much less likely to be victims of murders, or in other words on average and overall, women have a much lower incidence of actually suffering violent acts than men do.[
It is, certainly, much less likely. Both men and women are much more likely to commit acts of violence against men than against women. Women are also much more likely to commit their acts of violence against people close to them, and any claim that men are substantially more likely to commit intimate partner violence, aka domestic violence, is demonstrably false.
It’s not clear what you mean by “oppressed or persecuted for being women”. If you mean that simply being female has never been a crime in and of itself, that’s true. But, of course, neither has simply being male.
If you mean that women have never been oppressed or persecuted for doing things that men have been allowed to do with impunity, or that women have never been punished more harshly than men for committing the same transgressions, that’s not true. During the women’s suffrage movement, for example, women (not just lawbreaking militant “suffragettes” but peaceful gatherings as well) were not only reviled but physically assaulted simply for seeking the right to vote, something that men took for granted.
And of course, women have always been and still are frequently victims of rape simply as a consequence of their being women in a situation where a man would have been safe (e.g., in a deserted parking lot). That doesn’t mean that men never get raped, of course, or that women never commit rape. But it is definitely an example of oppression suffered primarily by women simply because they’re women.
That sort of dodges the point that people who are actually known to have made death threats—i.e., legally convicted of such offenses—are overwhelmingly male. It’s a bit weak to suggest that while known real-life death-threateners are primarily male, online death-threateners who self-identify as male might secretly be primarily female.
[QUOTE=blindboyard]
- while women commit less murders, they are also much less likely to be victims of murders, or in other words on average and overall, women have a much lower incidence of actually suffering violent acts than men do.
[/quote]
But not when you take into account the victims’ own violent activity. Yes, overall men are more likely to be murdered, because most of the people active in high-violence environments (gang wars, bar fights, etc.) are men.
If we consider people who suffer violent acts without themselves committing violent acts, they are much more likely to be female than male. Which is why, among law-abiding peaceable people, women on average have greater cause for fearing violence than men do.
Husbands beating their wives.
And yet, somehow, wife-beating was incredibly common well after this time period.
Through much of the world marital rape has only recently been criminalized or is still legal.
And yet it happened quite a bit… so the authorities and the cultures at large must have accepted it at least some of the time.
We feminists are not obsessed with anything but equality – and I’m simply stating facts. I guess you find these facts uncomfortable.
This is just laughably false. Most men and women were at the bottom of society, true, but most of these women were subservient to their husbands.
So no woman in any English speaking country has been oppressed or persecuted for being a woman? That’s such a ridiculous claim it deserves nothing but mockery. Ha ha ha – look at the silly fool making such silly claims.
reads thread
sees blindboyard has posted a whole bunch but is on ignore
Wait, why do I have this guy on ignore again?
views posts
Oh, right! What a ballbag.
I would have gone with female genital mutilation myself. Bit more dramatic, and by definition unisex.
Female genital mutilation is unisex, and also extremely illegal in every western country, and most other countries. Possibly all other countries. It has only been regularly practiced, to the best of my knowledge, by a small part of the Muslim population of East Africa, and emigrants therefrom. Those areas also circumcise their male children. You might say the practice is worse for girls, which is true, but then far more boys are effected, about a hundred times as many in the world as a whole.
So no, female genital mutilation is not a form of violence carried out against women just for being women, not oppression of women. It is, of course, reprehensible. And, indeed, dramatic.
Was it you previously pointing out that men have been the majority of rulers enforcing sexist policies? Because FGM is overwhelmingly carried out by women. I don’t think that’s relevant, of course, any more than having a male prime minister proves that men are treated fairly now.
A crime in the sense of contravening and act of the legislature, no. On the other hand it is regularly the case that armed forces will specifically target male populations for extermination. Take the Obama government’s definition of an enemy combatant as any military age male, for example. Hence, in Fallujah, women and children below something like ten years old were allowed to leave. Men trying to leave were turned back, and then the bombing started.
In England, at the very least, this is untrue. Men hard gain the right to vote only through long and dangerous struggle, for example during the Reform Riots when cavalry units were sent to massacre protestors clamouring for the Great Reform Act of 1832, which extended the right to vote from 2% of the adult male population (and a handful of very rich women, as it was a property qualification) to 3% of the adult male population (along with a few other reforms to rotten boroughs and suchlike, and the banning of women voting). The total time in which working-class men could vote and working-class women couldn’t was ten years. The time in which all men could vote and no women could was zero years. The suffragattes also ran a terrorist campaign against the state, destroying prominent houses and buildings, including the home of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and yet the worst punishment they got was imprisonment and, for those on hunger strike, force feeding. Cavalry units hacking them to death were in short supply.
