Yeah, it seems like by this standard it's near impossible not to spend all your time overrationalizing extremes. Would she similarly force herself to describe QAnon as the belief that the world should not be run by pedophiles? Surely she doesn't believe the world *should* be run by pedophiles. But that typically isn't the reason people disagree with QAnon.
There’s a false equivalence with the QAnon example. It’s more that QAnon is the positive belief that an oligarch of pedophiles DO run the world. And it’s a convenient mischaracterization to suggest the inverse is their position.
In the same way, there really isn’t any problem with a definition capturing a large swath of people. Perhaps that has a powerful moderating force to those who are “extremist” on either end of the spectrum of any cohort of collectively grouped humans.
The criticism that “the belief that the sky is blue” has the exact opposite intuition for me. We so believe the trope we can’t actually get our heads around the truth of the matter or what side of the position you’d be on if the issue had any teeth. It is completely reasonable to believe the sky is NOT blue. Most the day the sky is some other color, say at night the sky isn’t blue. Overcast skies are largely gray. The sky isn’t itself blue, but diffuses light to create color on the blue-violet spectrum. Categorically, it’s correct to say “the sky isn’t blue” because of the various phase changes.
Much like it isn’t unreasonable to believe that biological differences in genders afford different capacities and therefore different treatment. The logic isn’t morally good, but it’s a thought process much like “the sky is blue;” technically correct but utterly wrong. While the popular opinion that equal gender rights has shifted (predominantly as a result of feminist movement), it’s not at all clear that means we should reject the definition on that basis. Common sense isn’t common after all, even if we survey for it.
Frankly, it seems the wholesale rejection of “feminism” by mischaracterization spoils the otherwise valid criticisms of feminism conveyed by Caplan. Really, the “reject feminism” conclusion is a red-herring to the “reform feminism” lessons drawn from Caplan’s valid critiques. Sure, “equal rights between men and women” captures a lot of people who don’t self-identify. Not at all clear that’s a defect. In fact, that’s a feature! Feminists are normal reasonable people, and people who are self proclaimed feminists who act poorly should be judged as crazy people because they are acting outside the norm of acceptable behavior. It’s like we excuse people because of some “-ism.” People can just be bad on the basis of their behavior, not their ideological alignment.
I think your first sentence makes the point for exactly why its a true example. Feminists believe that society unequally disadvantages women, and the argument of the book is that this belief is false.
That you commit a logical fallacy is evidence that the example is true? You’re going to have to clarify “first sentence” because it can’t literally be true. I am literally calling you out so tack that on as another count of willful ignorance.
In this post, Caplan literally concedes the opposite - women have been historically disadvantaged. I don’t think it’s even controversial to believe society still maintains some of those cultural dynamics.
I think the problem is you want the conclusion to be true regardless of the argument to get there.
This is very funny because it demonstrates exactly the parallel that we're talking about. It's difficult to get QAnon supporters to agree to a fair characterization of their beliefs because they are so dogmatically convinced of a falsehood. The same is true here.
If you have read Caplan's book, or really have any familiarity at all with affirmative actions laws and the numerous regimes which de jure favor women over men, you should at least be able to understand the parallel. It really isn't difficult.
It certainly reveals a lot about you’re argument, but sadly we won’t want to extend that to QAnon, Feminism, or Caplan. Your conclusions just don’t follow. In the same line you say QAnon can’t agree on a characterization you nonetheless commit yourself to saying them believe in a falsehood. That’s not the case in your original claim about the group’s beliefs but it is a falsehood in my characterization. Clearly if you read my argument you would understand how individual perception of a group is irrelevant.
I’d hardly say you’re making any kind of good faith argument. You like conclusions and you’ll ditch whatever reasoning to get there.
This is an excellent response, but I'm going to try to be more Bryan than Bryan.
Female well-being IS more important than male well-being, for obvious reasons. I'm as anti-draft as you are, but the fact that it only applies to men is far more just than having it apply to both men and women. In case I haven't sufficiently offended your casual readers, I'll add that Charles Murray's research on family stability supports this. Children born to and living with their married parents have the best outcomes on average. Children of single mothers (or even divorced and remarried mothers) tend to have worse outcomes, with one exception: if the father dies while the parents are married and the children live at home (if only there were a shorter way to say this, like "stable traditional family"), average children's outcomes barely differ. We matter as fathers, but we're pretty effective whether we're alive or dead. Especially if we have enough life insurance. Men are simply more expendable, and we should embrace that. We are important but expendable. Women are important and essential. What's weird is that's viewed as anti-woman.
1) The kids didn't live through the trauma of a breakup
2) The kids didn't live through the factors that lead to the breakup
3) The parents were the kind of people that didn't break up (and thus the kids probably inherit those traits)
So anyway, there are strong reasons to believe this doesn't prove what you say. For many broken homes state subsidies act in a similar way to life insurance, and yet those homes are a mess. It's not just the money.
If I gave the impression that I'm saying it's just about the money, then that's my mistake. I'm saying fathers don't have to be alive to have a positive impact. It's very much about your point #3.
Because it's real. I would think this is obvious from life experience, but if not here goes.
About 1/3 of divorces are a result of actual abuse, and in those cases the children actually do better in divorce (or at least not worse).
But about 2/3 of divorces are "ennui divorces". There is no abuse, the woman (and sometimes the man) just gets a case of "Eat, Pray, Love" and fucks it all up. In those cases the children do a lot worse.
Doesn't that just mean that someone should be ineligible for the draft if their spouse is already in the military, rather than that women in general should be ineligible for the draft?
Women aren't essential, having one living parent is essential, regardless of whether that parent is a mother or a father. I just took a look at the research on children of single fathers, and it does not look like there is significant evidence that they are statistically worse off than the children of single mothers.
Also, it's pretty obvious to me why saying that "women are important and essential" is anti-woman: It's because it's saying they are only important and essential for one thing, raising children. It would be like if someone said that African Americans are important and essential for playing basketball and recording hip-hop albums, or that Asian Americans are important and essential for doing math. Locking someone into a single social role is oppressive, even if people who perform that role well are praised and respected.
