Which is why it’s disingenuous to claim that a system which is only concerned with a portion of the population is equal or a subset of another philosophy that is really concerned with the entire population, with no exceptions, limits or caveats, as humanism is.
But that’s the last I have to say on that tangent. Folks can make up their own minds.
You do realize that inventing an imaginary conspiracy which automatically all men belong to, and are therefore bashed for belonging to, and then saying that men are ‘hurt’ by belonging to the imaginary conspiracy (no matter what any individual man actually does, thinks, or says), is kinda… misandristic?
I’m not “hurt” by “the patriarchy” because A) it doesn’t exist B) even while some men are chauvinists, that has nothing to do with me. I’m me, they’re them, and it’s sexist to act as if I have a moral burden simply because someone else with a penis is a bastard. C) I’ve done nothing wrong, so there’s no rational reason that anything would bite me in the ass and ‘cause me harm’. Saying that I’m somehow harmed by other men’s actions, simply because I’m also a man, is sexist.
Humanism is a philosophy. Feminism is an activist wing of that philosophy, dedicated to securing equal rights for women. You can’t fight every single injustice in the world. People specialize in what they know. Just because feminism is fighting for one cause, it doesn’t invalidate the other causes. And it doesn’t mean individual feminists don’t work towards equality for other disadvantaged peoples; they can and do.
That isn’t what the patriarchy is. Read up on it and then come back to comment. I’m not going to give you a primer in Feminist Terms 101; I provided a link for that information earlier in the thread. Go educate yourself on what a feminist is talking about when she says “the patriarchy” and then come back and we can discuss it.
But I thought you said feminism was about guaranteeing that both genders are treated equally. If that is true, it stands to reason that feminists would also protest misandry.
For the most part?
Which laws are they not equal under? You’re not referring to the fact that women do not have to register for Selective Service, or that they are not automatically considered to be members of the unorganized militia are you? Because I would love to see the day when feminists propose that be changed. Surely you don’t mean the family courts, where custody is almost always given to the mother and in which non-custodial mothers default either partially or totally on child support at much higher rates than men, did you? There’s still some inequality under the law in the US. But right now I can’t think of any examples where it’s tilted in the favor of men.
You fail to understand the point. Feminists will protest that there are not enough women in the sciences as they sit in their gender studies classes, but if you ask them ‘Why don’t you major in physics? No one is stopping you.’ they reply ‘I don’t want to.’
They never consider that they already have the answr for why there are fewer women in hard sciences, mathematics and engineering.
You think I believe in the giant conspiracy theory of the patriarchy? Hardly. These attitudes towards men being lazy bums if they aren’t top wage earning cut-throats out there working sixty or seventy hours a week are not ‘the patriarchy’. They are not some vast conspiracy to which all men belong. They are misandrist bullshit.
Well, a young women often can’t find anyone willing to tie her tubes - even if she is sure she never wants children. A young man can have a vasectomy for the asking.
In the past decade I’ve interviewed for jobs and been TOLD (not kidding, TOLD) that “HR makes us interview a woman, your name was obviously female, but we have no intention of hiring you.” (I was a systems administrator, a male dominated field). I’ve heard vice presidents of Fortune 100 sized companies say “I don’t promote women, they leave and have babies.”
My mortgage had my ex-husband’s name on it first (this was 1988 - but I own other property that I bought five years ago where Brainiac4’s name is first) even though I was the primary wage earner and asked to have my name first. When we divorced, this caused huge problems as the mortgage related mail was forwarded to him and I had to fight for the tax deduction for the interest I was paying.
Brainiac4 can call up and change things by saying “oh, its my wife’s account” - even in this era of data privacy. I’ve never been extended the same courtesy (and he probably shouldn’t be, but he is) - if I call I’m told he has to call and at least add me to the account.
catsix, when I read this piece a couple of months ago, I actually thought of you. I think there is a huge question that is unanswered and that much of feminism does not want to face facts on, and that is why women still lag in the hard sciences. You and other women I know who are in traditionally male careers have said to me that they do not believe that they have encountered discrimination based on their sex, and that they think they have as much opportunity to succeed as men…even more so, because these fields are anxious to become more diverse in their representation. One of the most interesting things in my linked article is that the females students who completed Math 55 at Harvard reported that they felt VERY welcome in the class, and one young man reported that they WANT more girls in the class.
