What constitutes Misogyny?

[Plutonia]

And I take issue at being characterized anti-feminist, c2w? because I've been so careful not to be oppositional, and because I also consciously positioned myself within the great tradition of the feminist's critique of feminism. What I have said is that I think Identity Politics is divisive, which surely has been demonstrated here. And that I don't think that "mere inclusion" in the institutions of the dominant culture is a workable or attractive solution. Where I come from that's called assimilation.

I apologize. You are sometimes unduly oppositional as I perceive it (as, for example, in your response to John Colapinto's "John/Joan" story, which I didn't understand as either an indictment of feminism or as a universal invalidation of the entire concept that common cultural views on gender influence our understanding of what it means to be male or female). But quite apart from the dubious reliability of our old friend, The Hopeless Subjectivity of Individual Perception, seriously, who isn't? At least sometimes? Not me, that's for damn sure.

I didn’t realize that I was being oppositional, so that’s on me. I'm sorry about that, everyone. I'll try to be more respectful.

As for the other thing, I’m perhaps overly fond of the idea of “nurture” in trying to figure out why we are the way they are but I was stunned by this example of concerted effort to re-make that boy into a girl and how badly it failed. So, yes there is something fundamental and ephemeral about gender that is non-negotiable though some aspects are social constructs, but they must be comparatively superficial. Oops! Is that me being oppositional again? Doh!

BTW, I followed up and found that both the young men committed suicide, John and his twin. Very sad.

Besides which, you're right. It's a totally unmerited and inaccurate characterization, with which I myself don't even personally agree, like, privately.

I'm very sorry. I quite literally don't know what, if anything, I could possibly have been thinking when I typed it.

Apology accepted. Thanks.

I'm differently brained in ways that science can quantify, measure and remark on. just not in any particular way that's either recognized by science as a named condition (a la autism-spectrum conditions) or recognized by the world as much of anything at all. As a consequence, all thinking done by me is original of a necessity. It's not always high-quality original thinking, sadly. But it is always original. That has its pros and cons as a permanent aspect of being, in my experience of it. But it's absolutely nothing but a plus as a trait in others, as far as I'm concerned. I appreciate it...not exactly above all things, I guess.

Perhaps you are of this ilk of different: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_sensitive_person


Edit for spelling

I absolutely LOVE that suggestion, since it's so very flattering that I always have to stifle the impulse to stop being myself and just sign on as a full-time HSP malingerer for all the rest of my days. Sadly, the truth is: In some key ways, yes, in other key ways, no. But it's definitely one of the top ilks of difference that aren't open to me to which I sometimes wistfully yearn to belong in a childish kind of a way. They're sort of like the ilks-of-difference equivalent of Heathers, from my perspective.

But what can you do? I gotta be me. FWIW, I also have a chronic medical condition that I've come to think of as Not-MS-Leukemia-or-One-of-the-Silent-Killer-Diseases Syndrome strictly as a matter of personal convenience, the number and variety of illnesses that I don't have being far too wide-ranging for me to review in full every single damn time.

I'm just chronically and existentially undiagnosable, basically. I have Diagnosis-Oppositional Conduct Disorder, with mixed baffling features. As does everyone, to a greater or lesser extent, I believe. It's my hypothesis (which is based on nothing) that neurotypicality is mostly just an undetected symptom of repressed neurodiversity that's been further screened from view by compensatory learned behaviors consequent on the initial repression.

I mean, could be, for all anyone knows. So why not?

I’m sorry about your health problems.

I agree about the increasingly untenable idea of neurotypicality, the spectrum of neurodiversity seems to be stretching to universal inclusiveness.

[Canadian_watcher]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/africa-mideast/every-hour-48-women-raped-in-congo-study-finds/article2018236/

Every hour, 48 women raped in Congo, study finds

The central African nation of Congo has been called the worst place on earth to be a woman. A new study released Wednesday by the American Journal of Public Health shows it’s even worse than previously thought: 1,152 women are raped every day, a rate equal to 48 per hour.

That rate is 26 times more than the previous estimate of 16,000 rapes reported in one year by the United Nations.

Michelle Hindin, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health who specializes in gender-based violence, said the rate could be even higher. The source of the data, she noted, is a survey that was conducted through face-to-face interviews, and people are not always forthcoming about the violence they have suffered when talking to strangers.

“The numbers are astounding,” she said.

Congo – a nation of 70 million people that is equal in size to Western Europe – has been plagued by decades of war. Its vast forests are rife with militias that have systematically used rape to destroy communities.

