There is a train wreck of thread in ATMB that condemns mysogyny on the board. It is based on two other train wreck threads now in the Pit. In the ATMB thread the accusations are flying, and the language is contemptful all around, while at the same time declaring contempt for women in some percieved respect as mysogyny, and ironically doing so with with the demonstration of contempt for men (mostly based on that perceived contempt for women.
I’ve come here to GD to try to discuss this issue since I don’t see any modding going on in ATMB that would keep the discussion tracked and reasonable.
I don’t know what mysogyny is unless someone says very clearly that they hate women. I can guess that some men through a pattern of actions are mysogynist, but the accusation that men making jokes about women or their bodies, or even ascribing negative attributes to women is not necessarily mysogyny as far as I’m concerned.
I think this discussion is worth having, and hopefully here in GD it can be held without simply flinging insults. Sorry if it’s not debate-y enough, but the disagreements in those other threads indicate this is certainly a controversial subject.
Is this going to go the same way a thread about “What is Racism?” would go? On one side you have the simple dictionary definition of “Hatred of women or girls”, and on the other you have the concept of attitudes, social structures, or habits that lessen the status of women or reinforce their position as inferior to men.
Then we will get into heated debates about what does and does not affect women negatively and how telling a women to smile on the street is done out of affection and not to reinforce social standards. Some men will be offended because they honestly care about he women in their life and have done things that they felt were harmless or positive and are now being told that they are hurtful or depressing.
Others will jump that this simply uptight women looking to be victims and if you aren’t having you genitals mutilated or being sold as a child bride you shouldn’t be complaining.
Then at some point we will wonder into a discussion of rape culture and what it means and someone will feel slighted.
Bottom line is that this is one of the many aspect of privilege that are invisible to those not holding the poo end of the stick. For most men it takes effort to conceptualize what misogyny, patriarchy, rape culture, etc. mean when you are a woman.
Case in point that has come up in the last few years in skeptical circles is “elevatorgate”. A prominent female blogger wrote a post about what an incident in a hotel elevator. At the end of the night she was headed to her room when a man who had been hanging out in the same hotel bar followed her into the elevator and asked her back to his room. She declined and wrote a short post about how this is not the way to make a woman feel comfortable and want to go out with you. The post was not angry, but rather pointing out that approaching a woman for the first time alone and in a closed space is not the best way to make her think well of you. This led to a huge firestorm in the online skeptical community that is still going on.
The big issue seemed to be:
a. Men who don’t get why a woman find that a problem as they would be happy to be propositioned like that even if they didn’t intend accept.
b. This is such a minor issue she had no right to bring it up.
c. How dare she feel uncomfortable when a strange man propositions her in a closed elevator, she must think all men are evil rapists.
[QUOTE=Strassia]
Bottom line is that this is one of the many aspect of privilege that are invisible to those not holding the poo end of the stick. For most men it takes effort to conceptualize what misogyny, patriarchy, rape culture, etc. mean when you are a woman.
[/QUOTE]
You’re absolutely right about all these things but you aren’t answering the rather straightforward question posed by the OP.
It’s perfectly valid to ask what “misogyny” means as opposed to “sexism,” “patriarchy,” or “rape culture.” Those are different terms with different meanings, and describing something as “misogyny” when it’s sexist or patriarchal (as opposed to, though in some circumstances it could be both) is just ignorant and doesn’t contribute to a discussion. It’s helpful to have some understanding as to just what the hell someone is talking about when they use a word. Given that “misogyny” is actually a pretty useful word when used as it was originally meant, it seems to me to be a loss to our language and our ability to understand each other if we co-opt the world as a stand-in for absolutely anything that constitutes disadvantage to women.
****Misogyny is like racism, but there is a big difference, we acknowledge racism but sexism is often sanctioned or unacknowledged. An example is we don’t use the N word because we know it is an insidious word…but yet we use the B word for women and no one bats an eyelash ,
No, we don’t.
[QUOTE=TriPolar]
I don’t know what mysogyny is unless someone says very clearly that they hate women. I can guess that some men through a pattern of actions are mysogynist, but the accusation that men making jokes about women or their bodies, or even ascribing negative attributes to women is not necessarily mysogyny as far as I’m concerned.
[/QUOTE]
I agree, or at least not misogyny that matters. Making jokes about women does not demonstrate that you hate them.