Couldn't you use the same argument to say that men are worth more and that only women should be conscripted? There is no reason (and I couldn't find any evidence) to think single-fathers would be any different to single mothers, so it shouldn't matter which one of them die in a war.
Regardless of whether it's anti-woman or anti-man, it's sexist and anti-equality to say that women or men are worth less or are more expendable. Men and women are worth the same. Sex and gender shouldn't matter at all.
Perhaps Bryan's biggest blind spot is sexual assault. By the time she is 20 almost every woman will have at the bare minimum been flashed at by a person capable of physically overpowering her, and suffered a lot of unwanted sexual propositions. Far more sinister is the amount of sexual assault and rape. The vast majority of women I have been very close to (girlfriends, close family) have been sexually assaulted or raped. I don't know of a man I am similarlly close to that has been.
Now, this is anecdotal you may say, but I would respond that none of those women I know have told a stranger this, and my anecdotal evidence leads me to believe this is a huge undiscovered problem.
Sexual assault is, of course, horrible. I think practically all non-feminists think so. In many cases, it is the most conservative people that call for the harshest punishments. The main difference - at least from what I've read - between feminists and non-feminists on this issue is that feminists more commonly believe that sexual assault is learned behavior. That gender roles and sexual objectification of women in society fosters a culture that encourages rape. In contrast, non-feminists are more likely to be agnostic on this matter or think it happens for other reasons.
I am not sure if there is enough data to definitively confirm or deny any theory on why it happens.
Agreed, but there is a weaker version of the feminist case that a hypothetical culture that removed shame from victims of sexual crime (both women and the far less common male victims) regardless of its causes, leads to better outcomes for all, in a way that disportionately helps half the population become "more equal".
No similar reluctance to speak attaches to being a victim of other crimes, either to your person or your property.
Your beliefs (that sexual assault and shame around sexual assault are bad) are held by both feminists and non-feminists.
You could argue that sexual assault means society generally treats women less fairly than men. But society is extremely anti-sexual assault, possibly more than it is anti-murder.
Broadly true, but I assert that there are some differences in attitudes.
Ask yourself, would a woman be more willing to speak about being a victim of a sexual crime to a feminist or to a non-feminist? I'd assert that even conservative women who strongly disagree with feminism would know where they would be more likely to receive a sympathetic hearing.
You have a point there, but I think there's a chance that Caplan would argue (and I would tend to agree) that feminism's attack on sexual norms have done more to encourage "society's" ignoring of the informal but important walls against such disgusting behavior as assaulting, flashing, etc.
Not sure I undertand you correctly, but are you saying that the stereotypical liberal feminist has less disapproval for sexual misbehaviour than the stereotypical conservative non-feminist?
They have different definitions of sexual misbehaviour, to the point where one side disapproves of some things the other side encourages, but I find it difficult to believe that assault is regarded less severely post feminism than pre feminism.
An average man is something like ten times more likely to be murdered, than an average woman.
One of the symptoms of feminism is a constant focus on problems that more strongly affect women - as sexual assault (excluding those that occur in prison) does - while ignoring or downplaying problems that more strongly affect men.
I take the point, but, as I mentioned in my original post, I don't think stats capture the full extent of sexual assaults and rapes. Although muder is obviously a more serious crime and I don't have the stats, it is also far far less common.
Finally, a scandal of 1000s of sets of forensic evidence for murder cases getting warehoused and ignored didn't happen, suggesting that sexual assault/rape still isn't taken seriously enough.
I think it's the opposite. One of the biggest failings of modern feminism as an equality movement is that it rarely if ever seems to care about men when they are victims of violence, especially sexual violence by women. According to the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, the 12-month prevalence estimates of sexual victimization is very similar for men and women [1][2], but there is almost no support available to men, and men who are victims of rape and other sexual or domestic violence are often met with hostility and ridicule, including by police and social workers.
Women sometimes experience the same, and that is of course just as unacceptable, but significant effort and resources are expended to improve the situation for women while next to nothing is done for men in the same situation. Some people who call themselves feminists even deny that men are abused by women, or that it's a serious problem when it happens.
Regarding anecdotal evidence, my experience is similar to yours regardless of gender. I don't know anyone well enough that I think they would tell me who has not told me about being sexually assaulted, regardless of gender.
I don't really understand Murti's disagreement regarding Caplan's definition of feminism. Her preferred definition is that "men and women should be treated equally". Which is a statement only required to be made if someone believes that they are not being treated equally (because if they are already being treated equally then the word "should" would not exist in that definition).
This in turn confirms Caplan's definition of Feminism that it is "The view that our society generally treats men more fairly than women" (i.e. not equally).
Or did changes in the economy raise the value of female labor in the marketplace, thus leading to more female wage earners, thus leading to more female access to credit. Not to mention the general rise in credit (very few people had access to credit in the old days regardless of gender).
I think we credit to feminism a lot of things that were probably going to happen anyway due to other changes in society. At best, maybe feminism slightly accelerated the changes.
I'm not even sure what "oppression" is supposed to mean.
You could say men as "oppressed" by having to do military service, but who else is going to do it? Obviously, men are better equipped for it.
And you could say that women are "oppressed" by having to stay home and raise children, but who else is better equipped to do it?
As technology improves we can use machines to dull the comparative advantage of the sexes, and thus more people can do more things profitably. But its not a blight on earlier eras that this wasn't an option.
By "oppressed" I mean not permitted to undertake a certain action, by law or by convention. Being forced into a certain action is also oppression. I can tell this word bothers you, so perhaps "having objectively less liberty" will do as a substitute, although it is cumbersome.
Its very sloppy thinking to say oppression/deprivation of liberty example 1 is false because oppression/deprivation of liberty example 2 exists - all you are doing is reinforcing the idea that oppression is pervasive.
I'm glad we agree that gender roles, enforced strictly with barely any exceptions, cause deprivation of liberty.
How much liberty is deprived depends on context. If a foriegn army conquers you country and your are taken as a sex spave, your liberty is reduced. If your husband is conscripted to prevent that outcome, his liberty is reduced but yours potentially increased.