The study found that 29 Congolese women out of 1,000 were raped. That means that even in the parts of Congo that are least affected by the war, a woman is 58 times more likely to be raped than a woman in the United States, where the annual rate is 0.5 per 1,000 women.

Previous estimates of the number of rapes were derived from police and health centre reports in the nation’s troubled east where the conflict is concentrated. The authors of the study, “Estimates and Determinants of Sexual Violence Against Women in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” used data from a government health survey and pooled data from across the country.

The highest frequency of rape was found in North Kivu, the province most affected by the conflict, where 67 women out of 1,000 have been raped at least once.

The analysis which will be published in the medical journal in June shows that more than 400,000 women had been raped nationwide during a 12-month period between 2006 and 2007.

“The message is important and clear: Rape in (Congo) has metastasized amid a climate of impunity, and has emerged as one of the great human crises of our time,” said Michael VanRooyen, the director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.

[charlie meadows]

The study found that 29 Congolese women out of 1,000 were raped. That means that even in the parts of Congo that are least affected by the war, a woman is 58 times more likely to be raped than a woman in the United States, where the annual rate is 0.5 per 1,000 women.

Without quibbling about the conservative rape rates attributed to the Wild West, what might be inferred from the comparison of the U.S. and the Congo about possible process unfolding?

[Canadian_watcher]

The study found that 29 Congolese women out of 1,000 were raped. That means that even in the parts of Congo that are least affected by the war, a woman is 58 times more likely to be raped than a woman in the United States, where the annual rate is 0.5 per 1,000 women.

Without quibbling about the conservative rape rates attributed to the Wild West, what might be inferred from the comparison of the U.S. and the Congo about possible process unfolding?

why don't you tell us, meadows.

[Stephen Morgan]

http://www.bepress.com/bejeap/advances/vol6/iss2/art1/

Abstract

Pairs of carefully-matched, written applications were made to advertised job vacancies in England to test for sexual discrimination in hiring. Two standard résumés were constructed for each occupation to control for all relevant supply-side variables, such as qualifications, experience and age. Consequently any differential response recorded can be attributed to demand-side discrimination. Statistically significant discrimination against men was found in the `female occupation' - secretary, and against women in the `male occupation' - engineer. Statistically significant, and unprecedented, discrimination against men was found in two `mixed occupations' - trainee chartered accountant and computer analyst programmer.

Submitted: February 24, 2005 · Accepted: January 12, 2006 · Published: January 13, 2006

Originally published in Advances in Economic Analysis & Policy.

[Plutonia]

But you yourself have provided the same solution I’m proposing in that link to handling narcissists- how’s that for irony?

I’ve re-worded it to reflect my position towards "handling" institutions of dominance:

...snip...
Fourthly, if you can not walk away for some reason, make sure you take advantage of the resources and support that's offered to assist look after your self esteem and self worth, and to teach you how to communicate and act towards [the dominant culture], in a means that gets the best outcome FOR YOU without bringing out the nastiest features of [the dominant culture].

I cannot walk away for various reasons. I do not live in a hinterland of ready abundance, and it gets cold here - really cold. My relatives' cultural heritage, which they tried to pass down to me, did include gardening, fishing and one incident of turtle wrangling but other than that were centered around the white anglo-saxon traditions: bus riding, grocery shopping, hockey watching, politics talking and a bit of party planning. As a result of this empty upbringing I became dependent on this culture, where I can pay for warmth and clothing and transport and medicine and food. It only got worse after I became a mother, since now there were two of us who needed those trappings.

Right, you can’t be a nomadic tribesman ‘round here anymore. Besides all those other reasons, the land is controlled and the State wouldn’t allow you to continue once it caught on to what you were doing. This is SOP and what the ill-fated Diggers and Levelers were challenging with their spades and plows. If your roots are in England, then you have the possibility of owning those peoples struggles, as your own traditions: http://www.diggers.org/english_diggers.htm

Unfortunately as luck would have it my culture is under attack from things like taxes and rising commodity prices - working conditions are eroding, healthcare is failing, women are still not safe on the streets.. etc. My mode of existence is under threat.

It’s not luck. Our comforts (rights) were always provisional and that we’ve got to experience a few decades of relative freedom here in the West, is due to centuries of struggle.

