Amanda, considering if MRAs ((Men’s Rights Activists.)) have any legitimate complaints, makes a few points I agree with. (Amanda was bouncing off this post at Shakesville, which — incredibly — has gotten over 1,000 comments.) Typically, I’m going to ignore points of agreement and instead concentrate on nit-picking. Amanda writes:
What about the draft? Only men get drafted.
It’s indicative of the intellectual emptiness of MRA thought that in order to show discrimination against men, they have to reach for a practice that hasn’t been activated in the U.S. since women weren’t allowed into the Ivy Leagues or to sit on juries in Texas. […]
But the draft issue is misguided for two reasons: One is that the need for and the practice of the draft are both results of the patriarchy’s tendency to war-monger and ill-informed notions about women’s weakness. The other reason is that the draft argument implies, quite wrongly, that men bear the most cost of war. In reality, the vast majority of war casualties are unarmed civilians, and they come in all ages and genders.
Certainly the US draft is an issue of only symbolic relevance today; but it’s nonetheless objectionable on its own sexist merits, without implying anything who bears most of the costs of war. (And if we don’t limit our view to the United States, military conscription is alive and well today).
Amanda is right that “the vast majority of war casualties are unarmed civilians.” But the Shakesville post she cites, which says “In the 20th century, 90 percent of all war deaths were unarmed women, children, and men,” is mistaken to suggest that’s been the case for the whole 20th century. The likely original source of that statistic is Patricia Hynes’ work. ((H. Pratricia Hynes, “On the Battlefield of Women’s Bodies; An Overview of the Harm of War to Women,” Women’s Studies International Forum 27 (2004) 431-445. Pdf link.)) Hynes writes:
Civilian deaths as a percent of all deaths, direct and indirect, from war rose from between 60 and 67 percent in World War II to 90 percent in the 1990s (Renner, 1999; Garfield & Neugut, 2000), a trend that makes the enterprise of war increasingly unjust, when those who wage it are a diminishing fraction of those who suffer its consequences.
The few recent studies that have examined the death toll of war on females and males have concluded that equal numbers of civilian women and girls die of war-related injuries as civilian men and boys (Reza et. al, 2001; Murray et al., 2002). In 1990, one of the only years for which female civilian deaths were computed, an estimated 211,000 women and girls were killed in war (Reza et al., 2001). Many more, from 2-13 times more, are likely to have been injured (Murray et al., 2002). This data does not include the increased suicide and premature death that would directly result from the sexual torture, despair and destitution of women in conflict-ridden and armed societies.
I know that MRAs would have counter-arguments purporting to show that men are the overwhelming victims of war (and, indeed, of everything). That’s not an argument I want to be drawn into; I don’t know which sex is victimized “more” by war, and I don’t care. It’s pretty obvious that women, men and children are all victimized in great numbers by war.
[UPDATE: As I predicted, Daran at Feminist Critics has put up a post, arguing that Hynes’ research is unreliable. Assuming Daran’s factual claims are accurate I think Daran’s pretty persuasive on that point. My main point — which is that huge numbers of adults and children of both sexes are casualties of war — is not opposed by Daran, if I’m reading him correctly.]
But we don’t have to agree that “men bear the most cost of war” to notice that, just as there are particular war crimes that happen overwhelmingly to women (most obviously, rape), there are particular war crimes that happen overwhelmingly to men. In Gender and Genocide, Adam Jones compiles a great deal of evidence showing that groups of unarmed men — sometimes men and women both, but most often only men — are commonly rounded up and slaughtered during wartime, perhaps to prevent them from later resisting.
Kosovo, 1999. “Shortly before dawn on April 27, according to locals, a large contingent of Yugoslav army troops garrisoned in Junik started moving eastward through the valley, dragging men from their houses and pushing them into trucks. ‘Go to Albania!’ they screamed at the women before driving on to the next town with their prisoners. By the time they got to Meja they had collected as many as 300 men. The regular army took up positions around the town while the militia and paramilitaries went through the houses grabbing the last few villagers and shoving them out into the road. The men were surrounded by fields most of them had worked in their whole lives, and they could look up and see mountains they’d admired since they were children. Around noon the first group was led to the compost heap, gunned down, and burned under piles of cornhusks. A few minutes later a group of about 70 were forced to lie down in three neat rows and were machine-gunned in the back. The rest — about 35 men — were taken to a farmhouse along the Gjakove road, pushed into one of the rooms, and then shot through the windows at point-blank range. The militiamen who did this then stepped inside, finished them off with shots to the head, and burned the house down. They walked away singing.”
To be sure, ((The phrase “to be sure” is copyright and trademark Hack Editorial Writers Of America. Used by permission.)) in the overwhelming majority of cases the people doing the slaughtering — and the ruling class which made the decision to commit such atrocities against men — are themselves male. I don’t believe that makes it illegitimate for men’s rights activists to be concerned with atrocities against men, however. ((You could argue that the idea of “oppression” requires there to be an oppressed class and an oppressor class, and that men — as the oppressor class — cannot be oppressed as men. I don’t agree with that; but even if I did agree, it would still be the case that men can suffer systematic harm without being the oppressed class, and it makes no sense to object to people objecting to such systematic harms.))
Back to Amanda’s post:
Well, that was a downer. What about how sitcoms make men like overgrown babies and buffoons?
[…] In order to make the argument work that male buffoonery on TV is based on an anti-male sentiment, then you have to assume that women in these shows and commercials are generally portrayed well. MRAs generally try to do this, saying women are held up as paragons of competence, and there’s something to this. But the larger story is that the standard buffoon husband/competent wife pair on TV comes with a thick dose of misogyny—the competent women are generally portrayed as humorless, fun-killing, finger-wagging prudish bores.
I agree, and I’d add — to quote a post of mine — that there’s a technical term for the “standard buffoon” in a TV comedy; this part is called “the Lead.”
As in the leading role, the central role, the funny role, the better role. What actor in the world, given the choice, would rather play Zeppo than Harpo? The smart, levelheaded, competent wife is the secondary part, which is why the shows aren’t named “Everybody Loves Debra” or “According to Cheryl” (or, for that matter, “I Love Ricky”).
Which sex gets to play the leads is a measure of which actors Hollywood is willing to give the juiciest roles and the highest salaries. The sexism in these sitcoms hurts both men and women, and that’s worth objecting to — but it’s not a sign of male disadvantage.
Again, back to Amanda’s post:
What about how men tend to die on the job more than women? Isn’t that unfair?
More hand-waving, especially from MRAs, who tend to be the first to decry efforts to fix the pay gap between men and women. Men die on the job more because men are more likely to have the blue collar jobs that put workers in danger—and therefore take home the larger paycheck than women of that socioeconomic class, who tend to have pink collar jobs that pay much less.
Surprisingly, MRAs tend to understate the scope of the workplace death problem in the USA, because they usually miss the larger problem; they focus on men killed in workplace accidents but overlook deaths caused by workplace-related disease, which are probably about 84% male. There are about 6,000 accidental workplace deaths in the US each year, and about 100,000 deaths due to workplace-caused diseases.
Amanda is wrong, however, to think that this discrepancy is strongly related to the pay gap. In general, the workers in the least safe jobs have very little recourse or power; is it any surprise that they also get lousy pay?
To once again quote myself, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics investigated job traits that are associated with wage premiums, they found that “Job attributes relating to … physically demanding or dangerous jobs… do not seem to affect wages.” Here’s a bar graph. As you can see, what pays most is specialized knowledge. The very tiniest bar, all the way over on the right, that’s actually slightly negative? That’s the “death and exposure” effect on wages.
So no, higher male deaths in the workplace aren’t connected to higher male wages. And the higher rate of workplace-related deaths is a legitimate concern for men’s rights activists.
* * *
Here’s where I agree with Amanda: I think the MRAs are, if anything, counterproductive. Most MRAs are focused first and foremost on attacking feminism, and helping men comes in second place (at best). But feminists aren’t the ones setting the draft laws, or starting wars, or casting TV shows, or running work sites.
