Differing reactions to men & women getting abused

[Loppan Torkel]

So I checked out wikipedia and it seems that are correct

I understand less and less of your discussion..

 

[Gori the Grey]

I would contest the idea of hierarchy being the hallmark of patriarchy as it would seem to me to be an inversion of cause and effect. Patriarchy is a inequal system, and a hierarchy is generalized system of inequality (usually with a goal of skewing power to the upper tiers of the hierarchy).

I think I understand what you're saying. Any inequal social formation is ipso facto a hierarchy, so hierarchy can't be a hallmark of one particular inequal social formation, patriarchy. That's a good point. I'll revise my passage accordingly. I don't think it affects what is to me the most important stretch of my passage. But I'm grateful for the insight.

I in turn would quibble with one of your phrasings. Once there is a hierarchy, power doesn't need to be skewed to the upper tiers of it: the upper tiers of a hierarchy simply are the powerful. Now with Bourdieu we know that the social formation reproduces itself (including, perhaps especially, its inequalities), that the privileged mobilize many societal institutions to maintain their privilege and power. So there is that kind of ongoing "skewing" necessary to maintain the privilege for the upper tiers of the hierarchy.

Here's the edited passage, spoilered to spare those who hadn't wanted to read it in its first incarnation:

Spoiler :

Look, if feminist-inspired ideological critique is to be the only coin that can pass current, then let’s at least go all in. We won’t need to read terribly deep into our Kristeva and Irirgary to learn that, like any inequal social formation, patriarchy is hierarchical and hierarchizing, in the case of patriarchy to the advantage of men. Major, overtly political institutions long dominated by men, like the Church or the military, patently exhibit such hierarcical organization. But the more pernicious aspect of any dominant ideology lies in how it tacitly structures even the most mundane dimensions of social interaction. In the framing of a discussion, for example, the hierarchizing bent of patriarchy might manifest itself in the phallogocentric presupposition or insistence that there be a best, or even only one correct, viewpoint or perspective, and that all others must be aggressively silenced, discredited, or marginalized.

The only mode of more egalitarian discourse, then, that will serve to dismantle and supplant an inequal social formation like patriarchy is one that is multilateral and multivocal, plural, inviting, open, unclosed, i.e. that has no room for olnys

In short, feminist thought* would suggest that the very manner in which we talk with one another** will serve either to reinforce or subvert patriarchal structures of domination. Are we using a mode that is driven by an intellectual oneupsmanship or one (or many) that are welcoming of difference, suspension, polyphony?

*written under erasure. Feminist(s) thought(s) are not monolithic, not a thought, but, under patriarchy, must present themselves as such or risk being discounted as not, properly, thought.

**as one doesn't in fact need feminist thought to know; simply conversing with women will generally drive this point home.

 

[Borachio]

I understand less and less of your discussion..

It could be worse. I, for instance, am convinced I knew a great deal more before I started reading.

 

[Rashiminos]

I in turn would quibble with one of your phrasings. Once there is a hierarchy, power doesn't need to be skewed to the upper tiers of it: the upper tiers of a hierarchy simply are the powerful. Now with Bourdieu we know that the social formation reproduces itself (including, perhaps especially, its inequalities), that the privileged mobilize many societal institutions to maintain their privilege and power. So there is that kind of ongoing "skewing" necessary to maintain the privilege for the upper tiers of the hierarchy.

I said skew as the tendency among those who form hierarchies isn't to "maintain" priviliege {sic}. It is to enlarge it. However, even if I were to suppose "maintenance," the distribution of power being unequal and the distribution of power being skewed are nearly equivalent statements, with skewed giving a directionality for the inequality (towards men, towards wealth, towards white, etc). IMO, "maintenance" implies a static skew.

 

[Gori the Grey]

I said skew as the tendency among those who form hierarchies isn't to "maintain" priviliege {sic}. It is to enlarge it.

Yes, "maintain and enhance." That one I'll quick go do as a edit in the previous post.

Oh, wait, it wasn't in my passage. Just my reply to you. Anyway, good point.

 

[Old Hippy]

I hate to do this but , really, what the hell is STEM?

thankyou, for that post, I did not wish to appear uninformed... oh never mind.

 

[Crezth]

Maybe if you punch him more he'll start looking at things your way.

Normally my thing is to respond to posts in kind but I don't know how to respond to fat unformatted manifestos of false and misleading information. There's only so many ways you can say "um... that's not true" before the entire exercise begins to look as meaningless as it really is.