None of this has to do with misogyny, except that really ALL of it does, in some ways. This culture sees fit to ignore, ridicule, exclude, punish and scapegoat women - half of all possibilities are rendered unreachable because of this. Misogyny is more than a hatred of women it is a hatred of anything considered 'feminine.' How best to elevate femininity, then?

More than half of all possibilities, in my book. Think of it as a colonialism of the mind. Foucault discusses the phenomenon of the internalized self-policing mechanism:

The Panopticon was a metaphor that allowed Foucault to explore the relationship between systems of social control and people in a disciplinary situation, and the power-knowledge concept, since, in his view, power and knowledge comes from observing others. It marked the transition to a disciplinary power, with every movement supervised and all events recorded. The result of this surveillance is acceptance of regulations and docility -- a normalization of sorts -- stemming from the threat of discipline. Suitable behaviour is achieved not through total surveillance, but by panoptic discipline and inducing a population to internalize that surveillance.
http://www.moyak.com/papers/michel-foucault-power.html

So we think we are free because we don’t see soldiers on the streets with rifles, but we’ve internalized the threat and police ourselves and each other:

The concept of the Feminine is connected to the Earth and the Land? That idea is dangerous to the social order – stamp it out.

The same hold true for men’s erm, let’s call it virility, especially in young men. That’s also dangerous to the social order, particularly when groups of men are moved to protect their families from oppressive or genocidal policy. Stamp it out.

I do not wish for women to simply become 'men in dresses' at the helm of corrupt organizations, although that is what you seem to think I am saying. That would still be a rejection of the feminine. I want the culture to change to adopt the feminine into everything it does. I want the cultural 'take' on femininity to change. I don't see how that can be accomplished by vowing to stay out of the culture. If it worked, wouldn't Convents be the answer? We should all become nuns. That would surely cure all the worlds ills.

Morgan could probably tell you more about the monastic social order of Medieval England. I think the figure is 60% of the population lived collectively in monasteries. But a short answer to your Q would be something like “connect horizontally rather than seeking vertically oriented solutions. That is a simple way to describes different “Way” within the dominant culture.

Girards theory says that competitors become more and more alike. So we would expect that in competing with men for control of the Empire, even if our intention is to change it, women would be come more like men and men more like women. And so we have the phenomenae of masculine and feminine metrosexuality: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrosexual

EDIT: forgot this part: Even if I and hordes of other people excluded ourselves from the culture to begin to carve out a new niche that was more secure, self-sufficient and egalitarian, what would stop the dominant culture from trampling all over it? Any way I look at it it just doesn't work. I've spent the entire day listening to historical commentary an various socialist movements the world over and they only work for a short while if they work at all. It would seem that dominant culture stays dominant - and always has.

Welcome to the struggle. Centuries behind us, centuries before us. Though I think there are transpersonal forces at work too which makes the timing of change unpredictable to some extent.

It might surprise you C_W that I, at one time went to see Gloria Steinem speak and that I enjoyed it very much and was not the least critical.

It doesn't surprise me at all because I know you to be a person who has come up with feminism but transcended it - you said so yourself. This whole identity politics thing is divisive, you said. I remember.

That was one of the cards I played, “I’ve seen Gloria Steinem speak! Listen to me!” Really, that was too bad of me.

The thing she said that night that has stayed with me is that working class women have more freedom to define themselves and live creatively, than more privileged women professionals, who experience more pressure to conform to standards of appearance, sexuality, lifestyle, values etc. That does seem to be the case, which makes the “lower class” an invaluable site of resistance to the dominant culture, and thus can help make a safer, fairer social order for women- don’t you agree?

This is kind of funny, because it illustrates how there is just no pleasing everybody. I'm positive that Steinem has been criticised for saying that. The whole 'liberal feminist - upper class vs everyone else thing.'

Well, I saw her during her Revolution Within book tour, which drew criticism from activists because she was seen to be advocating more self-indulgent navel-gazing. I call it “sorting the seeds”, Cinderella’s task, as interpreted by Robert A. Johnson’s:

SHE
A Jungian psychological interpretation of an archetypal myth for women challenged with developing and living out a genuine and powerful connection with the feminine in a patriarchal structure, with predominantly masculine values and constraints.

BTW, there is also a He:

HE
A Jungian psychological interpretation of the Grail Legend; the journey of individuation as experienced by the archetypal figure Parsifal. This book is an excellent introduction to masculine psychology through a classic European tale.

