You do get that the 6 PM curfew for men was never proposed as a real solution, instant or not, right? It was a starting point for a discussion about the restrictions placed on women that society accepts as normal.
There’s kind of a nasty catch-22, though. Everybody’s nice and calm and collected? Well, there must not be any real problem then, since no one’s actually upset about it. Some people are getting emotional? We shouldn’t listen to anyone who’s emotional, everybody ought to be calm, cool, and collected!
Emotions are a part of being human. They need to be taken into account.
And, yeah, I don’t know why at this point in the thread, or really at any point, anyone’s talking as if such a curfew were a serious suggestion that might go into effect next week. It’s a “Modest Proposal”.
While I’m at it: I had no idea of the derivation of “mollycoddling”. Thanks for info.
A little bit selective in your response there - I posted ‘effectively criminalising’, you missed out the first word which is quite important.
If we were to continue with the thought experiment, we would also need to consider what to do about curfew breakers - in other scenarios where curfews are imposed and then broken - such as criminal tagging, or prevention of looting, sanctions are imposed immediately in summary punishments or taken to custody and presented before courts - wether civilian or military.
How is that not effectively criminalising a half of the population?
Whist I certainly do not approve of the restrictive advice foisted upon women, there is no prospect of any sort of legal sanction for declining that advice - the clue is in the word ‘advice’ which is unfortunaly given far too much weight when it comes to the blame game.
No more than I feel criminalized by a law requiring that I stop at red lights. I mean, sure, if I violate the law I’ve become a criminal for doing something that used to be legal. But the law doesn’t make me into a criminal, my reaction to it does.
Every year my white friends (I am also white) discover Juneteeth and post about it as if its the VERY FIRST TIME they have ever heard about this important piece of American History - “I never knew this” (link to Juneteeth article). And every year I think the same thing…“either you don’t remember last year when you posted this same thing and it really isn’t that important to you, or you think everyone else has been living under the same rock you were before you discovered this, and are trying to disingenuously educate us.” But I only think it to myself, because, hey, they are at least moving the right direction - and maybe all their other friends have been living under a rock.
And @Mangetout, thanks. I don’t come around here too much anymore because talking to the men on this board about these issues is usually like spitting in the wind, and I don’t have the spoons left for it often anymore. And I know other women around here feel the same. To get to participate in someone turning a corner…that’s good.
And thanks for saying it in the thread. I think people often do change their minds eventually, but it may take multiple different conversations with different people, and/or it may happen gradually over time and/or in the middle of the night in their sleep. It’s rare to have a significant change of mind in the middle of the conversation, and rarer still to acknowledge it at the time.
By asking, which is exactly what you did. You asked for help and got it, because the thought experiment created a conversation and got you thinking about it. And then you were able to come to a conclusion. So it worked as intended.
You weren’t led by the hand. You actively worked to figure it all out. Asking people for help is part of that. Listening to women explain things is part of that. The idea that you could somehow figure it out on your own is a fallacy–none of us did that. Not even even the women posting her figured this all out by themselves.
That is, I think, part of the problem. Men are socialized to try and figure things out, while women are socialized to talk things out. (Note, these aren’t absolutes–just a general emphasis.)
The idea seems to be that some men will see this thought experiment, get offended, and then women can say “See, that’s what we face! You hate the idea of a curfew for you, but that’s exactly what we’re told, not go out after dark.” It’s entirely intended that you’ll need to talk about it with others (likely women) to work it through.
I think this misunderstands the thought experiment a bit. You’re supposed to realize such a suggestion is obviously a violation of men’s right to autonomy, and not get too bogged down in how it would be implemented.
The point is to compare the very real de facto restrictions on women to a hypothetical de jure restriction on men. Women may not face arrest for violating the advised curfew, but they do face punishment for it, in the form of social approbation and blame if something happens to them. They are discouraged from getting the law involved because the defense will try to bring up the woman’s actions as part of her culpability. And, even if they don’t, the general public will.
The idea is just to realize that we put way too much of the onus to prevent rape on the victims. The bystanders, e.g. the men who don’t rape, don’t necessarily step in. We’ll tell a woman that they should beware of guys who do certain things, but them still pal around with that guy who is a bit creepy towards women.