I mean, can we go back to the part where he claimed feminists hate STEM? Like actually WTH.

Science, technology, Engineering...... Mathematics?

Basically male dominated disciplines full of a particular type of stupid smartness. They're all really intelligent and good at one thing but the young inexperienced ones in particular incorrectly believe that being good at this one thing makes them good at everything. Including sharing opinions about women and other races.

woah, dude. friendly fire.

 

[nc-1701]

I mean, can we go back to the part where he claimed feminists hate STEM? Like actually WTH.

I in no way said that "feminists hate STEM" most feminists are neutral or relatively friendly toward STEM (Or if they do hate it at least no more so than the general population). The majority of feminists are rational good people with (at least some) good ideas, I made this very clear in my post. The "modern" feminism henceforth called it "Tumblr feminism" that has popped up recently and appears in this thread. Obsessed with "power hierarchies" and "privilege", wanting to throw trigger warnings everywhere, dismantle constitutional protections in the name of catching a few extra rapists, and in my experiences reading some of what they produce (/r/tumblrinaction) mostly they also tend to be openly hostile to STEM and generally to most fields or activities that advance on merit. Tumblr feminism is not only a cancer on society but also on the greater goals of feminism. It in no way advances women and by polarizing merely for the sake of polarizing while offering no actual benefit it actually harms the movement for women to finally reach their place as full and equal members of society.

That's why I find the hurled insults of misogyny so amusing, they have no bearing on anything I have said, just verbal abuse for daring to reject the cult. Carefully read what a few of you have been posting, it's like claiming that if you aren't a Jew then you must be a Nazi. But plenty of people still manage to reject Nazism for being hateful even if they look like the model Aryan.

 

[Traitorfish]

"A cancer on society"? You don't think that's over-stating things just a mite?

edit: And, y'know, I didn't want to say because this place has enough bad will, but...

You accuse "tumblr feminists" of seeing everyone as a Jew or a Nazi.

But you yourself have arbitrarily grouped feminists into "rational" and "tumblr", into "good" and "bad", or to put it bluntly, "basically non-threatening" and "too ridiculous to feel obliged to engage with".

You're performing the same manoeuvre, here, closing down meaningful debate while presenting yourself as its custodian.

The only real difference is the tone, self-righteous anger in their case and weary condescension in yours, and neither are flattering enough to disguise the rhetorical mechanism at work.

 

[Senethro]

nc-1701 hasn't done it here, but it also really gets me when some OT posters draw equivalencies between "bad" feminists and MRAs. "Ridiculous" is not equivalent to "spectrum starting at creepy and ending at proto-hate group"

 

[Crezth]

I in no way said that "feminists hate STEM" most feminists are neutral or relatively friendly toward STEM (Or if they do hate it at least no more so than the general population). The majority of feminists are rational good people with (at least some) good ideas, I made this very clear in my post. The "modern" feminism henceforth called it "Tumblr feminism" that has popped up recently and appears in this thread. Obsessed with "power hierarchies" and "privilege", wanting to throw trigger warnings everywhere, dismantle constitutional protections in the name of catching a few extra rapists, and in my experiences reading some of what they produce (/r/tumblrinaction) mostly they also tend to be openly hostile to STEM and generally to most fields or activities that advance on merit. Tumblr feminism is not only a cancer on society but also on the greater goals of feminism. It in no way advances women and by polarizing merely for the sake of polarizing while offering no actual benefit it actually harms the movement for women to finally reach their place as full and equal members of society.

It sounds to me like you've constructed an enormous straw-man feminist to flog at will, here. I might be wrong on that (I don't frequent /r/tumblrinaction, though if we're on the subject of reddit, you might check out /r/mensrights and /r/stuffredditsays (technically language inappropriate for this forum, just fyi)) but it doesn't sound to me like you're attempting to engage with a meaningful or relevant opponent.

And this is kinda why I keep calling you guys MRAs, or at best crypto-MRAs, because you keep trying to elaborate why you don't trust feminism, and it's incredibly frustrating to see, because I don't think you're making even a cursory effort to understand these people.

Let's go to /r/tumblrinaction. Here's the top thread right now (warning, NSFW language and stuff): http://www.reddit.com/r/TumblrInAction/comments/26plo3/this_is_such_horrible_logic/

The image in question is an admittedly rather odd analogy that explains why some women are afraid of men. Here's a link to the image. And the idea is that when women are propositioned by men (or vice-versa, hell), they need to be reasonably cautious that the man in question will physically harm them. Is it an unreasonable fear? Maybe. I'm not going to pry open that crabshell, but more importantly, I don't know. My knowledge of this is limited to what I can learn from other people, such as the (evidently tens of thousands of) women who sympathize with the message contained in this image.