Among the other great works of his: http://www.wholenesstherapy.com/public/johnson.htm

I do agree, however, that there is a freedom in having little to lose. There is, but then I get caught up on what if that thing I had left to lose was my only pair of warm socks which I need for my nights at the shelter. I find it difficult to believe that I could be more effective if I were poorer.
Something else that is funny about this whole 'reject all of the traditional power systems' notion you are advancing is that you said earlier "I'll write later because I have a job to go to every day." (I'm paraphrasing). I thought it was a shot at me because I don't have a traditional job, but I guess that it might be a compliment! I'm an outsider! Yay! A creative non traditionalist! yee-haw!

I'm using my outsider status to try and create a "safer, fairer social order for women."

Right. So we become more secure when we connect horizontally- there’s a name for that now: Social Capital. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_capital

I’ll use myself to illustrate a different Way within the system that we can’t exist entirely outside of:
I work for a woman who is married to a Native man with something like PTSD and they have two young children. Because of the work I do she is able to volunteer in the community in various capacities one being as an advocate for Native kids in the school system. We recently moved into a complex with a literacy center, community center and a book shop which doubles as an outreach for people with mental illness and disabilities. Our business “anchors” the building because it’s stable and (mildly) profitable, whereas the book shop and literacy center are not. It’s a chain of support that is growing organically, just because of choosing towards caring, you could say.

But, there is no one right way to do this thing and my way is just my way. I can tell you that I have been very glad more than once of people in positions of power who chose to help me, against the roles assigned to them. So who knows. Anybody can be an Agent Smith just as anybody can be a Morpheous.

[Plutonia]

I think the idea of being a group (I mean people who only have a nebulous, default "White" culture to identify themselves with) that has been invisibly (within the dominant culture) and internally (within our inner lives) colonized, is worth looking at, at this point:

Hegemony

Hegemony was a concept previously used by Marxists such as Vladimir Ilyich Lenin to indicate the political leadership of the working-class in a democratic revolution, but developed by Gramsci into an acute analysis to explain why the 'inevitable' socialist revolution predicted by orthodox Marxism had not occurred by the early 20th century. Capitalism, it seemed, was even more entrenched than ever. Capitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintained control not just through violence and political and economic coercion, but also through a hegemonic culture in which the values of the bourgeoisie became the 'common sense values of all. Thus a consensus culture developed in which people in the working-class identified their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie, and helped to maintain the status quo rather than [be] revolting. [*snicker*]

The working class needed to develop a culture of its own, which would overthrow the notion that bourgeois values represented 'natural' or 'normal' values for society, and would attract the oppressed and intellectual classes to the cause of the proletariat. Lenin held that culture was 'ancillary' to political objectives but for Gramsci it was fundamental to the attainment of power that cultural hegemony be achieved first. In Gramsci's view, any class that wishes to dominate in modern conditions has to move beyond its own narrow ‘economic-corporate’ interests, to exert intellectual and moral leadership, and to make alliances and compromises with a variety of forces. Gramsci calls this union of social forces a ‘historic bloc’, taking a term from Georges Sorel. This bloc forms the basis of consent to a certain social order, which produces and re-produces the hegemony of the dominant class through a nexus of institutions, social relations and ideas. In this manner, Gramsci developed a theory that emphasized the importance of the superstructure in both maintaining and fracturing relations of the base.

Gramsci stated that, in the West, bourgeois cultural values were tied to religion, and therefore much of his polemic against hegemonic culture is aimed at religious norms and values. He was impressed by the power Roman Catholicism had over men's minds and the care the Church had taken to prevent an excessive gap developing between the religion of the learned and that of the less educated. Gramsci believed that it was Marxism's task to marry the purely intellectual critique of religion found in Renaissance humanism to the elements of the Reformation that had appealed to the masses. For Gramsci, Marxism could supersede religion only if it met people's spiritual needs, and to do so people would have to recognize it as an expression of their own experience.

For Gramsci, hegemonic dominance ultimately relied on coercion, and in a "crisis of authority" the "masks of consent" slip away, revealing the fist of force.

http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Antonio_Gramsci

[lyrimal]

The single most damaging statistic to modern American domestic equality and human rights (from the American domain, with which I am familiar) is the fact that nearly ten times more men than women have their very freedom and lives taken away from them by our supposed system of justice... letting alone for now all the other very real ways men have it terribly worse than women. Because we live in the most incarceration-happy nation on this planet, this disparity, in turn, translates to American males living in a state of omnipresent jeopardy with which most American women simply cannot relate.