It’s just about saying the onus should be on all of us to try and prevent rape, not just on women. We should speak up. We should do things.
We would hate it if all the onus was on us, so we shouldn’t do that to them.
You seem to be missing the point of the joke. It’s not “hurr, durr, men are so rapey that they need a woman to watch them.”
The joke is that the statement is so obviously ludicrous, that no one would seriously suggest it. But then, you’re supposed to realize that this is exactly what women are told—that they need to have an escort to go out after dark.
It’s one of those jokes with an underlying truth embedded in it.
Just to revisit the ‘it’s 2021’ thing (without any butthurt this time, hopefully)…
I thought some more about this and there are just lots of things that seem like they should be obvious to everyone.
For example, I do a lot of work related to online scams, and it always seems to me that we should just be able to inform everyone what a scam is, and the problem ends, overnight.
Except that never seems to happen - and it’s not just a ‘boomer’ problem - it represents some sort of mental blind-spot in a very broad cross section of the human population.
You would think, in the internet age, it would be very simple for anyone to discover that the wealthy dying philanthropist widow of a Ghanian engineer-tycoon, who wants to write you, a complete stranger on the internet into her will, is always false, and is the setup for a scam. You would think nobody could have escaped the news about that, and yet, it remains a favourite method for online scammers.
And the problem isn’t stupdity - at least, not mostly; certainly there is a thin streak of wilful ignorance, and probably another streak of forgetfulness, but for the most part, it’s just that people don’t have the right information in their heads.
The information is very widely available, but so is a very large amount of other information, all competing for space and attention; the problem is discovery and selection of the pertinent information.
Now that’s not an exact analogue to the topic of this thread, but I think it’s a related phenomenon, together with maybe something that could be called ‘care fatigue’ - without wanting to lump all possible causes in one bucket, a modern human can be exposed to demands that they should care about a great many things; racism, sexual inequality, environmental issues, animal welfare, modern slavery, wealth inequality… the list goes on - and none of those things are trivial, but at a certain point people can become numb to the continual demand for their attention and action, and (I think) start to settle on a smaller number of things that they may try to act appropriately upon, whilst shutting out some of the other things.
I don’t know… I’ve rambled a lot here, and I want to do the right things, but it’s obvious that nobody can devote 100% of their effort to each and every demand - you can’t be an activist on every subject.
Of course that must not be an excuse for doing nothing at all or preventing others from doing the right things.
That is not the point of the joke, that is the unchallenged premise underlying it. It’s presumed true by both the maker of the joke and the intended recipient. “Yeah, men are all rapists,” the joke goes, “but imagine the backlash if we suggested chaperoning them, AMIRITE?”
Women are not told that they are inherently animalistic, inhuman monsters that require a bear tamer to keep from impulsively mauling passersby.
While I grant that the “joke” is ludicrous, the reasons for why it’s ludicrous are completely different than what you seem to think. For starters people really do suggest all men should be monitored like that. And this is no rare one-off idea, this is a common refrain.
Next, the situations are not a true reversal, making the comparison non-analogous. “Women are safer if they have someone protecting them” is not in any way similar to “Men need women to keep them on a leash.” Yeah, when you want to enforce control over someone with the a-priori assumption of guilt , you’ll have a lot of resistance. Not so much when you suggest that strategic cooperation can reduce exposure to risk.
I find it truly upsetting that if the roles were reversed and this was a group of men joking about passing a Saudi Arabia style women must be escorted law, it would be (rightly) treated like a grave offense and every single participant would be reviled (and potentially banned). But this is women hypothetically passing the same law against men, so it’s funny. Apparently, the law wasn’t immoral after all, just the fact that men were benefactors.
Last, my point of contention with the “joke” was that people who are ostensibly opposed to sexism are perfectly fine with direct, overt sexism as long as it isn’t targeting a favored group. I have the exact same point of contention with opponents to racism who casually practice racism. It’s rank hypocrisy, causes extraneous harm to marginalized groups within the group supposedly advocated for, destroys any opportunity for civil discourse and mutual understanding and I could go on, but you get the picture.
