- I am very sorry. I am as well and it sucks. I was raped at work by my boss.
- You have apparently been paid the same. I’ve also had many jobs were I’ve worked twice as hard for the same money. I’ve had jobs were I’ve worked twice as hard for 30% less.
- The inability of people to get medical care in the U.S. is criminal. And actually does disproportionally impact men. But when women get healthcare, it is subpar to the healthcare men get. (There are exceptions, breast cancer research has gotten a ton of funding - although most of it has been private funding).
- I have supported one husband. Who was cheating on me. No one thought him a failure (except me). Many women support deadbeat partners. When the marriage fails because we get sick of it, we are often blamed. And I was expected to work. My cousin recently got out of an abusive relationship in which she brought in all the money - she finally escaped when he started demanding she prostitute herself.
You are wrong with this interpretation of the joke. It definitely says more about you than about the joke teller.
I hear what you’re saying. Those experiences were undoubtedly quite terrible. I hope, perhaps naively, you never have to face similar circumstances.
I don’t typically talk directly about my experiences because I don’t believe oppression olympics are useful for anyone, nor do I support the idea that only the one who can claim the most oppression has a voice. I really do recognize that life is shit for everyone, and when you really step back and look there’s oppression thrown around by everyone - myself certainly included. There is no delineation between oppressed and oppressors, merely specific situations where one person has and exploits an advantage over another. The attempt to divide the world into oppressors and oppressed just blinds people to the ways they are oppressive themselves, and divides “fairly decent” people against each other for no reason.
We can easily work together or we can all fight each other. I try my hardest to work together and make sure to try and include as many perspectives as I can (for instance, I try to make sure I acknowledge racism against whites despite my very much being black and having all the “joys” of the black experience) and be as alienating to as few groups as I can. I shy away from language like “all men have to” or “all mexicans must” and instead embrace notions like the rules of society should treat all people as equals - and it’s not equal if you can’t swap the two.
Nope.
The unchallenged premise underlying it is ‘we would never do this to men.’
Cite, please?
Preferably not cites that turn out to be other versions of Modest Proposals.
No, they don’t. There may be a few wackos (every political stripe has them) but it’s not now and has never been a common refrain by anyone of any importance. You’re going hyperbolic here.
But I did face those circumstances. Those are stories about me. I have been raped by a boss at work. I have had a bad medication reaction that “wasn’t tested on women.” I have gotten paid 30% less for a job where I statistically proved I was doing twice the work. I have had a friend (the sister of a boyfriend of mine) murdered by her former boyfriend. I have supported a husband who wouldn’t support himself and then was blamed when the marriage fell apart - I didn’t “try” hard enough. I was one of the top students in my graduating class and the Superintendent did ask where my boyfriend was going to college, not where I was going to college. All those things HAVE happened to me. Except for the friend who was killed - and possibly the getting blamed for a marriage failing where I was doing all of the work (both economic and emotional), each of those things happened to me BECAUSE I was a woman.
And I have spent a lifetime hearing that its my behavior that needs to be changed. “You were raped, what were you wearing? You shouldn’t have been out alone. You should always watch your drink?” “You got paid less, well, you should have advocated for yourself, you shouldn’t have had children (I didn’t at the time), you should have picked a different college major.” “Your marriage fell apart, you didn’t try hard enough, you weren’t supportive enough, you didn’t have sex often enough.”
And although these are my unique experiences, these experiences of being a woman do not sound unfamiliar to many women. And I used to believe that if we all lived in one big non-sexist happy family, things might change. And I have decided that too many men (notallmen) just can’t get it without feeling some of the emotional impact of putting up with this shit day in and day out, until you have nothing left. So I’m done with the feelings of “men as a general population” - I’ve paid too much to babysit them while my actual life has been torn apart and reconstructed over and over again.
You know, everyone will react to the words on the page through the lens of their own experience. But that’s absolutely not how i read the joke. I read it as simply “imagine if men were told they can’t walk alone, the way women are routinely told that.”
