What constitutes Misogyny?

[norton ash]

Men are, generally speaking, largely a bunch of fucking rapists.

That's moderate, and nothing like hate speech. Well done, barracuda.

[barracuda]

I accept the statistics that 1 in 6 women have been sexually assaulted, don't you? In fact, I think that stat is probably alarmingly low. However, even going with the low end of the figure, that means everyone you know almost certainly knows some woman who has been sexually assaulted.

So why try and pretty it up? Somebody's doin' all that shit, and it aint the Tooth Fairy. It's a bunch of men. Demonstrably about 25% of them, but if you're willing to be honest about it, we both know it's higher than that.

But you're right about the hate-speech thing. Instead of "fucking rapists" I should have said, "dag-gum sex-assaulters".

I'm a lousy mod, really.

[charlie meadows]

I accept the statistics that 1 in 6 women have been sexually assaulted, don't you? In fact, I think that stat is probably alarmingly low. However, even going with the low end of the figure, that means everyone you know almost certainly knows some woman who has been sexually assaulted.

So why try and pretty it up? Somebody's doin' all that shit, and it aint the Tooth Fairy. It's a bunch of men. Demonstrably about 25% of them, but if you're willing to be honest about it, we both know it's higher than that.

But you're right about the hate-speech thing. Instead of "fucking rapists" I should have said, "dag-gum sex-assaulters".

I'm a lousy mod, really.

Pornography for depressives.

[compared2what?]

If ya can't beat 'em join 'em.....

When that option's available -- which is neither always nor for everyone -- it's usually the best that can be done, I agree. But you're talking about half the world's population subjugating itself to the other half in order to avoid being involuntarily beaten. In exchange for that, and on a geographically narrow basis, some elite members of the defeated group (aka "you and me") receive a number of conditional and non-binding concessions from the group they were lucky enough to be born with the option of joining.

It's one thing to admit that and another to endorse it.
___________________

(I'm not sure which you intended to do, but the above would be an observation and not a criticism either way, it sure can't hurt to add.)

[compared2what?]

I love Etta James, but that song belongs exclusively to James Brown:



I don't think I've ever heard a good cover version of it. And while I'd be thrilled to discover it if there's one I've missed, I've certainly never heard a cover by a female vocalist that wasn't basically a gross and exploitative misconstruction of lyrical chance.

It was (officially) co-written by a woman, Betty Jean Newsome. But it's not like her story is any testament to the centrality and importance of women or girls in a man's world, and even according to her, it's no more about that than (for example) "Woman," which she had nothing to do with:

Betty Newsome says she first conceived of "Man's World" after reading Genesis. "I was just reading the Bible and thinking about how wonderful and powerful man is . . . God, he can create, he can take man's rib out of his body and make a woman. I was just sitting there and thinking about how, after all of these things that he made and he did, all of it was worthless without a woman—and you gotta have them kids—or a girl. That's where the girl part comes in."

(And LINK.)

It's just a much better song than "Woman" is. Let's play two, in fact:



For the sexy girl dancer extras.

[Plutonia]

Plutonia, I'd like to use your post as a springboard for some general thoughts I have on the subject of the OP, if you don't mind, more because your post simply set me thinking than that I had any big problem with what you said or how you said it.

Appreciate your kindly explanation. Thinking is good.

So we are in the predicament where both the abuse (exploitative, unequal power relations) and the antidote of Identity Politics- yield the same result. How neat and tidy.

I'm not certain where this supposition of a supposed predicament might be drawn from...

I was responding to what Jack said in response to my assertion that Identity Politics is divisive:

.....racism, sexism and other similar prejudices are important, but mainly as ways the owning class keeps the working class internally divided so groups within the working class fight each other instead of coming together to challenge the owning class.

Both true and untrue. Racism and especially sexism exist very much independently of also being divide-and-conquer strategies for ruling classes. There is an enormous conditioned and traditional and partly biological drive behind the subjugation and devaluation of women or the "feminine," and it largely operates independently of class warfare. A lot of men want a woman to rule over...

