I meant someone can pick cherries elsewhere and then add them to the conversation, as badhwar does with the joint property bit. The young men who are experiencing the worst of what Caplan was saying don't have any property to speak of, either.
Ah yes precisely. I’ve noticed that a lot of Feminism and it’s adherents rely on Apex fallacy for a lot of the justifications and I find that fascinating.
Isn't men's rights activism relying on the apex fallacy? Like all men are homeless, prisoners, work deaths, suicide victims, homicide victims, etc., when all of them combined are less than 1%.
Not at all, actually. Men are 90% of homicide victims, etc etc etc we spend tons of energy on issues that impact a super-minority of the population when discussing feminism and leave larger issues unaddressed. Even worse, to bring up those issues is immediately met with claims of sexism.
Child support and alimony are not gendered, custody outcomes obviously neither. So there is no legal discrimination. Also two, three, five, ten wrongs don't make a right.
Child support and alimony are, in fact, gendered. This is why you cannot pass laws that order a default understanding of 50/50 custody and a mandatory DNA test at birth.
They are not gendered, there is no law that mentions men have to pay. And there are laws for 50/50 custody (for example in Kentucky), but most men get it anway when they ask.
The notion that alimony/child support are just reasonable compensation for opportunity cost is belied by the fact that they're compulsory. Couples *could* (and often do) make such arrangements voluntarily that reflect the valuations of each party. Child support and alimony are themselves vestiges of a time when women were legally restricted in the workplace etc., and thus men were required to support their ex-wives. I can't speak for Andrew but I see nothing here suggesting one justifies the other, but rather than both are wrong. Except feminists have gotten restrictions on work and property ownership eliminated to the benefit of women, while compulsory child support and alimony curiously persist, with the support of feminists, and more heavily enforced at the expense of men. There's a certain irony to using long since abolished economic restrictions on women to justify feminism today while compulsory child support and alimony actually still exist.
Faith in humanity officially diminished - right back at you.
Family law is a reaction to the unconscionable treatment of women, a long time ago. Today, it treats the higher-income member of a couple unconscionably badly. There's no other way to put it. Mark is absolutely right.
You do not have experience with a typical family law court in the US. It is getting better, but it is still relatively routine for courts to all but sever the father's relationship with their child. And it happens even when the father is the more nurturing parent and regardless of income.
And your phrase "if you break up the family then the obligation needs to be split in a charitable way" is laughably ignorant. That "you" is pretty nondescript there. The typical situation is for the woman to break up the family (at about a 2-1 rate) and for the father to end up with a custody arrangement making it unlikely that he will maintain strong bonds with his children.
Taking the position of feminists from two generations ago and presenting them as though they are equivalent to the modern variant is just intellectually dishonest. The current variant tries to implement demonstrably destructive economics policies, and is fundamentally at odds with our culture of the presumption of innocence.
The thing is that "the positions of feminists two generations ago" are still opposed by many people (nearly all of them men) in 2023, and hence still need to be defended. I don't know if you noticed Roe v Wade being overturned last year - if you didn't think the gains of the sixties and seventies were on shaky ground before, then surely this event changed your mind? And all this remains true even if some modern feminists are wrong about other stuff.
I suppose its a question of the relative importance of that issue. Weighting it against other things they support is hard in the personal liberty sense; how do we assign value? From a fiscal standpoint, you may be on to something, because the exterminated offspring may have resulted in net negative consumption of government resources; its unclear however if that would hold true over their lifetimes. Its also unclear whether they would 1. adopt the politics of their mothers (disproportionately democrat), and 2. whether the anti market bias of that camp would functionally lead to more detrimental fiscal outcomes (since republicans are largely just a reactive party/movement). As a side note I have always thought it was funny that republicans are worried about the politics of immigrants, but not millions of added welfare kids absent abortion. On the personal liberty side; is the right to abort > presumption of innocence and due process? This is a subjective question, personally I would say no (despite me supporting abortion). Further this begs the question of whether we need the modern feminist movement to fight back on the abortion mandates, they are certainly not the only political camp, even and especially within the left, in favor of those rights. Though that also begs the question: are they the worst camp, which I would also have to answer no. Either way I love your comment Alex it got me thinking this morning!
I took him to mean things like expecting corporate boards to be half women, or mandating promotion schedules that treat pregnancy and maternity leave as if it were time spent on the job.
Not in family law, either. When the couple separates, cash incomes get counted and transferred, but domestic labor - by either partner - does not. No-one considers the cost of domestic services for the newly-alone breadwinner, who is still expected to keep breadwinning.
1) "but after the dust settles, they will surely be able to see the difference between showing a romantic interest in someone, and harassing her."
I don't see how he could measure or provide any insight on this. At best he offers a poll where I think we can all agree there is only one acceptable answer. Contradicting evidence is ignored.
How can one prove that #MeToo has made it easier for people to distinguish romantic interest and harassment?