Take the example of workplace-related deaths. The best public policy for reducing those deaths is to crack down on workers’ exposure to dangerous substances, to beef up OSHA, and to make it easier for workers to unionize. These steps, however, would be opposed by the large majority of MRAs, who are reflexively right-wing.
I long for a better men’s rights movement — one that substantively talks about the significant, systematic harm to men that occurs without seeking to blame feminism or to pretend that sexism against women doesn’t matter. One that could seriously address not only conscription, war, sexist media, and workplace deaths, but also bullying of weak boys, discrimination against gay men and transmen, forced labor, emotional alienation, the insanely high incarceration rate for black men, the uneven work/family divide that harms mothers and fathers, the problems of abused and raped men, and a host of other “men’s issues.”
But the men’s rights movement we have is, frankly, too often not just useless on these issues, but actually regressive. And feminism, by and large, can’t give these issues much attention; it has its hands full just trying to deal with monumental injustice against women.
Gee, I’ll nitpick too:
they have to reach for a practice that hasn’t been activated in the U.S. since women weren’t allowed into the Ivy Leagues
How old is Amanda? I went to undergraduate college from 1970 through 1974 just down the street from Harvard. People were being drafted then, and there were women in the Ivy League colleges then – I know, I met them.
But the larger story is that the standard buffoon husband/competent wife pair on TV comes with a thick dose of misogyny—the competent women are generally portrayed as humorless, fun-killing, finger-wagging prudish bores.
Which leads me to wonder why anyone watches those shows, although they’re damn popular. I watch Law and Order (when will they ever have a female ADA on that show that isn’t a model? Not that I don’t like watching them, but trust me, the law schools aren’t exactly crawling with them) and ER; otherwise, it’s news, sports and the History and Discovery channels. I can’t stand sitcoms, except for the occasional episode of Frazier.
I think you’re wrong about the sitcom thing. The idea that it’s okay because men are the lead ignores the theory that it’s a negative stereotype about men (usually fat blue collor men). These shows are pretty class based in target.
If there were a show where a female lead was Peggy Bundy but the rest of the cast was more normal and Al was a hardworking, caring person would you say the same thing? That it was okay because a woman is in the lead? Or would you focus on how harmful and incorrect it is to show woman as lazy and incompetent with money?
I think that the reason they choose to make white men play the buffoon is because it’s easier. There would be a lot of anger directed towards a show that had fat black man’s incompetence, greed, and lack of ambition as the source of all the jokes.
I just think this argument is inconsistent with things you’ve previously written.
I think a better counter is to point out that while White guys might be the butt of the jokes they’re also the DA, Lead Cop, Lead lawyer, boss, romantic lead, main villain, and doctor.
Thank you for taking a balanced look at gender issues.
After Fecke and Amanda picked up on Glenn’s article, the hate on both sides hit fever-pitch, and it was pretty disgusting all around. While Glenn tried to be dignified about the whole thing, he kept cranking out the statistics that nobody seriously believes (like the stuff about women being as physically violent as men, which anyone who works in social work will tell you is just plain impossible), and meanwhile his followers went off the deep end. Meanwhile, Fecke, Amanda et al attacked anyone and everyone with even a moderate consideration of the stuff Glenn talked about as being woman-hating pro-rape abusers.
The whole affair thoroughly turned my stomach.
On the subject of Adam Jones’ dicussions of Kosovo, I’m quite fond of this article:
http://adamjones.freeservers.com/effacing.htm
Jones discusses how the news media is so much more interested in women as victims when it comes to genocide, even in a case like Kosovo, which was almost uniformly a torturous massacre of battle-aged men. Rape sells papers better than death, apparently, and the numbers don’t matter.
@RonF – I’ve always been bugged by the ADAs on Law And Order (although I stell worship Jill Hennessy). It just seems so bizarre that, even though they’ve gone through so many, EVERY TIME it’s an attractive white brunette. Never an old woman, or a man, or a non-white, or even a redhead. Wait, I looked at the list – I forgot that it started with a man (I don’t even remember those episodes) and that, at one point, they did have a blond. But yeah, 5 out of 7 is pretty weird.
And as for the thing about actors, I do have to agree – it’s important to remember that all of the biggest buffoons on TV are written by the buffoons themselves(Ray, King of Queens, Home Improvement, etc). Women are stuck in playing the straight role. In The Simpsons, when they have episodes that fixate on the female characters, they move away from the straight role and suddenly the show fixates on their neuroses, and the men suddenly become the (rather dense) straight-men.
Really, TV comedy plays on peoples’ faults. When it’s a man, he’s a blundering neanderthal. When it’s a woman, she’s a neurotic obsessive loon. It’s just that most comedies focus more on the male characters that allows the stupidity bias to occur.
As for the “counterproductive” thing, I think the point of contention is that one huge, massive issue: false allegations. MRAs think that a woman’s word will get their kids taken, their houses stolen, their bank-accounts ransacked, and them thrown in prison. Feminists think that this is just a smokescreen by abusive, raping men who want to be able to get away with victimizing women. Because of this, butting heads with feminists is almost routine.
Also, some men like Sacks have come to think of everything through the lens of persecution. You see that too with many feminists, black-activists, etc. – every media, every commercial must be analyzed for slights against their respective group. The problem is that it’s hard to say what’s in good fun, what’s just playing on a stereotype, and what’s hateful. The perfect example of a “huh?” moment with Glenn’s blog was when he pointed out how many deaths are played for yuks in the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and how deaths-for-yuks is a universally male feature of films. I suppose he might have had a point, but it was such an utterly bizarre thing to notice. Personally, I usually get turned off by humourous deaths in an otherwise-serious live-action movie (Bond films are the worst), but I never bothered to consider the gender of all the dead lackeys.
(yes, I regularly read Glenn’s blog. And Marcotte’s, too. I think there may be something wrong with me.)
oops, double-post.
I’ve thought a lot about a thoughtful men’s movement, because I think there are awful social and cultural pressures on men that harm men and women immensely. “Machismo” is, I think, one of the most damaging mentalities in the world. It supports a notion of toughness that encourages emotional disengagement of men and violence towards those seen as weaker (women, gays, minorities, foreigners, and other men who are not macho).
Frankly, and this will not be a popular thing to say, I believe feminism is basically stalled in the US until attitudes about masculinity start to change. Sure, we can make little bits of progress here and there, but the systemic changes that need to happen require a revolution in thinking about masculinity akin to the revolution in thinking about femininity that’s happened in the last 50 years. It’s an incomplete revolution, to be sure, but part of the reason I think our work is so far from being done is that our revolution cannot be completed my focusing on women’s issues alone, or even predominantly at this point. We have to start talking about machismo.
(Note on the word “machismo:” I don’t mean it to refer specifically to Latin American macho culture, I mean it to refer to macho attitudes in general, I’m just not sure if there’s a American word for it exactly. Machoness?)
@elizabeth.
This is one place where women really can break down the Patriarchy, because in this case they do participate in it alongside men. You have to consider what the idealized man is to women. Even a feminist will tell you that they need confidence, which is only the tip of the iceberg in the romantic idolization of “macho” values. Before you say that “confidence” isn’t a macho value, consider that a man who finds a woman otherwise attractive wouldn’t be dissuaded if she seemed nervous and self-deprecating.
exelizabeth said: “(Note on the word “machismo:” I don’t mean it to refer specifically to Latin American macho culture, I mean it to refer to macho attitudes in general, I’m just not sure if there’s a American word for it exactly. Machoness?)”
I think hegemonic masculinity covers it pretty well.
And, I don’t disagree with you that feminism does need to include critiques of how patriarchy and sexism hurt men as well as women. And there are definitely branches of feminism that do that more than others, just like discussions of white racism have to at some point include how racism hurts white people too. not because they bear the brunt of the problems, but because they are the group in power with the best position to make change happen.
