What constitutes Misogyny?

[charlie meadows]

ah yes, thanks for reminding me of that article, Jack. I had wanted to draw attention to this little bit:

Like Richard and James, [David] feels much of his masculinity and power in the relationship was lost when he gave up his job to become a househusband.

"It is ironic, given that for hundreds of years women have been perceived solely as housewives and mothers, and yet their role has been regarded as essential to society and they have been respected and valued for it," he says.

"But once I gave up my career, I lost prestige both in society and in the eyes of my wife. It was as if I had no value.

"There were times in our marriage when I felt as if I was being treated like a subservient Victorian housewife. I'd be criticised if the washing wasn't hung out exactly how my wife wanted it and she used to check to make sure that I had cleaned the house perfectly, checking for dust and badly-washed plates.

"My wife was a real control freak and she wanted everything to be done perfectly. My standards weren't good enough, even though I had run a house perfectly successfully on my own before I met her. I spent my days cooking and cleaning, as well as doing everything for our daughter."

Really, David, which is it? Have housewives been regarded as essential to society and respected for it for hundreds of years, or as a subservient class of people?

Both?!

That you imply those are mutually exclusive shows that you are unable presently to think clearly about the matter at hand.

subservient classes are not also respected classes. that subservience exists in a relationship in the first place demonstrates a power imbalance within the relationship. the power imbalance demonstrates a lack of respect for the inherent, equal worth of both parties within the relationship.

Are you capable of debate without derision?

It is true without possible reasonable objection that "housewives [have] been regarded as essential to society and respected for it for hundreds of years, and also as a subservient class of people".

That you cannot seem to grasp this simple truth shows that you are unable to think clearly presently about the matter.

[Stephen Morgan]

Women executives, women who are successful by American cultural standards, tend to be even worse than men when it comes to holding traditional women's work in utter contempt. They are often worse than men and the men are pretty damned bad. If you doubt this, try doing childcare or being a waitress or a maid or a secretary -- don't care what gender or lack therof you claim -- just try doing the WORK. Try out telling an organization made up entirely of dedicated feminist activists that it appears from this job description that their office needs a housewife and that being an office manager is often simply a clerical form of housewivery. Then watch as they fall all over themselves assuring you that they meant no offense (which only gives further offense to me at least). Should you be so unfortunate (or stupid) as to then take the job, watch as you then experience, from women, all the body language of contempt -- eye rolling and etc. -- from the dedicated feminists for whom you labor.

I wouldn't mind doing that sort of work at all. Of course I am by nature an idler. The industrial revolution was sold to workers suspected of sympathy with Luddites and Swingers and other trouble-makers as something which would make them richer, mechanisation would allow more to be made with less effort, everyone could work less and have more. And it could have been so, and still could be so. Most of the work done is nothing more than busy-work, because it's though people need to be given something to do so they can't think of something to do for themselves. That and the fact that a person's time is valued so lowly.

Anyone may indulge in power tripping. That's not misogny, it's contempt. The contempt for everything traditionally womanly -- that is misogny and it is often practiced by women on women, although sometimes men fall victim too when they too are so trusting that they dare do women's work.

It's probably the inevitable result of giving one person power over another, an inherently unjust situation.

This is more dribble you've read on your anti-feminist websites. Look at it this way: in 2006, 5,840 deaths occurred in the workplace in the US. In the same period, an estimated 160,000 women were raped or sexually assulted. Welcome to America.

Mostly from the website Project Willow posted in the genre gender bender thread. And you're comparing apples to oranges, the number of deaths in the workplace is irrelevant to victims of violent crime. Men do all the most dangerous jobs by a large majority in each, but I wasn't comparing that to rape. Rape, on the other hand, is the only one of the violent crimes of which women are the majority of victims.

Sometimes I wonder if you even think about these issues for yourself rather than simply regurgitating talking points. Whatever statistics you might use to quantify your premise that it is is "safe to walk alone at night" are at the very least skewed by the fact that it is actually not safe to walk at night, and so women almost never do. And the fact that they wisely and consistently utilise the protective measure of not walking alone at night, has significantly lessened the chance that they will be attacked. Because they aren't alone. At night.

But men are considerably more likely to be attacked, but are also less likely to be paralysed by fear, or to have fear play a part in their day to day decisions. This is the fundamental dichotomy.

