I, for one, don’t give a shit what raventhief thinks of as “feminine” qualities. I want to know what you, LinusK, think are feminine traits - and more specifically, does the fact that you listed a bunch of traits as specifically “masculine,” does that mean that you think that women do not, in general, possess those traits?
I want to know what YOU think. If the traits you listed are masculine, what traits do you consider feminine? Is it simply the absence of the above traits that make a woman more feminine? It can be argued that if certain objective “masculine” traits exist, a woman that is “feminine” does NOT, by definition, posses those masculine traits.
In other words, the contractor or boss who calls the shots for the employee/subordinate has the privilege of screaming at them because he/she has the superior power and status to get away with being an asshole.
The child, on the other hand, is able to get away with screaming because he/she is considered irresponsible and incapable of sustaining mature civilized behavior: in other words, because he/she doesn’t have any power and status.
I still think that even though the screamer in both cases is “getting an advantage over the other group” (i.e., over the people who can’t get away with screaming), the two kinds of “advantage” aren’t remotely comparable.
The first one is a genuine form of privilege in the sense I’m using the word, i.e., an advantage derived from having built-in superior status and power: call it “boss privilege”, say. The second advantage is just the result of privileged people (i.e., adults) making allowances for an inferior who can’t be expected to live up to their rules. I think it would be misleading to call that “child privilege”.
Like I said, I make no claims for the quality of the dialogue. But are you really interested in picking up a woman who considers she’s entitled to a free drink from you just because she’s a woman and you’re a man?
I think we still have a long way to go in our society when it comes to removing sexist unfairness, including the sort of toxic femininity that provides women with some superficial but ultimately degrading benefits such as free drinks from men hoping to pick them up. But we’re not going to make progress unless we’re willing to make some sacrifices for our principles along the way.
I’m reminded of some of the “first wave” feminists back in the nineteenth century who became what was called “spinsters by choice”, i.e., a sort of conscientious objector to the gender expectations that pressured women into marriage by declaring that women who didn’t manage to snare a husband were failures and objects of ridicule. I’m sure that at least some of the “spinsters by choice” would have liked more sex and domestic happiness than they got in life, but they were willing to make that sacrifice to stand up for their principled position against sexist expectations of marriage.
Similarly, if you have a principled position against sexist expectations that give women some unfair advantages, then you should stand up for it, even if it entails some rejections. If you’re willing to go along with an exploitative sexist custom such as men buying drinks for women in bars even though you know it’s unfair and unprincipled, just because it might increase your chance of getting laid, well, that’s your choice.
I still disapprove of the female “bar leeches” being willing to go along with that exploitative sexist custom just to get free drinks, but I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the male “leech enablers” who voluntarily buy the drinks and then continue to gripe about the unfairness of it, either.
[QUOTE=Mithrander]
I’m actually trying not to be defensive, and I have never claimed that women as a group are as privileged as men. What I’m claiming is that women as a group are as bad at seeing their own privilege as men are.
[/QUOTE]
That is certainly true, and a natural human trait (as evinced by the fact that white privilege and other non-gender-related types of privilege are taken for granted by both women and men who benefit from them).
I still don’t think the technical term “female privilege” really makes sense as a parallel to “male privilege”, for the reasons explained above. But I’m not denying that women benefit from some unfair advantages in a sexist society, and I think those unfair advantages should be called out and rejected whenever they’re encountered, just like the unfair advantages that men benefit from.
Meanwhile, those pesky extremists have the University of York (UK) by the nuts, tightly. Two hundred students (of over 15,000 enrolled) and a couple of feminist faculty members have obliged the University to cancel its plans for International Men’s Day…because ‘equality for everyone’ is “misogynistic rhetoric”.
That’s a feminist telling you you’re not feminists. Listening now?
[I considered the courtesy of links, but I thought to myself…‘If any of them actually give a damn, they’ll want to know what that’s about and seek out the story - perhaps even find themselves a properly feminist doublethink-piece artfully justifying it. But either way, we’ll sort wise wheat from chippy chaff’.’]