The one MRA I had the misfortune to spend time with blamed women for war because women find men in uniform attractive. Guess who he blamed for blood diamonds.
I don’t know if he was typical of the movement.
You’re right.
The MRAs who raise the issue of the draft are, largely, U.S. MRAs. And in that limited context, Amanda’s reply to them makes much less sense. Because for a U.S. citizen, the chances of dying as a civilian war casualty are close to zero.
In fact, most of the first world countries who fight wars would probably have similar statistics. Mostly this is because large technically savvy first world countries tend not to fight wars that they don’t think they have a good chance of winning. Also, they tend to fight wars in other countries, which means that they kill other countries’ civilians.
Killing civilians is bad no matter where it happens. But civilian death risk as a counterargument to the draft issue doesn’t work for most of the people Amanda is arguing against.
Another angle to consider wrt drafting is that when women are not forced to fight in a war, that means they’re also not forced to kill anyone, or generally have to follow orders for which they may feel guilty later.
One of my biggest fears for the men and boys that I care about, aside from their dying in a war, is that they would have to do something which goes against their conscience, or which diminishes that part of them which is loving and nurturing.
I was under the impression the draft was restarted in the 60s, Ron. Did they not start it until the 70s? That doesn’t seem right. Granted, it wasn’t stopped until very shortly after they started tolerating women in the Ivy Leagues, but that, I think, reinforces my bit of whismical rhetoric, which was about how MRAs are grasping at straws. You can’t hold up the draft as a sign of sexism against men while denying there’s sexism against women when it was exponentially worse during the period of the draft.
Joe writes:
Joe, I’m not at all convinced that you read the same post I wrote. Far from saying that it was “okay,” I said “The sexism in these sitcoms hurts both men and women, and that’s worth objecting to — but it’s not a sign of male disadvantage.” There’s in no reasonable reading of my post that would lead to the conclusion that I think the sexist stereotypes in such sitcoms are “okay,” or don’t hurt men.
Reading the comments at Pandagon and Shakeville made me, if anything, more sympathetic to the MRA view, whereas I wasn’t to begin with. Why? Precisely because so many feminists failed to make the point that the draft/selective service _is_ sexist (no matter what side that argument comes from). Also because the topic of adoption was deemed irrelevant to the issue of parental opt-out, which it clearly isn’t.
Note: Selective service is still in effect. You cannot get college funding unless you sign up or have a disqualifying condition.
Look, the issue of the draft is a red herring. For one thing, it’s overwhelmingly men who make the rules WRT who gets drafted. It’s also overwhelmingly men who decide whether or not women will be in combat units, which in the current war is an increasingly meaningless distinction (when there is no real rear, who exactly are the REMFs?).
In any event, there’s next to no chance the draft will ever be activated again, because it’s political suicide.
That said, yes, it is sexist to have only men be subject to the draft. But to attribute this to feminism is bizarre, given a) as mentioned above, it’s the male-dominated Congress and the male-dominated military who keep things that way (in fact, these groups are still debating about whether it was a good idea to allow women into the military at all, so you can see how far off equality is); and b) feminist groups, when they address the draft and/or the military, argue either that no one should be drafted or that both men and women should be subject to the draft.
I really fail to see why this is always such a big issue with the MRAs.
One that could seriously address not only conscription, war, sexist media, and workplace deaths, but also bullying of weak boys, discrimination against gay men and transmen, forced labor, emotional alienation, the insanely high incarceration rate for black men, the uneven work/family divide that harms mothers and fathers, the problems of abused and raped men, and a host of other “men’s issues.”
All these issues are already handled by progressivism, feminism, union movements, the LGBT movement and anti-racism.
On the topic of the earnings bonus from working at a dangerous job: I’m not certain how the data in your graph is arranged, but it is important to note that taking a dangerous or unpleasant job may have a bonus, holding all other characteristics of the worker and the job constant. For example, if you are uneducated and without much work experience you probably will get a better wage at a dangerous or dirty job than at the next best alternative job. It’s still true, of course, that the best paying jobs in general are not especially dangerous or dirty.
Also, historically, being a housewife used to be quite dangerous because of the risk of fire in the kitchen, long dresses and so on.
The problem I have with the more civilized form of MRA message is that it seems to want to justify male domination by arguing that the rewards individual men get are fair compensation for whatever the problems men as a class might experience. There is no attempt to fix those problems; they are used as an excuse for arguing that women can’t have equality.
This approach then requires delving into the problems in ways which are distasteful for some. For instance, it may well be that wars have killed men in much larger numbers than they have killed women, but it is certainly true that almost all that killing has been done by other men in wars managed by almost solely men. It’s difficult to see how female feminists could have affected any of this.
More generally, I’m uncomfortable with pursuing this comparative harms approach. I’m not sure if I have this right but I think that slaves in ancient Greece didn’t have to fight in the wars. If this is true we could argue that the society gave slaves an advantage that free men didn’t have and so on.
@zuzu
Yes, I agree that the draft is an example of MRA’s grasping at straws to find examples of modern-day persecution, but I have to point out the mistake in this line:
“But to attribute this to feminism is bizarre”
Nobody did. Men’s Movement and anti-feminist are not necessarily synonymous.
I think you make the mistake of assuming that MRAs are “against” feminists or blaming women for their ills. Obviously, there are a lot of anti-feminist fundamentalist conservatives and misogynists within the Men’s Movement. But in the case of Sacks, I think he’s genuinely advocating what he perceives to be equality, just like feminists. The problem is that he goes looking for persecution, and obviously finds it, so it’s hard to say how much is prevalent and how much is just an anecdotal fallacy. I think he actually believes that, as Amp says, “The Patriarchy Hurts Men Too”. The draft is just another “The Patriarchy Hurts Men Too” issue.
Scott Adams said it best: while most CEOs (and generals, and politicians) are men, it’s important to remember that most men aren’t CEOs (0r generals, or politicians).
If Bush decides to institute a draft, do you think that John-Q-public can phone him up and say “hey, you can’t do this, I’m a man too! What about our Patriarchy, huh? Go draft the women instead!”
The main issues that the MRAs directly fight with feminists about are the ones concerning sex-crimes, child-support/parenting-rights and abuse. Issues that directly involve women, too. But in the case of things like media (Sacks goes after any commercial he thinks is “anti-male”, occasionally to the outright bewilderment of his supporters) or work-safety, or the draft, they have nothing to do with feminism.
@Echidne – I think you managed to contradict yourself in there.
On the one hand, you say how a collective injustice against men doesn’t allow for an individual injustice in favour of men (more dangerous work is not an excuse for the salary imbalance for equivalent jobs), but then go on to talk about how a collective injustice by men is justification for an injustice against men. If you view each person as an individual, everyone is getting screwed, regardless of gender (except the small, small group of men who run the war instead of fight it).
I think that the MRAs erroneously (or self-deludedly) believe that the jobs pay more as compensation for the danger, which justifies the higher salaries. In that case it’s not the collective punishment you perceive, but individual reward. The truth, as suggested by Ampersand, is simply that both sides are getting screwed – women are discriminated against for pay, and men are given to dangerous jobs with minimal compensation for that danger.
ZUZU,
Congress enacts the draft. Last time I checked, Congress was an elected body; about half of the eligible voters in the United States are women.
Furthermore, what difference does it make who enacts it? We’re talking about effect. Are you willing to accept sexism against women as being irrelevant, or non-harmful, when women do it? I’m not.
See above.
I agree it’s unlikely.
But for shits and giggles, let’s say that Congress passed a secret law this morning that said:
“If the draft is ever re-enacted, then during said period of draft, women shall not be eligible to receive public education, and abortions shall be illegal.”
You’re the only person who knows about this law, so the do-we-draft decision won’t take the collateral effect on women into account. Would that law bother you at all?
And, of course, there’s the POSSIBILITY of draft. When you register for it–which is mandatory, by the way–you are eligible to be drafted. Are you claiming there’s no cost to that?