Beyond that completely obvious bit of thoughfulness, yes, I think if a group feels they are historically oppressed, and I can see, and have seen throughout my life that it is actually unsafe for them to walk alone at night in virtually every geographic location I have ever lived in by any measure you care to look at, their feelings might deserve some consideration. So I contrast those observations with observations regarding the feelings of members of a different group which I myself happen to belong to, and whose priviledges as well as oppressions I have experienced my whole life, or at least ever since I came to consciousness regarding basic injustices around me. For whom, I might add, it is not always the best idea to walk alone at night, either. And at some point I decline to insist that the feelings of women are irrelevant to their reality in the world, in the same way that I acknowledge the importance in my life of my own feelings.

I walk alone at night all the time and have never had any problems. Never seen any problems. I don't doubt that the feelings are legitimate, but your statement that it "actually is unsafe", is unsupportable. You assume it is unsafe because you have been told so, and women believe the same thing for the same reason. Their feelings deserve consideration, but should that no include reassuring those who are fearful? Those who fear and stress when forced by circumstance to do something they believe to be dangerous, but which statistically isn't? As the saying goes, the only thing to fear is fear itself. I quite approve of one or two feminist efforts in this area, such as encouraging better street lighting and women's self-defence lessons, although I've also come across feminists who say this shouldn't be necessary because men shouldn't commit crimes which scare women in the first place. My position is that it isn't necessary, strictly speaking, but if it makes women less scared then it's fine by me. I doubt it stops a single crime, but the fear of crime is more important. For several years the over-all rate of crime has fallen while the fear of crime has risen. Fear is the enemy of reason, so if you don't mind I will continue not to accept that all fears are of equally real threats.

Again, do ou think they are lying? Or stupid? Or conniving? Statistics simply don't reflect the state of the world in all it's complexity, Stephen. They can be useful for certain models of reality, but not for all models.

No, statistics don't reflect all of reality. But let me present you with another oppressed group, which I assume we will agree to be oppressed, which is black people. In this country at least I could have gone for Muslims, former prisoners, people born into families below the poverty line, but I think the position of black people and the putative position of women is somewhat analogous.

Now, the phenomenon of a society racist against black people is no doubt a complex one, manifesting in fear of black people, fear that they are more likely to commit crimes, a belief they are less intelligent, that they may instinctively stir themselves to the primal rhythms of the Peruvian nose flute, &c..

However, we don't say black people are oppressed because someone may cross the street to avoid having to walk past a group of young black people, not even in the belief they may be criminals but simply from intimidation, now do we? We say black people are oppressed because of the ways in which they can be observed, through the medium of statistics and facts, to be oppressed. It all comes down to the numbers. Black people don't live as long, they have a higher chance of being in prison, a lower average income, a higher chance of not having an income, a higher chance of being the victim of pretty much all types of crime, a lower chance of a university education, they tend to live ghettoised in areas of poverty with less access to healthcare, education, gainful employment, protection from the law, and so forth, they have a greater rate of drug addiction, of suicide, of poor nutrition, of debt, of addiction to legal drugs and cigarettes, and I could continue this list for page after page, but I won't bore you.

On the other hand, in this country at least, racial minorities make up the same proportion of the judiciary as they do of the population, and based on your claims that only those at the very top of society matter, maybe black people are really equal already after all.

Now, although the source of the oppression and the results of the oppression may be seperate, it is by the visible results that we measure it. Not just measure, it is by these results that we know it exists and can prove it to all comers.

With the exception of having a lower income, how many of the above apply to women?

Now, I'm not saying women aren't oppressed, as men are oppressed, by the system in which we live. But I am saying that women aren't an oppressed class. An oppressed class must be oppressed in comparison to others. Black people have a clearly defined level of disadvantage compared to white people, it isn't the hardness of their lives which makes them and oppressed class, but the relative hardness compared to those people not of their class. Women do not have massively harder lives than men, as a class. Both have their joint grievances against society, and their seperate. I think men have a worse go of it at present, although obviously I am as much a victim of confirmation bias as they are, but what men certainly don't have is a grand political movement in their favour a la feminism.