I'll try and guess based upon the information in your statement: let's see - you might be presuming that the power structure evoked by the implementation of the new rule and it's attendant results on the board have now overwhelmingly tilted to favor the women over the men, as a result of an exploitation of the new rules whether consciously or not, to the point of degraded overzealousness, yielding the current "predicament", i.e. several resigned, suspended and banned posters, and a wary remaining forum group essentially walking on eggshells.

I wouldn't say that the new rule tilts the board in favour of “women” (in quotes because as a woman, an intended beneficiary, when in fact the rule does not reflect my interest, which is usually to question everything). I understand that the rule was meant to make the community safer for "women" contributors, in which it may not have succeeded but I don’t believe it was the cause of the carnage. It was Identity Politics that done did that, because it sets up an us-versus-them psycho-dynamic, where, not unlike the Stamford Prison Experiment, people will spontaneously enact the role assigned to them.

I'm not arguing that misogyny doesn't exist, BTW, I just see it differently, more of an artifact of the inherently and, one might say strategically, abusive System.

Let me tell you what I learned from Harriet Nahanee, the late Nuu-chah-nulth Elder: When she was 5 years old, she was seized by the RCMP along with all the other little children of her village and taken to the Ahousaht Residential School. The teachers and administration of the school treated the children brutally; they were abused in every way, beaten, starved and even murdered. Harriet and the other children were punished for speaking their language (even though they didn’t know any other), for singing their traditional songs, for playing their traditional games, and for defiance. Pretty soon the children divided into two groups, those that resisted their captors and those that aligned with their captors - those ones watched their peers, informing on them for infractions and received rewards of better treatment, more food and comparative safety. Harriet resisted and had a very hard time of it.

Years later, and this is the essential lesson, when the children, now grown, returned to their village, the ones who had sided with their captors became the band councilors and band administrators, tasked with implementing the federally legislated Indian Act- which BTW, imposes the legal status of children of the Status Indians, making them all wards of the federal government which is against our constitution and the Geneva Convention, but never mind that. Harriet’s peers, who had resisted with her, became Traditionalists, who oppose the Indian Act and the band council’s right to govern.

So, in BC at least, I don’t know about other provinces, the Native communities tend to be divided and fractious. The Traditionalists are persecuted, threatened, impoverished and pushed out. The band councilors line their pockets and distribute funds to their friends. Addiction, abuse, suicide, mental illness, are rampant.

So are the Natives who sided with “power” in the residential school to blame for the state of their communities? No. They are predictably living out the effects of the abuse they were subjected to.

That’s how I see our predicament. We are all in it together.

As Lloyd deMause would have it:

To Selma Freiberg's dicta that "Trauma demands repetition" I would only add "repetition in social behavior."

The culture and environment in which the board and its membership exists is fundamentally and unequivocally androcentric. For example:

The vast majority of films are written & directed by men. This may result in an androcentric bias with most films (and film characters) being created from a male perspective….

This is a cultural bias beyond the ken of forum wrangling over particulars, and is in essence a negation of any attempted imposition of any ruling to the contrary which it is possible to create here by fiat. Any perceived normative bias toward "exploitative, unequal power relations" in favor of the females on the board is an outright illusion. Within this culture, there can be no such bias by definition.

Within “this culture” is more than one culture. I certainly don’t consider Hollywood “my culture,” do you? But anyway, in my Queer Theory class I learned that people are creatively minded and psychically dynamic enough to ignore the gender of the actor and identify specifically with the hero’s (or heroine’s) actions. That’s certainly true for me. Plus, I can enjoy an otherwise lame film if it’s visually interesting, got creative lighting or beautiful costumes, but I’m an autie so I’m like that.