To me it just looks like a moral panic flip out that ended in more bureaucracy.
2) The rape stuff feels tiring. It's not clear to me that the prescriptions of #MeToo (affirmative consent and kangaroo courts for sex allegations) have improved the situation here.
3) Women's opinion on abortion is split and about half of all abortions kill a woman.
4) Women have been able to get credit cards and such for some time, so I don't know what this guy is going on about. If your digging for shit fifty years ago, you don't have anything relevant to say.
Suppose someone told you to vote Republican because Lincoln freed the slaves. Or vote Democrat because Roosevelt won WWII. How would you respond? I know what I'd say, "I don't care what happened in 1860 or 1940, what matters is what will happen in the present if your candidate wins the election. That's what's gonna determine how I vote."
You see this a lot in discussions of feminism. Some centrist, usually a man, will identify as a feminist and list all these good things that the feminists did long ago, with no reference to any of the things they are doing in the present. Because, one suspects, he doesn't actually like any of the things the feminists are doing now and doesn't want to be put in a position where he has to defend them.
Oh God... you've just described me! Rarely have I felt so seen...
Though I would argue that just because some feminists say crazy things does not mean feminism itself is not a good idea. Every movement has its own share of cranks. If anything, surely the task is to reclaim the mantle of feminism for the common-sense, middle-of-the-road majority?
I really can't support the idea that a man should have any due process right in this matter: to do so would be to establish slavery over the woman.
I do note that men have never had a right to choose and have no reliable reversible form of contraception available to them - but they are placed into pretty burdensome bondage if they become fathers. But that's not important.
The man (except for the very, microscopically rare case of conception during SA) NEVER has any say over any part of the conceiving process. Men give away their freedom the moment they sleep with a woman.
I think a possible compromise is to make it incredibly easy for men to sign away parental rights in exchange for not being held liable for support.
Very weak argument to bring up so many things that are no longer problems. This gives the impression that she does not know many current problems or that she wants to list salacious previous problems to confuse people that they are still current problems or just poison the well.
Not sure if it's pertinent to the topic at hand, but this struck me: "Putting women in the position of having to ask their husbands for money is demeaning, and worse if the man is unfair." In my case, I make great money but don't dare buy things without getting my wife's permission. I have a number of things we could easily afford that I don't have simply because I don't want to deal with getting said permission and possibly getting into some sort of fight. I don't think this is super unusual, and points to the "hidden" power women have in our culture.
What all the feminists tend to suppress from their arguments is the power many women had in the family ... Women were not chained to the beds or kitchen sink in the far majority of cases. It were generally men that had a boss at home and one in the office. Women control 80% of the household income, you really do no want have her against you.
I am 64 but my grand ma's were formidable women that could control my grand pa's when needed. So was my mum and, except for a few cases, all the mum's of my friends. As feminists like Simone de Beauvoir, and in Holland Joke Kool-Smit, said, many, if not most, women were more than OK with the arrangement that the men worked outside and the woman around the home.
My grand father left home at 6am, worked on a ship yard all day under a boss, came home at 6 dirty with oil, grease, and sweat, gave her the money, washed himself in the sink, and then rested a bit, and then generally had to do some stuff in the house. At the time, housework was much more demanding but I seriously doubt that many women would have preferred to change roles. Read Orwell's Wigan Pier if you have any doubts.
The problem with feminism is that it tends to be extremely selective in its arguments and this is enforced by a huge army of female journalists & teachers. There is something called gamma bias: For females, positive news tends to get amplified, negative news muted. For the males the opposite. E.g. "The firefighters saved five children from the attic" when all fire fighters were male vs "The plane was landed by the first female captain on a Cessna 172!", or the "The 20 year old man was charged with arson" vs "The journalist doxxed the libs of tiktok account". Once you're aware of the mechanism, you see it everywhere. "Women are paid less due to systemic sexism" vs "Women earn higher salaries at NGO's because due to higher education."
It took 50 years of massive indoctrination by big business to make women believe that the ideal for a woman is to compete on masculine traits ... And even the epidemic mental health problems in young women seems to not be able make a dent in their believes.
"You’re probably right that men are now scared to show an interest in a co-worker, but after the dust settles, they will surely be able to see the difference between showing a romantic interest in someone, and harassing her. The same goes for the woman, of course."
Every movement claims that the "problems" and "excesses" are just temporary things that will go away once things "settle." The communist apologists told people the shortages would be temporary, and I'm sure they honestly believed this.
One can already see the phrase "sexual harassment" being quietly retired in favor of "sexual misconduct." Might it be BECAUSE the latter is vaguer, and vagueness is the point.
The underlying reality is this: if a man is accused of sexual harassment, his employer will claim to conduct a "fair" and "impartial" investigation. But it will face the following incentive. If it rules in favor of him, his accuser can sue, costing them a boatload of legal fees even if they win the case. If they rule against him, he has no recourse to the law. It's at-will employment, company can fire him any time they feel like it. There's a massive thumb on the scale to just assume he's guilty. That will not change until the law changes.