Eliminate the “that said…” and the following “…but…” and you’re getting somewhere.
[shrug] Clearly you and I have run into different feminism-draft discussions.
My own experience is that there are a number of feminists who deny, at every opportunity, that there exist any instances in which being male is a disadvantage. This includes the draft. Heck, you yourself spend the vast majority of your post explaining how the draft isn’t really sexist, for a variety of reasons.
I can sort of see it.
The draft isn’t really the issue. The issue is that it is a rationality test of sorts.
Most MRAs and most feminists actually have somewhat similar views of the world. They both think that there are areas in which men are disadvantaged and in which women are disadvantaged. Obviously they disagree about the EXTENT of those disadvantages, but they don’t see the world as totally black and white, nor totally one sided.
Those MRAs and those feminists can actually have some interesting discussions. Both sides can, in theory, make concessions and understand the other side’s point. I’m in that category myself: I think the world is vastly biased to the benefit of men in a general sense, but that there exist some isolated instances where the reverse is true.
Some MRAs, and some feminists, don’t see things that way. To them, there are ZERO situations where their general belief doesn’t hold; there are NO instances where the reverse is true. Those people aren’t going to be much good to have a discussion with.
In my experience, the draft is a fairly simple “test issue” to use with feminists, much as rape is a fairly simple “test issue” to use with MRAs. Any feminist who can’t admit that the isolated instance of the United States’ military, male-only, draft is sexist is too dishonest for me to waste much time on. Similarly, any MRA who can’t admit that rape is a crime disproportionately committed by men against women are too dishonest to waste much time on.
I was under the impression the draft was restarted in the 60s, Ron. Did they not start it until the 70s?
Since the WWII era, we’ve had conscription from 1940 through 1947, and then again from 1948 until 1973, with big spikes around 1951 (Korea) and the early 1970s (Vietnam). Since 1973 conscription has been inactive, though the process was reinstated in 1980.
Granted, it wasn’t stopped until very shortly after they started tolerating women in the Ivy Leagues
Cornell – 1870
University of Pennsylvania – ~1875
Princeton – 1969
Yale – 1969
Brown – 1971*
Dartmouth – 1972
Columbia – 1983*
Harvard – 1999*
* These universities had affiliated women’s schools in the 19th and 20th centuries and the indicated date is when the schools formally merged.
Hi,
Let me just say that I recall the return of Selective Service on a personal level. Yes, I signed. But not one of my female friends had to. Neither did the wealthy kids. I wasn’t too thrilled knowing that a future Dear Leader could draft my sorry ass while gender and cash allowed others to finish school.
I also watched women in the US Navy avoid sea duty while my share was 16 years out of 20. Not good for a career but you stayed closer to home.
Equality is preferred. If one is draftable, then all are. If you want my job, do the same crap and you’re welcome to it.
Continuing in the fine tradition of picking nits…
When you register for it–which is mandatory, by the way–you are eligible to be drafted.
Technically it is mandatory, in reality it isn’t. I can’t remember the last time anybody was prosecuted for not registering with the selective service.
The mist frequent fallout is that you can’t get federal student aid (which is a pretty big deal, seeing as registration age is 18, and most students in the U.S. get some sort of aid.)
I seem to recall there is some other administrative penalty as well, functionally speaking, though I can’t remember what it is/was.
But if you prefer, you can replace the sexism of registering for the draft with the sexism of denying draft-age males the access to student aid. I’m not sure that’s an improvement, though….
Please note, I am not using the draft issue as a way of agreeing with the general stance of MRA’s, but to point out that it is, in fact, sexist. It may not be on the top of anyone’s list of things in the world to be remedied, but a commitment to gender parity requires that one admit that it’s wrong.
A feminist response to an MRA can include admission that the draft/selective service is wrong without buckling on the larger issue that men aren’t harmed by feminism (or whatever you make out the larger issue to be). You lose credibility otherwise.
Jake, note that you can’t receive funding for college if you don’t register. The fact that harms may be small doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
Come to think of it, one of the issues that affirmed my early feminism was in fact the draft/selective service.
Harvard admitted women long before 1999…I had classmates who went there.
Jake, note that you can’t receive funding for college if you don’t register. The fact that harms may be small doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
I was merely noting that there are no legal consequences of not registering with the Selective Service.
Also, from my POV, concentrating exclusively on the (anti-male) sexism of registration and draft is laughable in the face of the much greater (anti-female) sexism of the US military. Mostly because the former is created by the latter.
I believe (I could be wrong on this one) that your classmates were actually at Radcliffe. At Harvard, the distinction between the men and women’s was almost nonexistent in later decades, and I think that women who went there think of themselves and are thought of by others as having “gone to Harvard” – but technically it’s Radcliffe up to 1999. The other asterisked schools had schools that were more distinct in the public conception.
But I could be wrong about that one and maybe women were admitted to Harvard and Radcliffe both.
Jake, note that you can’t receive funding for college if you don’t register.
To continue nitpicking (a favorite pastime), you can’t receive federal aid for college if you don’t register. You can still receive state (not from all states, though) and private funding from organizations such as Fund for Education and Training (FEAT) and Student Aid Fund for Nonregistrants..
There are no CRIMINAL consequences, true, but the denial of funding happens through code (don’t know if it’s USC or CFR though), which is “legal” in most senses of the word..
What do you mean by this? I don’t think the argument of most MRAs is one of “exclusively,” though I think they are more exclusively focused than I like.
But i notice that it seems reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally hard for some folks to just say “yes, it’s sexist.” Why is that?
I mean that the harm caused to men by a male only draft is the result of anti-woman policies in the military establishment.
ETA: And that MRA’s never discuss (at least nowhere that I’ve ever seen) the fact that a male only draft is caused by/a direct result of policies that discriminate against women.
I think it’s worth discussing the draft issue in that it points to the hugely overarching issue: The idea that there are roles that are properly men’s and roles that are properly women’s and the idea that there’s a ‘way men are’ and a ‘way women are.’
Certainly, the draft issue is because of military policies that discriminate against women . . . but I also think that it’s just as true that both of these issues are because of this third idea.
For my money, 1) whether the military discriminates against women because the draft only accounts for men or 2) whether the draft only accounts for men because the military discriminates against women is sort of irrelevant. Both are because women are thought of as delicate little creatures who need protection and whom we don’t want dying in combat (and who aren’t really competent enough to carry a gun anyhow) and men are thought of as tough, crafty warriors (who are also violent beasts who need women’s civilizing influence).
It’s the idea of preset roles and everything that flows from them that’s bullshit.
—Myca
I oppose draft registration. I opposed it from the minute it was signed into law (yes, I’m that old). I oppose it for men and I oppose it for women.
I am also a feminist. Where did anyone get the idea that feminists were all in favor of Selective Service registration? Most of the feminists I know are fiercely anti-war, in every sense, so why on earth would we find this hunky-dory?
My feeling is that if you have a truly just war, you will have to beat off people begging to fight with a stick. And I’d damnsure rather have a woman going off to war — and yes, in active combat — who wanted to be there than a man who didn’t.
Amp, You’re right, i misread your post. It was early and I was in a hurry. Sorry to respond to something you didn’t say.
My own experience is that there are a number of feminists who deny, at every opportunity, that there exist any instances in which being male is a disadvantage.
Really? Name some.
Echidne wrote:
Echidne, I actually think there’s good reason to doubt that such a “danger premium” exists, after holding other characteristics constant. To quote from my earlier post on the subject,
As far as this army brat is concerned, the draft issue is fundamentally dishonest because 1) congress retains the right to draft women, and 2) feminists have long held that if a draft is reinstated, women are no less obligated to serve, and 3) 80% of the armed forces personnel, men and women alike, are in the support services which prior to the Iraq debacle…never saw combat and 4) the vast, vast majority of men in the US do not serve, have never served and never will serve.
