I dunno; maybe DT is angry that women are afraid of him, in spite of his being one of the “good” men?
He was generally agreeing that frats have a huge problem with sexual assault and that it stems from privilege/misogyny. I agree with this. He is taking a stance that seems to support women who are victimized by men in frats.
I don’t know how to square this with his other views about women, is what I’m saying. It’s all very confusing. Because if you take this stance at face value - frats are full of rapists and their enablers - and you take his other statements at face value, women would be immoral to avoid fraternities, men who are in fraternities, or take any measures to protect themselves even though the risk of sexual assault is really high, because it would show irrational contempt for men.
Like when I was in college I wouldn’t be caught dead at a frat party, not that this was ever a realistic possibility. But women know the risk of sexual assault at these parties. That does not mean it’s their fault if they go to one and are assaulted, that’s not my point. My point is I don’t know how avoiding male fraternities could be interpreted, in his worldview, as anything but misandry.
And it pisses me off because it ignores the fact that women are frequently and predictably blamed for their own assault because they shouldn’t have walked down the street at night, trusted that guy, went to that party, consented to sex with one man (but not seven.) There is literally nothing we could reasonably do to not get blamed for our own assault. It is always our fault.
But in his world it’s just fine for us to both risk assault and get blamed for it by not taking basic safety precautions. We should not be able to take safety precautions because it’s more important for a man not to feel insulted than it is for a woman not to get raped.
Now I think some women take it too far. I’m not particularly afraid of men myself and I’m guilty of getting a little roll-eyed about shit like the bear/man in the woods debate. I would 1000% prefer a man and the whole thing strikes me as pretty misandrist (with a side order of “watches too much true crime.”) On the balance I’d rather be with a group of guys than not. But to the extent that women irrationally fear men, it’s because they’ve been socialized to, largely by women who were sexually assaulted by men they trusted.
Gets my goat, it does.
Pretty sure the number of posters that fit you assessing them as that is far larger than those who don’t! Proud to be in that club! You “just don’t like dumb people” and very probably consider all to any direction of you as that. That’s a lot of us dumb people making you very angry. Must be exhausting.
FWIW I hear your perspective. I just don’t agree.
When I young fewer of my parents generation got college educations, especially women. I had a good school but that was a privileged thing to experience. I don’t think there actually was a Golden Era going then. It was just after McCarthyism. Some things were better then, some worse.
As noted - he did not live to see he was right but he was. The changes he catalyzed got us to point of electing a Black president. Reactionary backlash after yes. That is the pattern. I do not dismiss the horribleness of the backlash. The arc of history is made of individuals but the outcome for any one individual is not the arc. The course of any arbitrary small (relative to the bigger arc) period of time is not the arc. We can push back and make more gains yet. I believe we will.
I guess I would separate knowledge from education here, because a lot of people with college degrees voted for Trump based in part on stuff that just wasn’t true. It’s not as simple as how educated you are, it’s sort of how often you make use of that education and particularly critical thinking skills. I’m not really sure how to do that but I think whatever’s happening is happening outside the classroom.
I’m sure that well and truly sucks, but I know a lot of guys who don’t take that stuff personally, and some who actively stand up for women who express these concerns.
When I was 17 I ran out of gas on the freeway and a man offered to drive me to the gas station. I declined for safety reasons. Not only was he not offended, he went to the gas station, filled up a jug and brought it back to me, free of charge.
Was he probably a safe person? Yes. Was it drilled into my head from girlhood never to accept rides from strangers? Also yes. Does that make me misandrist? No.
Especially because I did accept a ride from a stranger when I was seven years old and nothing bad happened, but boy was I in trouble!
(Aside: Does this sort of Good Samaritan thing happen anymore? When I was growing up, bystanders were falling all over themselves to help others, I just don’t see it where I live.)
You get to be a certain age, or perhaps level of maturity, and you realize that many of the women in your own life, who you care deeply about, have been through some of these experiences - and once that happens you have to be a real fucking asshole to keep being butthurt about women protecting themselves.