Yes, although it seems we might both be guilty of conflating liberty and utility. I need to have a better think!
For example, 95% top maginal income tax rates redistributed to the poorest deprive the liberty of very few people to increase the liberty of very many people. But utility would be better word for that.
A [irrelevant qualifiers] dude who is thoroughly familiar with the social science of gender does, in fact, have a clearer vision of what women in society face than a [irrelevant qualifiers] woman who only goes off of her own experiences and what she hears from her ideological echo chamber.
I think it's hard for people to admit that in a poor and dangerous world, the restrictions put on women were probably a decent equilibrium in order to protect and provide for them. As the world got less poor and dangerous societal mores updated pretty darn quickly, and I don't see much evidence that it was done so slowly that it constituted the worst crime ever.
I don't think "earnest feminists" can be converted, but if uncommitted normies would stop providing token cover for them they would be a lot less disruptive to the rest of us.
I think it would be enough if more moderate feminists criticized the extreme parts of the movement more. I think they are somewhat scared to speak up too.
(You could object that the right to vote, though of little value to any woman individually, is of great value to women collectively. If people voted selfishly, this would make sense, but almost all of the evidence says otherwise. The gender gap on abortion, for example, is minimal).
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I'm not sure this is a good example. Support for abortion is evenly split by gender on most surveys. While agree that some women are really into it, it's not clear to me that abortion law would be significantly different if women couldn't vote or that its in a woman's interest to have maximal abortion freedom. Most of the volunteers I see at crisis pregnancy centers are women.
And of course, about half (or more) of abortions kill a future woman.
A better example might be divorce law or child custody, where women definitely have organized to get the better end of it.
Because men and women have to live together, there aren't that many issues that are uniquely gendered (the less they live together, the bigger the gender gaps get).
There is probably a stronger case for minorities getting the vote being able to use it to secure certain rights (like blacks).
The value of a vote varies with the supply of votes. Under universal suffrage votes are cheap.
I don't doubt you, but what's the mechanism whereby women have organized on divorce law?
The idea of making marriage law more balanced is apparently very far outside the Overton Window, because while there are online spaces dedicated to these issues, I don't think I've ever heard them discussed by a politician.
The idea that society treats women better than men (on a specific issue) is entirely consistent with the Overton window being in a place where... society treats women better than men (on that specific issue).
Indeed, the equal rights movement's point, that women were disadvantaged (in certain respects) by society's views on their "proper" role - is exactly the reason why men are disadvantaged (in certain respects) by society's views on their "proper" role. Society still (weakly) holds that a woman's place is in the home, preferably raising children; and (strongly) that a man's place is providing for her.
Perhaps not in the USA, but I'd say the gender gap on the number of female babies killed by abortion is radically higher in most of the world, and I'd guess it's actually higher in the USA too, just by a smaller margin.
Brilliant as always. Her indignation at your success objects rebuttal coupled with her MGTOW/incel smear is quite telling. A thinker approaching a topic in a dispassionate way won't allow argument to slide into guilt by association indictment. Also, that something as obvs true as success objects would provoke it makes it all the stranger (or perhaps makes sense - when there are no good arguments for something, the way to maintain it is to double down on the taboo).
"...are, in fact, issues that modern feminists do identify as problems and have discussed at great length."
The NOW - I think the most prominent feminist organization in the country - actively opposes and lobbies against gender equality in state custody law. And to my knowledge, most feminists support compulsory child support laws, which is a key reason for some of the things she lists. It's not just a matter of how much one emphasize male vs. female issues; most feminists - or at least most activists - support policies that privilege women or redistribute from men to women. They support such policies because they believe it's fair compensation for what they see as society's unfair treatment of women, but whether that's true or not, one can't just sweep all that under the rug when positing that feminists oppose discrimination against males too.
My issue with the definition of feminism as "the belief society treats men more fairly than it treats women," is that it seems to me that whether or not someone is a feminist is a fact about them specifically. It should not change based on what society one lives in. If I get on a plane in Saudi Arabia and fly to Themyscira it sounds weird to say that I was a feminist when I got on the plane, but not a feminist when I got off.
It also doesn't match the usage of the word by the people Bryan describes who believe in equality but don't describe themselves as feminists. They believe that feminism is "no longer necessary" because of how society advances. If feminism was a belief that society treats men more fairly than women it wouldn't be "no longer neccessary," it would be "no longer true."
Maybe "activism directed at making society treat women as fairly as it treats men" would be more accurate?
I don't agree that your beliefs can't change if your society changes. I would describe myself as right-wing in the US but left wing in Saudi Arabia, nothing wrong with that.
In the phrase "the belief society treats men more fairly than it treats women," the word society refers to the specific society in which one lives, not any society in general.
If I hold "the belief society [i.e. Saudi Arabia] treats men more fairly than it treats women," nothing about that belief changes if I move to Themyscira.
What strikes me about the counter arguments against feminism here and otherwise, is how thematically masculine they tend to be. At the end of your essay you say “doers over talkers”, isn’t that a metaphorical way of saying men over women? Statistically speaking who “does” more and who “talks” more? I think women tend to be more analyzing the metaphorical world and men the surface world. I think figuring it out really takes the back and forth between both.
> At the end of your essay you say “doers over talkers”, isn’t that a metaphorical way of saying men over women?
This is a really interesting approach, but it seems like either that's a false stereotype, and reading that meaning into Caplan's words reveals your own misogyny; or it's a true stereotype, and you have to square that with the fact that in many scenarios, doers are objectively more valuable than talkers, and that may have ramifications for the differences in outcomes between men and women.
Surely 'advocating for women's interests' is a better definition than an equality based definition. Equality depends on the conditions of men and no feminist would advocate for worse outcomes for women just because male outcomes had fallen. Likewise generally advocating for better conditions for all doesn't count as feminist for obvious reasons. Why would any group not have an interest in advocating for itself? It is almost tautologically true that any group of people will tend to advocate for their own interests.
> If you just want to say that feminism inspired women to try harder, that hardly counts as “helping women obtain access to markets.” It counts, rather, as helping women take advantage of access they already had.
