Differing reactions to men & women getting abused

[Terxpahseyton]

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 one of the predominant features of patriarchy, indeed perhaps its hallmark, is that it is hierarchical and hierarchizing. 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, 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 discourse, then, that will serve to dismantle and supplant 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.

(My version of metatron's "new flag" observation.)

If I may guess - the "proper" response is probably that this was like saying Affirmative Action was racist or something of the sort.

 

[Crezth]

You can point to any group at some point in history that has been repressed.

Well since everyone is doing it, that makes it okay. Right? ...Right?

 

[Gori the Grey]

If I may guess

You more than may; you are positively invited to!

- the "proper" response

But there is no "proper" response. Propriety is one of the, if not the, chief regulatory mechanisms of hegemonic ideological regimes.

 

[Senethro]

Whats the problem with being intolerant of intolerance?

 

[Traitorfish]

But there is no "proper" response. Propriety is one of the, if not the, chief regulatory mechanisms of hegemonic ideological regimes.

It's also one of the chief regulatory mechanisms of egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands. I'm all for taking a critical attitude towards cultural norms, but the simple idea that there are proper and improper ways to behave is not the creeping totalitarianism that you seem to imagine.

 

[Gori the Grey]

It's also one of the chief regulatory mechanisms of egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands.

How do we know that?

But as to the bigger point. If you can believe it, for all the sparring I've done with him recently, Cheezy's going to side with me on this. Ask any feminist how "propriety" has operated within patriarchy.

 

[Traitorfish]

...The academic discipline of anthropology? (Was that a trick question?)

 

[Gori the Grey]

Whats the problem with being intolerant of intolerance?

There's no problem.

As I've said before, the one thing tolerance cannot tolerate is intolerance. This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof.

...The academic discipline of anthropology? (Was that a trick question?)

Is there particular source within that discipline that I could consult? No, no trick. What you say seems plausible. I might even say it would be what I would expect to find. But I can't say I've seen an anthropological treatment of "propriety" in hunter-gatherer societies.

 

[Gori the Grey]

double post. sorry.

 

[Traitorfish]

Have you looked for one?

(Clastre's Society Against the State might be a good place to state, although it deals mostly with horticulturalists. I'm afraid that I've never really studied hunter-gatherers, only read about them in passing.)

 

[Tahuti]

What I do notice is that men complaining about female privilege and the difference in which women and men are treated more often than not fail to live up to typical male expectations. Basically, they are not simply not male in their behavior. Complaining about feminism will not help change that.

I think that giving more attention to women in some areas and more attention to males in others is both natural to humans, as well as beneficial.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Have you looked for one?

(Clastre's Society Against the State might be a good place to state, although it deals mostly with horticulturalists. I'm afraid that I've never really studied hunter-gatherers, only read about them in passing.)

No. I can, I guess.

But to me it initially sounded like you were very certain of this point. Like it was one of the fundamental facts that anthropology had established. I don't know the field well, so I was willing to believe that it was and you could quick shoot me a source. I've only read about hunter-gatherers in passing myself. I would think there would be some methodological difficulties in establishing their sense of propriety. And I would think they might have a very different sense of propriety than we do, their peregrinations not giving them quite the same concept of property that more settled peoples have.

 

[Traitorfish]

Certainly they have a very different sense of propriety. Most peoples do; a British bank once ran a series of ads to that effect. But you'd be hard pressed to discover a society which had no sense of propriety whatsoever.

 

[Gori the Grey]

That's why I say it seems plausible. but what if hunter-gatherers just happen to be the one kind of society that don't. Then they'd be interesting for that reason too. I feel it would intensify what makes them interesting to me, and I have to assume to you: their egalitarian nature.

I think I know what you mean. One would be hard pressed to find a society that didn't have what we would call a sense of propriety. But what if it could be established that h-g's specifically didn't have any terms or mechanisms for communicating propriety and impropriety to one another? We shouldn't utterly rule the possibility out, it seems to me. Or at least, if we don't know it for sure, we shouldn't pronounce categorically that it is so.

I'm not trying to hassle you here. And it's a tangent off a tangent (at least). I'll poke around and see if I can find anything. Maybe they had more elaborate codes of propriety than eighteenth-century England.

 

[Old Hippy]

Aboriginal non-violence in the 50s, 60s and 70s wasn't a tactical choice but a necessity borne out of the fact that white people took any provocation as an excuse to unleash violence on black bodies. In the 1910s and 1920s it was outright massacres (Conistsan, Bedford Downs and Forrest River). In the 1940s, beatings, mock executions and marching people across large distances in irons were used to try and break the peaceful Pilbara Strike. In the 50s and 60s white people were all for taking robust action against the Wavehill strikers. These robust measures included every kind of violence imaginable up to killing a bunch of the strikers as a lesson to the others. Why? Because violence was an accepted part of how you dealt with Aboriginals. Station owners toted buffalo hide whips as part of their day to day and thought nothing of letting lose with bird shot to show their displeasure. Policemen could rape young black girls in the 1940s and have nothing happen to them even when the girls white foster parents complained. In actual fact, criminal convictions against whites for any sort of violence against blacks were almost nonexistent before the 1970s. Even walking off was a crime punishable by incarceration...

not to forget plain out poisoning waterholes, and we still have away to go, which is why it is my issue as an Australian,
same with domestic voilence issues, the safety of women in general, the fact that I'm male does not exclude me from having an actictive concern and understanding for feminist issues, even an obligation to get involved I would go so far to say

 

[Rashiminos]

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 one of the predominant features of patriarchy, indeed perhaps its hallmark, is that it is hierarchical and hierarchizing. 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, 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.

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).

Why not? That's how the predator operates.