Perhaps ironically, at the heart of virtually all right-of-center arguments against feminism, racial issues, welfare/revenue issues, is a hard kernel of deep personal grievance, complaints of unfairness, prejudice, and wholesale bigotry against [men/whites/wealthy]. While I generally recognize the effectors of such grievances on both the left and the right, marginally, these left and right wing grievance are equal and opposite reactions -- if we substitute the adjectives in any of these “great” arguments, it gets hard to differentiate who wrote them. Thus, the obsession to complain against such broad market reactions is the job of both the reactionaries, and the academics. But the academics have a responsibility to discover nuance, not display and defend their own personal biases.
Just a nit, but women were admitted to the Ivy League way before the late 1960s, unless for some reason you are excluding graduate school. My mother was in the first class of women graduating from Harvard Medical School, in 1949.
My main beef with the response was "More importantly, you leave out some very serious problems for women: rape, domestic abuse, ... It’s women who are by far the main victims in the first three cases"
Tired of this trope. At least within the US, men are raped more often than women especially once you factor in repeatedly raped. As far as domestic abuse, likewise. Domestic abuse by women in fact is so accepted that's it's not even considered abuse any more and nearly every modern show and movie condones it as does the media, cue the recent Dana White fiasco.
In my five decades, I've never met a single heterosexual man that was not assaulted at least once by a woman, met plenty of women who have never been assaulted by a man ever. Lesbians have the highest rate of domestic violence among relationship types and not let's even talk about which gender is primarily responsible for abuse of elderly or children.
Men primarily abuse strangers, women abuse family. Don't confuse "reported, charged, or convicted" with reality.
Ridiculous comment, men are not raped more often or abused domestically. Most domestic violence killings are committed by men against women, same with serious injuries. Same with rape and sexual assault. MRA are literally more concerned with false accusations than with rape, that says a lot.
Peter is probably counting prison rapes. Men in prison, of course, don't count.
One of the most un-acknowledged facts of domestic violence is that approximately the same number of men are injured as women, at all levels of injury, including death (the split is something between 55-45 and 60-40, with women injured more often). The idea that it solely involves men injuring and killing women simply isn't true, nor close to true. The DoJ documented this for not just years, but decades; no-one talks about it (and the Obama administration changed the definitions to hide it during the college rape debate, which is a different topic). That claim may offend your intuition, but some simple math will show how it works: men are about 10 times more likely to kill someone - but about 9 out of 10 people they kill are men. Women are much less likely to kill someone - but about 9 out of 10 people they kill are men. So, assuming those numbers, 81% of killings are men killing men, 1% are women killing women, 9% are men killing women - and 9% are women killing men (surprise!).
You may also wonder how women are able to injure men. The quote I've heard to explain this is, angry men use their fists; angry women use weapons (often something found around the house). The old trope of the man ducking from flying plates is not altogether wrong.
MRA are not "literally more concerned with false accusations than with rape". I just told you about rapes you probably weren't considering at all. I am certainly concerned about rapes of women, and have worried about women I love who were in worrisome situations. I am also concerned about false accusations: civil rights shouldn't end just because one party is a woman and the other is a man - didn't we already cover this?
Finally, the domestic abuse statistics don't consider the financial abuse of the higher-earning members of married (or formerly-married) couples - more often (although by no means always) men. That's a long topic and one that will, some day, be looked back on in shame. I've heard all the justifications, and - acknowledging that there are sometimes genuine issues, which I've advised the lower-earning member of a couple about myself - the truth is that when compared to the scope of the abuse, most of those justifications hold about as much water as a sieve.
Women are much more likely to be injured and killed than men in domestic violence cases. That may be uncomfortable for you, but it's the truth. No one denies that men can get abused by women, it's just not 50/50.
There's no "financial abuse" lol, this stuff is what makes MRA look so ridiculous.
MRA do care more about false accusations that about rape, much much more actually. Otherwise, they would start to care about male rape victims (talk about how they're not to blame, how we need to #BelieveMen, etc.) instead of being obsessed about a supposed epidemic of false accusations and about victim-blaming female rape victims. Paul Elam literally said women who are going out and drinking at night are "begging to get raped." This is average MRA position.
Bullshit? Ownership of the income-generating potential of another human being - is there another word for it? Because I think it pretty well defines slavery (in at least one form).
Well, if you accept the absurd (but widely claimed) premise that sex with anyone who's had enough alcohol to be over the legal BAC for driving is rape, then it might be true, since many more men are daily drinkers. Including myself, so I've been victimized hundreds of times by sober girlfriends. :-p
Men enjoyed greater freedom from legal - and to a lesser extent social - restrictions in earlier times than women. But it should be noted that those freedoms were, in practice, often useless. E.g., the overwhelming majority of men wouldn't be able to afford a mortgage anyway until fairly recently in history (only a small minority owned property). Until the 19th century or so, most men worked the same job their fathers and grandfathers worked on the same land because that was the only option realistically available. Many of these freedoms had little to know value for the vast majority of the male population until the world became a much wealthier place.