I think it inspired women to do things they had previously been told they can not or should not do, and inspired men to see women as equals and refrain from trying to stop them from doing those things. In that aspect, I think feminism should be given credit from making the world a much better place and liberating many people from arbitrary and harmful social and cultural restraints.
I don't really think one can describe "feminist" views, because there are so many different kinds of feminism. A classically liberal feminist and a marxist feminist would probably both believe that women are treated less fairly than men, but they would have drastically different views on the root causes, the ideal world, what fairness means and maybe even what a woman is. Which is why I think Bryan's definition is good.
I have read a bit about feminism and I really want to understand it, but it is really hard to figure out which part of the movement believes in what and how it all fits together.
Feminism isn't one thing. It's traditionally described in at least three historical "waves", but as with all movements, even those waves have different directions. I would argue that a lot of the movement just doesn't fit together, really.
The equal rights movement died when it started to call itself "feminism". There is, in fact, a huge difference between arguing for equal rights (or, even more, for freedom for all genders) and arguing for women's rights. They're simply not the same thing.
I'd date the death of the "equal rights" and non-hostile-to-men "women's lib" movements to somewhere between the late 1970s and the early 1990s.
What we now call the "feminist" movement has had an internal debate about whether to embrace or attack men more or less since its foundation. I know people who had that debate in the '70s. There were those who thought that both sexes suffer under traditional gender roles and need liberation, and that women could not be free until men were (the "equal rights" movement). Some thought it was up to men to seek their own liberation: the goal was to liberate women, without regard to men (the "women's lib" concept). Marilyn French's 1977 novel, "The Women's Room" was arguably largely in that camp. And there were those who thought women had it worse so it was appropriate to try to raise women, regardless of the implications for men (the "feminism" concept). This was justified by claiming that "men" had long been advantaged so they could afford to take the back seat for a while (ignoring the fact that the individual men were entirely different people - never mind the fact that most of the individual people who actually have the absolute worst situations in our society are... men).
The suffragettes were clearly women's liberationists. In 1912, some women objected to reports of "women and children first" after the sinking of the Titanic, because they thought that gender liberation meant exactly that. By 1923 the name of the amendment introduced in Congress was the Equal Rights Amendment, and the term survived in widespread use until the late 1970s at least. I'm old enough that I remember both Mary Tyler Moore's beret flying into the air, and MASH's exploration of what it meant to be a "real man". By the late 1980s, at the latest, there were efforts to start men's movements, which suggests that men were recognizing that no-one was addressing their issues. By the early 1990s, the main movement had definitely become "feminism" and we saw a sharp shift toward the de-branding of men. This was the time when deadbeat dads and domestic violence took front page, if you recall. It was also when the press, and public policy, shifted quite markedly toward assessing almost every issue by how it affected women. And, of course, it was when the demonization of anyone associating themselves with men's rights really took hold (the exception, perhaps, being Bob Geldof).
I have come to believe that most of the opposition to "equal rights" actually came, not from men, but from women who benefited from the traditional order (remember Phyllis Schlaffly?) The movement pivoted to feminism, simultaneously rejecting traditional gender roles for women while enforcing them far more strictly for men, so as to reflect the wishes of women across the board. The early 90s were also a time when, in response to the rise of professional women who were also married, the traditional "at-home-mom" role was reimagined for smaller family sizes, through helicopter parenting and the "soccer mom" phenomenon, to the point where once-normal childhood freedoms are today likely to result in Family Services being called in by the neighbors. It was also a time when a woman keeping her own name on marriage fell sharply out of vogue as "too feminist", seen as too much of a rebuke to tradition.
With the perspective of age, I know that Mary Tyler Moore did not represent the first time women were liberated from their traditional roles. Before her there were Rosie the Riveter and the WASPs, and decades before that the flappers (now a century ago). These movements come and go. Each one makes some progress, but then each fades and leads into a resurgence of traditionalism. Rosie was followed by Father Knows Best. Today, we are experiencing a sort of echo of victorianism (who in the 1970s would have expected we would see men avoiding being alone with women at work, lest there be scandal, in the 21st century?) - and possibly it's the same sort of reaction as victorianism itself was, in its day (after all, the monarch was a woman, which must have shaken some traditional norms early on).
The young are, once again, rejecting gender roles, in new, creative ways. They are becoming adults 30 years after the 1990s, which is a long cycle in the history of gender liberation (the 1970s were only 20 years after the 1950s). Let's see what they come up with.
We are in a bizarre form of reactionary behavior right now, from the MeToo inspired men avoiding women, to the extremely exaggerated femininity of drag queens and trans influencers. I also notice in your account the way feminism (however you're going to define it) has shaped the way we see history, and how we need to peel back the layers of history to really find out what happened and how men and women really treated each other.
Ian, I think that peeling back layers of history may actually fall into the trap of supporting the paradigm used by modern feminists to justify gender-based oppression: as you note, it's like an onion, and the "yes butting" can continue indefinitely, leaving the dominant narrative unaltered. As the women's lib movement could tell you, changing the narrative is a heavy lift.
It may be more productive to focus on treating each other fairly, and not imposing stereotyped expectations on each other - especially in the law - starting now. And not just doing it, but insisting on it - both ways (or, more generally, all ways!)
Yeah, it seems like by this standard it's near impossible not to spend all your time overrationalizing extremes. Would she similarly force herself to describe QAnon as the belief that the world should not be run by pedophiles? Surely she doesn't believe the world *should* be run by pedophiles. But that typically isn't the reason people disagree with QAnon.
There’s a false equivalence with the QAnon example. It’s more that QAnon is the positive belief that an oligarch of pedophiles DO run the world. And it’s a convenient mischaracterization to suggest the inverse is their position.
In the same way, there really isn’t any problem with a definition capturing a large swath of people. Perhaps that has a powerful moderating force to those who are “extremist” on either end of the spectrum of any cohort of collectively grouped humans.