Men who do not serve, have never served and will never serve may not claim oppressed status on the backs of the men AND women who voluntarily enlisted, and are currently the cannon fodder of a legally and morally bankrupt administration.
I think you’re just instinctively blaming male-only conscription on the patriarchy. You see discrimination, and you’re automatically pointing the finger before you’ve thought about things.
The US government did actually try and institute conscription for women during WWII, and feminists did successfully oppose it. Is the patriarchy really to blame for mens’ problems with regards to conscription? The patriarchy would have had women conscripted if they’d gotten their own way. The reason women aren’t in the same position as men with regards to selective service is because of feminism. Feminists did play a role in making the law.
Cites please? I keep hearing this factoid but no one has yet offered up one shred of credible evidence.
James, some citations for your claims would be in order.
It’s certainly not true that feminists in the last four decades have supported a male-only draft. For example, in Rostker v. Goldberg, the National Organization for Women and the Women’s Equity Action League submitted amicus briefs to the Supreme Court arguing that male-only selective service is sexual discrimination and should be overturned.
@Myca October 16th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
APPLAUSE.
The sitcom complaint is so silly. Of course the portrayal of actual living breathing gender stereotypes come off as ridiculous and pathetic. That’s because gender stereotypes–of men and women–are exactly that. We should all be insulted by pervailing gender stereotypes. On TV as in real life, people who live like them are sad and boring.
Pingback: Pandagon :: But really, what about the menz? :: October :: 2007
The idea that there are roles that are properly men’s and roles that are properly women’s and the idea that there’s a ‘way men are’ and a ‘way women are.’
Yeah, Myca, I agree completely with your comment. I’m not sure, however, if you can actually have a conversation with a typical MRA about this. Part of MRAism (and anti-feminism), as far as I can tell, is a strong belief in the necessity of validity of gender roles.
There is no attempt to fix those problems; they are used as an excuse for arguing that women can’t have equality.
This is the crux of it, I think. It’s not “we all face injustice, let’s team up to better fight it!” so much as “stop complaining, everyone has problems.”
Don’t have time to read through this whole thread, but I saw this in one of Jake’s comments:
And I am wondering if this is really true. I turned 18 in 1980, the year Carter instituted Selective Service registration in response to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. (And there was, at the time, a Supreme Court case in which someone sued to have women included; the Supreme Court decided against that; along time ago, I read the decision. It makes interesting reading.)
Anyway, I sent in my registration form but without my social security number; I received a letter threatening rather severe legal action. (I still have the letter somewhere.) So I am wondering if it is that there is no legal penalty, or that legal penalties simply are not inforced as a general rule.
The US Army intended to draft women as nurses in World War II (cite). They didn’t do so because the quantity of volunteers increased enough to meet the demand. Admittedly the source is very sketchy, but there doesn’t appear to be any feminist involvement in that.
From the same source, it seems there have been sporadic efforts by the executive since 1973 to add women to the law, so that if there were a draft, women would be included. Congress has mostly disregarded those efforts.
Wikipedia has an article on the Women’s Army Corps (which did yeoman work during the war) that says some generals wanted to draft more WACs but Congress said no; no details provided.
Jake and Jfpbookworm –
Agreed completely, which is why (to echo abso-fucking-lutely everyone) we need a non-MRA group that can ally with feminists while focusing on the ways that our current gender system harms men. Sigh.
So I am wondering if it is that there is no legal penalty, or that legal penalties simply are not inforced as a general rule.
There is a legal penalty of a fine up to $250k and 5 years of jail time (I believe – I may be wrong on the details), but there have been a total of 20 prosecutions (the last in 1986). Of those prosecutions, 19 have been sought by the offenders. It seems that the S.S. decided that prosecuting non-registrants actually reduced registration percentages, so they decided to stop all prosecutions.
Therefore, there really are no (enforced) legal penalties for non-registration with the S.S.
@Jake – again, varies from activist to activist. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen Sacks discuss how men and women are innately different and thus have different roles in society. The closest thing I’ve ever seen him say is that he believes that it’s healthier for children to have one parent of each gender… which normally would be a lead-in for gay-bashing, but he comes out on the side of LGBT rights whenever they come up.
Still, I don’t follow any other MRAs, and I’m sure that the usual swarm of misogynists and anti-feminist fundamentalists have a different opinion.
“I long for a better men’s rights movement — one that substantively talks about the significant, systematic harm to men that occurs without seeking to blame feminism or to pretend that sexism against women doesn’t matter. ”
Oh BS. You’d think from this post there was no activism addressing these two issues. Except there’s THE LABOR MOVEMENT and THE ANT-WAR MOVEMENT which cover these problems more than enough. I guess if it does say FOR THE MENENS in the title, the boys don’t feel properly honored. I guess because most MRA are pro-war and anti-union, they are too dim to notice this.
All activism already benefits men and quite often before it helps women, except for feminism where men still benefit, just slightly after women.
This whining men somehow need to be feel specially cared for by name makes me think of questions like: “Why is there Mother’s Day and Father’s Day but no kids day?” or “Why is there Black History Month but no White History Month?” Answer: because every day/month is white/kids time.
I wish there was a men’s movement – a movement where men learn to stop whining and realize activism which helps everyone helps them even if it doesn’t pat them on the head for having a wee-wee.
Softdog, kindly dial it back a few notches.
Slight clarification. Columbia never merged with Barnard College. 1983 is the date that Columbia began accepting female students on its own alongside Barnard.
TY, megalodon.
Softdog has a point, though.
This is the basic flaw in Will Shetterly’s arguments about race. When he argues that race isn’t something that needs to be acknowledged in things like activism to ameliorate class issues, he’s ignoring the fact that without deliberate attempts to help non-whites, most activism helps whites first and foremost. It also helps men first and foremost.
This is true within feminism, as well. We have to make an active attempt to ensure inclusion (with rocky success) of women of color, of poor women, etc. The most privileged group (white, wealthy women of which I am one) is served first, even when that privileged group is part of an oppressed minority.
Not that I’d particularly object to pro-feminist men forming a group of some kind to talk and be active about gender issues that harm men. At least, not in principle. In practice, what does that look like? Like Hugo’s urgings toward young men? Those are bothersome to me, because they feel like they tap into harmful constructs of masculinity and chivalry. I would probably be more comfortable with Ampersand’s or Myca’s version of a group like that, but I have some trouble imagining how it should be framed.
I disagree. I think that her response was mostly snyde, insulting rage at the idea that anyone would want to talk about male issues at all.
Here’s how I see it:
1) I think that the gender system is really fucked up.
2) This fucked up system hugely massively overwhelmingly benefits men to the detriment of women.
3) But still, as much as TPHMT is a stereotype, the fucked up gender system does actually hurt men too.
4) I believe that obliterating the gender system would be a net good for the vast majority of both women and men in the world.
5) Feminism is not the proper forum and framework for discussing the harms the gender system does to men, though, both because women should rightly be the focus of feminism and because of the very real danger of (and negative response to) sidetracking.
Therefore, I only see one solution, and that’s to discuss the harms that the gender system does to men, and to do it in a dedicated space that is not taking space from women.
I feel like what I’m hearing is, “Don’t sidetrack! Don’t be all ‘What about the MENZ,'” and simultaneously, “If you decide to discuss this yourselves, you’re whining men who want a pat on the head for having a wee wee.”
Fuck that.
—Myca
Well, do you feel like you’re hearing that from me? (If so, I apologize.)
I don’t think your concerns are minimal. Dangerous jobs do fall under the umbrella of labor rights, and draft concerns do fall under the umbrella of the anti-war movement.
I think what you want is a group that looks at these issues through the lens of masculinity/patriarchy, and which would talk about the interconnected system that underlies them. This is probably a worthy goal.
I’m not sure it’s a burning need, per se — because these issues are discussed elsewhere, if not through the theoretical lens of anti-patriarchy. The argument that I thought softdog was making was that men don’t need a special group because all groups already — unless specifically designed otherwise — cater to their interests.