Back to the reddit thread, almost all of the comments are some indignant interpretation that casts men as the victims and, perhaps most importantly, refuses to engage the message on the level, let alone try to understand where it's coming from. Take this charming fellow:

Gaspar_Guru_Of_Time
I wasn't aware women "consumed" men handfuls at a time. See, most men get to know women, they vet them in one way or another, before allowing themselves to be vulnerable around them.
Perhaps the problem isn't bad men, it's idiot women.

I mean, wow. Does he not know that women get raped, like, kind of a lot? Kind of too much? Or does he just not care? This is tantamount to victim-blaming for rape. It's really a little shocking.

This is what Cheezy is asking you guys to do: Take a few seconds to shut up and listen, instead of retreating to your reddit echo-chambers to hear about what idiots women are.

 

[Loppan Torkel]

This is what Cheezy is asking you guys to do: Take a few seconds to shut up and listen, instead of retreating to your reddit echo-chambers to hear about what idiots women are.

I'd guess that you, 'feminists', have visited these "reddit echo-chambers" you speak of, more than anyone else here. The opposition you face is probably mostly common sense from separate individuals.

 

[Crezth]

Well, I tried. God knows I tried.

 

[Loppan Torkel]

Just trying to calm you from the paranoia you seem to experience.

 

[Gori the Grey]

I sometimes think we CFC:OTers would be served by agreeing amongst ourselves to stay relatively strictly focused on the particulars of the item that the OP submits for our consideration, not what tumblr feminists have to say about reddit MRAs. I'm not on tumblr. I don't really even know what it is. I'm not on reddit. I had to learn what it was when it came up in a recent thread. I'm on CFC. There are things I like about this discussion site. That's why I'm on this discussion site. How long has it been, on this thread, since we talked about the video that Narz proposed for our consideration? I understand that once any conversation gets under way it ranges here and there. That's part of what's fun about conversations. But if keep tasking ourselves with sorting out what all men think about all women, and vice versa, how are we ever going to get any productive conversation about any actual thing in this world? I include myself in this criticism. I've posted several times on the meta- questoins since I last posted on the video. My next post will somehow reference the video.

 

[Crezth]

I got flamed in this very thread for discussing the video, so, good luck to you, ser.

 

[Gori the Grey]

I got flamed in this very thread for discussing the video, so, good luck to you, ser.

That's why the "agree amongst ourselves." You did provide constructive analysis of the video early on. It's posts like (some of) your early posts about the intentions of the videomaker that I would propose as a model for our conversation.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

I'd guess that you, 'feminists', have visited these "reddit echo-chambers" you speak of, more than anyone else here. The opposition you face is probably mostly common sense from separate individuals.

This word "echo chamber" keeps coming up. I wonder if you're aware of how ironic it is, when it is used in this thread to slander "feminists." Notice that once I, TF, and Crezth stopped frequenting the thread (and the other "feminist" threads), things went from extremely high-strung to calmed down. Once the "feminists" were gone, the men could finally get down to business and discuss things in a calm and orderly manner. Get to the bottom of the issue, without all that feminist claptrap clouding up the matter. And now it's a bunch of men patting each other on the backs for coming to agreements about a feminist issue without consulting anyfemale or feminist opinions.

Do you understand now how these threads are each excellent examples of an echo chamber? How it is not we who are the ones intolerant of other viewpoints, but you guys? Or at worst, we are both somewhat intolerant.

*The word "feminist" here appears in inverted commas, because I don't consider myself or any man to be feminists. Feminism is the movement to liberate women, and it would be improper for a man to assert his power over the movement to escape the power of men. We men are allies, with a mission and duties unique to our identity as it relates to the situation. It is the same for LGBTQ allies, POC allies, proletarian allies. We work together, but in separate ways, toward a common goal, according to our abilities, without stepping on any toes.

 

[Algeroth]

@All jumping at Cheezy for his past: Don't tell me that he's the first case of born-again critical theorist of some sort that you've met?

 

[Senethro]

There is something to be said for "no true believer like a convert", but that doesn't take away from the fact that he dug himself out of a pretty deep hole, so his thinking toolset is probably pretty sharp!