The subject matter is important. Advocating to end sexual violence is important. I’m all for it. But just because you’re fighting something evil does not mean that whatever you do or the tactics you employ are a-okay, have no consequences, and are above all judgement or reproach.
1 out of 3 U.S. women will be sexually assaulted in her life. 1000+ die every year in the U.S. due to domestic abuse. Domestic abuse is one of the most under reported and under prosecuted crimes - and for a good reason - police families are 2 to 4 times more likely to be abusive - is it any surprise that officers often just walk away from a call. And U.S. and European women have it pretty good. We aren’t often sold into prostitution by our families and there is very little risk we will be kidnapped as forced brides. Women in much of the world have legally restricted educations and in some places are literally cloistered. And that’s just the sex and violence end of it. Our health concerns are less likely to be studied (did you know, here in the 21st century, we still haven’t figured out how labor is triggered) and are more likely to be ignored by our own physicians - often written off as mental health issues when they are in fact physical issues. We have left the workforce at a much higher rate than men during the pandemic, because statistically, we are far more likely to be the ones coaching the kids through their virtual schooling while dropping groceries off at both our parents and our in-laws. Our poverty level is higher. And some asshole in Georgia can by a gun in the morning and shoot half a dozen women in the afternoon, but by god, if I can find a place to get an abortion, I’d better be prepared to get counseling and wait 24 hours.
But your feelings are hurt because someone is punching up. I’ll tell you what, I’ll trade you places - you can be a sexual abuse survivor who was paid 30% less than her less qualified male colleagues, and has had to fight to get any meaningful medical diagnosis her entire life, and who, when meeting with the high school superintendent because she graduated at the top of her class, was not asked - like the boys were - about her college plans, but was asked what her BOYFRIEND’S college plans were, and I’ll take the implication that all men suck.
Have you also had all the other shit thrown at you? Have you had a friend killed in domestic abuse? Have you gotten paid 30% less? Have you had a bad reaction to medication and discovered “we didn’t test this in women?”
In retrospect, the original “joke” was only funny to the oppressed class, not the oppressor class. Oppressors never have a sense of humor about their oppressiveness. We should never expect them to be amused by role reversal. It freaks them right out to their deep inner cores.
This isn’t about feelings. Its about overt lies. If you care about sexism (read that as a proxy for all sex related issues, including violence) then care about sexism. If you care about only yourself then be honest and come out and say that it’s not sexism that bothers you, but the fact that it hurts you.
I am a staunch enemy of sexism. Not only the sexism that is directed at me, sexism anywhere but especially by hypocrites.
You sure you want to trade? You really sure?
(1) I AM a sexual abuse survivor
(2) I have never once worked a job where I was paid more despite being tasked with more responsibilities because I was a man. My first job at walgreens had me do every task the female workers were expected to do and work the neigh-illegally dangerous trash compactor, and do anything involving heavy lifting including the back-breakingly exhausting reload of the entire chilled food department (“food” is a misnomer considering how heavy hundreds of bottles of liquid are). I was also required to pick up slack when the female employees missed days because they didn’t feel like coming, and was required to make up for any shortfall they happened to have in their duties.
At my current job I’m required to do two person’s duties while my female coworker who’s supposed to take up some of the slack sleeps. Why? Because (completely inappropriately for my line of work) COVID introduced a need to stock heavy water bottles. The bosses know she sleeps, but they don’t want to “overwork” her.
I have always had to do more than double the work and get paid exactly the same (and sometimes less).
(3) Wow, medical care? I’d love to have some of that! The progressive neural degeneration in my arms should probably be looked at… too bad I haven’t ever been able to afford so much as a visit!
(4) No, I haven’t had someone ask about my “boyfriends college plans” because my hypothetical wife isn’t expected to work, but then again I am socially obligated to provide 100% of the income or I am a failure.
So yes, please, lets swap. Because life is shit for everyone, but if life is going to be absolute shit I’d rather be desired, fawned over and protected than utterly disposable, required to put on an the face of an emotionless automaton, expected to leap at every opportunity to expose myself to harm even and perhaps especially when someone else conducts a behavior I myself would never even consider anyday.