There are a lot of off-topic comments in this thread. Or rather, there were. But I’m now moving them to this thread. Or, rather, I will. If the plug-in I downloaded works.
UPDATE: I think it worked!
the people he picks to work in his administration are supposed to support that effort as long as they don’t…
@Ron: What do you think Trump did in his first term that was unique or made a positive impact on…
During his first term Trump walked into the White House with no experience in government, so he selected a lot…
To give a specific example: When I first moved to Oregon, the state had a rule against government organizations replacing…
Eliminating unnecessary jobs to focus on the actual core functions of the Federal government is the epitome of increasing efficiency.…
Well, Amp, we’ll see if this comment appears.
I don’t recall ever actually writing a post to your blog before even though I’ve been reading and aware of you since about 2003 or thereabouts as I was on lots of MRA sites by then.
In any case I just want to post this to point out something to commenter PG: we’ll see if you’ll let me do it.
The point I want to bring up is that all the stuff that NOW did in regards to the draft equality was done in the early or mid 1980’s , at least 25 years ago. They never followed up on it, unless you count a separate smaller effort to get Clinton to allow women to be front line troops as a matter of policy in the mid 90’s. This was controversial between different proponents of feminism so was not universally supported. Lastly, I find it a bit unfair to compare efforts between a largely government and foundation sponsered movement whose roots can be traced back over 40 years (just for the modern version of feminism) to a largely (even today, though things are better)unfunded and unknown movement such as the men’s rights movement which can’t even boost “institutional” power, unlike feminism.
I can also assure you that the vast majority of PUA blogs don’t dabble in politics, the vast majority of MGTOW blogs don’t speak of PUA except in dismissive or disrespectful tones, and that the MRM has for the most part disavowed this type of behavior. Reading a few cross over comments on what has got to be one of the most hated (if most useful) blogs on the web (Roissy in DC) does not suffice to tar the MRM.
Never! I’ve deleted it and now it’ll never, ever be seen! Nah-ha-ha-ha!
*shrug* It’s not like feminists just sat around on their asses and suddenly the government passed some (not all) feminist policy and foundations dropped off money. Feminists worked for it, building institutions over time. The reason your movement is small is that MRAs just haven’t put in the work that feminists have.
Some of that is that the Men’s Rights Movement is younger. But a lot of it is that too many MRAs are driven by hatred of feminists/women/their ex-wives, rather than being driven by a positive desire to build institutions that will help men. MRA’s have been around for nearly 20 years now; it’s been 16 years since the MRA equivalent of The Feminine Mystique was published. How many battered men’s shelters have MRAs opened in that time?
With all due respect, this is alphabet soup. I eventually figured out what PUA and MRM meant, but I have no idea what MGTOW is.
Actually,
seventen of the quotes weren’t from Roissy’s blog. Are you really going to claim that antimisandry.com isn’t part of the Men’s Rights Movement?Marmosets Gambol Tantalizingly Over Wheatfields.
Or: Men Going Their Own Way, which apparently believes:
Er, yes. So, this is very different from anti-feminism because — look, gamboling marmosets!
I think I’ll go ahead and have other qualities not interesting to men, and fuck my husband (thus enjoying his masculinity), who has the good sense not to join this movement.
MGTOW is Men Going Their Own Way, a movement that encourages (though does not require) men to dissasociate entirely from women. If you read their forums you find them varying from hating women as inferior intellectually and morally and unworthy of voting to people with quite liberal persuasions who simply feel it is too risky legally to have anything to do with women. Some of the people on the forums advocate foreign brides , others advocate trusting no women. The one useful and proper thing about the whole movement is that they all agree that men do not derive their worth or value from women. It’s one of their main issues with the PUA philosophy.
Hope this short explanation helps.
As for your question about Antimisandry.com , I won’t deny that’s part of the mainstream MRM blogs (though Glenn Sacks would disagree with a bit of it) and I won’t deny that there are some hateful and misogynistic comments on there, anymore than I think you’ll deny that certain female posters who used to post on your blog [attack on another comment-writer deleted by Amp] have acted likewise at times.