In some cases this is probably why there was little resistance to the stricture of gender norms: they weren't practically meaningful. Sex and reproduction is a great example of this, which Badhwar presents as an imposition of sexism, but in reality, before modern medicine, sexual freedom wasn't worth much for women: in addition to STDs, they could easily get pregnant and very likely die. It only made sense for women to strongly seek less onerous sexual norms when technology had dramatically reduced the cost of sex for women.
This is also similar to how many women will argue about the way society deals with female promiscuity v male promiscuity, ignoring the reality that the number of men who can even BE promiscuous is vanishingly small, as compared to women who care literally able to monetize feet pictures.
I think it's worth clarifying a few things with her and seeing if she'd like to add anything.
Because, in trying to summarize these issues, they're kinda weak.
Her best argument, by far, is rape and sexual violence, which are very serious offenses and deserve attention, but she doesn't do much to develop those critiques here. I think this is worth more expansion on her part.
But the other two arguments congeal into access to birth control and, essentially, access to loans. I don't think the access to birth control and abortion arguments are terribly convincing; by any reasonable measure women have far more access to birth control and abortion options than men.
But what feels like the real heart of the matter is financial, basically meaning access to credit cards and mortgages. And this...just isn't that impactful. I mean, access to financial instruments is important but it's not, ya know, voting or a critical human right. Literally billions of people have lived perfectly happy lives without credit cards. This just doesn't feel as important as, say, spousal rape, and I'm curious why she spends so much time on it.
And again, these critiques are stuck in the 60's and 70's. I'm not saying this is ancient history but for you to have any memory of this period, say being 5 years old by 1979, you'd need to have been born in 1974 or earlier, so 48 years old, and to have reasonably been affected by it, say being 18 by 1979, you'd need to be born in 1961 or earlier, so 61 years old. Which means there might be working age adults who remember this period but basically everybody actually affected by is either retired or about to.
This just feels like doubly weak tea. Access to loans and more birth control options aren't just...kinda weak points but they're also basically limited to your boomer grandma, even if the Gen Xers remember this world they never experienced it as adults and within another 10-20 years we will have not living connection to this period.
And that's why I'd double check with her about these critiques because, well, access to credit cards and mortgages just doesn't hit that hard and I suspect on review she'd refocus some of her critique.
Let's consider the fact that, today, a married person can be thrown into life-altering debt by their spouse. They DO NOT GET A SAY IN THE MATTER.
That's a real, present-day civil rights problem. And it's that way because feminists wanted it.
No-one should be able to enforce a debt against a married person unless they have that person's signature on the documents. Ever. That's a happening-today problem (and it affects women - I know one who found her husband had effectively given away their house, and it was legally binding).
But no, let's talk about credit cards half a century ago.
Rape, sexual harassment and domestic violence are interesting, because they get mentioned a lot in contemporary discussions of feminism. I would love to see a breakdown of the differences in feminist and non-feminist opinions on how often rape happens, why it happens and how it can be prevented.
In my own short research on the subject I have found this:
She writes that "after the dust settles, they will surely be able to see the difference between showing a romantic interest in someone, and harassing her." Surely . . . not! Everyone knows there are misunderstandings, and that has a chilling effect.
For the rest, she lists past obstacles faced by women, due to the rigidity of social roles imposed on the sexes. Some women chafed at the female role, but some men chafed at the male role. Anyway, society is now much more fluid about these matters; the old rigidity belongs to the dustbin of history, and to some less progressive parts of today's world--not the USA.
"If Kat is right, husbands could sell their joint property without their wives’ consent. Horribly unjust!"
Laughs in child support, alimony, and custody outcomes.
My response to this response also was laughter.
In every case, it matters what we measure. Cherry-pick the right variables and we can prove anything.
Attempting to add in additional datapoints to the conversation is a mite bit different than cherry-picking, I would argue.
I meant someone can pick cherries elsewhere and then add them to the conversation, as badhwar does with the joint property bit. The young men who are experiencing the worst of what Caplan was saying don't have any property to speak of, either.
Ah yes precisely. I’ve noticed that a lot of Feminism and it’s adherents rely on Apex fallacy for a lot of the justifications and I find that fascinating.
Isn't men's rights activism relying on the apex fallacy? Like all men are homeless, prisoners, work deaths, suicide victims, homicide victims, etc., when all of them combined are less than 1%.
Not at all, actually. Men are 90% of homicide victims, etc etc etc we spend tons of energy on issues that impact a super-minority of the population when discussing feminism and leave larger issues unaddressed. Even worse, to bring up those issues is immediately met with claims of sexism.
