So you think that women are attracted to responsible, mature actions in men, whereas men are attracted to physical attributes in women only? Is there a more insulting characterization of men?
If women are attracted to men with your description of masculinity, how would they be attracted to the “wrong” men?
Attraction is part conscious decision, part social conditioning, and part biological. Given how different attraction is in different cultures, how rapidly it changes with time, and how malleable people’s mate selection is when they move from one culture to another, there is no way that it is purely biological.
You might not be able to find it because I said your linked summary was referencing ATUS, which it’s not – my error. It’s referencing CPS, which isn’t BLS; it’s Census. Still useful, but less fidelity.
Handling large data sets is a pain, and I’m bad at SPSS, but sometimes we get lucky and find that others have already extracted useful information. For example, the Pew Research Center often digs into ATUS. They have a summary of childcare here: Modern Parenthood | Pew Research Center
They don’t, in that report, look back at old data for trends. And I haven’t done it myself, but I’d like to. I expect to see leveling over time of the relative time spent on childcare in two-income families.
With respect to child custody, if we wanted to impose some arbitrary rule based on child-rearing time, working time, income, etc., I don’t know that we’d get an 85/15 split. I suspect there are some societal biases, but good luck quantifying them. It’s like the gender wage gap. We know that gender discrimination exists, and we know that a significant portion of the wage gap can be explained by other reasons, but it’s difficult to quantify how much of the remainder is due to discrimination. Neither is a simple subtraction problem…I think.
Well, in this thread, we have had posters lamenting that no feminists are standing up to extremists or fringe feminists, and here we have 200 self-identified feminists who reacted badly to a proposed International Men’s Day. In response, over 2,000 and counting self identified feminist (plus JackofWords) standing up and saying “no, we are not cool with that; as feminists we reject that position.”
Thanks for bringing this to our attention. It’s kind of awesome to see mainstream feminists (plus JackofWords) very publicly renounce a fringe position like that, especially since some people have been saying that never happens. A lot of feminists disagree with that kind of position, but don’t necessarily seek out a platform to denounce it.
oh, andy, when I wanted to show that you are fond of popping up repeating the same baseless claim that you speak for more than yourself, I went and found every instance of it in this thread (there were quite a few, you’ll recall).
Find one instance of my saying ‘feminism is very bad for humanity’ (YDRC)…or even something ‘similar’ enough that you and I might agree that’s what I meant.
I did say ‘Definitions seem somewhat slippery’ - they are. You’ve yet to take on the thread’s overt misandrist, by the way. ‘Feminism is not for men’ she said. According to your slippery definition, you’re the one that needs to tell her she’s wrong…you or one of the other slipperily-defined feminists. Nobody did. “I’m not an extremist (and nor are my six imaginary friends)” appears to have the slippery definition ‘I’m glad there are extremists, and I’m happy to shield them’.
A male student at York committed suicide on the day his university cancelled Int. Men’s Day. How do you feel about that?
He was certainly an extremist, eh? A foul misogynist MRA offs himself, as if he were Emily Davison with a penis. A penis, *and a huge heap of privilege *!
And yes, I signed a feminist petition. I refer you to my previous answer on that point. Oh, hang on, you don’t want answers. You want points. And what do points mean? Prizes!*
You might recall (C) that I’m happy to admit that I was once a member of your cult. Stories are powerful…women are powerful, always have been. Sometimes one can see outside the story, sometimes one cares not or dares not. I’m happy to pretend to be a feminist, as and when it suits me - when there’s something, tangible or otherwise, to be gained.
Once, it was just for my own amusement - at a small business seminar, during the meetngreet coffee, I spotted ‘the feminist’ (it’s mostly in the pained expression, though there are usually costume clues). I engaged her in conversation about her own business (supplying solely female tradesmen (don’t even bother)). I slipped in the word ‘spinster’ (in a context valid enough to allow it, but complex enough to require more keystrokes even than this over-egged excursion). In the seminar proper (50/50 men and women), she tried to stir up a mob - ‘spinster’ being on the bad-word list, an indication of crimethink. I was going to say ‘whip up’, but she couldn’t even get a second, so no mob at all. The women there wanted to be successful, and there was really nothing in their way (accept potentially themselves…and feminists).
Pish and tosh. ‘self-identifying’ feminists? What a leap. And then another! ‘Mainstream feminists’, now. 2,000 people, only two of whom we know anything about - Ruth is a self-[del]deluded[/del]identified feminist, and I’m not, even though I signed it. So nobody else who signed it is. Not just by signing it, at any rate. Possibly 2,000 then, but equally, possibly any other number including 0. Ah, I see your problem - ‘equality’ has lost all meaning for you.
And York doesn’t care about 2,000 strangers, it seems. 200 students call the shots.
