This is unusual, I’ve previously heard feminists complain about the “bride-price”, which is in place instead of dowries in some cultures. When the payment is made by the family of the groom the claim is that the girl is being bought, the practice survives in the tradition in the west of the father of the bride paying for the wedding, but when the dowry replaces it the complaint is still that this somehow commoditises women, not that men are being sold. This is the reason for sex-selection abortions in China and India, a boy can be raised for a profit while a girl will make a loss.
And the Iranian girls, I don’t see how FIFA(spit)'s dictat that they should not wear headscarves, the head of FIFA has previously demanded that female players should wear tighter shorts to present more of a spectacle, is less “misogynistic” than the insistence of the Iranian team, or FA, or government or whoever, insisting the opposite.
In fact I don’t think I’ve seen any misogny listed in this thread.
Abortion is a philosophical issue, opposition is no more misogyny than support is a sign that you bare a murderous hatred toward babies.
Female circumcision is a cultural practice like male circumcision in America, it might be more unpleasant in effect but it’s not driven by any hatred of women.
There are places where stoning women for adultery is something that happens, although it’s nowhere common, but in those places men make up the vast majority of those executed, which no-one complains about. The whinging about rape being a “weapon of war” rather distracts from the fact that the main weapon of war is killing. If a village’s women are all raped, the men are probably dead.
Perhaps a better question than why the misogyny would be why all the concern about misogyny, such that any event no matter how far away or long ago can be bent and twisted to fit the paradigm.
First of all compare apples with apples. When you compare women with men in terms of salaries and ONLY compare those in similar companies, graduating from similar college of stature, and time served, etc, you find the differences aren’t great if any. Motherhood and the time off, does make a different.
Corporate culture also explains a lot. I worked for a large hotel company where women routinely complained that they were underpaid. Sorry, it was false. When I showed them, they made excuses. The reason was promotions were largely based on “knowing the right people.” The women who did extra charity work, played golf, put in long night, and sacrificed their lives were right up there with the men in terms of position and pay.
As for abortion, the results come from how you ask a question. NO ONE disputes a woman shouldn’t be allowed to do whatever she wants with her own body. But if that involves harming someone else then it becomes a different question. To some people life IS the moment the egg and sperm unite.
But that’s a separate issue.
As for the Middle East, in many ways they are backward in terms of Western culture, but here’s a shocker, until about 1900, women in Muslim countries were doing BETTER than women in (what is today) Western and Christian countries.
Islam is more than a religion it is a totality of life. Unlike Christianity where you have a “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” you don’t have that separation of church.
As a gay male, I NEVER thought I’d see gay rights come as far as they have. And I’m only 46. 20 years ago, I would have laughed in your face if you told me gay people would come as far as they have, in terms of rights and acceptance.
I am in favor of women having the legal right to abortion but I find the canard that anyone who opposes legal abortion by choice must “hate women”. It’s a juvenile, lame, nasty, irritating argument tactic that’s not even close to true.
I’ve been going through marriage records and came across one from less than a century ago, in New York State, where a 13-year-old girl was marrying a 28-year-old man – with her mother’s signed approval. So it’s not like that sort of thing is something in the far past in the US.
Attitudes on this have changed (try it today and see where it gets you), but it’s been part of human history for centuries.
The dowry is supposed to be in place of an old age pension, if the husband dies.
Do you know what they do in female circumcision? For the most part, women who have been circumcised cannot have orgasms. Ever. In almost all of the FGM procedures, the clitoris is removed. Sometimes the labia are removed as well, and the resulting wound is stitched or otherwise held together until the raw flesh grows together, with only a small hole left for urine and menstrual fluid to escape. When the girl is married, her husband has to CUT HER OPEN in order to have sex with her. FGM is used to make sure that women don’t enjoy sex, because it’s thought that if they don’t enjoy it, they’re less likely to have extramarital sex. A number of girls/women die from this procedure, and more have severe complications from it. Women who have had anything more than just removal of the clitoris usually have a harder time giving birth. Female genital mutilation
NSFW drawings of ladybits illustrating the differences: [spoiler]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FGC_Types.svg[/spoiler] Most women can’t orgasm without that external clitoris…and almost all FGM procedures remove it. Only one type removes the prepuce of the clitoris, and nothing else. Only this type can be considered to be female circumcision. All other types should be called mutilation. If you’re male, would YOU particularly want just about all of your penis removed?
Don’t tell ME that female “circumcision” is like male circumcision. Most circumcised males can still enjoy sex. And there is some health benefit to male circumcision, circumcised men are significantly less likely to carry and transmit HIV, for instance. http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/resources/factsheets/circumcision.htm
Thank you. I am a woman who is against abortion, and not because I hate women. Think about how it would sound if someone said that the only reason someone would support abortion is because they hate children. Those kinds of statements are not productive or true.
One of the reasons I oppose abortion is because I believe abortion can be used against women. There are women out there who have been pressured or forced into abortions they did not want. It’s also a reality that sex-selection abortions occur in which fetuses are aborted because they are female. Is that supposed to be pro-woman?
Yes, and as our history and the existence of the planet’s population clearly proves, mating is quite possible without privileged late 21st-century Western (especially American) feminist ideals. In fact, I’d argue most of our modern civilization only exists because of men trying to impress women by accumulating wealth and resources so they can get laid. If working hard didn’t get you laid or you could get laid just as easily without working then we’d all still be hunter-gatherers living in mud huts fucking all the time. Hell, we wouldn’t even bother hunting because it would be so much work - we’d just fuck ourselves to starvation.
