It’s known to a fair number of Brits, and to people who have attended more diversity sensitivity training courses than is good for them. The mental image is meant to be of a man given lifting someone’s shirt-tails in order to expose his behind.
I like the expression “aiming too low in the leap-frog”, myself.
Second quote on this page. Not that I want to fight anyone’s battles, or even get involved in this thread. I don’t even know why I opened this thread at all.
This isn’t exactly a fear issue for me, so much as outrage at the deliberate slander being perpetrated against my sex, and at the political motivations of those doing so.
I larfed. This was directed toward those of us who believed that rape might be as common as the statistics offered by a rape crisis center says it is. Political motivations…? Not even applicable. Whatever the term is for seeing a feminist agenda where none exists, that’s the one I’d choose for him.
“Pussy?” well, shrugs not something I find really objectionable as an insult…“pussification of society” is just more of the same anti-feminist BS.
FWIW, it seems to me that Malacandra, while perhaps somewhat controversial, has at least put some thought into his opinions. It’s a bit hard to have an interesting discussion with someone you completely agree with. That (plus the Ian Mckellen factoid) counts for quite a bit.
I knew the McKellen was gay, but I that thing with the hotel bibles puts a whole new light on his POV. Tolkien certainly didn’t include a homo-erotic subtext in LotR but that wouldn’t prevent McKellen from putting one in. Now that I think about it, I had wondered about all the hobbit hugging in the FotR film. Sam will kill him.
No agenda? No political motivations? Many feminists would disagree with you. There are many feminist theories and political motivations, not all of which agree with yours. Surely it is better to dismantle Mala’s arguments point by point than to invoke some “term” to label him, a term which not even you can remember. This is a BBQ Pit, not a lukewarm bath.
Hmmm…so it is, the BBQ Pit and most assuredly not the Ms. forum…I was referring to the people in that thread and his labeling of the situation. Addressed those points already though.
I don’t even think he’ll object to the anti-feminist label FranticMad, so chill.
If you’ll excuse a somewhat lengthy c&p, I found this some time ago and downloaded it:
[c&p] *
The radical feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon claims that forceable rape “by conservative definition happens to almost half of all women at least once in their lives.”
By CONSERVATIVE definition, then, almost half (close to 50%) of all women will be forceably raped during their lifetime.
In fact, some feminists routinely refer to American society as a “rape culture.” Yet estimates on the prevalence of rape vary wildly. According to the FBI Uniform Crime Report, there were 102,560 reported rapes or attempted rapes in 1990. The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that 130,000 women were victims of rape in 1990. A Harris poll sets the figure at 380,000 rapes or sexual assaults for 1993. According to a study by the National Victims Center, there were 683,000 completed forcible rapes in 1990. The Justice Department says that 8 percent of all American women will be victims of rape or attempted rape in their lifetime.
So opinions vary, possibly due to research techniques and alternate definitions regarding what might be construed as “rape.”
Eugene Kanin, a retired professor of sociology from Purdue University and a pioneer in the field of acquaintance rape, is upset by the intrusion of feminist activism into the field of inquiry: “This is highly convoluted activism rather than social science research.” Professor Margaret Gordon of the University of Washington did a study in 1981 that came up with relatively low figures for rape (one in fifty). She tells of the negative reaction to her findings: “There was some pressure–at least I felt pressure–to have rape be as prevalent as possible … I’m a pretty strong feminist, but one of the things I was fighting was that the really avid feminists were trying to get me to say that things were worse than they really are.”
Despite Catharine MacKinnon’s own fifty-percent figure, the percentage MOST often quoted by feminists is closer to one-quarter, or 25%. Meaning that one woman in four would be raped during her lifetime.
This figure is based on a survey/study conducted by Ms. magazine.
In an article in the New York Times Magazine, Katie Roiphe questioned that figure: “If 25 percent of my women friends were really being raped, wouldn’t I know it?” She also questioned the feminist perspective on male/female relations: “These feminists are endorsing their own utopian vision of sexual relations: sex without struggle, sex without power, sex without persuasion, sex without pursuit. If verbal coercion constitutes rape, then the word rape itself expands to include any kind of sex a woman experiences as negative.”
The publication of Roiphe’s piece incensed the campus feminists. “The New York Times should be shot,” railed Laurie Fink, a professor at Kenyon College. “Don’t invite [Katie Roiphe] to your school if you can prevent it,” counseled Pauline Bart of the University of Illinois. Gail Dines, a women’s studies professor and date rape activist from Wheelock College, called Roiphe a traitor who has sold out to the “white male patriarchy.”
*
[/c&p]
Yes, very alarming. (Why are so many of them “professors” or “scholars” or “campus” something-or-others.) Just so you know, not all women stop by their local Women’s Studies department to have their thinking done for them, much like all men are not followers of Weininger if they question rape statistics. Fair enough?
Tee, fair enough, if you’re willing to retract that sneer about ** seeing a feminist agenda where none exists**. It looks like you’re no longer arguing that no feminist agenda exists, only whether or not “women stop by their local Women’s Studies department to have their thinking done for them”. In that case, I presume I’m entitled to see what does exist, and hold my own opinions about it?
I’ll say it again: none exists for the people in that thread. In other words, if I say (and I did) that I believe the 1 in 6 statistic might be correct, this is “promoting the feminist agenda?” Forgive my stubborn insistence: that’s BS. I know what I’m saying, and it was never that the feminists don’t have one. I am saying it’s possible to hold an opinion on the frequency of rape without one. I can’t think of a reason one needs a political agenda for such a view - that idea is probably unique to the feminists themselves, and people fiercely opposed to them.