In my opinion, abuse of every variety is endemic to the System, within which we here are but wee constituents - unless of course some of us here are monarchs, governors, dictators or CEO's. But I don't locate the psychic distortion's genesis in Capitalism, since exploitative and abusive power relations have taken many, even much worse forms, predating its invention. I consider that the origin of the System, as we receive it, is the State.

And this is how I imagine the State's inception:

At one time, all human groups plodded around as nomadic hunter gatherers. Then a few groups here and there figured out agriculture and herding. Because the agrarians stayed put, they were able to accumulate excess of both food and goods. This would have made the agrarians tasty targets for passing nomadic groups, now transformed into marauders, returning again and again to take from the agrarians first what they needed and then what they wanted. And if the villages were beset by competing groups of marauders? Isn't it likely that the villagers would decide to "hire" one of those groups of marauders to protect them from the others - though "hire" is the wrong verb for an essentially coerced arrangement? So that's it then. A protection racket.

I bet that in the moment after their subjugation, the men and women of those early agrarian communities began to relate to each other ... differently.

It's an interesting take, but I have a few changes I would make to your hypothetical prehistory as you laid it out...

- Semi-permanent dwellings almost certainly predated agriculture, and were based on staying where the food was plentiful.

- Neolithic communal groups consisted of male hunters and female gatherers in these permanent settlements.

- The women gathering grains were able to accumulate far more foodstuffs than the hunters.

- Carrying and processing the grain near the settlement gave rise to selected crops close to home, which produced a feedback loop creating even more abundant surplus.

- Hunters became largely superfluous - they would come home from the hunt with two days worth of deer meat for the village, only to find that the women had enough grain to last most of the year. This is the first instance of wealth, along with male resentment.

- Some part of the hunt must now stay behind to protect the stores of grain and the women from other raiding communities, and along with this,

- Hunting becomes ceremonial in nature, and food-types become gender branded, i.e. male steaks vs. female cereals.

- Then it's only a matter of time before protecting the communal grain and the women at the settlement becomes protecting "our" grain and "our" women, as male resentment solidifies into ownership, and the hunting group becomes the standing army.

- Before women were owned there were no husbands. From now on, ownership of women begets tyhe system of paternity, which is the genesis of the existing rape culture prevailing up to this day.

Well, I like my creation myth better than yours. I have tended towards preferring a Fall from Grace scenario, wherein our ancestors became carriers of abusiveness through some traumatizing circumstance, but maybe Lloyd deMause is right and we are actually emerging from brutish primate consciousness.

Let's be clear about this: nothing important can change about the state of the world - about the state of constant war, about the plundering and destruction of the environment, about any of it - until men change how they act and relate to women. It is a destructive systemic fault which is deeper than economic constructs, and deeper than the State. The State would not exist as we know it today without having sprung from male subjugation of women.

There is a danger in simply prohibiting some behaviors and rewarding others while ignoring the psychic underpinnings that are the fount of behaviors; that sets one up to develop an engorged Super-ego (self-righteousness) and a super-charged Id, Destroyer of Worlds. Id is expressed wonderfully in all it’s abject offensiveness in 4 Chan where /b/astards flaunts their rejection of every politically correct stricture. Super-ego and Id inflate together together.

Have you heard of the Yale University Title XI complaint? It would seem to be a fair representation of the fundamental nature of androcentricism and misogyny within the culture:

*snip*

Please read the whole thing, those of you who have a real interest in gaining a glimmer of what day-to-day, don't-get-dressed-without-it life is probably like for the vast majority of women here.

And please read Disciplined Minds to get an idea how and why Yale and other universities are inherently and strategically abusive:

Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-battering System That Shapes Their Lives
A book by Jeff Schmidt about the social agenda of the process of professional training, and how it is used to promote orthodoxy by detecting and weeding out candidates with the most critical view and by exerting pressure on the rest to obey their instructors and abandon a social agenda or efforts to reform injustices. So that they, in turn, can squeeze the life out of the next generation.

http://www.disciplinedminds.com/

You can also listen to it here: http://www.unwelcomeguests.net/Disciplined_Minds

Honestly, I don't really care if people's feelings get hurt here about this...