See http://www.realworlddivorce.com/
Child support and alimony are not gendered, custody outcomes obviously neither. So there is no legal discrimination. Also two, three, five, ten wrongs don't make a right.
Child support and alimony are, in fact, gendered. This is why you cannot pass laws that order a default understanding of 50/50 custody and a mandatory DNA test at birth.
They are not gendered, there is no law that mentions men have to pay. And there are laws for 50/50 custody (for example in Kentucky), but most men get it anway when they ask.
https://utahdivorce.biz/national-child-custody-statistics-by-gender/
Most men do not get it - why lie?
Most men *who ask for it* get it. This is a fact.
And why might men not ask for it as often as women do?
So when women receive 90% of all alimony and obtain custody in 90% of cases, that is the court taking property from a spouse is it not?
The notion that alimony/child support are just reasonable compensation for opportunity cost is belied by the fact that they're compulsory. Couples *could* (and often do) make such arrangements voluntarily that reflect the valuations of each party. Child support and alimony are themselves vestiges of a time when women were legally restricted in the workplace etc., and thus men were required to support their ex-wives. I can't speak for Andrew but I see nothing here suggesting one justifies the other, but rather than both are wrong. Except feminists have gotten restrictions on work and property ownership eliminated to the benefit of women, while compulsory child support and alimony curiously persist, with the support of feminists, and more heavily enforced at the expense of men. There's a certain irony to using long since abolished economic restrictions on women to justify feminism today while compulsory child support and alimony actually still exist.
Faith in humanity officially diminished - right back at you.
Family law is a reaction to the unconscionable treatment of women, a long time ago. Today, it treats the higher-income member of a couple unconscionably badly. There's no other way to put it. Mark is absolutely right.
You do not have experience with a typical family law court in the US. It is getting better, but it is still relatively routine for courts to all but sever the father's relationship with their child. And it happens even when the father is the more nurturing parent and regardless of income.
And your phrase "if you break up the family then the obligation needs to be split in a charitable way" is laughably ignorant. That "you" is pretty nondescript there. The typical situation is for the woman to break up the family (at about a 2-1 rate) and for the father to end up with a custody arrangement making it unlikely that he will maintain strong bonds with his children.
You clearly don't have the temperament for rational discussion, I can see this is a waste of time.
Taking the position of feminists from two generations ago and presenting them as though they are equivalent to the modern variant is just intellectually dishonest. The current variant tries to implement demonstrably destructive economics policies, and is fundamentally at odds with our culture of the presumption of innocence.
The thing is that "the positions of feminists two generations ago" are still opposed by many people (nearly all of them men) in 2023, and hence still need to be defended. I don't know if you noticed Roe v Wade being overturned last year - if you didn't think the gains of the sixties and seventies were on shaky ground before, then surely this event changed your mind? And all this remains true even if some modern feminists are wrong about other stuff.
I suppose its a question of the relative importance of that issue. Weighting it against other things they support is hard in the personal liberty sense; how do we assign value? From a fiscal standpoint, you may be on to something, because the exterminated offspring may have resulted in net negative consumption of government resources; its unclear however if that would hold true over their lifetimes. Its also unclear whether they would 1. adopt the politics of their mothers (disproportionately democrat), and 2. whether the anti market bias of that camp would functionally lead to more detrimental fiscal outcomes (since republicans are largely just a reactive party/movement). As a side note I have always thought it was funny that republicans are worried about the politics of immigrants, but not millions of added welfare kids absent abortion. On the personal liberty side; is the right to abort > presumption of innocence and due process? This is a subjective question, personally I would say no (despite me supporting abortion). Further this begs the question of whether we need the modern feminist movement to fight back on the abortion mandates, they are certainly not the only political camp, even and especially within the left, in favor of those rights. Though that also begs the question: are they the worst camp, which I would also have to answer no. Either way I love your comment Alex it got me thinking this morning!
"destructive economics policies" You can't just say most feminists are communists, communism is bad, so feminism is bad.
Did I say they were communists? Don't strawman me bro!
I took him to mean things like expecting corporate boards to be half women, or mandating promotion schedules that treat pregnancy and maternity leave as if it were time spent on the job.
"Is women’s domestic labor not worth any amount of money?"
Not to the bank!
Not in family law, either. When the couple separates, cash incomes get counted and transferred, but domestic labor - by either partner - does not. No-one considers the cost of domestic services for the newly-alone breadwinner, who is still expected to keep breadwinning.
1) "but after the dust settles, they will surely be able to see the difference between showing a romantic interest in someone, and harassing her."
I don't see how he could measure or provide any insight on this. At best he offers a poll where I think we can all agree there is only one acceptable answer. Contradicting evidence is ignored.
How can one prove that #MeToo has made it easier for people to distinguish romantic interest and harassment?
To me it just looks like a moral panic flip out that ended in more bureaucracy.