Consider the currently popular catchphrase ‘Look up feminism in the dictionary’. I wonder if the ‘extremists’ can control dictionaries as easily as they control universities? (Is that not a privilege?) Feminism, I’ll grant, is a ‘doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men’. But it’s not the doctrine, nor to my mind the preferred one.
Funny expression that, “in the trenches”, given that the trenches were 99.9% men with the privilege of being conscripted or compelled to die in manic slaughter. And of course the whole war was in large parts sold to Britain as a war to protect women following some (fake) propaganda bits about the Germans.
In any case, if women are so underprivileged why is it that at the absolute bottom of society – in jail and the homeless, etc. – men are vastly overrepresented? Imagine that, all that privilege and they can’t even make it.
Well, in the broadest terms and historically speaking, it’s like this: A patriarchal society where women are controlled by men tends to be overwhelmingly dominated by men at its high and low extremities. In such a society, prisons and vagrancy are primarily extreme measures for men to control the behavior of other men.
Women in such a society are more easily controlled by lack of legal autonomy and social indoctrination to be docile, ignorant and dependent. Men are more independent, legally and socially, so if they persist in behaving in ways that more powerful men deem antisocial, bringing them into line often requires stripping them of their livelihoods or throwing them into jail.
Now, those of us in the developed world no longer inhabit a formally patriarchal legal and social structure, but our society still has a lot of residual features of the one we used to inhabit. So controlling the behavior of women is still disproportionately about financial dependency and gender expectations, while controlling the behavior of men is still disproportionately about physically constraining them in some way. (But it’s still disproportionately men doing the controlling.)
Note that I’m not saying any of this disparity is a good thing in itself, and in fact all of it is in the process of changing. (E.g., incarceration rates for women are presently rising faster than those for men.)
But it explains why patriarchal societies where men are traditionally superior and privileged compared to women nonetheless have overwhelmingly more men than women in their prison and homeless populations.
I’ve responded to similar statements multiple times – it seemed like a repeat, so I didn’t bother responding to it specifically.
It’s many of your other assertions that are misrepresentations – you characterize feminists (and even women in general, one time, IIRC) in a certain way while ignoring the many assertions of feminists in these threads that are contrary to this. For some reason you spend much more time arguing against extremists you find on the internet instead of the feminists in this thread, while occasionally insisting that our beliefs aren’t real feminism. Why do you think you understand feminism so much better than feminists, and why would you expect us to accept this? Would you expect an anti-humanist, who thinks humanism is a terrible, evil philosophy, to understand humanism better than an actual humanist?
While you’ve got the dictionary open, you might want to look up “poisoning the well”.
The bitch of it is that one of the doctrines of feminism is intersectionality, which (before it was co-opted for rhetoric points) was used to mean that you couldn’t just sum up someone’s axes of privilege and get -1 woman, -1 black, +3 upper-middle class, because the intersections of those areas had unique interactions with each other. In a patriarchal, polygynous society, being male and not-in-charge means that you are surplus to society’s requirements, and that you will suffer from social forces to get rid of you or drive you out that the women in society will not suffer. They, in turn, will have extra effort put on them to keep them from running off, because they’re the scarce resource being competed over.
Or we can get into fun definition games where we say “This society values its men so much it kills off 20% of them before they reach age 25.”, which seems kind of pointless to me unless we’re looking to score the aforementioned rhetoric points.
Round and round we go. All this has come up and been put down. Your ‘many assertions’ are just that - yours. Running around speaking for yourself and your six 'i’s as though that constituted a crowd.
Feminists just told you what feminism is, when they shut down International Men’s Day at York Uni. It’s a movement for women, and any suggestion that equality might also be for men is ‘misogynistic rhetoric’.
Just once (or six extra times if you must), tell us what feminism is. And then try telling the 200 staff and students at York, because you’re adamant that they shouldn’t listen to me. Even your magnificent seven voices aren’t enough to make all 200 of them ‘extremists’ or a fringe. But they all believe in a nonsensical idea of ‘equality’ and perpetuate a gender feud. They all believe that they represent all women, without ever consulting more than a fraction of them. They all believe that the best understanding of men comes from misandrists. Are they working in your name, andy?