The ways in which individual men are harmed by constructs of masculinity in their lives… yeah. I want this talked about. I guess I feel like I get my dose of that primarily in the queer rights movement, because I feel like they talk about the benefits of being gender atypical. I can see the need for a group here.
I really do wish that the thread on male sexual abuse survivors had been able to get off the ground. I’d alerted a couple male sexual abuse survivors who weren’t able to talk about it yet that the thread was happening, because they don’t have recourse, but unfortunately, it was destroyed.
No, no, not at all . . . but I do think that that was the majority of Softdog’s point.
I’ll respond to the rest in a bit
—Myca
“Cites please? I keep hearing this factoid but no one has yet offered up one shred of credible evidence.”
http://www.swarthmore.edu/library/peace/DG051-099/dg068.wcoc/dg068.wcoc.htm
“…in Rostker v. Goldberg, the National Organization for Women and the Women’s Equity Action League submitted amicus briefs to the Supreme Court arguing that male-only selective service is sexual discrimination and should be overturned.”
This is perfectly true. The only thing I would mention is that the detail of the briefs argued that male-only selective service is sexual discrimination *against women*. The suggestion was that service was necessary for women to be full citizens. That’s an interesting way of looking at things, and they’re well within their rights to make that argument, but it’s not quite the objection that Goldberg or the MRAs have.
Warning: I haven’t read the thread completely yet. So I may be bringing up something that has already been discussed. However, with respect to the draft, two points. One, IIRC, Israel drafts both men and women. Two, a draft of people with medical training, male and female, is not off the table in the US. Just to point out that while the draft affects men more than women in most places, it does not, strictly speaking, affect only men.
Men who do not serve, have never served and will never serve may not claim oppressed status on the backs of the men AND women who voluntarily enlisted,
Not to mention men and women who enlisted “voluntarily” through the poverty draft: that is, because they were poor and volunteered because they believed that military’s promise of a better life if they joined.
Myca,
I almost totally agree. The thing is, that I think there absolutely IS a place in feminism for discussion of how patriarchy and hegemonic masculinity/normative gender roles hurt men as well as women.
And, I don’t think that’s side tracking from feminist issues. I mean, if someone is talking about rape culture and the effect is has on how women move about the world and some MRA comes in and says, “But what about the MEN? MEN are raped too and it’s even worse because they never talk about, don’t get services, blah blah blah.” It’s true, men get raped too. it’s true that it can be really really harmful to the men who do get raped largely because of gender constructs, but a discussion about rape culture is not the place to talk about that, not that it’s not important, just that it belongs in a different discussion, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t belong in a feminist discussion at all…
And, fwiw, there is plenty of academic feminist work that absolutely deals with how patriarchy and gender constructs harm men. See anything by RW Connell and many others. I know when I used to teach “Introduction to Gender Studies” I assigned a text book dealing exclusively with Masculinity as well as a text book dealing with gender issues that affect women. Each week we had a particular topic: Gender and work, Gender and education, Gender and family, etc and students had to read articles on that topic from each book. IMHO, you simply can not ignore the effect that patriarchy and gender constructs have on men because if you do, you aren’t getting a full picture. And how can you enact change if you are only looking at snapshots and not the larger picture as a whole?
Don’t get me wrong, the particular brand of MRA I’ve seen are a bunch of angry mysoginistic assholes, but a discussion of how partriachy hurts men led by Myca, Amp, Jake Squid as well as many women who can contribute to that discussion (who says we can only recognize the harms to our own genders????) is definitely something I wouldn’t have a problem with.
Uhm James…please read your own reference.
This group was originally named the Committee to Oppose the Conscription of Women, and then the National Committee to Oppose the Conscription of Women. It was formed to protest the Austin-Wadsworth legislative bills and similar measures, and as an independent committee with one objective it expected to educate and motivate a constituency no organized peace group could reach. At its height, the group had a governing committee of 150 members and a national mailing list of 3000. When the immediate threat of drafting women had passed, the group changed its name again, this time to the Women’s Committee to Oppose Conscription, to reflect its stand against any conscription. Mildred Scott Olmsted served as Director, A.J. Muste as Treasurer, and Grace Rhoads as secretary. The Committee was headed by Katherine Pierce and Frances Chalmers of New York City.
I see no references to feminists or feminist organizations. I do see references to “organized peace group(s).” You will have to do much, much better than this!
Interesting that American men have legitimate complaints, but American Jews don’t.
Find me the cite where someone said Amreican Jews have no legitimate complaints.
American Jews are not men?
Holy crap! Just when you think you’ve got things under control in one thread, there it is in another.
Unreasonable people of any stripe are still no fun to talk with.
” Just when you think you’ve got things under control in one thread, there it is in another.”
This is a good point.
Tara, if your complaints relate to the thread about Israel, please make your comments there.
If you want to talk about the definition of oppression as it relates to both groups — substantially, as opposed to via snide threadjacking — then this would probably be a good place to do it. (For the record, I view a lack of pervasive, system wide discrimination against men in the United States as a reason why I would say that men are not an oppressed group in the United States. I think I made that argument last time the question came up, which was here.)
That would surprise my friend who got her engineering degree from Columbia in the 1970s. We met in grad school in 1982.
I went over and read the post at Shakesville and my two cents is that men should have an option to terminate their paternity rights at will if they had no intention of having a child with a woman before they had sex with her.
Just like it does not follow that a woman consents to carry a pregnancy to term when an unplanned pregnancy occurs, a man should not have to father a child that he did not want because he had sex with the childs’ mother. I think it is only fair that both men and women are allowed to disassociate the sexual act with any intention to bring a child into the world.
Jamila, if you’d like to argue about “Choice For Men” (aka c4m), there are many threads on “Alas” where I think that would be more on-subject. Look through the threads in the choice for men category archive, or perhaps look at this thread or this thread in particular.
there’s THE LABOR MOVEMENT and THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT
LOL. Women are the loudest voices in the anti-war movement too. Code Pink, Cindy Sheehan et al. Feminists also started Patriarchy Hurts Men Too.
Women have to do everything, don’t they?
Thanks Amp for info about the links.
I wasn’t sure if this thread was specifically for discussing the points Amanda raised or not.
Myca;
TPHMT space wouldnt have to be all male, though. I think it would work better if it wasnt.
A fascinating read on the subject of the metamorphosis of feminism, including the birth of Farrel and Sacks’ brand of “Victim-feminism for men” as it’s called in the article.
http://www.radicalmiddle.com/x_feminists.htm
Personally, I find it actually pretty depressing, since the author, in the end of a lengthy exploration of his perception of the history of feminism, talks about how we’re joyously embracing traditional gender roles and qualities, but in a modern, equal light. I don’t want to embrace traditional gender roles. I want to see them ended.
But that’s probably because I’m a wimpy nerd-man with low income.
Silenced; I read that piece a different way. Most of the things he lists as the goals of the “stand up guy” are equally applicable to women and having nothing to do with traditional gender roles, but the difference between being an adult and not. I think he’s blaming feminism for the fact that neither he nor cathy could get it together to be sexually sophisticated, self-realized and not threatened by success.
Sure, I agree, it’s just that I would want to avoid the whole “you’re all just whiny babies for wanting to talk about this” problem . . . and it seems like every time Amp posts anything like this, that ends up being a major point of discussion.
—Myca
I guess I was trying to distinguish bewteen bothering women and bothering women in feminist spaces devoted to improving women’s lives, for the simple reason that any group organized to solve men’s legit problems wiht the patriarchy would, in order to not become a backlash/MRA group, would have to be explicitly feminist, and would work better if it included women as well as men, to disrupt the materially antifeminsit dynamic of men organized as men.
But I think really, all that is beside the point. If you’re a feminist, you can either think that there is a place in feminist organizing to address how tphmt, or you dont. I do.
Someday men and women are going to care about injustice, period, and they’re not going to try to blame living members of the other gender for everything bad that targets their own gender. If we all did that now, feminism would cease to be necessary and the MRA’s would be a footnote in social science history.