Perhaps it comes from my life-long poverty, but I also rather doubt it was ever all that different. I mean, I can see complaints about women not being allowed to become doctors 150 years ago, and intellectually I see that was bad, but what I hear is "150 years ago the top 1% of women couldn't become doctors while the top 1% of men had that option" and I just think "who cares? 150 years ago 99% of women were working with their husbands on the farm, or naked down a coal-mine, right next to the men of the village". So today I don't know any women who've had their brains washed by university. Or any men, for that matter. As far as I can tell none of the women I know believe themselves to be the persecuted underclass of a patriarchal state, so perhaps they're all lying, conniving, idiots, but I suppose that only cuts one way.

Anyway, there was a question you actually asked up there, these women who agree with you say misogyny is rife in society. Well, something like that, as we haven't got a nailed down definition of misogyny it's difficult to be precise. Anyway, these women who agree with you are sure there's a shitload of misogyny all over the place, and I, as you might have noticed, don't agree. Am I, therefore, calling them:

a) idiots
b) liars
c) conniving, which in this context seems to be functionally identical with b)

Well, what I though I was doing was respectfully disagreeing and then trying to reach a conclusion over the matter through debate, which is a process known as dialectic. Obviously I was woefully mistaken and what questioning someone's own subjective impressions really is, is calling them idiots or liars. Given that until recently I though I was in a discussion, I suppose you are probably better placed to answer your question. Apologies for my failure.

And I find your ability to parrot anti-feminist statisics in support of what is essentially hate-speech less and less valuable to this discussion as time goes on.

Perhaps if you were to find some statistics of your own. Doesn't have to be statistics, just some objective and quantifiable stuff, something other than "these women say it's misogyny, so either you're calling them liars or you're conceding".

I'd also, briefly, like to go back to your parliamentary example, just for a moment. You believe that the consensus of women on this thread is that our society is misogynistic, and that this consensus reflects not just their feelings and experiences, or even the objective truth of their lives, but the inarguable truth about the whole of society. Your primary example of the manifestation of this state is the lack of elected representatives in our legislatures who are women. Now, both in your country and mine we have the so-called "democratic" system whereby we elect representatives. The electorate is just over half female, due to the larger number of adult women in both our countries, and the larger number of men who are immigrants, former or present convicts, or otherwise inelligible to vote. Women are also, in both of our countries, more likely to vote. So your evidence for the misogynist state you believe to exist is the composition of a body, the members of which are decided by a group made up mostly of women.

I should look up which sex is more likely to be in political parties, too, and try to confirm my vague memory of reading that women are no more likely to vote for other women, but I won't. That last paragraph wasn't really argument, just something that I found amusing.

Two words:
wage slavery.

My thoughts exactly. As the primary focus for gendered consciousness in the modern world I consider feminism the most guilty of those responsible for the sexual split in the human race. Feminism takes the energies of women, mostly university-type women who are of high intelligence and energy and who have a future in high positions in society, and deprives the socialist movement of them. They send them to try to combat domestic violence as if it was a problem with men, not with people, hence wasting their time. In trade unions they direct their union's energies and funds to remedying such pay inequity as that between dinner ladies and bin men, rather than between dinner ladies and the head of the local education authority, say. They spend their educational funds on trying to get women into engineering, despite women already being the majority going into the professions, for example, which merely serves to divide men and women further, as well as increasing the educational advantage of women. And so on, ad infinitum, a movement of feminists diverting all their energies to bettering the position of women in relation to men, and of poor women in relation to poor men, but never ever of poor women to rich women.

Much effort diverted into harmless channels. To quote Shelley, "we are many, they are few!" Well, you redefine "we" and "they" and you end up with "we are many, and so are they", and the original "they" go off laughing.

[compared2what?]

May I suggest (again) that a discussion of misogyny that continually reverts to questions of

(a) how it affects men;
(b) how it affects men;
(c) how men are affected by it; and
(d) the numerous ways in which the utter blamelessness of men in perpetuating it serve only to make the tortures that they suffer as a result of it that much worse

is (perhaps) formulaically destined to fail?

The points raised by (a), (b), and (c) are important ones, no fucking doubt. But you can't really address them, like, immediately after the preface. You have to read and discuss chapters one through ten first. Sort of like how you have to learn basic math before you can learn advanced math.

That's just how it is. Because it is NOT A BOY VERSUS GIRL TYPE OF THING. Unless you make it one.