The criticism that “the belief that the sky is blue” has the exact opposite intuition for me. We so believe the trope we can’t actually get our heads around the truth of the matter or what side of the position you’d be on if the issue had any teeth. It is completely reasonable to believe the sky is NOT blue. Most the day the sky is some other color, say at night the sky isn’t blue. Overcast skies are largely gray. The sky isn’t itself blue, but diffuses light to create color on the blue-violet spectrum. Categorically, it’s correct to say “the sky isn’t blue” because of the various phase changes.
Much like it isn’t unreasonable to believe that biological differences in genders afford different capacities and therefore different treatment. The logic isn’t morally good, but it’s a thought process much like “the sky is blue;” technically correct but utterly wrong. While the popular opinion that equal gender rights has shifted (predominantly as a result of feminist movement), it’s not at all clear that means we should reject the definition on that basis. Common sense isn’t common after all, even if we survey for it.
Frankly, it seems the wholesale rejection of “feminism” by mischaracterization spoils the otherwise valid criticisms of feminism conveyed by Caplan. Really, the “reject feminism” conclusion is a red-herring to the “reform feminism” lessons drawn from Caplan’s valid critiques. Sure, “equal rights between men and women” captures a lot of people who don’t self-identify. Not at all clear that’s a defect. In fact, that’s a feature! Feminists are normal reasonable people, and people who are self proclaimed feminists who act poorly should be judged as crazy people because they are acting outside the norm of acceptable behavior. It’s like we excuse people because of some “-ism.” People can just be bad on the basis of their behavior, not their ideological alignment.
I think your first sentence makes the point for exactly why its a true example. Feminists believe that society unequally disadvantages women, and the argument of the book is that this belief is false.
That you commit a logical fallacy is evidence that the example is true? You’re going to have to clarify “first sentence” because it can’t literally be true. I am literally calling you out so tack that on as another count of willful ignorance.
In this post, Caplan literally concedes the opposite - women have been historically disadvantaged. I don’t think it’s even controversial to believe society still maintains some of those cultural dynamics.
I think the problem is you want the conclusion to be true regardless of the argument to get there.
This is very funny because it demonstrates exactly the parallel that we're talking about. It's difficult to get QAnon supporters to agree to a fair characterization of their beliefs because they are so dogmatically convinced of a falsehood. The same is true here.
If you have read Caplan's book, or really have any familiarity at all with affirmative actions laws and the numerous regimes which de jure favor women over men, you should at least be able to understand the parallel. It really isn't difficult.
It certainly reveals a lot about you’re argument, but sadly we won’t want to extend that to QAnon, Feminism, or Caplan. Your conclusions just don’t follow. In the same line you say QAnon can’t agree on a characterization you nonetheless commit yourself to saying them believe in a falsehood. That’s not the case in your original claim about the group’s beliefs but it is a falsehood in my characterization. Clearly if you read my argument you would understand how individual perception of a group is irrelevant.
I’d hardly say you’re making any kind of good faith argument. You like conclusions and you’ll ditch whatever reasoning to get there.
This is an excellent response, but I'm going to try to be more Bryan than Bryan.
Female well-being IS more important than male well-being, for obvious reasons. I'm as anti-draft as you are, but the fact that it only applies to men is far more just than having it apply to both men and women. In case I haven't sufficiently offended your casual readers, I'll add that Charles Murray's research on family stability supports this. Children born to and living with their married parents have the best outcomes on average. Children of single mothers (or even divorced and remarried mothers) tend to have worse outcomes, with one exception: if the father dies while the parents are married and the children live at home (if only there were a shorter way to say this, like "stable traditional family"), average children's outcomes barely differ. We matter as fathers, but we're pretty effective whether we're alive or dead. Especially if we have enough life insurance. Men are simply more expendable, and we should embrace that. We are important but expendable. Women are important and essential. What's weird is that's viewed as anti-woman.
If the father dies:
1) The kids didn't live through the trauma of a breakup
2) The kids didn't live through the factors that lead to the breakup
3) The parents were the kind of people that didn't break up (and thus the kids probably inherit those traits)
So anyway, there are strong reasons to believe this doesn't prove what you say. For many broken homes state subsidies act in a similar way to life insurance, and yet those homes are a mess. It's not just the money.
If I gave the impression that I'm saying it's just about the money, then that's my mistake. I'm saying fathers don't have to be alive to have a positive impact. It's very much about your point #3.
Why believe in the existence of "trauma" from parents breaking up?
Because it's real. I would think this is obvious from life experience, but if not here goes.
About 1/3 of divorces are a result of actual abuse, and in those cases the children actually do better in divorce (or at least not worse).
But about 2/3 of divorces are "ennui divorces". There is no abuse, the woman (and sometimes the man) just gets a case of "Eat, Pray, Love" and fucks it all up. In those cases the children do a lot worse.
Which makes sense.
The evidence is consistent with the trauma being caused by the failed relationship, not by the breakup.
Doesn't that just mean that someone should be ineligible for the draft if their spouse is already in the military, rather than that women in general should be ineligible for the draft?
Women aren't essential, having one living parent is essential, regardless of whether that parent is a mother or a father. I just took a look at the research on children of single fathers, and it does not look like there is significant evidence that they are statistically worse off than the children of single mothers.
Also, it's pretty obvious to me why saying that "women are important and essential" is anti-woman: It's because it's saying they are only important and essential for one thing, raising children. It would be like if someone said that African Americans are important and essential for playing basketball and recording hip-hop albums, or that Asian Americans are important and essential for doing math. Locking someone into a single social role is oppressive, even if people who perform that role well are praised and respected.
Couldn't you use the same argument to say that men are worth more and that only women should be conscripted? There is no reason (and I couldn't find any evidence) to think single-fathers would be any different to single mothers, so it shouldn't matter which one of them die in a war.
Regardless of whether it's anti-woman or anti-man, it's sexist and anti-equality to say that women or men are worth less or are more expendable. Men and women are worth the same. Sex and gender shouldn't matter at all.
Perhaps Bryan's biggest blind spot is sexual assault. By the time she is 20 almost every woman will have at the bare minimum been flashed at by a person capable of physically overpowering her, and suffered a lot of unwanted sexual propositions. Far more sinister is the amount of sexual assault and rape. The vast majority of women I have been very close to (girlfriends, close family) have been sexually assaulted or raped. I don't know of a man I am similarlly close to that has been.