And that dynamic between men and women, which has existed from time immemorial, shapes the nature of gender roles. When that role is essentially (from a man’s point of view) “I provide and you put out”, it tends to create a sense of entitlement - and yes even, dare I say, ownership. I’m not saying it’s right and I sure as hell would never defend rape/abuse/etc. but you said you don’t understand it. Let me take a really wild guess here: are you white, educated, Western, and middle/upper class? (and “middle class” to us of course means being in the top 1% wealthiest of the world’s population - which you are if you make over USD $47k/year)
Of course you can’t understand what it’s like not to sit on that perch of privilege which has so fundamentally shaped your values. Don’t get me wrong, I’m part of it too, but at least I recognize it, and I recognize how it affects my perspective. You are essentially saying “why can’t they just be more like us?” with a level of naïveté akin to saying “let them eat cake”. If you really want to understand it you need to live it - and since obviously that’s not an option - you have to at least make a genuine effort to imagine how your values might be different if you grew up in some filthy crumbling shack in Bumblefuckistan working the fields at 12 and eating nothing but rice (or whatever) for months on end. You’d probably expect your wife to put out too. And seeing as that’s probably one of the few pleasures you’d have in your shitty life, you might just be more controlling of her as well - maybe even so controlling that it would seem barbaric to a rich white guy sipping his latté at a Starbucks somewhere while posting to message boards from his $3000 MacBook Pro.
I’m not arguing for equivalence in degree, but it motivation. The FGM thread in GD a few weeks back was very interesting.
Which would be a reason to conscript them into other parts of the army, nursing, camp cook, logistics, &c., not a reason to leave them at home. Those roles, in short, in which women are already allowed to sign up.
Hmm. Feminism seems to have coincided with a dramatic fall in birthrates. Probably due to the pill. All those “savages” with their FGM and stonings might have discovered an evolutionary advantage.
Just wondering if you’ve considered the inverse, placing a comparable amount of obligation on the shoulders of your Bumblefuckistanian to put forth his genuine effort of imagination?
Years ago, when I was single, I used to participate in message boards devoted to dating and relationships. There was always a subset of guys who constantly posted messages about how awful women were. As far as I could see the problem was that they simply couldn’t get a date.
What is the excuse for misogyny for men who haven’t grown up in some crumbling shack in Bumblefuckistan? Sounds like it wouldn’t be far off from this, actually.
What kind of misogyny are you thinking of, exactly? There are matters of degree, obviously. What goes on in Africa and the Middle East is a lot more severe than what goes on in the U.S. or Europe - but even here where women get to have jobs and such the fundamental dynamic between men and women is still there. There are plenty of kept women out there and others who wish they were kept. My point is that wherever that relationship exists where the roles are divided between provider and baby-maker, the provider is going to expect a greater degree of privilege and control over the other. It’s not an excuse, because I don’t believe there’s ever an excuse to (say) hit a woman. But I think it provides at least some explanation as to motivations, which is what the OP seemed to be looking for.
I sometimes say things that are blatantly misogynist but I also worship my mother and devote everything I have to each of my daughters and their happiness. I can’t stand most females but the same is true for most males as well. That is just the privilege that all of us have now being living in First World countries in the 21st century. However, there are very sound anthropological reasons why women’s and men’s sex role were largely segregated through most of history.
If you want to test your own levels of tolerance and acceptance, try to view these issues through different cultural lenses. The shortest version I can give is that reproductive rights and property rights are incredibly important within all human societies and not in terms in of luxuries, but of basic survival throughout most of history and in many places around the world today. Women tend to be smaller physically so they are less useful for pure manual labor but they are the only ones that can produce babies to continue the lineage. When basic survival for the whole group is at stake, you can’t just let females them wander and be subject to rape or seduction. There have to be strict rules in place so that you know whose child is whose and who is entitled to inheritance and legacy built up over generations no matter how small. It may sound offensive but the main job of females has been to raise healthy children from a known father. Any deviances outside of that were a threat to the family and society.
Those rules are inappropriate in our world today but the circumstances that made that true came along very suddenly. It shouldn’t be tolerated moving into the future it is also a fallacy to think that evil men invented these traditions for no reason at all. It is another fallacy to worship feminine traits or females in general as inherently good or immune to the same types of problems. Now that the opportunities have opened, we find that many females are more than happy to sleep with their students, kill their children because of purely selfish reasons, commit fraud, use their perceived position as an advantage in the courts. That is what real equality is all about.
Misogyny as in actual hate, I don’t see that much. I don’t think the human race would last long and it wouldn’t have developed much past swinging in trees and grunting. Probably not even that far. Humans need each other and want each other, and that’s pretty much it. Unhappy women are a real pain in the ass to be around.
In more recent times I do think a lot of men are threatened by women’s changing traditional roles. Fear of the unknown is a great way to generate hate I guess. OTOH, women aren’t thrilled about changing roles either, and I have never, ever in my life seen a woman happy about making lots of dough to keep her man happy and handsome and make sure he has only the best life.
That is actually a pretty profound quote. I will have to use that sometime. I have seen lots of perversions in my day but never that one. My uncle once told me a slightly different version of that. He said, “the most terrifying thing a woman can see is a man relaxing and happy.”
Wait, what? Those are news stories because they are the extreme. The women I know in real life just lead ordinary lives. They raise children, they go to work, they go shopping – they do whatever anyone would normally do.
But that leads back to a point you made near the beginning of this post. In general, I like people. Both men and women. I get along with people. People have mostly been very good to me in my life. So I don’t get the undercurrent of resentment that I can sense here.
![http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FGC_Types.svg[/spoiler]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FGC_Types.svg%5B/spoiler%5D){kind=link}