Again,** iiandyiiii**, if I can’t tell this person how wrong they are, and you won’t, what hope?
Of course you can (not that I disagree with the post). When have I said you or anyone can’t criticize feminists, or feminism?
Look, I’m mere man. What I’m attracted to is physical attractiveness. I don’t think I’m telling a secret when I say that’s pretty common among people of my gender.
But you shouldn’t blame us for it. Attraction isn’t a conscious decision. You should be aware of that, too, as a woman. You don’t decide who attracted to. It’s why men constantly pursue women who’re not interested in them. It’s why women complain they’re attracted to the wrong men. It’s why you can’t “pray away the gay.”
Attraction is a biological matter, decided over millions of years of evolution. Attraction is amoral. That shouldn’t be surprising, since it’s a product of evolution, which is amoral itself.
It’s also why what attracts women and what attracts men are different.
I should probably walk that back a bit. Masculinity is not exactly the same as “what women are attracted to.” They certainly overlap, but they’re not exactly the same.
I’ll say one more thing before I have go: monogamy (marriage) is civilization’s attempt to 1.) curb the most destructive aspects of sexual anarchy; 2.) channel the sexual energies of people productively; 3.) create a kind of compromise between the sexual interests (or strategies) of men and women (one that favors women, btw); and 4.) protect and provide for the most important product of civilization - children.
Actually, you left out perhaps the most important goal of monogamy in a patriarchal society: to increase the reproductive chances of the majority of average men as opposed to the few high-ranking men.
Patriarchal monogamy is not so much a compromise between the interests of men and women as it is a redistribution of women from the minority of elite men in a polygynous social structure to the majority of non-elite men.
If elite men who would otherwise monopolize the sexual control of multiple women are restricted by law to having only one wife, and if most women are dependent on marriage for economic and social support, then the rank and file of average men have much better odds of getting a wife than they would in a polygynous system.
Not the complete story…
Feminists are fighting to reinstate International Men’s Day Celebration
Turns out many on campus are upset that the Uni bent so easily to “mob rule”. They assert that, “true feminists should be fighting for gender equality for both men and women. To cancel Men’s Day is simply hypocritical. Equality is not just for women and should concern both genders.”
Over 1,000 signatures have been gathered on that petition.
I don’t know what to tell you. You have nothing to contribute and you don’t appear to understand anything you read, or at least your responses have nothing to do with what they purport to respond to.
Mine’s one of them. ‘Anti-feminist signs petition fighting feminism’ is not a headline. I don’t know Ruth Morris - I’m not permitted to suggest she isn’t a feminist, but the 200 feminists who provoked her are permitted - and told her clearly she wasn’t. It really is a meaningless term now, eh?
So, let’s keep an eye on this story. Will York bend as easily to the bigger mob (possibly 999 anti-feminists plus Ruth)? Oh, were you attempting to imply that 1,000 feminists had signed it? '“True” feminism is not decided by petition, it’s demonstrated by its actions.
Jack, you signed a petition that referred to “we feminists”?
**All ****feminists **are being wrongly portrayed here which is simply unfair. **We **are not man-haters and the university should go ahead with plans to celebrate all diversity, not just one gender.
Well, definitions seem somewhat slippery, but at various points in these conversations some feminists have been at pains to claim that I am a feminist, so why not sign? I was happy to add to the numbers standing behind the aim of that petition, though I may not agree with all of the words in it. What’s your point? That my criticism of feminism is invalid because I’m the sort of low-down dirty dawg that signs a statement he doesn’t wholeheartedly support? That’s really scraping the barrel.
Did you have anything to say about the thread topic, or that particular feminist action and its ongoing impact? I’m not the subject here - though it seems the ‘feminists’ would rather talk about me than feminism.
Wow, what a change – ‘feminism is very bad for humanity’, or something similar (IIRC from several discussions ago), all the way to “definitions seem somewhat slippery”, and signing an explicitly self-identified feminist petition! Good on you, Jack!