Pingback: Feminist Critics
Robert Jensen had a relevant Counterpunch article the other day called “The Quagmire of Masculinity”:
Masculinity in three acts: Attempts at dominance through (1) force and humiliation, (2) words and argument, and (3) raw insults. Three episodes about the ways masculinity does men in, neatly played out during one long weekend. By the time I get home, I am tired. I am sad. It feels like there are few ways out.
But there is, of course, a way out. It’s called feminism. It offers men a way to understand the nature of this toxic conception of who we are.
Feminism is a gift to men, if we are smart enough to accept it.
“Silenced is foo”, you wrote:
It is amazing that you can appreciate Jones’ insight yet you fail to connect the dots with respect to domestic violence. Earlier in the same comment you wrote:
People who work in social work don’t just come in from the street and say “I want to be a social worker”, and get a case assigned. They tend to come in from a very specific sector of education, and their views are shaped by the ideology prevailing in that educational sector. That ideology is in turn a _product_ of the very same underlying bias the effects on which on media reporting of wartime male victimization are analyzed by Adam Jones. Whatever these people experience while doing social work, they filter it through that bias. They see a woman in the street with a blue eye and they assume her male partner did it. They see a man with a similar injury and they assume it must have been “patriarchal male violence”, i.e. pub brawl or something of the sort. See the New DV Wheel at Glenn’s place.
I think the problem is traditional gender roles, not “patriarchy” – which is why I don’t buy into the “patriarchy hurts men too” thing – because, in my view, there is no “patriarchy” – there are, however, traditional gender roles, and both men and women have a role in enforcing them. Women have made strides in breaking free of them. Men less so.
I favor allowing everyone to escape traditional gender roles. I think feminism certainly started that. But it can’t finish it – because it will always be about women, not people, and the only way to truly abolish traditional gender roles is (like the old line about how do you ‘take a bridge’ militarily:) to tackle both roles at one once. (take both sides at once). Neither role works in isolation. In fact, the roles are dependant on their opposites. You can’t have the ‘stay at home mom’ female gender role without the ‘go out and make the bacon dad’ gender role. Addressing one without addressing the other is ultimately doomed to failure.
Blaming everything on men (i.e. saying it is all the ‘patriarchy’) isn’t particularly helpful, especially when you need both women and men to work together for any movement to eradicate the bonds of traditional gender roles to be successful. And a bonus of such a movement would be that it would not attract the mysognists that flock to the MRAs nor the misandrists that flock to feminism because the movement would not be about one gender or the other, but would be about both. (And I don’t mean to imply anything about the relative numbers of misandrists/misogynists in the respective movements, merely that they are attracted to them because both give some license to bashing the other gender).
I’m a practical person. I want my son (soon to be) and daughter to grow up in a world where they are both equal, able to do what they want in life without any artificial restrictions based on any ‘isms’ out there. I just don’t see feminism getting us there. And the MRAs certainly won’t get us there either. Time for something new, something inclusive (and thus not divisive). Time for a movement to abolish traditional gender roles for both men and women.
Ampersand:
You would have done better to have attached that caveat to Hynes.
Neither you, nor anyone else need assume my factual claims are accurate; they can be verified. Every single one of my sources is available for free on the web, (registration is required in some cases) and linked in the notes to my post. I’ve done the hard work in locating them; all you need do is check them.
Thanks for the link.
I did add a caveat to my discussion of Hynes and war mortality, noting in my post that “I don’t know which sex is victimized ‘more’ by war.”
Nowadays I’m trying to spend more time drawing comics, which rules out time-consuming bloggy activities like vetting another blogger’s links for an issue I really don’t care about. For the narrow point you’re making, I assume you are being accurate. But since I haven’t checked that out myself, it’s an assumption, not something I know.
So, in other words, you’re saying that no observation is not theory-laden, a la Thomas Kuhn. Everyone’s reality, which is to say their interpretation of reality, is shaped by their experiences, education, and prior beliefs. This applies to social workers. But this also applies to MRA’s who have an emotional investment in the subject – you guys aren’t special snowflakes to whom regular rules of human fallibility don’t apply.
So if we can’t fully trust anyone’s perspective, how can we ever draw empirical conclusions about a topic like this? Well, we use a combination of the weight of the majority of published studies on the subject, the barometer of expert opinion, and (because experts don’t know everything) the shared experiences and common sense of regular folk. Thankfully, w/r/t domestic violence all of these indicators point in the same direction.
Furthermore, it’s not just social workers. Try asking policemen who routinely have to investigate domestic disturbances if they think domestic violence is equally a female-on-male crime.
I think that generalizing this is much less powerful than the specifics, and that generalizing it is not really accurate in this case.
Certain programs are relatively well known for attracting students of a certain bias, and also teaching students along a certain bias. Social work is one of them.
See, for example, http://www.thefire.org/index.php/case/669.html
@Disgusted Beyond Belief
You’re arguing terminology. Feminism is, ostensibly, equal rights for the genders and an end to gender roles. Radical feminism is the active abolition of all concept of gender roles – a laudable, but imho unattainable goal, since it ignores the neurological differences between the genders. Patriarchy is really just a term for the enforcement of traditional gender roles.
It’s unfortunate that the constructs of gender equality are so wrapped up in gender-specific language. It makes the concept of “PHMT” confusing (when that really falls into the larger concept of feminism) and minimizes the role of free women in reinforcing and empowering the patriarchy.
For the record, I don’t think you’re using a correct definition for “radical feminism.” As I understand it, radical feminism is based around the core belief that the first and defining mode of oppression is that of men oppressing women — a claim which can’t be proven, but can sometimes pave the way for interesting analysis.
Ah. I admit I pulled that definition out of my ass, I was just focusing on how self-identified radical feminists seem to talk about changing attitudes regarding sex and power and similar concepts – some concepts that I believe are intrinsic to a testosterone-fueled brain (or estrogen-fueled brain, in the case of women’s attitudes) and thus inseparable from the sex of the person.
If that were true, then I as someone with atypical hormones would act differently than I do.
But anyway, it’s a topic for a different thread.
@foo
That’s the point. The terminology makes plain that “feminism” as a term is primarily about women and “patriarchy” as a term is primarily about blaming enforcement of traditional gender roles on men. The very words themselves reinforce that. They are not gender neutral words. And that matters. And that is part of the problem.
Feminists promote women. MRAs promote men (generally somewhat crudely). We need something that promotes equality, clearly and unequivically, in a gender neutral way. That is a movement men and women can both get behind without any of the gender warfare often seen (at least by me in the blogsphere). A movement that, by its name, promotes one particular gender is a movement that will attract people who want to bash the other gender. It is jut inevitable. It provides cover (in varying quantities) for doing so. (Not to say that most people in any movement are bashers). Time for a movement that is about equality and breaking out of traditional gender roles, period.
I think gender equality has gone far enough that we (as a society) are ready for something like that. Feminism helped paved the way for that, helping women break out of their traditional gender roles to some extent. Now we need to break out the men more as well as continue to break out the women.
Whee.
Either way, we’re arguing terminology, which is practically the definition of the point at which a discussion has ended.
@foo
It is more than just about terminology – it is about defining what a movement actually is, who it is for, who it might be against. Implied in the use of words ‘feminism’ and ‘patriarchy’ are things that are antithecal to the notion of full gender equality. Perhaps some people embrace that and like that, and perhaps that is why some will never give up those words, even if it means it is less likely we ever actually get full gender equality. There is also the fact that people fear change and get comfortable with the status quo. I don’t pretend to know what the ultimate reasons are. But I do know that there is a divisiveness to the use of those terms that I see every time I look at sites that discuss it, and that makes me sad. It makes me think that equality isn’t really the goal. Even if that isn’t true, that is the perception, and when it comes to politics and changing people’s mind on a mass scale, perception matters a lot. I don’t imagine if I nameda movement ‘masculism’ but said that it was really about full equality for both genders, that people take that a face value even if the movement truly was about full equality for both genders. And that conclusion is rather obvious, on its face. I wonder why it is so hard, then, for others to see that when a movement is called ‘feminism’ there is strong skepticism when it is said that it is really about breaking gender roles for both women and men. Obviously, something else is going on here, and that something else isn’t some deep desire for gender equality. Not that that desire isn’t there, simply that it seems like it isn’t at the top of the priority list. At least, that is my perception.