Well, you haven’t hurt my feelings at least.

Approximately one in six boys is sexually abused before age 16.

(Conservative estimate of incidents involving physical contact in U.S. and Canada. See below.)

...
For the most recent and authoritative evidence supporting the 1 in 6 prevalence estimate, read the study of 17,000 California residents, Long-term consequences of childhood sexual abuse by gender of victim, published in 2005 by Shanta Dube and colleagues in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

http://www.jimhopper.com/male-ab/

[barracuda]

There is a danger in simply prohibiting some behaviors and rewarding others while ignoring the psychic underpinnings that are the fount of behaviors...

I agree with that completely. There's no prohibition or law or rule which is going to make a difference in the final analysis. Behavioral change will result from some other unknown third thing, a black swan of some sort, if it results at all. Or it might arise from the crisis yet to come, if we're primed for it, and able to view ending misogyny as a vital fundamental step in the process of saving our planet, as I do. But such change doesn't have to be predicated upon prohibition, in fact, it probably couldn't be accomplished that way at all.

I certainly don’t consider Hollywood “my culture,” do you?

Oh god, yes, I'm not ashamed to say.

[Stephen Morgan]

That's deeply troubling reading about campus rape culture. They should have a big giant billboard on campus with big pictures and names of guys who've been shown to be rapists or a website, since its clear criminal action isn't happening.

"shown" as in "beyond a reasonable doubt"? Because then your billboard would be empty most of the time, in most places.

[Stephen Morgan]

I'm not certain where this supposition of a supposed predicament might be drawn from. I'll try and guess based upon the information in your statement: let's see - you might be presuming that the power structure evoked by the implementation of the new rule and it's attendant results on the board have now overwhelmingly tilted to favor the women over the men, as a result of an exploitation of the new rules whether consciously or not, to the point of degraded overzealousness, yielding the current "predicament", i.e. several resigned, suspended and banned posters, and a wary remaining forum group essentially walking on eggshells.

The disappeared ones probably mostly deserved it. Maybe a little bit overzealous, but overall seems like the right set of decisions. People like slomo leaving is more worrying, and rightly so. But I'm used to a feminist reign of terror.

It's just a guess, though. But however you view it, the remaining situation here is, in my opinion, completely unchanged with regards to certain fundamentals when compared to any previous normative state of affairs. In fact, I'd argue that it is literally impossible to implement any rule here at the forum which could affect or alter the baseline of misogyny which is experienced by the women on the board in any meaningful way. Let's have the new rule at hand for a moment:

While Rigorous Intuition welcomes a range of informed perspectives, it is not intended to be a forum for the re-fighting of elemental human values. It should be assumed that this is a place where the dignity and rights of all people are respected. Members who challenge these rights may be regarded as disruptive, and members who habitually challenge them will be banned.

...

This is an anti-sexist board. We correctly assume that women, as a group, have been and continue to be the object of oppression based upon their gender. It is expected that members will respect the rights of women to justice and equality in all spheres of life, and to a positive experience of RI. Contending that feminism is a "New World Order plot" will not be permitted.

I have bolded the primary problematic particular of the new rule. "Members will respect the rights of women to justice and equality in all spheres of life, and to a positive experience of RI."

I was looking more at the bit about being anti-sexist, and the bit about people who habitually challenge the right to dignity of all people and elemental human values being banned. The fact is that these could be enforced, but aren't. Warnings could be issued when people, for example, decide to announce that all men should be held responsible for the crimes of a few, that men are inherently inclined to become rapists, that men are incapable of learning, and so on. All sexist, all denigrating one group, all insulting and disruptive, all questioning elemental human values being applied to men. And all common and habitual statements from certain posters, and all cheerfully accepted without being addressed by the mods and admin with anything other than being told to man up.