Of course, mention of most of this is left out of most school history classes.
No, it’s not. Women are more likely to be raped, but then men are more likely to be victim of all other violence crimes. I doubt you would present that as evidence of men being oppressed. As for your deserted car park, as I’m sure you’re aware by far the rarest type of rape (most being rapes by people known to the victim, very very few rapes taking place outdoors), a man walking through it would be less likely to be raped, but more likely to be mugged, murdered or assaulted. Not, in other words, “safe”.
But in any case, we’re meant to be talking about oppression, things done by society. So far you have only come up with things that are illegal, which demonstrates a lack of acceptance by society.
I’ve got no idea who is more likely to be convicted of making death threats. You may well be right that men are more likely both to be convicted and to make anonymous threats on the internet. It can’t, however, be shown to be the case. It therefore has no probative or evidentiary value.
This is an outright lie. I fully expect your next thread to be “niggers, they need shootin’”, given your propensity for victim-blaming.
Counterpoint: Wives beating their husbands. And, because I am inclusive, homosexual intimate partner violence too. Hence, it does not happen to people because those people are women.
And still is today. As is husband-beating. And bank robbing. And shop-lifting. The illegality is a sign that it is not accepted by society, which is making an effort to stamp it out. That effort has never, to the best of my knowledge, even once been successful.
For example in England, where spousal rape is legal if the victim is male.
You will need to provide evidence if you want me to think that forced marriage in England happened “quite a bit” in historic times.
More irrelevant. Please do feel free to respond to the point I made to Kobal, about FGM, a quite reprehensible practice performed on young girls in some parts of the world and exclusively carried out by women.
The practice of skimmington shows otherwise, as does the history of efforts to stop violence against women by their husbands. Rather, there were always numerous legal safeguards in place to protect women from their husbands, but not the other way around. For example it was illegal for a woman to give any real property she owned to her husband, under the English common law, in case he had coerced her into it.
And yet notice the paucity of evidence to contradict my “silly claims”. Women have been persecuted for other things, although to a much lesser degree than men, and have no doubt been persecuted as individuals, but always despite their femaleness rather than because of it. Femininity has always been a shield against violence and oppression.
It happens to some people because they’re women. Some people hate women, and do violence because they hate women. This is a thing that has happened with humans in our history.
For much of our history, wife-beating was not illegal. And wife-beating is and was far more common than husband-beating.
This is a bad thing, but spousal rape is and has been much more commonly for female victims.
You’re not interested in evidence, so I see no reason too.
Many women take part in violence towards women, because they are women. This has happened through much of history, unfortunately. For the women who suffered FGM, it happened to them because they were women.
No it doesn’t – the practice of skimmington shows that society made efforts, often violent ones, to reiterate that men were supposed to dominate their women. Even your own cites show this.
These numerous legal safeguards existed, when they did (and often they didn’t) because women needed far more protection then men did.
Your claims are self-evidently silly – as silly as saying no one has ever been oppressed or persecuted for being black, or gay. Jack the Ripper and Ted Bundy did violence to women because they were women.
And considering that women are far, far more likely to be murdered or assaulted by men than the reverse, your last statement is just laughably false.
You have some real reading comprehension problems. I certainly am not suggesting that it’s okay, much less desirable, for men to be victims of violence, even in violence-intensive environments. Nor do I think that even men engaged in violence should be blamed for violence committed against them.
But the fact is that people who are victims of violence while not engaged in violent activities are more likely to be women than men. To lump all the different contexts together and call them “being a victim of violence” is to some extent mixing apples and oranges.
I’m just going to leave that there, in case anybody missed Peak Absurdity.
You were excusing the violence against men and minimising it by pretending that those men who are victims of violence are mostly asking for it. i suppose that’s why boys are more likely to be beaten by their parents, all those gang-fights they get involved in.
Your “fact” is a lie.
Ballbags are actually useful.
Nope.
I don’t “excuse” violence against men under any circumstances. I just don’t go along with your obscurantist attempt to hide the fact that it’s difference in circumstances that accounts for a lot of the difference in numbers of male victims of violence vs. female victims of violence.
That doesn’t mean for an instant that the tragedy of violence against men should be “minimized” or that its victims are somehow “asking for it”. It does mean, however, that combining apples and oranges can be misleading.