The joke is cast as a curfew law only because it’s too complicated to make up a situation where men (and not women) would be at danger walking alone, but might be safe enough if they can drag along a female relative to protect them. And jokes need to be succinct.
To say, “there is no law preventing women from walking alone” is to miss the point. Most of the restrictions that most of us face in daily life are not due to laws, but due to lack of resources and the opposition of other people.
(Aside: that’s why libertarians drive me nuts. They have based a whole philosophy on the idea that the only restrictions that matter are those imposed by the government. What a surprise that libertarians tend to be young, healthy, wealthy, and male.)
It seems that my use of softeners is impeding conversation. I generally use them to try and avoid sounding condescending. But, if you don’t feel the need to use them, then I won’t, either. So, to be more direct:
You are wrong in your interpretation. No one in this thread has suggested anything bad about men in general. You have no reason whatsoever to think they are attacking men. You are jumping to erroneous conclusions.
Sure, there are a very small number of women who think all men are horrible. But these are rare, and not what our society tends to push. When the “men can’t control themselves” argument comes up in wider discourse, it is in the context of justifying toxic behavior, not in the context of saying there’s anything wrong with men for this. It is, for example, used to justify the idea that a woman can’t dress sexily, as men won’t be able to control themselves. It’s used to say “boys will be boys.”
I am a man myself. I live in an area with very defined gender roles. So I have direct experience with just how bad these sorts of narratives are in our day to day lives. No one seriously thinks that men need to be constantly chaperoned, just like no one seriously thinks we need to put some sort of curfew for men.
This is a common problem I see in male grievance politics. They do mention some real problems. But then they try to overinflate them specifically as part of the “oppression Olympics” you say you don’t want to get into. The idea generally seems to be that women don’t really have it all that bad, and it’s really the men who are the most oppressed. Male grievance politics exist to avoid having to deal with anyone else’s issues, making it only about us men.
It is clear there is a real problem here to be discussed. Yet you seem to be bringing in male grievance politics to try and shut down that discussion. How dare women point out how restrictive it is being told that it is their responsibility to do all these things to prevent being raped. How dare they point out that it is as if they have a 6pm curfew, and have to have handlers walk with them.
The discussion itself is clearly not inherently tainted. We already had one guy come in and understand the situation better because of it. Heck, honestly, it helped clarify some things for me.
I actually did see the title and got somewhat angry. But the difference is that, once I realized it was never a legitimate proposal, I understood that there was nothing to get angry about. I stopped thinking about how I felt, and started looking at the way the people involved felt. I didn’t let my anger try to shut down the conversation.
Maybe the tactic they used here doesn’t work for you. But it has worked for some. It’s not inherently flawed. There is no obligation to stop it.
You say you want to work together, but your way of responding in this thread has been almost entirely oppositional, essentially telling the people involved to just shut up. That’s not useful. And it comes off badly when it’s a man telling that to women addressing that issue.
And, no, I’m not telling you to shut up about issues men face, either. I would, however, suggests that they belong in another thread, and not being presented as competition to the issues women face. That’s “oppression Olympics” stuff.
If we want to work together, we have to be willing to listen, not try to use the problems we men do face as a way to shut down women talking about the problems they face.
You don’t have to be oppressing anybody to not find satire amusing or insightful. I generally don’t like satire or caricature or stereotyping of anyone even if I don’t agree with them, with the exception of the rare people whom it is impossible to make look worse. For instance, I am not a corporate overlord or conservative commentator but I find the caricatures of them in liberal cartoons to be cringy even though the purveyors of the GQP party line are generally in the service of evil. I dislike almost all actual caricature-style drawing because of its deliberate simplicity which reduces people to a set of stereotypes. I am not Indian but I disliked Apu for the same reason when he first appeared on the Simpsons. I disliked the “men do this, women to that” style of comedy since I first heard it decades ago: well, more like I thought it was 90% cringy and 20% humorous with some overlap.