This section of the rule is unenforceable by any means known to anyone here at the forum. It simply cannot be regarded as practicable within the confines of the system as it exists today, and has existed for a long, long time. That is, it is beyond any reasonable scope of possibility that I or any other forum member can in any meaningful way cause this to happen. The culture and environment in which the board and its membership exists is fundamentally and unequivocally androcentric. For example:

The vast majority of films are written & directed by men. This may result in an androcentric bias with most films (and film characters) being created from a male perspective. Of the top 250 grossing films in 2007, eighty two percent (82%) had no female writers & only 6% had a female director.[5] 70% of all film reviews published in the USA are written by men.[6] Therefore, not only do men have more influence than women over the story-line and characters of most films, they also have the most influence when it comes to publicly reviewing. Because most film reviewers are male, androcentric films (films from a masculine viewpoint) may tend to receive more glowing reviews than female-centric films.

A 2009 Study conducted by the Geena Davis Institute analysed 122 children's films (released between 2006 & 2009) and found both a male bias 'behind the scenes' of the films as we as a male bias in the content of the films.[7] Of this sample, 93% of directors, 87% of writers, and 80% of producers were male. Therefore, an androcentric (male) perspective was dominant in most of the films. The report argued that the male dominance behind most of the films was connected to a male bias (an androcentric bias) in the content of the films themselves. For instance, the majority (70.8%) of the speaking characters in these films were also male, and female characters were much more likely than male characters to be portrayed as beautiful. The report argued that " cinematic females are valued more than cinematic males for their looks, youthfulness, and sexy demeanor".

This, if I may say, is a classic example. Collective responsibility, treating men as a monolithic block, as if the few in power represent the mass, as if the viewpoint of a few in power is somehow the "masculine" viewpoint sharing more affinity with co-genitalists than with those of the same social class, as if the films aren't aimed at attracting female audiences as much as male, as if, in short, men were one indivisible being.

This is a cultural bias beyond the ken of forum wrangling over particulars, and is in essence a negation of any attempted imposition of any ruling to the contrary which it is possible to create here by fiat. Any perceived normative bias toward "exploitative, unequal power relations" in favor of the females on the board is an outright illusion. Within this culture, there can be no such bias by definition.

That certainly articulates your position, which certainly illustrates the reasons for your resistance to an evidence based approach. Your position is that society is inherently against women, so there can be no bias against men, even in limited areas of society. Any evidence of bias against men can therefore be ignored. Any evidence against the idea that women are fundamentally disadvantaged in modern society, or any past society, would be excluded by the posting guidelines.

Which is why your reaction to people leaving the board over its bias in favour of feminist positions (not "women", at all), and to women being openly abusive and purveying hate speech, and one of the mods (that's you) being openly anti-male is that the board is still hostile to women and always will be, no matter what.

- Semi-permanent dwellings almost certainly predated agriculture, and were based on staying where the food was plentiful.

If you read Fortean Times you'd know that entire cities (or at least city) have been found predating the development of cultivation.

- Neolithic communal groups consisted of male hunters and female gatherers in these permanent settlements.

Debatable. Especially given the recent evidence extracted from palaeolithic bones indicating a predominance of sea-food in the diet.

- The women gathering grains were able to accumulate far more foodstuffs than the hunters.

Only in those areas, specifically the middle east (and Columbia, IndoChina, the Sahel, maybe a couple of others), where productive grain crops could be found in the wild.

- Carrying and processing the grain near the settlement gave rise to selected crops close to home, which produced a feedback loop creating even more abundant surplus.

Again, only in the Fertile Crescent and similar areas where such grains were in abundance in nature.

- Hunters became largely superfluous - they would come home from the hunt with two days worth of deer meat for the village, only to find that the women had enough grain to last most of the year. This is the first instance of wealth, along with male resentment.

Given the importance of lysein the meat would have been of greater importance, but the whole situation is absurd.