[Stephen Morgan]

This would not be the magic solution to all things, but I honestly believe it would be a big improvement on a range of "women's issues" as defined in the corporate mindset. (This would hardly include all issues pertaining to women generally, let alone to justice and other human values, but would cover equity of treatment between the sexes by the employer and matters of harrassment and discrimination in the workplace.)

Or we could, you know, abolished these dens of thievery and corruption, do away with the parasites who lurk within and replace them with a rotating group selected at random from the body of the workers so as to properly represent their fellow workers.

Or we could give the workers proper rights, forbid things like arbitrary redundancies, or any redundancies from a profitable company, and levy a special tax against directors, we could go back to the system which forbade directors from owning shares in their company, and appoint government officials witht he power to veto corrupt corporate board decisions, and put proper taxes on companies which they actually have to pay so as to fund services for the workers.

Or we could bring companies under democratic control and nationalise them, running them in the long-term interests of the workers and the nation, using profits either to lower the tax burden on the poorest or to reward the workers who generated them.

Or a combination of the above with a rigid and brutally efficient enforcement regime to ensure a corporate system which serves the people as a whole rather than just the biggest shareholders and the corrupt managerial class.

Or, alternatively, we could bring in a law to force each individual gang of parasitic scum to let in a few token female parasites alongside themselves. Yeah, that one's best, let's do that.

[JackRiddler]

Stray thoughts.

In Tennessee, the damaged goods defense is allowed in civil cases. That is, if you are the clerk who gets held up at gun point, suffer PTSD, and then attempt to have workers comp pay for counselling, the workers comp insurance company will defend that at all costs. State law allows the defense attorneys to review your mental health records. If said records reveal that you were raped (or mugged or assaulted or had any trauma of any kind) in the past, the defense will be that you already had PTSD and that it is therefore unjust to expect workers comp to pay counselling costs. In order to have this paid in Tennessee, it pretty much has to be establsihed that this was your first psychological trauma.

This applies equally to men and women. I wouldn't doubt that, if the clerk revealed that he was a nervous wreck after seeing a fellow construction worker crushed to death on the job and so he quit and started retail work, his claim would be disallowed as well. Therefore, it is not a misognistic law, just a really unreasonable one.

Misogny is the glee and delight I've seen in lawyers eyes when they discover a woman plaintiff told her counsellor she was raped 20 years ago. It's a lot of why I am no longer a paralegal. Having seen that glee and delight on a regular basis is why I'm even less trustful of men in general than I once was. Those lawyers -- if the plaintiff was a man it would be "poor bastard," but if a woman it would be "evil slut." That is misogny.

About men staying home with their kids -- men and women both tend to dispise traditional women's work. It's not only unpaid, which doesn't bother me all that much, it is utterly dispised, maybe especially by people who protest that they are feminists. I associate the label feminism with what I used to call "the lady lawyer type" back in the 80s when I was in my 20s and still routinely called myself a feminist. Women executives, women who are successful by American cultural standards, tend to be even worse than men when it comes to holding traditional women's work in utter contempt. They are often worse than men and the men are pretty damned bad. If you doubt this, try doing childcare or being a waitress or a maid or a secretary -- don't care what gender or lack therof you claim -- just try doing the WORK. Try out telling an organization made up entirely of dedicated feminist activists that it appears from this job description that their office needs a housewife and that being an office manager is often simply a clerical form of housewivery. Then watch as they fall all over themselves assuring you that they meant no offense (which only gives further offense to me at least). Should you be so unfortunate (or stupid) as to then take the job, watch as you then experience, from women, all the body language of contempt -- eye rolling and etc. -- from the dedicated feminists for whom you labor.

Anyone may indulge in power tripping. That's not misogny, it's contempt. The contempt for everything traditionally womanly -- that is misogny and it is often practiced by women on women, although sometimes men fall victim too when they too are so trusting that they dare do women's work.

I just wanted to express appreciation for this post, Yarnell.

My experience in my periods as house-husband was that inside the house, we had tensions we probably would have had anyway, but that these sometimes (not usually) expressed themselves around the house-husband role; whereas outside, among the mommies, I got way too much cred and, in fact, extra points on the attraction scale, just for being a guy taking care of a child. But maybe that's Occupied Berlin for you (fell to the Second-Wave Feminist Armies no later than 1974, according to some accounts).