So, the question to me is this: is it pervasive and insidious sexism that steers women towards the humanities and men towards the sciences? Or is it a natural inclination that women have to study more humanistic fields? There seems to be strong evidence that it’s the latter, since despite all the efforts to affect change in terms of equality of opportunity in this area, we haven’t achieved anywhere close to equality of outcome (as catsix points out).
One of the problems with feminist is that they seem to believe that they speak for all women. During the 19th century feminist in England were baffled at why women among the lower economic classes weren’t buying into their movement. What these middle class women failed to realize is that their interest weren’t the same as those of lower class women. Ironically enough these very middle class feminist were exploiting lower class women.
So feminism is a global movement? What relevance does western style feminism have for a Bedouin woman in Egypt or a women in Iran?
Well, after my B.A. M.Ed and more than a dozen required ‘gender studies’ or ‘multiculturist’ courses, with attached reading, I’m pretty sure that you don’t need to"educate" me.
Thanks though.
I’d especially be content stacking up my education against a blog entitled “finallyfeminism101”… which doesn’t even seem to have a lexicon. And, of course, which evidently you expect readers to simply slog through rather than citing anything in specific. Scattershot FTL. Nor, of course, is there any reason for me to take some blogger’s opinion over more than half a decade of study in the Academy.
And speaking of your blogger’s opinions, your cite’s definition of “patriarchy”, for which I had to dig through the damn thing, is not only exactly as I described it, it’s total bull, and the author talks out of both sides of her mouth.
So any man who has any influence on society, even through achievement, is a member of the shadow conspiracy, “the patriarchy.” In other words, only if a man is a total powerless loser, nebish wimp can he not be an eeeevil patriarch.
In other words, it’s tinfoil hattist sexist rubbish.
Or, of course, from the same page, now with racist slurs!
b) setting aside, momentarily, questions about codifying it within law (or deciding not to), people should not condemn behavior in one sex that they condone in the other, whether it be in employment or in accepting applications for admission or even in less public aspects of life. Just be fair.
c) there may be inherent, innnate differences between the sexes — there probably are — but insofar as we only get to observe people in context, we can’t know for sure exactly what they consist of, totally isolated from how they manifest in a sexually polarized world. Because of this, and because it’s far more likely to do damage to assume inherent diffs than to suspend such assumptions, such assumptions should be suspended in formal eval settings. And usually in informal & private ones as well.
d) the world has, historically, been a patriarchy. we’re still living something that ranges from being ‘still patriarchy’ to being ‘the aftermath’ depending on immediate context. Failing to understand patriarchy as a social system institutionalizing the control of women is to fail to understand our world.
It is Christina Hoff Sommers - hardly an unbiased source. Its kind of like reading Andrea Dworkin on porn and rape. Or Mary Daly on language. But Hoff-Sommers has an anti-feminist-establishment slant in all her writings.
I’m a Civil Engineer. The university I graduated from has an accredited engineering school. If, say, the push for quotas of females in engineering schools threatens that accreditation, it looks as though those behind the quota idea would have NCEES change their accreditation standards; which would lead to less rigorous training for engineers, which would be a Bad Thing. It is a ‘big if’, sure, but it’s there.
I’m definitely in the group that thinks people who claim to be feminist should instead be humanist. I’ll trust in the ‘equality’ portion of feminism as soon as they mandate selective service for all females as well as men.
So it’s okay with everyone if boys say girls are dumb as a general statement?
It’s this double standard that makes calling oneself a feminist as valid as calling oneself a male chauvinist in my view. Any feminists out there mind if people call themselves male chauvinists and try to enact chauvinist views?
Personal note: I’ve been reprimanded for holding a door for a woman because it reinforces patriarchal values. In fact, I’ll hold the door for anyone who’s behind me, regardless of gender.
The complimentary philosophy to Patriarchism is that “behind every great man stands a great woman.” I don’t believe either philosophy holds the full truth.