- Some part of the hunt must now stay behind to protect the stores of grain and the women from other raiding communities, and along with this,

So before grain they didn't care about protecting their women, is what you're saying?

- Hunting becomes ceremonial in nature, and food-types become gender branded, i.e. male steaks vs. female cereals.

This still ignores the reality that the vast majority of the hunter-gatherer crowd of the day lived largely on sea-food and without any cereals at all. Cereals only spread to most of the world with the arrival of cultivation in the neolithic.

- Then it's only a matter of time before protecting the communal grain and the women at the settlement becomes protecting "our" grain and "our" women, as male resentment solidifies into ownership, and the hunting group becomes the standing army.

"our" would presumably have been the term used to refer to "the community's" too. Also, no standing army is recorded in early history, armies were levied only when needed while the men spent most of their time in the fields. Standing armies only become possible with large agricultural surpluses, or areas of domination large enough to use the small surpluses to build a military caste.

- Before women were owned there were no husbands. From now on, ownership of women begets tyhe system of paternity, which is the genesis of the existing rape culture prevailing up to this day.

So your position is that prohibitions on rape are solely to protect the property of polygynous men?

Let's be clear about this: nothing important can change about the state of the world - about the state of constant war, about the plundering and destruction of the environment, about any of it - until men change how they act and relate to women. It is a destructive systemic fault which is deeper than economic constructs, and deeper than the State. The State would not exist as we know it today without having sprung from male subjugation of women.

This is just bizarre.

Have you heard of the Yale University Title XI complaint? It would seem to be a fair representation of the fundamental nature of androcentricism and misogyny within the culture:

Am I the only one that doesn't see anything particularly objectionable in necrophilia? Apart from that it's some unpleasant stuff, not quite as unpleasant as what I might expect from Yale in fact, but in concrete terms it boils down to some women being made to feel uncomfortable but more than welcome to complain. I mean, there's a women's centre and they try to have people punished for being objectionable, but non-criminal. And there are resources available to victims of sexual misconduct, but maybe not enough advertising to make people aware. And there are proper protections, possibly even excessive protections in place for alleged rape victims, but the girls don't have enough confidence in them. And no-one was punished for stealing t-shirts when no-one knew who had done it. I'm not seeing the rape culture.

So this is what freshmen women entering the most prestigious university in America, and possibly the finest in the world,

I thought we were talking about Yale.

have to expect as their introduction to higher learning:

- They will be sexually harrassed as a matter of course, and no authority will intervene.

What you regard as sexual harassment I see as freedom of speech, objectionable though it may be. I won't bother listing anything women's groups might do that may effect men, because you obviously wouldn't care.

- They will be sexually assaulted, and no one will be found accountable.

Yeah, they will be. That'll definitely happen. It's in the brochure, and Yale don't break their promises.

- They may be raped, and no one will be dismissed from the university.

I refer you here. In short, the burden of proof is to be changed so that it's easier to conclude that someone is guilty, and therefore that more people who can't be convicted of any crime because there isn't enough evidence will be evicted from university, have their reputations educations and future prospects ruined, and that this will only happen to men on the say so of women. Feel free to do a little jig: glad I could lighten your day.

- Any and all of these circumstances can and will routinely be used as a source of humor and frivolity by the men on campus, and no one will be in any significant way rebuked or held accountable.

Yes, as no-one ever made a joke about prison rape, or Lorena Bobbit, or men being kicked in the balls, or underage boys being raped by their female teachers, it certainly is a pity that women can be subject to hurtful jokes which will suffer no rebuke except for official complaints by the Women's Centre and newspaper articles denouncing them.