As I've said, I think misogyny is extremely important on its own, and comes on a scale from the (all-too-common) violent extreme to a general miasma in which all can participate quasi-unwittingly, or plausibly deniably. But it also cannot be separated more generally from power-tripping, or bullying, or attitudes of supremacy, or lack of empathy, or hatred of everyone perceived to be subordinate and weaker, especially: children. Thought example, tell me how it lines up with your experience: An extreme misogynist is never going to be someone who is empathic, just and straightforward (as opposed to neurotic) in his treatment of men. Woman is the least separable form of "other." We're all women.

.

[JackRiddler]

This would not be the magic solution to all things, but I honestly believe it would be a big improvement on a range of "women's issues" as defined in the corporate mindset. (This would hardly include all issues pertaining to women generally, let alone to justice and other human values, but would cover equity of treatment between the sexes by the employer and matters of harrassment and discrimination in the workplace.)

Or we could, you know, abolished these dens of thievery and corruption, do away with the parasites who lurk within and replace them with a rotating group selected at random from the body of the workers so as to properly represent their fellow workers.

Or we could give the workers proper rights, forbid things like arbitrary redundancies, or any redundancies from a profitable company, and levy a special tax against directors, we could go back to the system which forbade directors from owning shares in their company, and appoint government officials witht he power to veto corrupt corporate board decisions, and put proper taxes on companies which they actually have to pay so as to fund services for the workers.

Or we could bring companies under democratic control and nationalise them, running them in the long-term interests of the workers and the nation, using profits either to lower the tax burden on the poorest or to reward the workers who generated them.

Or a combination of the above with a rigid and brutally efficient enforcement regime to ensure a corporate system which serves the people as a whole rather than just the biggest shareholders and the corrupt managerial class.

Or, alternatively, we could bring in a law to force each individual gang of parasitic scum to let in a few token female parasites alongside themselves. Yeah, that one's best, let's do that.

If you read me fairly past the quoted (first) paragraph, you'd see this is a case where we (mostly) agree, and in fact I make some points identical to your own. But I suspect anyone anywhere merely floating the idea is a big red flag that blinds you.

.

[Cedars of Overburden]

Thought example, tell me how it lines up with your experience: An extreme misogynist is never going to be someone who is empathic, just and straightforward (as opposed to neurotic) in his treatment of men. Woman is the least separable form of "other." We're all women.

.

I think you're right, Jack. We're all women one way or the other.

[Canadian_watcher]

I think you're right, Jack. We're all women one way or the other.

You should thank your lucky stars that non of those ways involve tampons.

[barracuda]

...comparing apples to oranges,

I wasn't comparing death in the workplace to rape, though. I was making a point regarding your comparison here:

A far better measure would be the ratio of women to men in high positions of government.

A convenient way to ignore the disparity between men and women among the homeless, those who die in on-the-job accidents, those who are unemployed, and the other disadvantaged groups who make upa much larger part f the population that those in the high positions of government,

Which, yes, I agree, is apples and oranges.

But men are considerably more likely to be attacked, but are also less likely to be paralysed by fear, or to have fear play a part in their day to day decisions.

This statement constitutes unexamined misogyny.

I mean, obviously no level of economic or social or legal advantage can make up for the fact that some women on this board think society is guilty of this "misogyny" which only women, in your view, are capable of even defining.

I know you meant this sarcastically, but that very sarcasm constitutes unexamined misogyny.

Now, the phenomenon of a society racist against black people is no doubt a complex one, manifesting in fear of black people, ... a belief they are less intelligent, that they may instinctively stir themselves to the primal rhythms of the Peruvian nose flute, &c..

Substitute "misogynistic" for "racist" and "women" for "black people" and you have said something which has pertinence to the discussion. Because in each example, it is the case.

However, we don't say black people are oppressed because someone may cross the street to avoid having to walk past a group of young black people, not even in the belief they may be criminals but simply from intimidation, now do we?

Yes, we do. This is a symptom of racism.

Now, although the source of the oppression and the results of the oppression may be seperate, it is by the visible results that we measure it. Not just measure, it is by these results that we know it exists and can prove it to all comers.

No, not to all comers. You cannot prove it in this fashion to a racist, can you?