I’ve waxed on this before, and it has mostly been ignored or, in some cases, resulted in me being accused of being a mysognist. One can draw additional conclusions about someone who calls me a mysognist for calling for gender equality. I think it just reinforced for me the ‘us versus them’ problem of a movement ostensibly for gender equality that identifies primarily with only one gender.
So I close with saying, again, this is about more than terminology. (Hell, if it was a terminology discussion, I’d be pointing out that ‘patriarchy’ is just plain wrong terminology to use anyway because in this culture, there is no such thing – patriarchy is about EXCLUSIVELY male rule – and we clearly do not have that here – women can hold any political office, and pretty much have held them all, with few exceptions, now – and we may soon be ruled by a woman, making the term completely ridiculous. Women are CEOs. Women run Universities. Women are in charge all over the place. Sure, there are more men in those positions. But that still isn’t a patriarchy. I imagine trying to explain this to a space alien who just landed in 2009 – ‘oh, we are in a patriarchy – men rule’ the alien asks then, oh, who is your leader? ‘a woman.’ ) But like I said, this isn’t about terminology in that sense.
“Patriarchy” is a term of art within feminism. It does not mean “blaming everything on men.”
Please attempt to post intelligently on “Alas.” Being an intelligent poster doesn’t require that you agree with me, but it does require that you familiarize yourself with the basics of feminism before you start pontificating on what basic feminist terms mean.
Even if you do know what feminists mean when they say “feminist” and “patriarchy,” you don’t get any credit for that if your comments about those terms don’t demonstrate that you know anything about feminism.
Here are some links that might help you:
Wikipedia.
Feminism 101 blog.
Feminism 101 blog again.
(I’m not saying I agree with everything posted at these links, but they’re a start.)
Plus the link Mandolin provided to an earlier post of mine.
Ampersand – there’s what you list as a definition for meaning, then there’s actual usage, and finally, there’s perception.
What I was mostly referring to was the nature of the words themselves. Feminism is clearly from the base ‘feminine’ which is clearly about women. ‘Patriarchy’ is clearly talking about men. I’m just talking about on their face. No matter what you define the words as in your 101 blogs, you still can’t escape that basic fact.
Further, as you just told me in another thread, advocating total equality based on gender is not enough to be considered even pro-feminist. Which makes claims that feminism is primarily about equality for men and women rather suspect. What you said makes it sound to me like feminism isn’t about equality, it is about promoting women. Which is fine and dandy, but don’t pretend it is primarily an equality movement or that it is simply about the “radical notion that women are people” when clearly, believing such things does not make one a feminist by your definition of it. I certainly think women are people. Yet I’m not a feminist, nor am I even considered pro-feminist (by you in any case).
I’ve read all of those links you’ve posted. And more. I’ve read countless feminist blogs. I’ve done more than just read what the alleged definitions are, I’ve seen feminism in practice, as practiced, by feminists. I think that sheds more light on what the word means. I’ve also seen the use of the word ‘patriarchy’ in those places.
But ultimately, forget all of that and go back to what I said at the start of this comment – look at the words themselves. And ask yourself, if feminism is about equality for both genders, as some claim, why is the name about only one gender? If blaming ‘patriarchy’ is about blaming ‘society as a whole’ rather than just blaming men, why use a word that at its root is exclusively about men? Why not use gender neutral words, particularly where they are more accurate? Particularly where you are trying to get 100% of the population behind you?
DBB,
Do you believe that in the English language, meaning is dictated by etymology?
If not, then why do you think an argument based on etymology should be persuasive to me?
* * *
I already explained to you what “pro-feminist” means; it doesn’t mean “anyone who is in favor of feminism,” it’s what some feminists (not me) call male supporters of feminism because as a matter of theory they don’t believe men can be feminists.
Edited to add: You explicitly say that you do not consider yourself a feminist. If the primary reason you don’t consider yourself a feminist is because you’re male (I have no idea what sex you are), then you’re welcome to continue posting on feminist-only threads; that, and that alone, is what the “or pro-feminist” proviso is there for. If you have some other reason for not considering yourself a feminist, then you shouldn’t be posting on “feminist only” threads.
Feminism is not just a belief in equality; it’s also an analysis of the current status quo. Someone who says “I believe in equality, but I also believe that women rule the world, and we won’t have true equality until all women are barefoot and pregnant where they belong” isn’t a feminist just because they say they believe in equality, for instance.
You can read my personal definition of “feminist” here.
Amp – this isn’t about definitions with regard to your posting policy – this is about something more than that – it is about the goal of actually achieving the breaking women and men out of traditional gender roles and thus acheiving equality.
I just don’t think focusing on only one gender is the way to do that.
Etymology matters to the extent that it reinforces divisions between the genders through the use of gender-exclusive terminology.
My goal is full equality. Your example is nonsensical because clearly that is not advocating equality. Of course, in a way, it reinforces what I said because it just goes to show that official explanations of what something stands for can be at odds with the reality of actions taken. You can give whatever written defintions of feminism you want – they won’t mean much if they are not actually followed in practice.
My goal is full equality – and I am more concerned with getting there than with maintaining allegiance to any particular political ideology. If women could actually achieve full equality but to do so you had to move from feminism to a gender neutral movement to do it, would you do so? Which is more important to you – the label or the results? I started arguing in favor of a gender neutral movement to break out of traditional gender roles based on my conclusion (based on observing and participating in feminist sites and elsewhere) that feminism simply won’t get us there because of all of the reasons I’ve already outlined above (and elsewhere). Maybe I’m wrong about that. I don’t claim omniscience, certainly. But thus far, I haven’t seen any particularly convincing arguments to the contrary – heck, alot of what I see reinforces my view. A few people almost changed my mind, in fact, but then I saw the constant divisions that persist along gender lines and I just don’t think that they can be fixed in a movement about only one gender. I want to end the ‘us vs them’ – as much as possible. And make it a ‘we’ problem that we can all work together on.
Feminism is not just a belief in equality; it’s also an analysis of the current status quo.
An analysis, but also a description – and thereby hangs an organizational problem. In order to analyze, one must describe – and all description is personal, contextual. And, unfortunately, subject to often vociferous disagreement and mutual incompatibility.
Framing feminism around an emphasis on the analysis and description – what you might call the conclusions of feminism at any particular moment in time – is thus inherently destabilizing and divisive. It can’t help but be; with the most love and best mutual will in the world, everyone sees the world differently and all these sharp conflicts will be front and center.
There is productivity to be found in the eternal conflict, to be sure. A lot of ideas get hammered out. A lot of debate means a lot of chances to see other people’s point of view, and so on. Internal conflict can be a healthy thing, when it doesn’t hurt the organization. Or in your case, the cause.
You might get some good out of a new word, something to describe someone who is 100% with you on the whole equality thing but a little fuzzy on bell hooks. The whole gender/equity feminist thing might have been a stab at that, but it was made by people hostile to your basic ideas and so of course it wasn’t a tenable concept. But something along those general lines, minus the secret anti-leftist agenda, might be of utility on your side. Just a thought.
My goal is full equality – and I am more concerned with getting there than with maintaining allegiance to any particular political ideology.
If so, wouldn’t you be more concerned with the oppressed class? Wouldn’t you concentrate on improving their rights and living conditions and opportunities?*
Your answer to those questions, judging from your comments here, is “no.” In which case, I don’t believe that you’re actually doing anything to aid in achieving equality.
* Thus, “Feminism.”