Might as well prep a seat and mix a drink. Alteration mine.

Alright look. I'm not obliged to answer every single post that responds to one of mine, especially when all of them are taking apart my stuff line by line. It gets exhausting. So I'm sorry if I didn't reply to every little bit that you think I should have. Y'all wanted evidence of dogpiling a few days ago, well there it was.

What you need to realize is that I engage with this stuff a lot more than probably any of you do. The arguments being put forth about "it's not gender bias because it affected men too," "he had other forms of entitlement so therefore it wasn't misogyny," etc etc, they're all common red herrings that men throw out whenever issues of misogyny and patriarchy come up, in order to redirect the discussion away from misogyny and patriarchy. Again, I don't have the physical capacity to answer every single thing every person says, and explain why they are mistaken about whatever they're mistaken about.

Something about knowing your limits and not asking for more than you can handle.

Edit: and possibly developing more capacity

You're muddling my claim a bit, here. What I'm suggesting is that the experience of inequality is a necessary condition for a movement towards equality, but not that it's a sufficient one. As you say, inequality just as often breeds inequality.

Would you also be suggesting women must suffer abuse (an experience of inequality) as a necessary condition for a movement towards stopping abuse (towards a desired equilibrium)?

 

[Narz]

I remember when people read the words you posted and thought about them before responding.

Oh wait, no I don't.

What's the point indeed. This group is working very hard to make sure they don't understand simple sentences.

It has to be said, there's some exhausting about a thread which goes "guys, if we just spent less time talking and more time lis-" "Whadda you mean I'm not aloud to talk!?!" It's like, proving your point and trampling all over it at the same time.

I think you guys are just way to smart for the rest of us. Perhaps you could start you're own forum & never come back.

 

[Narz]

I think Novakart already made this point, but black women are in general doing much better than black men. At least in this part of the world, they go to (and graduate) college at much higher rates. Also they face comparatively little police violence from police which is what has really crushed the black male population. Preventing them from holding good jobs or going to college and thus leading them back towards crime as an only choice.

Isn't this exactly the reason judges/juries are supposed to be impartial and recuse themselves if they were a victim of a similar crime etc. The victims are actually the least qualified to find justice, a lot of the modern feminist theory being quoted in this thread explicitly contradicts this fact without justification.

I used to call myself a feminist, I think that I still am a feminist but I certainly wouldn't label myself as one anymore. In the mainstream culture feminism has grabbed a bunch of extremist views and tied them so closely to feminist it's hard to be a feminist without holding them or at least having others assume you do.
In our society there are a lot of places where we still need to advance rights for women. Reproductive health is probably the most obvious, recent pushes by Republican legislators against abortion etc. are disgusting. And while the reality of pay discrimination is that it's much smaller than is often claimed, it's still a problem that needs to be fixed. In a very related note the lack of women in STEM fields is a problem etc. (Ironically modern feminists tend to be overtly hostile to STEM).
However a lot of the things feminists have attached themselves too recently are very difficult issues to make that case with. A very standard example is violence and stranger violence in particular.
In every single country in the world men are far more likely to be victims of stranger violence than women are. But we always see stranger violence presented as a women's issue, especially with this inane trope about the '#womenexperiance' of holding your keys in your knuckles at night and how men will never understand their far. When men are explicitly in far more danger of stranger violence than women are. Also in more danger of violence in general, but by a lower margin and not in every country.
That only serves to put in greater perspective the different social reactions to violence against women and men. Which is something that bothers me greatly both as a "lite"-feminist and as a man. So to say looking at how our justice system discriminates against men and our society prioritizes female victims of violence over male, makes you explicitly misogynistic is not just wrong but disgusting. It betrays you as failing to truly be a feminist and as being trapped in an us-vs-them mindset. This is the problem with viewing the world through a filter based on identity, you trap everyone in an identity you built for them and the only method of discourse you have left is to scream privilege at all the identities you've classified as beings enemies until they give in.

Good post!

Whoopi took some criticism for saying this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
Link to video.

Damn, whoopi is awesome!

 

[Rashiminos]

There's a very good reason advocates of the above movements distance themselves from you: because you lecture them from a position of privilege. Do you not see the irony, as a man, of telling women that they're doing feminism wrong? Do you not see the irony, as a White (I'm pretty sure you're White), of telling POC that they're doing liberation wrong? The point of these movements is to escape the domination of men and of whites, respectively. So you lecturing them on how to liberate themselves correctly is really an extension of what they're trying to escape.

His post actually contained some decent information, if a few too many steps down the chain.

Infighting can be an effect of prior techniques to infiltrate and disrupt a movement.* A few confederates for the powers that be (eg patriarchy, racists, etc) disguise themselves as elements of the movement and attempt to alter the original message(s) to ones more aligned (and therefore tolerable) to the powers that be. So much as bona fide elements of the movement accept the subtly altered messages as being akin to the original ones, the polarity (the signal strength of the messages) of the movement is weakened (diluted with noise and a neutralizing signal). At some point this diminishment is noticed, but usually its long after the credentials of the confederates have been established. At some later digression, the degree of this diminishment provokes conflict among the 'movement,' perhaps resulting in infighting.

Spoiler :

*It could also be a degree of disharmony among the movement, but I think for the subjects being discussed, we can handwave the incompetence/malice question.

Now, Phrossack, as a white man, might know something about dividing and conquering.

 

[Crezth]

Good post!

"I'm not an MRA, but, guys, clearly feminism has gone too far. I'm not like those other feminists. I'm feminist-lite. Like Bud Lite! Mm-mm, good! Also, for some reason I think feminists hate STEM. Man, those ladies are crazy, huh? Maybe they should go back to the kitchen! Hahaha, just kidding! No, seriously though."