Now, this is anecdotal you may say, but I would respond that none of those women I know have told a stranger this, and my anecdotal evidence leads me to believe this is a huge undiscovered problem.
Sexual assault is, of course, horrible. I think practically all non-feminists think so. In many cases, it is the most conservative people that call for the harshest punishments. The main difference - at least from what I've read - between feminists and non-feminists on this issue is that feminists more commonly believe that sexual assault is learned behavior. That gender roles and sexual objectification of women in society fosters a culture that encourages rape. In contrast, non-feminists are more likely to be agnostic on this matter or think it happens for other reasons.
I am not sure if there is enough data to definitively confirm or deny any theory on why it happens.
Agreed, but there is a weaker version of the feminist case that a hypothetical culture that removed shame from victims of sexual crime (both women and the far less common male victims) regardless of its causes, leads to better outcomes for all, in a way that disportionately helps half the population become "more equal".
No similar reluctance to speak attaches to being a victim of other crimes, either to your person or your property.
Your beliefs (that sexual assault and shame around sexual assault are bad) are held by both feminists and non-feminists.
You could argue that sexual assault means society generally treats women less fairly than men. But society is extremely anti-sexual assault, possibly more than it is anti-murder.
Broadly true, but I assert that there are some differences in attitudes.
Ask yourself, would a woman be more willing to speak about being a victim of a sexual crime to a feminist or to a non-feminist? I'd assert that even conservative women who strongly disagree with feminism would know where they would be more likely to receive a sympathetic hearing.
You have a point there, but I think there's a chance that Caplan would argue (and I would tend to agree) that feminism's attack on sexual norms have done more to encourage "society's" ignoring of the informal but important walls against such disgusting behavior as assaulting, flashing, etc.
Not sure I undertand you correctly, but are you saying that the stereotypical liberal feminist has less disapproval for sexual misbehaviour than the stereotypical conservative non-feminist?
They have different definitions of sexual misbehaviour, to the point where one side disapproves of some things the other side encourages, but I find it difficult to believe that assault is regarded less severely post feminism than pre feminism.
Sexual assault is horrific.
An average man is something like ten times more likely to be murdered, than an average woman.
One of the symptoms of feminism is a constant focus on problems that more strongly affect women - as sexual assault (excluding those that occur in prison) does - while ignoring or downplaying problems that more strongly affect men.
I take the point, but, as I mentioned in my original post, I don't think stats capture the full extent of sexual assaults and rapes. Although muder is obviously a more serious crime and I don't have the stats, it is also far far less common.
Finally, a scandal of 1000s of sets of forensic evidence for murder cases getting warehoused and ignored didn't happen, suggesting that sexual assault/rape still isn't taken seriously enough.
That is indeed a scandal - I read about that also.
I was making a specific point, and it looks like it's made, so I'll stop!
What did you want to say? Have feminists said that murder isn't an important issue or was your comment just a whataboutism for whataboutism's sake?
I think it's the opposite. One of the biggest failings of modern feminism as an equality movement is that it rarely if ever seems to care about men when they are victims of violence, especially sexual violence by women. According to the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, the 12-month prevalence estimates of sexual victimization is very similar for men and women [1][2], but there is almost no support available to men, and men who are victims of rape and other sexual or domestic violence are often met with hostility and ridicule, including by police and social workers.
Women sometimes experience the same, and that is of course just as unacceptable, but significant effort and resources are expended to improve the situation for women while next to nothing is done for men in the same situation. Some people who call themselves feminists even deny that men are abused by women, or that it's a serious problem when it happens.
Regarding anecdotal evidence, my experience is similar to yours regardless of gender. I don't know anyone well enough that I think they would tell me who has not told me about being sexually assaulted, regardless of gender.
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4062022/
[2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1359178916301446
I don't really understand Murti's disagreement regarding Caplan's definition of feminism. Her preferred definition is that "men and women should be treated equally". Which is a statement only required to be made if someone believes that they are not being treated equally (because if they are already being treated equally then the word "should" would not exist in that definition).
This in turn confirms Caplan's definition of Feminism that it is "The view that our society generally treats men more fairly than women" (i.e. not equally).
How exactly did feminism “help women obtain the same access to markets as men enjoyed”?
The ability to open a bank account or take out a loan or credit card is a pretty big gap in market access
Did feminism do this?
Or did changes in the economy raise the value of female labor in the marketplace, thus leading to more female wage earners, thus leading to more female access to credit. Not to mention the general rise in credit (very few people had access to credit in the old days regardless of gender).
I think we credit to feminism a lot of things that were probably going to happen anyway due to other changes in society. At best, maybe feminism slightly accelerated the changes.
Perhaps, but my best guess is that its a self-reinforcing process:
Opressed group gets more rights -> more power for oppressed group -> more rights, etc
What gets the loop started is an open question.
So, I don't think that women were "oppressed".
I'm not even sure what "oppression" is supposed to mean.
You could say men as "oppressed" by having to do military service, but who else is going to do it? Obviously, men are better equipped for it.
And you could say that women are "oppressed" by having to stay home and raise children, but who else is better equipped to do it?
As technology improves we can use machines to dull the comparative advantage of the sexes, and thus more people can do more things profitably. But its not a blight on earlier eras that this wasn't an option.
By "oppressed" I mean not permitted to undertake a certain action, by law or by convention. Being forced into a certain action is also oppression. I can tell this word bothers you, so perhaps "having objectively less liberty" will do as a substitute, although it is cumbersome.
Its very sloppy thinking to say oppression/deprivation of liberty example 1 is false because oppression/deprivation of liberty example 2 exists - all you are doing is reinforcing the idea that oppression is pervasive.
I'm glad we agree that gender roles, enforced strictly with barely any exceptions, cause deprivation of liberty.
How much liberty is deprived depends on context. If a foriegn army conquers you country and your are taken as a sex spave, your liberty is reduced. If your husband is conscripted to prevent that outcome, his liberty is reduced but yours potentially increased.