In an equal society, NOTHING excuses the fact that levels more men are executed, incarcerated or have their rights taken away. Yet some hens on this board (and cocks who apparently wish themselves to be hens) gloss over it (and other troubling facts) and go on for hundreds of pages believing we live in a singularly misogynist culture, and, to cherry the top, attack contributing males (and some females) as misogynist who demonstrate more cross-aisle consideration than they will EVER entertain demonstrating themselves.

Would you like to know how it came to be so easy to scapegoat such a disproportionate number of men in this society? By holding them to matriarchal standards. Men are expected, genetically and, ironically, culturally, to be less subservient, and on the flip-side, more confronting, and they are punished mercilessly for it, both legally and extra-legally. When women do demonstrate less subservience... as a related and potent example, men and women are pretty evenly divided on drug use representation within society, yet many, many more men are imprisoned for drug crimes.

I do not disagree that misogyny is a big problem globally, in other countries where women are oppressed outright by the state. I do not disagree that at the wholly corrupt top of the American pyramid there most likely is a misogynist component to its operation, but 21st-century American middle and lower class culture is no more misogynist than it is the opposite.

I'd argue until I'm blue in the face that it is indeed more the opposite, but unfortunately that seems to be against the board rules... more holding the brothers down.

...In no way, shape, or form am I advocating more women be locked up or executed.

[annie aronburg]

Well, cockadoodle-doo to you, too.

[Canadian_watcher]

@lyrimal (AKA embittered former poster, no doubt).. hmmm. after re-reading I think current poster. but anyway...

There are many terrific and useful discussions that we could get in to about the justice system and why people end up in jail, etc. Poverty and lack of education, cyclical abuse, in the case of aboriginal and native peoples there is a serious culture clash that makes for a spiral towards encounters with the 'justice system' and the unfairness of these things needs to be looked at. NO DOUBT.

But you know what ANOTHER really important aspect of the fact that there are far far more men in jail than women is?

Men commit more crimes.

Deal with it.

And by 'deal with it' I mean not only that you should accept it, but that if you want to see it change you'd better get off your ass and get busy educating young men that might otherwise be ensnared in the prison system - work with them on addictions, gang interactions, literacy, mental health and psychological problem. If you want to KEEP them going to jail in record numbers here's what you do:

Tell them it's all women's fault.

Now get your head out of your ass because that's the end of my patience with your bullshit.

[Canadian_watcher]

Plutonia, thank you for that reply. I do think we're getting to a point of agreement and I'm going to do some thinking and respond later. Several things you wrote really set something positive off in me.

(Who didn't love Revolution from Within at the time?!! )

[tru3magic]

Men commit more crimes.

Men are convicted of more crimes. I don't know the exact numbers, but this is true. It is my opinion males also commit more crimes. Lastly, it is my opinion that females are more likely to not be issued a ticket/fine from a male cop, probably further skewing the statistic.


I would like to ask this of the women here....do you feel a male cop letting you off a ticket due to being female is a misogynistic act?

Tell them it's all women's fault.

If anyone thinks this (i.e it's their fault) about any opposing group, in my opinion their viewpoint is flawed.

[Canadian_watcher]

http://www.bepress.com/bejeap/advances/vol6/iss2/art1/

Abstract

Pairs of carefully-matched, written applications were made to advertised job vacancies in England to test for sexual discrimination in hiring. Two standard résumés were constructed for each occupation to control for all relevant supply-side variables, such as qualifications, experience and age. Consequently any differential response recorded can be attributed to demand-side discrimination. Statistically significant discrimination against men was found in the `female occupation' - secretary, and against women in the `male occupation' - engineer. Statistically significant, and unprecedented, discrimination against men was found in two `mixed occupations' - trainee chartered accountant and computer analyst programmer.

Submitted: February 24, 2005 · Accepted: January 12, 2006 · Published: January 13, 2006

Originally published in Advances in Economic Analysis & Policy.

what the fuck do you care - are you trying to find a job?

[tru3magic]

what the fuck do you care - are you trying to find a job?

I think he is trying to prove his point about male and female job opportunities being fairly equal from 10 pages back(?) That study has NO WHERE NEAR ENOUGH information to be considered acceptable though.

[Canadian_watcher]

what the fuck do you care - are you trying to find a job?

I think he is trying to prove his point about male and female job opportunities being fairly equal from 10 pages back(?) That study has NO WHERE NEAR ENOUGH information to be considered acceptable though.

nothing he ever says has anywhere near enough information to be acceptable.

in fact almost nothing he says is acceptable in any way.