This is the culture the women here, and everywhere, learn to adjust to as best they can from infancy onward. Rape culture 101:

Rape culture is 1 in 6 women being sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. Rape culture is not even talking about the reality that many women are sexually assaulted multiple times in their lives. Rape culture is the way in which the constant threat of sexual assault affects women's daily movements. Rape culture is telling girls and women to be careful about what you wear, how you wear it, how you carry yourself, where you walk, when you walk there, with whom you walk, whom you trust, what you do, where you do it, with whom you do it, what you drink, how much you drink, whether you make eye contact, if you're alone, if you're with a stranger, if you're in a group, if you're in a group of strangers, if it's dark, if the area is unfamiliar, if you're carrying something, how you carry it, what kind of shoes you're wearing in case you have to run, what kind of purse you carry, what jewelry you wear, what time it is, what street it is, what environment it is, how many people you sleep with, what kind of people you sleep with, who your friends are, to whom you give your number, who's around when the delivery guy comes, to get an apartment where you can see who's at the door before they can see you, to check before you open the door to the delivery guy, to own a dog or a dog-sound-making machine, to get a roommate, to take self-defense, to always be alert always pay attention always watch your back always be aware of your surroundings and never let your guard down for a moment lest you be sexually assaulted and if you are and didn't follow all the rules it's your fault.

Please read the whole thing, those of you who have a real interest in gaining a glimmer of what day-to-day, don't-get-dressed-without-it life is probably like for the vast majority of women here.

If rape culture is just the fear, I can believe it exists. But can you think of any way in which, especially with things like the 1 in 6 lie floating about, women are ever going to be convinced that fear is an unwise emotion? Beyond that, a complete sense of security would have to be internalised. Difficult. Perception of crime is often opposite to actual crime.

Honestly, I don't really care if people's feelings get hurt here about this. I know for a fact that if one in six women are sexually assaulted, the only real conclusion that can be drawn from that statistic is that men are, generally speaking, largely a bunch of fucking rapists.

If...

And until this attitude changes - men's attitude toward women - the nature of the state will never change, the wars will never end, the pollution will keep pumping, the assaults will keep happening, the prisons will get fuller, and on and on.

But the nature of the state has changed. The prisons have been emptier. Periods of peace have existed. And that may be the case again, as it has been in the past, with no noticeable change in the position of women. Although, as I've said, I think a socialist state would reduce the incidence of sexual and violence crime.

[Stephen Morgan]

I accept the statistics that 1 in 6 women have been sexually assaulted, don't you? In fact, I think that stat is probably alarmingly low. However, even going with the low end of the figure, that means everyone you know almost certainly knows some woman who has been sexually assaulted.

As a believer in original sin I find myself in the unaccustomed position of arguing for inherent human virtue. People, men, need to be extensively inured against the psychological trauma of shooting people to even be able to shoot people in combat and in self-defence. After that they typically suffer PTSD, nightmares, heavily psychological damage leading to a massively increased suicide rate. So excuse me if I find your assumption that a quarter of all men are rapists and most of the rest, with the obvious exception of Sir you, are just looking for an opportunity.

And no, I don't believe the 1 in 6 figure. If I did I would hardly consider it "alarmingly low". Partly because it's high, partly because low figures for rape should be a good thing. Rape is bad.

The reason I don't believe the figure is that it is long debunked, even forgetting the lack of objective evidence and the methodological errors, when the women deemed by the study to be rape victims were asked if they'd been raped, most of them said no, by a rather large margin. So barracuda, recently arguing that women have a unique knowledge of what constitutes misogyny, bases his rape figures on the idea that a woman doesn't know if she's been raped or not. Paternalistic. And to think, I'm the one who gets called a misogynist. I don't go around lecturing to women about whether they've been raped or not.

So why try and pretty it up? Somebody's doin' all that shit, and it aint the Tooth Fairy. It's a bunch of men. Demonstrably about 25% of them, but if you're willing to be honest about it, we both know it's higher than that.

"Demonstrably" implies you can demonstrate it. In fact, even if the one in six claim was correct, one in six men being rapists would probably be a ceiling rather than a floor, but that statistic is bullshit anyway, so I won't quibble over "one in six" leaping up to 25%, or "higher than that". So I'll just settle for the straight-forward demonstration that a quarter of men are rapists.