With the exception of having a lower income, how many of the above apply to women?

I think you'll agree that all of the above apply at the very least to black women, and besides all that, they have to deal with living in a misogynist culture as well.

...but what men certainly don't have is a grand political movement in their favour a la feminism.

As far as I can tell, at least here in the US, the entire grand political system is gamed in favor of men. So they at least have that.

As far as I can tell none of the women I know believe themselves to be the persecuted underclass of a patriarchal state, so perhaps they're all lying, conniving, idiots, but I suppose that only cuts one way.

Apparently you are saying you don't know any of the women on the forum.

Well, what I though I was doing was respectfully disagreeing and then trying to reach a conclusion over the matter through debate, which is a process known as dialectic.

What you are engaged in has just about no relation aside from cosmetic to actual dialectic. Mostly because you demonstrate virtually no interest in reaching a higher truth through dialogue, as your inability to put forth an answer of any merit to my question above shows. I'll rephrase it for you:

The women on the forum seem to evidence by consensus that they feel themselves to be living in a misogynist culture. You consider them to be wrong about that notion. To what do you attribute their misunderstanding?

Your dialectics are a sham. You are spouting propaganda and labeling it discourse.

So your evidence for the misogynist state you believe to exist is the composition of a body, the members of which are decided by a group made up mostly of women.

Absolutely. It is an obvious example.

That last paragraph wasn't really argument, just something that I found amusing.

Examine your amusement carefully. It constitutes misogyny.

As the primary focus for gendered consciousness in the modern world I consider feminism the most guilty of those responsible for the sexual split in the human race.

Misogyny.

Feminism takes the energies of women, mostly university-type women who are of high intelligence and energy and who have a future in high positions in society, and deprives the socialist movement of them. They send them to try to combat domestic violence as if it was a problem with men, not with people, hence wasting their time. In trade unions they direct their union's energies and funds to remedying such pay inequity as that between dinner ladies and bin men, rather than between dinner ladies and the head of the local education authority, say. They spend their educational funds on trying to get women into engineering, despite women already being the majority going into the professions, for example, which merely serves to divide men and women further, as well as increasing the educational advantage of women. And so on, ad infinitum, a movement of feminists diverting all their energies to bettering the position of women in relation to men, and of poor women in relation to poor men, but never ever of poor women to rich women.

Do you believe a socialist environment would lower the rate of sexual crime against women? By what particular mechanism?

[Nordic]

As the primary focus for gendered consciousness in the modern world I consider feminism the most guilty of those responsible for the sexual split in the human race.

Yes, that's an absurd statement and utterly ignores the last few ..... centuries? millenia? ...... of history.

Seriously, Stephen, the "sexual split in the human race" has come a long long ways in the past couple of generations, at least in the Western world, how could you possibly deny that and actually blame it on those who were largely responsible for reducing it??

The issue at hand, it seems to me, is has it come far enough? Has it gone too far in certain cases? Where do we still need to work on the misogyny inherent in our culture?

I don't think anyone here is "pro misogyny", I think we're all just bickering about where it exists, how it exists, and what to do about its lack or surplus.

And Stephen I enjoy your devil's advocate approach to these issues, but a statement like this destroys any credibility you may have managed to gain.

[JackRiddler]

Thought example, tell me how it lines up with your experience: An extreme misogynist is never going to be someone who is empathic, just and straightforward (as opposed to neurotic) in his treatment of men. Woman is the least separable form of "other." We're all women.

.

I think you're right, Jack. We're all women one way or the other.

Yes. Lest I be misunderstood, allow me to add: We're also not.

Which is to say there are many, many double standards and inequities, and also just experiences different from my own (good or bad), to which I have not been subjected, solely by virtue of being a man[1] and not a woman[2].

There is a sexist order that exists independently of whether we even acknowledge it, and that resembles in its structure the model described by vanlose kid (with a Lawmaker L mandating unjustly different treatment for two sets, A and B, creating tension and conundrums for both). It overlaps with many other such models.

And then there is also a misogyny that is completely wrapped up with and very hard to separate from other hateful and irrational emotional drives that fuck up life for all, that is anti-life in general, as well as anti-woman in particular.