Yes, although it seems we might both be guilty of conflating liberty and utility. I need to have a better think!
For example, 95% top maginal income tax rates redistributed to the poorest deprive the liberty of very few people to increase the liberty of very many people. But utility would be better word for that.
"The problem is not that I misunderstand feminism, but that I understand it all too well.'
Of course you do. The well-off straight white dude is the only one who has a clear vision of what women in society face.
Bravo.
Unironically true surprisingly often
A [irrelevant qualifiers] dude who is thoroughly familiar with the social science of gender does, in fact, have a clearer vision of what women in society face than a [irrelevant qualifiers] woman who only goes off of her own experiences and what she hears from her ideological echo chamber.
> of what women in society face.
So.. then you agree with Caplan that feminism is nothing but women whining about how hard they have it. 🤣
Bravo.
Said it better than I could.
Great post.
I think it's hard for people to admit that in a poor and dangerous world, the restrictions put on women were probably a decent equilibrium in order to protect and provide for them. As the world got less poor and dangerous societal mores updated pretty darn quickly, and I don't see much evidence that it was done so slowly that it constituted the worst crime ever.
I don't think "earnest feminists" can be converted, but if uncommitted normies would stop providing token cover for them they would be a lot less disruptive to the rest of us.
I think it would be enough if more moderate feminists criticized the extreme parts of the movement more. I think they are somewhat scared to speak up too.
(You could object that the right to vote, though of little value to any woman individually, is of great value to women collectively. If people voted selfishly, this would make sense, but almost all of the evidence says otherwise. The gender gap on abortion, for example, is minimal).
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I'm not sure this is a good example. Support for abortion is evenly split by gender on most surveys. While agree that some women are really into it, it's not clear to me that abortion law would be significantly different if women couldn't vote or that its in a woman's interest to have maximal abortion freedom. Most of the volunteers I see at crisis pregnancy centers are women.
And of course, about half (or more) of abortions kill a future woman.
A better example might be divorce law or child custody, where women definitely have organized to get the better end of it.
Because men and women have to live together, there aren't that many issues that are uniquely gendered (the less they live together, the bigger the gender gaps get).
There is probably a stronger case for minorities getting the vote being able to use it to secure certain rights (like blacks).
The value of a vote varies with the supply of votes. Under universal suffrage votes are cheap.
I don't doubt you, but what's the mechanism whereby women have organized on divorce law?
The idea of making marriage law more balanced is apparently very far outside the Overton Window, because while there are online spaces dedicated to these issues, I don't think I've ever heard them discussed by a politician.
The idea that society treats women better than men (on a specific issue) is entirely consistent with the Overton window being in a place where... society treats women better than men (on that specific issue).
Indeed, the equal rights movement's point, that women were disadvantaged (in certain respects) by society's views on their "proper" role - is exactly the reason why men are disadvantaged (in certain respects) by society's views on their "proper" role. Society still (weakly) holds that a woman's place is in the home, preferably raising children; and (strongly) that a man's place is providing for her.
Perhaps not in the USA, but I'd say the gender gap on the number of female babies killed by abortion is radically higher in most of the world, and I'd guess it's actually higher in the USA too, just by a smaller margin.
Brilliant as always. Her indignation at your success objects rebuttal coupled with her MGTOW/incel smear is quite telling. A thinker approaching a topic in a dispassionate way won't allow argument to slide into guilt by association indictment. Also, that something as obvs true as success objects would provoke it makes it all the stranger (or perhaps makes sense - when there are no good arguments for something, the way to maintain it is to double down on the taboo).
"...are, in fact, issues that modern feminists do identify as problems and have discussed at great length."
The NOW - I think the most prominent feminist organization in the country - actively opposes and lobbies against gender equality in state custody law. And to my knowledge, most feminists support compulsory child support laws, which is a key reason for some of the things she lists. It's not just a matter of how much one emphasize male vs. female issues; most feminists - or at least most activists - support policies that privilege women or redistribute from men to women. They support such policies because they believe it's fair compensation for what they see as society's unfair treatment of women, but whether that's true or not, one can't just sweep all that under the rug when positing that feminists oppose discrimination against males too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5s4sZi8zjzY
How much certain parts of the feminist movement opposed the MRA movement is telling.
My issue with the definition of feminism as "the belief society treats men more fairly than it treats women," is that it seems to me that whether or not someone is a feminist is a fact about them specifically. It should not change based on what society one lives in. If I get on a plane in Saudi Arabia and fly to Themyscira it sounds weird to say that I was a feminist when I got on the plane, but not a feminist when I got off.
It also doesn't match the usage of the word by the people Bryan describes who believe in equality but don't describe themselves as feminists. They believe that feminism is "no longer necessary" because of how society advances. If feminism was a belief that society treats men more fairly than women it wouldn't be "no longer neccessary," it would be "no longer true."
Maybe "activism directed at making society treat women as fairly as it treats men" would be more accurate?
I don't agree that your beliefs can't change if your society changes. I would describe myself as right-wing in the US but left wing in Saudi Arabia, nothing wrong with that.
In the phrase "the belief society treats men more fairly than it treats women," the word society refers to the specific society in which one lives, not any society in general.
If I hold "the belief society [i.e. Saudi Arabia] treats men more fairly than it treats women," nothing about that belief changes if I move to Themyscira.
> whether or not someone is a feminist is a fact about them specifically
Entirely disagree. Whether someone is a feminist or not is a *judgment*, not a *fact*.
What strikes me about the counter arguments against feminism here and otherwise, is how thematically masculine they tend to be. At the end of your essay you say “doers over talkers”, isn’t that a metaphorical way of saying men over women? Statistically speaking who “does” more and who “talks” more? I think women tend to be more analyzing the metaphorical world and men the surface world. I think figuring it out really takes the back and forth between both.
> At the end of your essay you say “doers over talkers”, isn’t that a metaphorical way of saying men over women?
This is a really interesting approach, but it seems like either that's a false stereotype, and reading that meaning into Caplan's words reveals your own misogyny; or it's a true stereotype, and you have to square that with the fact that in many scenarios, doers are objectively more valuable than talkers, and that may have ramifications for the differences in outcomes between men and women.