But you're right about the hate-speech thing. Instead of "fucking rapists" I should have said, "dag-gum sex-assaulters".

I shouldn't have said "niggers are criminals" I should have said "niggers are purveyors of transgressive behaviour".

Or, to put it another way, obviously it isn't the use of the word "rapist" which makes it hate speech.

I'm a lousy mod, really.

No, your conduct as a mod is broadly responsible and not generally unobjectionable. You're a bad person.

[seemslikeadream]

If ya can't beat 'em join 'em.....

When that option's available -- which is neither always nor for everyone -- it's usually the best that can be done, I agree. But you're talking about half the world's population subjugating itself to the other half in order to avoid being involuntarily beaten. In exchange for that, and on a geographically narrow basis, some elite members of the defeated group (aka "you and me") receive a number of conditional and non-binding concessions from the group they were lucky enough to be born with the option of joining.

It's one thing to admit that and another to endorse it.
___________________

(I'm not sure which you intended to do, but the above would be an observation and not a criticism either way, it sure can't hurt to add.)

I was talking about joining RIer's fascination with Misogyny

and I picked a woman on purpose to sing that song even though it belongs to James

[compared2what?]

Norton, I ask this in all innocence and without any rancor or hostility, out of no other motive than an earnest wish for mutual understanding, so there is no wrong answer.

But does this really read to you as an incitement to hatred of men?

Honestly, I don't really care if people's feelings get hurt here about this. I know for a fact that if one in six women are sexually assaulted, the only real conclusion that can be drawn from that statistic is that men are, generally speaking, largely a bunch of fucking rapists. And until this attitude changes - men's attitude toward women - the nature of the state will never change, the wars will never end, the pollution will keep pumping, the assaults will keep happening, the prisons will get fuller, and on and on.

Because it really doesn't to me.

Loosely speaking, I understood it as an incitement to recognize that although we all believe that we all treat behavior that we all abhor -- ie, the violent sexual assault of women by men -- as abhorrent, so many of us accept it as a matter of socially normative routine that the whole world is effectively crippled by it.

If it makes any difference at all, I have such a hard time recognizing that as true myself that for all practical purposes, 99.9 percent of the time, I not only don't but can't. That's just the case, even though violent sexual assault has been a regular part of my experience for longer than sex has and I never don't know that. On a strictly private and unarticulated level, it's just flatly un-not-knowable, as a matter of basic identity.

But above that, I live in the same world that everyone else does and recognize sexual violence by its standards not mine, for the most part. In short, I don't think that any man is sexually violent or that all men are sexually violent, ever. I very rarely even think that some men are sexually violent, including some who have sexually assaulted me. I don't hate some, any or all men. I hate myself. I mean, those are the rules, afaik.

They bear examining, if you ask me. But that's not because I want to change them in my own favor. It's because they don't work. We agree on that much in spirit, if not in letter, don't we?

[compared2what?]

And no, I don't believe the 1 in 6 figure. If I did I would hardly consider it "alarmingly low". Partly because it's high, partly because low figures for rape should be a good thing. Rape is bad.

The reason I don't believe the figure is that it is long debunked, even forgetting the lack of objective evidence and the methodological errors, when the women deemed by the study to be rape victims were asked if they'd been raped, most of them said no, by a rather large margin.

I'm almost positive that's the facile argument people use to dismiss the 1-in-4 study not the 1-in-6 study, honey. Are you sure you're not getting them mixed up?

I'll go check, I guess.

[Stephen Morgan]

I'm almost positive that's the facile argument people use to dismiss the 1-in-4 study not the 1-in-6 study, honey. Are you sure you're not getting them mixed up?

Good point, could be. Will look it up.

[vanlose kid]

... I'm used to a feminist reign of terror.

...

WTF?

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