And then I do believe in an essential humanity beneath our shapes and acquired characters, within which the irreducible biological difference due to sex is a small part. I think this essential humanity is more what we call "feminine" than "masculine," that its essence is sociability and warmth to our own kind.

.......................


[1] in my case, a man who usually is ascribed a "normal" or middling "masculine" character, based on my looks and manner

[2] also not a man who is identified as gay or too feminine, though sometimes I've had the misfortune to be targeted by homophobes and/or just plain psychotic bullies who wanted to beat on me for no reason they could specify coherently

.

[Nordic]

I'll throw something out there that I've seen in my life, just for the hell of it, because I'm unemployed again today (damn women are taking all the jobs!)<------JOKE

In my "day job" I do lighting for the entertainment business. It's probably about 97% guys who do this stuff. Often I am in charge. Probably 97% of the time there aren't women on our crew, because, well, there just are hardly any in existence. It's extremely physically demanding to the point of being brutal, it's a bit dangerous, involves huge amounts of electricity, and honestly it helps to be able to literally throw some weight around. Women just don't get into this field, in general.

On a recent job I hired a young woman. She was really cool and I really like her. She was also pretty green and inexperienced. I found myself being WAY nicer to her than I would be to a guy of the same experience level. The guy who works directly under me, who is in charge of hiring all of them (with my approval and input), told me I was being too nice to her. He may have been right. With the guys I'm really strict, and I treat them, well, like guys. With this young woman I treated her with far less strict oversight and with a far more forgiving attitude. I was "nicer". Honestly, with guys, I don't really care about their feelings so much, they're guys and they're gonna have to deal with it. With women? I'm more careful of their feelings.

Now, is that misogyny on my part? Or the opposite?

I'm serious, I'm curious what others think of this.

[Cedars of Overburden]

I think you're right, Jack. We're all women one way or the other.

You should thank your lucky stars that non of those ways involve tampons.

back at ya.

[Stephen Morgan]

...comparing apples to oranges,

I wasn't comparing death in the workplace to rape, though. I was making a point regarding your comparison here:

A far better measure would be the ratio of women to men in high positions of government.

A convenient way to ignore the disparity between men and women among the homeless, those who die in on-the-job accidents, those who are unemployed, and the other disadvantaged groups who make upa much larger part f the population that those in the high positions of government,

Which, yes, I agree, is apples and oranges.

You don't see a comparison there? You have said it is evidence of society's misogyny that women are outnumbered at the top, I have countered that they are also outnumbered at the bottom. You look at the priveleged few, I look at the disadvantaged.

But men are considerably more likely to be attacked, but are also less likely to be paralysed by fear, or to have fear play a part in their day to day decisions.

This statement constitutes unexamined misogyny.

Do you disagree that men are more likely to be attacked, that women are more likely to feel fear of, for example, night-time alleyways, or some related matter?

I mean, obviously no level of economic or social or legal advantage can make up for the fact that some women on this board think society is guilty of this "misogyny" which only women, in your view, are capable of even defining.

I know you meant this sarcastically, but that very sarcasm constitutes unexamined misogyny.

We're not going to get very far in this discussion if your only response to everything I write is "this is misogyny".

Now, the phenomenon of a society racist against black people is no doubt a complex one, manifesting in fear of black people, ... a belief they are less intelligent, that they may instinctively stir themselves to the primal rhythms of the Peruvian nose flute, &c..

Substitute "misogynistic" for "racist" and "women" for "black people" and you have said something which has pertinence to the discussion. Because in each example, it is the case.

Simply untrue.

However, we don't say black people are oppressed because someone may cross the street to avoid having to walk past a group of young black people, not even in the belief they may be criminals but simply from intimidation, now do we?

Yes, we do. This is a symptom of racism.

It is a symptom of racism, it is not a major symptom of racism. IT's a frippery.

Now, although the source of the oppression and the results of the oppression may be seperate, it is by the visible results that we measure it. Not just measure, it is by these results that we know it exists and can prove it to all comers.

No, not to all comers. You cannot prove it in this fashion to a racist, can you?

It can be proven to all reasonable standards, whether your correspondent agrees or not. Besides, racists rarely seem to disagree that black people are in a subordinate position, they're just more likely to think this is how things should be. In my experience, at least.

With the exception of having a lower income, how many of the above apply to women?