Thank you. Pew also says 30% of moms stay at home, vs 7% of dads (2012). Still, in 60% of homes, both parents work. One of the problems with the primary caregiver model - aside from being outdated - is that it’s arbitrary. How do you decide who is the primary caregiver? Is it the one who takes them to school? The one who buys their clothes? The one who takes them to the park? The one who teaches them to ride a bike? Do you count quantity of time, or quality?
And does it really even matter if - after the divorce - mom’s going to be dropping them off at daycare anyway? Which is more important: what was happening in the past, or what will be happening in the future?
If a child is attached to both parents, and needs both parents, why should one be relegated to 2nd class?
I don’t think what happens in family court is comparable to the wage gap. The 70% figure (or whatever it is) comes from comparing the wages of all women to all men. It doesn’t take into account the number of hours worked, the length of time on the job, or the type of job. When you take those kinds of things into consideration, the gap is closer to 5%. And I don’t know whether that takes into account the occupational death gap: men are 13 times more likely to die on the job than women.
I don’t think you can treat the past and future as separate situations: what happens in the future will partly depend on what was happening in the past.
Children don’t have a reset button that you can press to return them to a default setting which you can then modify at will to accommodate the chosen new situation. Children need the support of some stability and continuity in their lives, and their individual needs are more important than having one standard default template for structuring their lives post-divorce.
I don’t think individual children should be forced into any kind of procrustean one-size-fits-all default custody schedule. Let the parents agree on a custody schedule that works for everybody, and if they can’t agree, let the courts decide based on considering the needs of the individual child(ren), not some standard blueprint.
To be clear, Jack of Words, it was not my intent to accuse you of trolling this or any other message board. My apologies if it came across that way.
But based on your post it seems clear you expected a particular response from the woman you spoke, the one with the “pained expression” that you just knew was a feminist, and as you say you deliberately used a word you were confident would arouse ire for your own amusement, this would on first blush seem to be an example of trolling IRL.
I’m confident it really *wasn’t *that, of course. But I’d love to hear you explain your intentions in more detail.
While it’s best practices not to make any trolling reference, I can’t say definitively that it’s against the rules to mention it occurring outside the bounds of the concept of ‘trolling the SDMB’.
Warning reversed. I still think it best to avoid such in the future, though, just for sanity’s sake.
I think it’s possible that primary custody is better for children, in general, while shared custody might be best in some situations. I think every situation should be evaluated in its individual merits. But I’m no expert, and I’m not a parent (yet), so it’s not a particularly strong opinion.
Do we need an “Ask the Feminist” thread or something? I mean, yeesh. The existing SDMB threads about feminism seem to all be “against” even if there are lots of vociferous dissents. I don’t mind doing it and I’m tempted despite the complexities of being a male-bodied person so doing and all that.
You bring up a few issues that I would like to treat separately. One is whether a primary custody model is generally most beneficial for the child(ren). That seems to be assumed most of the time. And I believe you question that assumption. But I am not prepared to argue it one way or another. I’ve neither experienced it nor studied it. If there is interest, it might make for a good thread on it’s own, where we could dig into research on child development, etc. I’m not sure I even know enough to write a good OP, so I’m going to have to beg help on this one.
Leaving that important question aside, if we default to a primary custody model, the next question is: which parent? A coin toss would give us a 50:50 mother/father split. However, there may be factors that benefit the child one way over the other. Another assumption we’ve seen is the importance of continuity of the primary caregiver. I’m also not prepared to argue that one way or another. You question the primary caregiver model as both outdated and arbitrary. Regarding it being outdated, the data obviously show that we aren’t in the 1950s any more. Yes, we do still have a lot of stay-at-home mom / working father families, but it’s not the majority.
That said it’s still a significant chunk of families. If we assign custody to stay-at-home parents, who I’m more wiling to concede are likely to be primary caregivers, and coin-flip the rest, that would give us a ~65:35 mother/father custody split (30% + 50% x 70%).
We need to remember that in two-income households, mothers provide most of the childcare time. However, the summary I linked to doesn’t tell us the percent of families where one parent provides the majority (within some error) of the childcare. And even if it did, I think this is where the arbitrariness comes in. You mentioned measuring different kinds of childcare as counting more than others, but I think there’s enough arbitrariness just with the hours count. A family where one parent provides 90% of the childcare hours? Ok, probably a primary caregiver. 51%? I’m not sure we’re in a situation where continuity of the primary caregiver matters, and we might be back in coin-flip territory. Our cutoff for determining a primary vs equal cutoff is going to be arbitrary.
If we WAG that 1/2 of two-income families have the mother as the primary caregiver, 1/4 the father, and 1/4 are equal, and combine that with the 30% of two-parent family households with a SAHM, and apply a rule with continuity of primary care and a coin-flip for the rest, that gives us a 74:26 mother/father split. Still not 85:15, but we’d need to delve deep into ATUS to pull the real numbers out.