2) The rape stuff feels tiring. It's not clear to me that the prescriptions of #MeToo (affirmative consent and kangaroo courts for sex allegations) have improved the situation here.
3) Women's opinion on abortion is split and about half of all abortions kill a woman.
4) Women have been able to get credit cards and such for some time, so I don't know what this guy is going on about. If your digging for shit fifty years ago, you don't have anything relevant to say.
This whole response is embarrassingly weak.
Neera is not a guy; she's a woman.
Neera Badhwar is a female Indian (from Asia) name.
Suppose someone told you to vote Republican because Lincoln freed the slaves. Or vote Democrat because Roosevelt won WWII. How would you respond? I know what I'd say, "I don't care what happened in 1860 or 1940, what matters is what will happen in the present if your candidate wins the election. That's what's gonna determine how I vote."
You see this a lot in discussions of feminism. Some centrist, usually a man, will identify as a feminist and list all these good things that the feminists did long ago, with no reference to any of the things they are doing in the present. Because, one suspects, he doesn't actually like any of the things the feminists are doing now and doesn't want to be put in a position where he has to defend them.
Oh God... you've just described me! Rarely have I felt so seen...
Though I would argue that just because some feminists say crazy things does not mean feminism itself is not a good idea. Every movement has its own share of cranks. If anything, surely the task is to reclaim the mantle of feminism for the common-sense, middle-of-the-road majority?
What about abortion rights, this is a present topic.
I think feminists represent the morally and legally wrong side of the modern abortion debate. Talk about depriving a male of due process!
I really can't support the idea that a man should have any due process right in this matter: to do so would be to establish slavery over the woman.
I do note that men have never had a right to choose and have no reliable reversible form of contraception available to them - but they are placed into pretty burdensome bondage if they become fathers. But that's not important.
The man (except for the very, microscopically rare case of conception during SA) NEVER has any say over any part of the conceiving process. Men give away their freedom the moment they sleep with a woman.
I think a possible compromise is to make it incredibly easy for men to sign away parental rights in exchange for not being held liable for support.
I disagree, feminists are right about women having the right to abortion. So agree to disagree I guess.
Very weak argument to bring up so many things that are no longer problems. This gives the impression that she does not know many current problems or that she wants to list salacious previous problems to confuse people that they are still current problems or just poison the well.
Not sure if it's pertinent to the topic at hand, but this struck me: "Putting women in the position of having to ask their husbands for money is demeaning, and worse if the man is unfair." In my case, I make great money but don't dare buy things without getting my wife's permission. I have a number of things we could easily afford that I don't have simply because I don't want to deal with getting said permission and possibly getting into some sort of fight. I don't think this is super unusual, and points to the "hidden" power women have in our culture.
Advertisers know this, this is precisely why we understand that women make 80% of all buying decisions in a household.
What all the feminists tend to suppress from their arguments is the power many women had in the family ... Women were not chained to the beds or kitchen sink in the far majority of cases. It were generally men that had a boss at home and one in the office. Women control 80% of the household income, you really do no want have her against you.
I am 64 but my grand ma's were formidable women that could control my grand pa's when needed. So was my mum and, except for a few cases, all the mum's of my friends. As feminists like Simone de Beauvoir, and in Holland Joke Kool-Smit, said, many, if not most, women were more than OK with the arrangement that the men worked outside and the woman around the home.
My grand father left home at 6am, worked on a ship yard all day under a boss, came home at 6 dirty with oil, grease, and sweat, gave her the money, washed himself in the sink, and then rested a bit, and then generally had to do some stuff in the house. At the time, housework was much more demanding but I seriously doubt that many women would have preferred to change roles. Read Orwell's Wigan Pier if you have any doubts.
The problem with feminism is that it tends to be extremely selective in its arguments and this is enforced by a huge army of female journalists & teachers. There is something called gamma bias: For females, positive news tends to get amplified, negative news muted. For the males the opposite. E.g. "The firefighters saved five children from the attic" when all fire fighters were male vs "The plane was landed by the first female captain on a Cessna 172!", or the "The 20 year old man was charged with arson" vs "The journalist doxxed the libs of tiktok account". Once you're aware of the mechanism, you see it everywhere. "Women are paid less due to systemic sexism" vs "Women earn higher salaries at NGO's because due to higher education."
It took 50 years of massive indoctrination by big business to make women believe that the ideal for a woman is to compete on masculine traits ... And even the epidemic mental health problems in young women seems to not be able make a dent in their believes.
"You’re probably right that men are now scared to show an interest in a co-worker, but after the dust settles, they will surely be able to see the difference between showing a romantic interest in someone, and harassing her. The same goes for the woman, of course."
Every movement claims that the "problems" and "excesses" are just temporary things that will go away once things "settle." The communist apologists told people the shortages would be temporary, and I'm sure they honestly believed this.
One can already see the phrase "sexual harassment" being quietly retired in favor of "sexual misconduct." Might it be BECAUSE the latter is vaguer, and vagueness is the point.