I think you'll agree that all of the above apply at the very least to black women, and besides all that, they have to deal with living in a misogynist culture as well.

The misogynist culture doesn't exist, so it shouldn't bother them too much. Black women have to deal with racism too, although the disparities in, for example, higher education between the sexes are even larger in favour of women in the black community than the white.

...but what men certainly don't have is a grand political movement in their favour a la feminism.

As far as I can tell, at least here in the US, the entire grand political system is gamed in favor of men. So they at least have that.

It is gamed in favour of the rich. I mean, I provide plenty of evidence of how it does badly for poor men, but all you can respond with is an insistence that all evidence of men being more likely to be assaulted or incarcerated, less likely to be employed or university educated and so forth is totally irrelevant and they are still part of a privileged class. It is quite literally impossible to argue against such a position, as it has neither logic not supporting facts which can be questioned, merely blind faith.

As far as I can tell none of the women I know believe themselves to be the persecuted underclass of a patriarchal state, so perhaps they're all lying, conniving, idiots, but I suppose that only cuts one way.

Apparently you are saying you don't know any of the women on the forum.

I don't consider myself to know people I only "know" on the internet. At the very least I need to know someone's real name and face, and be able to put them together, or I don't know them.

Well, what I though I was doing was respectfully disagreeing and then trying to reach a conclusion over the matter through debate, which is a process known as dialectic.

What you are engaged in has just about no relation aside from cosmetic to actual dialectic. Mostly because you demonstrate virtually no interest in reaching a higher truth through dialogue, as your inability to put forth an answer of any merit to my question above shows. I'll rephrase it for you:

The women on the forum seem to evidence by consensus that they feel themselves to be living in a misogynist culture. You consider them to be wrong about that notion. To what do you attribute their misunderstanding?

Your dialectics are a sham. You are spouting propaganda and labeling it discourse.

You are repeatedly labelling everything "misogyny" and labelling it "misogyny".

So your evidence for the misogynist state you believe to exist is the composition of a body, the members of which are decided by a group made up mostly of women.

Absolutely. It is an obvious example.

It is, however, a fact, is it not? So, in what way does it constitute misogyny?

That last paragraph wasn't really argument, just something that I found amusing.

Examine your amusement carefully. It constitutes misogyny.

Examine your haircut. It constitutes misogyny. Examine your punctuation. It constitutes misogyny. Examine the word "scrumpy". It constitutes misogyny. A broken clock always says the same thing, but it at least has the virtue of occasionally being right.

As the primary focus for gendered consciousness in the modern world I consider feminism the most guilty of those responsible for the sexual split in the human race.

Misogyny.

Scrumpy.

Feminism takes the energies of women, mostly university-type women who are of high intelligence and energy and who have a future in high positions in society, and deprives the socialist movement of them. They send them to try to combat domestic violence as if it was a problem with men, not with people, hence wasting their time. In trade unions they direct their union's energies and funds to remedying such pay inequity as that between dinner ladies and bin men, rather than between dinner ladies and the head of the local education authority, say. They spend their educational funds on trying to get women into engineering, despite women already being the majority going into the professions, for example, which merely serves to divide men and women further, as well as increasing the educational advantage of women. And so on, ad infinitum, a movement of feminists diverting all their energies to bettering the position of women in relation to men, and of poor women in relation to poor men, but never ever of poor women to rich women.

Do you believe a socialist environment would lower the rate of sexual crime against women? By what particular mechanism?

Crime is a function of mental disorder brought on by deprivation, in the case of crimes against property, and the psychological damage caused by being in a subordiante position to the wealth, being forced into a life of pointless toil for a bare subsistence and so forth, for both crimes against the person and crimes against property. A system ensuring the equitable distribution of wealth and power would therefore reduce all crimes. It should also properly rehabilitate prisoners who have committed crimes so they will be less likely to reoffend, and set them up properly in the outside world rather than releasing people with one week's benefit and a ban of claiming benefit for two weeks, as presently happens.

Once people have been provided with a less invidious social and economic situation they will be less likely to have boundless wells of rage to spill out onto others or inwards in the form of addiction and self-abuse. There are physiological mechanisms behind some of this, cortisol levels and so forth.

Also a system allowing local control of law enforcement, and so forth, would ensure a more efficient enforcement of the law.

[Jeff]

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