I’ll go ahead an admit to some selection bias in my anecdotes. As a white male, I’ve sat through plenty of classes where women and so called minorities claimed that I could never understand sexism/racism because I was a white male. While that statement itself is both sexist and racist, I have in fact been the subject of both sexism and racism. Not to any extreme, but I do know what it’s like to have public transportation not stop for me because of the color of my skin, amongst other tales of woe.
Sorry… I’m in the middle of packing a picnic lunch, and about to run. But, to be brief: I found it scary that it isn’t out of the realm of possibility that applying Title IX to academia might actually succeed one day, and we’d gut our hard science programs on the altar of ‘equality of outcome’.
I think I’m on the same wavelength as Ninety on that point, upon preview.
Well, truth to be told, I haven’t had time to do a close reading yet… but it seems like many of her claims are 100% factual and not open to bias or distortion. I’ll comb through it later to see what I can see.
Yes, and I was just going to answer Ninety’s post, and I see yours is in agreement. I see the reason for concern now, and agree with you. I personally am against all forms of affirmative action, as I believe it is counter-productive and demeaning.
I would be interested to see your analysis on that. Although it’s true that Sommers’ ideas to tend to run counter to the feminist establishment, I’m not prepared to dismiss her on that basis.
Sorry, I was in a hurry, too, when I posted the above, and I wanted to come back to clarify why I didn’t find the article scary, despite my dislike of affirmative action programs. Although it seems as though the movement to apply Title IX to academics has legs, I think there would be enough pushback from top-level programs that it is unlikely to happen. And, if it did, I suspect it would be a disaster of epic proportions. Which, hopefully, would lead to a more balanced study of gender differences, with an emphasis on scientific analysis, vs. feel-good answers.
Hopefully this disaster would not be on the scale of, say, a bridge failure, or similar occurence which would cost lives. I admire your optimism, but I’m afraid I don’t share it.
At university, I knew engineering students who could not cut it - some male and some female. My Dad (a Civil professor) could probably name hundreds. Those people just don’t need to be licensed engineers. I hope I don’t appear to have a ‘gloom and doom’ attitude about this issue - but we have enough problems with simple human error causing engineering failures (Example: failure of the Minneapolis bridge over the Mississippi). We don’t need to exacerbate the problem by graduating sub-standard scientists. I think the idea should be quashed before it gets that far.
You all are talking like Title IX was an unqualified disaster, but remember that before it was passed the conventional wisdom was that girls didn’t like to play sports at all, that for biological reasons they were not suited or interested in physical activity or in competition, so requiring schools to have girls athletics was a farce. And now we have girls spots all over the place, and the idea that girls have some sort of biological disinterest seems bizarre in a world of softball and volleyball and girls’ basketball and girl’s track and cross country. Half my female students play competitive team sports in high school and they love it. But we never would have found out about that if we’d relied on the empirical evidence that girls weren’t clamoring to get on the existing boy’s teams.
This isn’t to say that we should apply the exact same model to math and science programs, nor is it a claim that Title IX is perfect. But it sure got rid of a piece of conventional wisdom.
In the same way, you can’t look at a lack of girls in a high level math class and draw iron-clad conclusions about inherent ability. The subtle pressures away from math and towards humanities are deeply embedded in our culture and while they have diminished, I think it’s too early to say that we’ve removed them entirely so the differences we see in performance must be based in biology.
What needs a little more emphasis here is that there is a distinction to be made between feminist extremism and more moderate feminism. I could be said that a moderate feminist is one whose views society has by now largely come to coincide with. And so as such the point is largely moot.
This makes the extremists–those who are hostile to any acknowledgment of gender differences, or are openly disdainful of women who choose traditional roles, or exaggerate the need for an ongoing struggle against the forces of sexism–more visible by contrast and more likely to have the mantle of sexism applied specifically to them.
Oh, I agree 100%, but by disaster I meant in the sense that it won’t be successful. I suspect that it won’t be as easy to convince women that they love engineering as the people making this proposition think it will be. I think it would be much much harder to convince women of that than it was to convince them to play sports, and simply making it easier to do is not necessarily going to solve that problem. I don’t think women who avoid engineering avoid it because it’s hard, I think they avoid it because it’s boring, at least to them. All the Title IX in the world won’t change that.