So one can dislike the proposition that all men are so slaveringly in thrall to their desire to inflict harm on women that they need to be escorted, or that all men believe that women must be escorted, because one thinks that broad humor is inherently suspect.
If you want a peactical suggestion, how about this: Stop bringing in hundreds of thousands of single young men from cultures that do not respect women and think that unaccompanied women in attractive clothes are harlots and therefore fair game. Especially if such men do not assimilate and eventually become unmarriable.
Also recognize that any society that accrues a large population of single young males is asking for a lot of trouble for women.
And liberalize concealed carry laws. If men thought there was a good chance that the women they are stalking will shoot them if the are menacing them, they might not see them as soft targets. There’s a form of herd immunity here: once the probability of someone carrying reaches a threshold it deters crime even against people who don’t carry, since the criminal can’t distinguish between them.
In the US for example, most home burglaries happen when no one is home. Burglars don’t like being shot. In countries with disarmed populations more burglaries happen when people are home to show the burglar where the valuables are. That also increases the risk of viokence if people resist.
The violent crime rate (non-murder) is way higher in the UK than it is in the US, for example, although the murder rate is much higher in the US. But the overall crime rate is three times higher in the UK. The incidence of rape in the UK is more than twice that of the US. Assaults happen twice as often in the UK, as do robberies.
https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/United-Kingdom/United-States/Crime
So maybe the answer is to stop doing whatever the UK is doing that’s causing so many people to be raped and assaulted.
Nobody in this thread has said either of those things. The joke under discussion may not be funny to everyone, but, as has been pointed out repeatedly, it also does not say either of those things.
This has been a problem in the USA all of my life, and I’m 69, and have lived most of my life in areas that are primarily white, Christian, and full of people who have been “assimilated” for generations. If anything, the problem’s gotten better as the country’s gotten more diverse.
This is our problem. It’s thoroughly embedded in long term USA culture. It is not something brought in from outside by strangers. That’s a bullshit argument.
Am I being gaslit here? It does say that. I did not say that it was meant to be taken literally. Satire is meant to be taken seriously but not literally, because it’s trying to make an underlying point. I find it hard to take it literally or seriously (at least in the way it was intended) because it is almost always cringy.
No. It does not. Do you think that the men who advise women not to go out alone at night believe that every time a woman does so she’s guaranteed to be attacked?
Of course there are always violent men wherever there are men. You can’t eliminate that. But the simple fact is that rape in the UK and EU has skyrocketed. Between 2017 and 2018, rapes in London increased 20%.
In 1985 there were 1842 reported rapes in England and Wales. By 2005/2006 that number had increased to 14,449. By last year, reported rapes rose to an astounding 62,200.
Anyone who wants to fix the problem should ask themselves what changed during that time. I’m sure there are a number of causes.
One weird thing I discovered: rape prosecutions in the UK are way down, while rapes are way up. Something has changed in criminal justice as well.
Here’s a horrifying graph for you:
You could ask them.
That was supposed to be a rhetorical question. You really think that people who give that advice are under the delusion that every woman who goes out alone at night gets attacked every time she does so?
I mean, there are people with delusions, I suppose somebody might. But I didn’t assume the people in this thread who gave that advice were among them; and I wouldn’t assume the ones who posted or liked that joke were under the delusion that every man needs a guard to prevent him from committing rape, either.
A curfew means that men are so dangerous that they need to have a curfew, not that they always attack each and every time they go out. That would be silly, as even serial killers go to the corner store and pay for things most of the time. I have no idea how much the people who hold the views that it is entirely upon women to keep themselves safe think about the environs and frequency of violence.
For what feels like the three hundredth time, the point of the joke is precisely that there would be no such curfew!
Now you’re going to tell me that Swift didn’t really think that toddlers would make a nice main course.
You got it.