In the very least men ought to realize that there are a lot of social and safety considerations for women to navigate and if you somehow fall afoul of their boundaries it’s nothing personal. A lot of us just have an internal sense of The Rules. Some might be more extreme than others, but I’m pretty sure most women have Rules. It’s categorical in the sense that the rule is followed in every circumstance but it’s not personal. Never leave your drink alone is a Rule that applies no matter how nice the guy you meet seems to be. He thinks, “oh, she must think I’m scum.” Nope. This is just the Rule.
The Rules are supposed to protect you, they often don’t, and as I pointed out in the other thread, women often punish other women who break their own internal Rules by either denying the assault or blaming the victim. “My Rule says never go to a party at 11:30 pm, therefore she had it coming.” “My Rule says never get drunk or take drugs so she shares some responsibility.” “My Rule says never go out at night” and so on and so forth. There’s no consensus on the Rules but based anecdotally on the women I know, they are damned near universal.
You make good points here. My first point though is about the institutions that trained and educated people to push back and had the power to do so. Mostly unions, I think. They were hardly perfect and it was no golden age, but I think people’s capacity to push back effectively has been eroded substantially.
Arc of history is our reference. Unions really got going what? Late ‘50s? And their decline began … late ‘70s? 20 ish years of it being strong institutions. Not long on that arc scale. Probably the institutional strength that has declined the most since the ‘50s is the church in its form of that era, replaced now by “no religion” or megachurch, and less in between as strong local institutions. Still churches of any form were rarely famous in America for encouraging people to push back.
@Spice_Weasel is of course correct that “knowledge” does not linearly follow education level. But I’m not really accepting that young adults today are necessarily less wise than we were at that age. And they may have smaller individual funds of knowledge than we did, but they have immediate access to vast amounts of knowledge in their pockets at all times. Are they always great consumers or that information (and misinformation)? No, but boy there was a lot of stupid shit my parents believed before the internet.
The decline of sources like Cronkike is a real loss.
I dunno. My WAG is that the capacity is still there but that the will to do so isn’t there, especially among the demographic that historically were the leading edge of pushing, young adults. Maybe it is the adequate leadership that is lacking? D-T and madmonk’s fatalism is pretty endemic, even if it plays out as more as resignation than anger. They have the capacity; they aren’t exercising it. At least it seems to me.
I see it. But reality is it happens more when the person needing help is a 17 year old attractive white girl than say when it is a 35 year old Black man.
But as much as you saw it before I don’t think it was actually ever the norm.
If that’s how things ended then maybe your point would make sense.
MLK was assassinated by the racist, fascist right wing and has been vilified by the GOP since then. And has now had many of his accomplishments overturned but the GOP stacked SCOTUS and the Trump Administration.
Funny/not funny how you managed to forget that.
I find you insufferably pompous. What I find particularly grating is that underneath all that posing you are expressing the most inane thoughts. I’m just completely over old men who think their every utterance is profound.
What a pompously verbose amount of inane dismissal!
(That post ironically displays everything you’re accusing him of.)
Hey! Who you calling old?!
“I’m thirty-seven. I’m not old!”
“Well, I can’t just call you ‘man.’”
It’s history, it doesn’t end unless we all die.
Correct, he was assassinated.
He was vilified by both Southern Democrats and some Republicans in his life and during the time he was active; the Southern Strategy took hold of the Republican party during his campaign for civil rights, but when he was starting out the party flip was still in progress. So I think it’s more accurate to say that the he was vilified by racists, not members of one particular party.
And people like Goldwater certainly vilified him at the time, but really? Ever since? No, that’s horseshit; Republicans like Bush were all about MLK. Which goes to show you just how much progress his movement made.
“Many” of his accomplishments? What do you think MLK accomplished and what has been overturned?
I agree that Trump is a massive step back in terms of how America grapples with its own history with racism, but the idea that it has overturned MLK’s accomplishments demonstrates a profound ignorance of just how bad things were in his day and just how much they improved in the time leading up to 2016. Some stagnation in that improvement, or even some steps back, is terrible; but it’s not going back to the pre MLK era. That’s just delusional.
That post reads like it was made by someone who is overdosing on their own farts.
How are the Voting and Civil Rights Acts doing these days?