The underlying reality is this: if a man is accused of sexual harassment, his employer will claim to conduct a "fair" and "impartial" investigation. But it will face the following incentive. If it rules in favor of him, his accuser can sue, costing them a boatload of legal fees even if they win the case. If they rule against him, he has no recourse to the law. It's at-will employment, company can fire him any time they feel like it. There's a massive thumb on the scale to just assume he's guilty. That will not change until the law changes.
Perhaps ironically, at the heart of virtually all right-of-center arguments against feminism, racial issues, welfare/revenue issues, is a hard kernel of deep personal grievance, complaints of unfairness, prejudice, and wholesale bigotry against [men/whites/wealthy]. While I generally recognize the effectors of such grievances on both the left and the right, marginally, these left and right wing grievance are equal and opposite reactions -- if we substitute the adjectives in any of these “great” arguments, it gets hard to differentiate who wrote them. Thus, the obsession to complain against such broad market reactions is the job of both the reactionaries, and the academics. But the academics have a responsibility to discover nuance, not display and defend their own personal biases.
That would be a noteworthy observation if it weren't similarly true of left of center arguments in favor of feminism, racial issues, welfare, etc.
Yes that was my long-winded point. Irony intended
Just a nit, but women were admitted to the Ivy League way before the late 1960s, unless for some reason you are excluding graduate school. My mother was in the first class of women graduating from Harvard Medical School, in 1949.
My main beef with the response was "More importantly, you leave out some very serious problems for women: rape, domestic abuse, ... It’s women who are by far the main victims in the first three cases"
Tired of this trope. At least within the US, men are raped more often than women especially once you factor in repeatedly raped. As far as domestic abuse, likewise. Domestic abuse by women in fact is so accepted that's it's not even considered abuse any more and nearly every modern show and movie condones it as does the media, cue the recent Dana White fiasco.
In my five decades, I've never met a single heterosexual man that was not assaulted at least once by a woman, met plenty of women who have never been assaulted by a man ever. Lesbians have the highest rate of domestic violence among relationship types and not let's even talk about which gender is primarily responsible for abuse of elderly or children.
Men primarily abuse strangers, women abuse family. Don't confuse "reported, charged, or convicted" with reality.
Ridiculous comment, men are not raped more often or abused domestically. Most domestic violence killings are committed by men against women, same with serious injuries. Same with rape and sexual assault. MRA are literally more concerned with false accusations than with rape, that says a lot.
That throwaway line caught my attention too.
Peter is probably counting prison rapes. Men in prison, of course, don't count.
One of the most un-acknowledged facts of domestic violence is that approximately the same number of men are injured as women, at all levels of injury, including death (the split is something between 55-45 and 60-40, with women injured more often). The idea that it solely involves men injuring and killing women simply isn't true, nor close to true. The DoJ documented this for not just years, but decades; no-one talks about it (and the Obama administration changed the definitions to hide it during the college rape debate, which is a different topic). That claim may offend your intuition, but some simple math will show how it works: men are about 10 times more likely to kill someone - but about 9 out of 10 people they kill are men. Women are much less likely to kill someone - but about 9 out of 10 people they kill are men. So, assuming those numbers, 81% of killings are men killing men, 1% are women killing women, 9% are men killing women - and 9% are women killing men (surprise!).
You may also wonder how women are able to injure men. The quote I've heard to explain this is, angry men use their fists; angry women use weapons (often something found around the house). The old trope of the man ducking from flying plates is not altogether wrong.
MRA are not "literally more concerned with false accusations than with rape". I just told you about rapes you probably weren't considering at all. I am certainly concerned about rapes of women, and have worried about women I love who were in worrisome situations. I am also concerned about false accusations: civil rights shouldn't end just because one party is a woman and the other is a man - didn't we already cover this?
Finally, the domestic abuse statistics don't consider the financial abuse of the higher-earning members of married (or formerly-married) couples - more often (although by no means always) men. That's a long topic and one that will, some day, be looked back on in shame. I've heard all the justifications, and - acknowledging that there are sometimes genuine issues, which I've advised the lower-earning member of a couple about myself - the truth is that when compared to the scope of the abuse, most of those justifications hold about as much water as a sieve.
Women are much more likely to be injured and killed than men in domestic violence cases. That may be uncomfortable for you, but it's the truth. No one denies that men can get abused by women, it's just not 50/50.
There's no "financial abuse" lol, this stuff is what makes MRA look so ridiculous.
MRA do care more about false accusations that about rape, much much more actually. Otherwise, they would start to care about male rape victims (talk about how they're not to blame, how we need to #BelieveMen, etc.) instead of being obsessed about a supposed epidemic of false accusations and about victim-blaming female rape victims. Paul Elam literally said women who are going out and drinking at night are "begging to get raped." This is average MRA position.
There is absolutely financial abuse, it is something early feminists ID'd, https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-32823-001
That you're denying this exists is...well it is something.
