Well, I wish that I’d known this yesterday. I thought that I was ENJOYING watching my husband eat crab and steak last night. And I paid for dinner. I don’t care for any sort of shellfish myself, but Bill loves snow crab, and he was perfectly relaxed and happy while he was eating it. I did not find this sight terrifying. He was thoroughly enjoying himself, so much so that it was contagious.
Just curious if I’m the only one who gets a Johnny Thunders song stuck in their head every time they read that thread title…
Seriously? This is your response to culturally approved brutalization of women? Not horror at the pain and suffering these women endure? Nope. It’s hurr hurr, maybe they have more babies than us!
Misogyny starts at home, friend. With a callous attitude toward women as human beings.
This post made me snicker at it’s unintentional irony.
Most men did not hate women throughout history anymore than they hated a dog or a stubborn mule they beat when necessary. I find it confusing so many people don’t understand even the basics of culture in say, the Western world prior to 1900 and especially more so as you go back prior to the Industrial Revolution.
Many places in Africa and the Middle East, while far more technologically developed have retained much of that ancient culture and that makes them appear barbaric to us. I’m not a moral relativist and I’m basically fine calling societies barbaric, because I believe barbaric is a relative term. I think the Romans were right to consider the Germanic tribes barbaric and I think we’re right to consider the ancient Romans barbaric. It’s all about perspective and relative sociocultural development.
The male-female dynamic is not universal across all of the Middle East and Africa and it wasn’t universal across all of the historical world. In most places women occupied a subservient position relative to men, men were seen as head of household. That didn’t mean the men hated the women, it just meant they were raised to believe their job as a man was to become a head of household and part of that meant you were everyone in the household’s “boss.” By the way, the women were brought up to believe in the correctness of their eventual roles so on an emotional level they probably were not in any serious sort of agony or anguish. Aside from the elite you have to keep in mind people from history were mostly not as introspective as we are because that’s a luxury that comes with consistent food stores and lack of insanely crushing physical labor being required every single day just to survive.
Since we know there were no universal-truths about male-female dynamics I can say that in the Western world, especially the Hellenistic world, amongst the elites men were far more educated and refined and these elite males found women stupid and uninteresting. Many of them felt that their relationship to their wife just entailed a duty to fuck and make offspring, but did not have the sort of husband wife relationship many of you have today that you probably assume is the universal norm.
The vast masses probably had closer to a modern “partnership” because both the man and the woman were doing back breaking labor all day and then going to bed in a hut shared with 8-9 children. Even then while the man might be seen as the highest authority such circumstances would tend to make him and his spouse closer to one another, and since they would both be essentially equally uneducated and ignorant they would be more apt to having the same interests in terms of conversation.
Now that’s a telling comparison.
I think the point is that owning something doesn’t imply hating it. Quite the opposite, in fact. You own your children. Do you hate them? You cat? Your car? Your horse? Your house? Your clothes? You actually hate the things you own?
No.
In addition to raising children, women: prepare food, garden, forage for wild vegetables, make clothing, care for domestic animals, … Where would men be if women did not prepare their food? The men just go out hunting and do the physical labor that requires heavy lifting.
Yeah, because men would just starve to death scratching their balls while sitting on the Barcolounger 5000 while the TV remote’s batteries died and they spent their last few miserable days of life stuck watching the Oprah channel…
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Most people have trouble wrapping their heads around the idea that society could be set up substantially differently from the way they’re used to. So your inability to grok Middle Eastern (say) treatment of women probably isn’t all that different from Middle Easterners’ inability to appreciate Western/American treatment of women.
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Some of the kinds of inequalities you mention aren’t really necessarily about hatred of women, just a low opinion of women. The reason we don’t allow five-year-olds to drive or vote isn’t because we hate five-year-olds; it’s because we think they don’t have the capacity to handle it.
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I think there’s a strong element of vicious-circling and self-fulfilling-prophecying behind the kinds of things the OP mentions. The way you treat women has a lot of influence over how you feel about them, which in turn has a lot of influence over how you treat them…
How so? I fully acknowledged that I’m from the same privileged environment. But I’ve also travelled extensively in Latin America as well as lived in some pretty poor areas of the U.S. and I just think sometimes people forget what a different world it really is.
And men actually are smarter than women. For a while in the 80s and 90s the prevailing educational doctrine (which we were taught) was that average IQ was the same between males and females with men simply showing greater variance. As it turns out, that data was fudged and fabricated to support an ideological agenda of gender equality. While it’s true that men do have a greater variance in IQ, they also have a small but statistically significant higher mean IQ (~4-5 points higher).
Interesting. I hadn’t seen this before.
Although of course this only means that men are smarter than women if by “smarter” you mean “better at whatever it is that IQ tests measure.”
Generally studies like to point out that females score higher in verbal abilities while males score higher in visual-spatial/mathematical abilities (I can get a cite for this but it’s pretty well-documented). Most IQ tests tend to measure the latter which is why the findings are not all that surprising - and indeed it’s difficult to include verbal abilities in an IQ measurement because it creates obvious cultural and educational biases. However in terms of implications for society, the bulk of the heavy lifting in building a civilization (scientific study, engineering, etc.) requires the cognitive skills which men are demonstrably better at. Not to mention the literal heavy lifting, which requires the physical skills men are also better suited for (obviously).
I get the Ronnie Spector version of that song in my head…
Which of course means absolutely nothing to the individual. IQ tests are very iffy to begin with “G” can be measured and defined in many different ways and as your post indicates verbal ability is not factored at all. A 4-5 point difference is trivial it can’t possibility mean much. Do really mean to say a man with an IQ of 145 is master of the world but a woman with 141 is not up to “building a civilization”? I think this thread is very aptly named and how timely seeing just how prevalent misogyny is in our society.
Actually, it’s not. It doesn’t seem like you grasp the concept of “statistically significant”. We’re not talking about one man who has a 4-5 point higher IQ than one woman. We’re talking about every man and every woman on the planet. When the mean is about a third of a standard deviation higher for one group over the other (and especially considering that males also have a higher variance, as noted), we’re talking about hundreds of millions of people falling into the top tiers of intelligence who are overwhelmingly male.
Anyway I think we’re getting off-track with this discussion and I don’t want to belabor the point. I offered it as a data point contributing to explaining the division of roles (and it’s only one data point - of course there are other reasons but it’s not fair to say the entirety of society is structured the way it is due to evil men oppressing women), which in turn contributes to the development of cultural/sociological attitudes toward gender.
That guy doesn’t need a wife. At that price, the MacBook better give blowjobs.
“Just”?