Surely 'advocating for women's interests' is a better definition than an equality based definition. Equality depends on the conditions of men and no feminist would advocate for worse outcomes for women just because male outcomes had fallen. Likewise generally advocating for better conditions for all doesn't count as feminist for obvious reasons. Why would any group not have an interest in advocating for itself? It is almost tautologically true that any group of people will tend to advocate for their own interests.
> If you just want to say that feminism inspired women to try harder, that hardly counts as “helping women obtain access to markets.” It counts, rather, as helping women take advantage of access they already had.
I think it inspired women to do things they had previously been told they can not or should not do, and inspired men to see women as equals and refrain from trying to stop them from doing those things. In that aspect, I think feminism should be given credit from making the world a much better place and liberating many people from arbitrary and harmful social and cultural restraints.
If you've never read any work of feminism, Carol Hay's Think Like A Feminist is an excellent place to start. https://www.harvard.com/book/9781324020271_think_like_a_feminist/
I don't really think one can describe "feminist" views, because there are so many different kinds of feminism. A classically liberal feminist and a marxist feminist would probably both believe that women are treated less fairly than men, but they would have drastically different views on the root causes, the ideal world, what fairness means and maybe even what a woman is. Which is why I think Bryan's definition is good.
I have read a bit about feminism and I really want to understand it, but it is really hard to figure out which part of the movement believes in what and how it all fits together.
Feminism isn't one thing. It's traditionally described in at least three historical "waves", but as with all movements, even those waves have different directions. I would argue that a lot of the movement just doesn't fit together, really.
The equal rights movement died when it started to call itself "feminism". There is, in fact, a huge difference between arguing for equal rights (or, even more, for freedom for all genders) and arguing for women's rights. They're simply not the same thing.
When do you pinpoint that in the history of the movement? And do you have any key players you notice?
I'd date the death of the "equal rights" and non-hostile-to-men "women's lib" movements to somewhere between the late 1970s and the early 1990s.
What we now call the "feminist" movement has had an internal debate about whether to embrace or attack men more or less since its foundation. I know people who had that debate in the '70s. There were those who thought that both sexes suffer under traditional gender roles and need liberation, and that women could not be free until men were (the "equal rights" movement). Some thought it was up to men to seek their own liberation: the goal was to liberate women, without regard to men (the "women's lib" concept). Marilyn French's 1977 novel, "The Women's Room" was arguably largely in that camp. And there were those who thought women had it worse so it was appropriate to try to raise women, regardless of the implications for men (the "feminism" concept). This was justified by claiming that "men" had long been advantaged so they could afford to take the back seat for a while (ignoring the fact that the individual men were entirely different people - never mind the fact that most of the individual people who actually have the absolute worst situations in our society are... men).
The suffragettes were clearly women's liberationists. In 1912, some women objected to reports of "women and children first" after the sinking of the Titanic, because they thought that gender liberation meant exactly that. By 1923 the name of the amendment introduced in Congress was the Equal Rights Amendment, and the term survived in widespread use until the late 1970s at least. I'm old enough that I remember both Mary Tyler Moore's beret flying into the air, and MASH's exploration of what it meant to be a "real man". By the late 1980s, at the latest, there were efforts to start men's movements, which suggests that men were recognizing that no-one was addressing their issues. By the early 1990s, the main movement had definitely become "feminism" and we saw a sharp shift toward the de-branding of men. This was the time when deadbeat dads and domestic violence took front page, if you recall. It was also when the press, and public policy, shifted quite markedly toward assessing almost every issue by how it affected women. And, of course, it was when the demonization of anyone associating themselves with men's rights really took hold (the exception, perhaps, being Bob Geldof).
I have come to believe that most of the opposition to "equal rights" actually came, not from men, but from women who benefited from the traditional order (remember Phyllis Schlaffly?) The movement pivoted to feminism, simultaneously rejecting traditional gender roles for women while enforcing them far more strictly for men, so as to reflect the wishes of women across the board. The early 90s were also a time when, in response to the rise of professional women who were also married, the traditional "at-home-mom" role was reimagined for smaller family sizes, through helicopter parenting and the "soccer mom" phenomenon, to the point where once-normal childhood freedoms are today likely to result in Family Services being called in by the neighbors. It was also a time when a woman keeping her own name on marriage fell sharply out of vogue as "too feminist", seen as too much of a rebuke to tradition.
With the perspective of age, I know that Mary Tyler Moore did not represent the first time women were liberated from their traditional roles. Before her there were Rosie the Riveter and the WASPs, and decades before that the flappers (now a century ago). These movements come and go. Each one makes some progress, but then each fades and leads into a resurgence of traditionalism. Rosie was followed by Father Knows Best. Today, we are experiencing a sort of echo of victorianism (who in the 1970s would have expected we would see men avoiding being alone with women at work, lest there be scandal, in the 21st century?) - and possibly it's the same sort of reaction as victorianism itself was, in its day (after all, the monarch was a woman, which must have shaken some traditional norms early on).
The young are, once again, rejecting gender roles, in new, creative ways. They are becoming adults 30 years after the 1990s, which is a long cycle in the history of gender liberation (the 1970s were only 20 years after the 1950s). Let's see what they come up with.
We are in a bizarre form of reactionary behavior right now, from the MeToo inspired men avoiding women, to the extremely exaggerated femininity of drag queens and trans influencers. I also notice in your account the way feminism (however you're going to define it) has shaped the way we see history, and how we need to peel back the layers of history to really find out what happened and how men and women really treated each other.
Ian, I think that peeling back layers of history may actually fall into the trap of supporting the paradigm used by modern feminists to justify gender-based oppression: as you note, it's like an onion, and the "yes butting" can continue indefinitely, leaving the dominant narrative unaltered. As the women's lib movement could tell you, changing the narrative is a heavy lift.
It may be more productive to focus on treating each other fairly, and not imposing stereotyped expectations on each other - especially in the law - starting now. And not just doing it, but insisting on it - both ways (or, more generally, all ways!)