The other bits are somewhat more problematic. Is it misogynistic to say that “no doesn’t always mean no”? Not in my view, because as a cite showed in one or other of the screechfests to which you linked, a bit more than a third of the women interviewed said that they had said No to sex when they really wanted to have sex.
Does that mean they should be raped? No, and those posters who responded as if that was what was being implied do themselves and the cause of feminism a disservice (IMO). Sometimes No means “maybe” or “not yet” or “talk me into it” or “probably not” or any of a dozen other ambiguous things.
Again, this is not justification for rape or sexual harassment. It is a recognition that male-female relations are not as black and white as some would have us believe.
If this means I am going to be Pitted by someone claiming I am justifying rape, :shrug:.
Intent, I think. One can be passively, ignorantly, or even innocently (and with good intentions) sexist. I do not think the same can be true for misogyny.
Sexism is behavior, action, or systemic design that causes disadvantage based on a person’s sex. To be sexist is to act is such a fashion, or to believe that sexism is an acceptable state of affairs.
Misogyny is the psychological state of feeling hatred or antipathy towards female human beings.
A person who is misogynist will almost certainly do sexist things, but sexism does not prove misogyny. Many people who do sexist things are not misogynists, since one can do sexist things out of ignorance, habit, cultural artifact, and other things that aren’t a hatred of females.
In terms of the comparison to racism, I do not believe English has the same range of words for race as it does for sex.
I don’t think it is quite as simple as explicit state hatred of women. We do have a cultural misogyny as well. There has been a lot of study of how sex affects reactions to behavior. Behavior that is interpreted positively when done by men is seen as negative when done by women. The level of sexual animosity towards women is not usually seen towards men. Have you ever seen a comment post of “Show your dick or GTFO!”
I’m not certain that sexually charged aggression is the same as misogyny. The people who say those sorts of things are just as likely to be the ones using all sorts of other racial, ethnic, and homophobic type speech. They’re just trolls. Nor is pay or behavioural double standards necessarily a reflection of a societal institution of hatred of women. It goes back to intent: was the commenter trying to insult her because she’s female and he thinks that women are stupid, and useless; or was he simply trying to be insulting in general? Sexual slurs have been with us since the beginning.
I don’t recall one from a woman, but would that be misandry?
There is a dichotomy here. You won’t find men discussing their genitals much in a serious manner because other men will make comments similar to the one you ask about. They would expect that kind of immature behavior from other men. Is the same behavior directed at both men and women miogynistic only when directed at women? Or both?
Core question - as with so many other instances of this type - is whether the expansive use of the language is intended to mislead.
IOW, the question at hand is whether those using it really mean for their usage to be understood as “attitudes, social structures, or habits that lessen the status of women or reinforce their position as inferior to men”, or do they intend for it to be taken as “woman-hater”.
And the same goes for words like “racism”. Do people who use it to attack others who hold non-PC positions really mean to convey the expansive meanings that fit, or do they mean to convey “bigot”, and only fall back on the technical definitions when called upon to justify their words?
Generally, I tend to suspect the latter, but you never know, and it probably varies case-by-case.
I do think this is a problem, I often see it as a way to shut down discussion or whip people who support your cause into a frenzy.
Take “elevatorgate” above (and can we stop appending “gate” to everything? Christ). Both sides had some points, regardless of the fact that I think overall Watson’s side was “right”, it could have been an interesting, educational discussion about gender relations. Instead, it turned into one of the most shameful internet slapfights in history. Aside from maybe the first few posts, suddenly we accusations of misogyny (from BOTH sides), accusitions of supporting rape, accusations of hating sex, and all sorts of ridiculous flames. “Misogyny” usually seems like a go-to word when you don’t particularly care about arguing anymore and just want to shut down your opponent. It’s never “that sounds kind of misogynistic to me because[…]” it’s almost always “you’re a MISOGYNIST and you should feel bad.”
In fact, Elevatorgate was so bad that it took me forever to work out what Watson’s side was actually saying, because it blew up so bad I had to reason out myself that it was the fact that she was alone and stuck in an elevator that made it bad. In fairness, I found out about it after the fact so I missed the initial, saner discourse, but that thing went way off the rails pretty quickly to the point that I think the message was lost.