I thought you were talking about the usual MRA bullshit of alimony as slavery, whatever.
Bullshit? Ownership of the income-generating potential of another human being - is there another word for it? Because I think it pretty well defines slavery (in at least one form).
Calling it bullshit isn't much of an answer.
Are you a woman or a man?
A man, why does it matter?
Just the way you talk about men made me wonder if you were a misandrist or merely had internalized misandry lol
Well, if you accept the absurd (but widely claimed) premise that sex with anyone who's had enough alcohol to be over the legal BAC for driving is rape, then it might be true, since many more men are daily drinkers. Including myself, so I've been victimized hundreds of times by sober girlfriends. :-p
So funny. :-p
Men enjoyed greater freedom from legal - and to a lesser extent social - restrictions in earlier times than women. But it should be noted that those freedoms were, in practice, often useless. E.g., the overwhelming majority of men wouldn't be able to afford a mortgage anyway until fairly recently in history (only a small minority owned property). Until the 19th century or so, most men worked the same job their fathers and grandfathers worked on the same land because that was the only option realistically available. Many of these freedoms had little to know value for the vast majority of the male population until the world became a much wealthier place.
In some cases this is probably why there was little resistance to the stricture of gender norms: they weren't practically meaningful. Sex and reproduction is a great example of this, which Badhwar presents as an imposition of sexism, but in reality, before modern medicine, sexual freedom wasn't worth much for women: in addition to STDs, they could easily get pregnant and very likely die. It only made sense for women to strongly seek less onerous sexual norms when technology had dramatically reduced the cost of sex for women.
This is also similar to how many women will argue about the way society deals with female promiscuity v male promiscuity, ignoring the reality that the number of men who can even BE promiscuous is vanishingly small, as compared to women who care literally able to monetize feet pictures.
I think it's worth clarifying a few things with her and seeing if she'd like to add anything.
Because, in trying to summarize these issues, they're kinda weak.
Her best argument, by far, is rape and sexual violence, which are very serious offenses and deserve attention, but she doesn't do much to develop those critiques here. I think this is worth more expansion on her part.
But the other two arguments congeal into access to birth control and, essentially, access to loans. I don't think the access to birth control and abortion arguments are terribly convincing; by any reasonable measure women have far more access to birth control and abortion options than men.
But what feels like the real heart of the matter is financial, basically meaning access to credit cards and mortgages. And this...just isn't that impactful. I mean, access to financial instruments is important but it's not, ya know, voting or a critical human right. Literally billions of people have lived perfectly happy lives without credit cards. This just doesn't feel as important as, say, spousal rape, and I'm curious why she spends so much time on it.
And again, these critiques are stuck in the 60's and 70's. I'm not saying this is ancient history but for you to have any memory of this period, say being 5 years old by 1979, you'd need to have been born in 1974 or earlier, so 48 years old, and to have reasonably been affected by it, say being 18 by 1979, you'd need to be born in 1961 or earlier, so 61 years old. Which means there might be working age adults who remember this period but basically everybody actually affected by is either retired or about to.
This just feels like doubly weak tea. Access to loans and more birth control options aren't just...kinda weak points but they're also basically limited to your boomer grandma, even if the Gen Xers remember this world they never experienced it as adults and within another 10-20 years we will have not living connection to this period.
And that's why I'd double check with her about these critiques because, well, access to credit cards and mortgages just doesn't hit that hard and I suspect on review she'd refocus some of her critique.
Let's consider the fact that, today, a married person can be thrown into life-altering debt by their spouse. They DO NOT GET A SAY IN THE MATTER.
That's a real, present-day civil rights problem. And it's that way because feminists wanted it.
No-one should be able to enforce a debt against a married person unless they have that person's signature on the documents. Ever. That's a happening-today problem (and it affects women - I know one who found her husband had effectively given away their house, and it was legally binding).
But no, let's talk about credit cards half a century ago.
And credit cards were not very wide spread among the commoners until the late seventies anyway. It is a fantastic example of a red herring.
Rape, sexual harassment and domestic violence are interesting, because they get mentioned a lot in contemporary discussions of feminism. I would love to see a breakdown of the differences in feminist and non-feminist opinions on how often rape happens, why it happens and how it can be prevented.
In my own short research on the subject I have found this:
https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2019/11/compilation-ways-you-can-stand-against-rape-culture
Are these claims really proven? How much evidence of rape culture is there?
She writes that "after the dust settles, they will surely be able to see the difference between showing a romantic interest in someone, and harassing her." Surely . . . not! Everyone knows there are misunderstandings, and that has a chilling effect.
For the rest, she lists past obstacles faced by women, due to the rigidity of social roles imposed on the sexes. Some women chafed at the female role, but some men chafed at the male role. Anyway, society is now much more fluid about these matters; the old rigidity belongs to the dustbin of history, and to some less progressive parts of today's world--not the USA.