Thanks for being fair.
Nice link, Mandolin.
Now if you started to mistreat your husband and you think he would have the good sense at that point to kick you out of his life – then MGTOW has nothing to teach him. Accountability is key for the more liberal members of that philosophy.
“If you read their forums you find them varying from hating women as inferior intellectually and morally and unworthy of voting to people with quite liberal persuasions who simply feel it is too risky legally to have anything to do with women. Some of the people on the forums advocate foreign brides , others advocate trusting no women…
Hope this short explanation helps.”
Let’s all take this very seriously, everyone. Very seriously. Those laughing will be asked to leave as their rolling about on the floor and gasping for air is distracting to the very serious conversation that is going on here very seriously.
Anyone who suggests these positions reflect paranoia and disconnection from reality at a level previously unknown to those who maintain a regular oxygen supply will receive a stern talking-to and a peppermint candy.
Mandolin, you can laugh all you want.
These men do not need your, nor Amp’s approval, and because it’s quite obvious you are dismissive of their (ones with legal concerns) problems without even talking to them, you merely validate their decision to have nothing to do with you and to mistrust you. So keep laughing. This stuff is spreading – I could have predicted it years ago. Your laughter will ring hollow in the end.
1) Yes, there are jerks everywhere, in every large movement, including in feminism. I don’t think that changes the fact that, within the men’s rights movement, a really enormous amount of misogyny is acceptable.
2) More broadly, I agree that there are some misandrist feminists (although that’s not unique to, nor universal among, feminists). But feminism simply isn’t as extreme as the MRM is.
The kind of comments I quoted in my post, would not be acceptable on “Alas,” following a similar mass-shooting of men (if such a thing were to happen). I’m pretty confident that they wouldn’t be acceptable on feministe, feministing, shakesville, etc…
3) But even if you say I’m wrong about that — so what? Even if feminist blogs consisted of nothing but fantasies about killing men, 24/7, that still wouldn’t justify the kind of garbage I quoted in my post. When will MRAs understand that “but feminists suck toooooo!” isn’t actually a logical defense of the woman-hating sexist filth your movement welcomes?
4) (BTW, I agree, Glenn would never say stuff like that — although some of the folks in his comments would. Glenn, however, is pretty much the most liberal and feminist-friendly member of the entire MRA movement, so I don’t think you can claim he’s a representative example.)
Nah.
You sound like you’re being written by Chris Claremont during his 1980s X-Men run.
Amp at #56
I really honestly DO take that as a compliment so if you wanted to insult me or say I’m wrong..well, you’ll have to find some other way. :)
As far as your point about the MRM: I will say there are alot of men that feminism and misplaced chivalry has done actual physical, psychological, or economic damage to which leads to some being quite angry and leave it at that. You might want to check out ToySoldiers blog: I know you have posted from time to time on Feminist Critics, so his blog is probably easy for you to find.
Believe it or not I don’t want women confined to the kitchen or deprived of the right to vote and you can count on me to help you fight that should it somehow ever come up. But meanwhile, I think I’ll focus on helping the ToySoldiers of the world. They get little help or recognition esp on feminist spaces.
Ah, Toy Soldier.
Well, let’s see. This blog has done things like advocate against male circumcision.
Toy Soldier’s response was to say that it was not our battle, and question our motives for doing so.
So, you’re right, he gets little help or recognition from us. Little recognition in that he’s so banned I won’t even let his trackbacks through; little help in that even when our interests coincide, he thinks we’re of the devil.
If your interest is in helping alleviate those oppressions of men which actually exist then rest assured — we’re on the same page. However, in the meantime, your kind seems more interested in attacking phantoms, and we won’t be helping you with that.
Also, MGTOW does not appear to espouse goals which match with yours. Feminism would like to free men from traditional gender roles, allowing them to be nurturing and supporting as well as strong and self-reliant. We’d like to give women the same freedoms. If you really want men to be free from oppression, then I’d hope that freedom would include the freedom to express whatever kind of gender role they want, just as hopefully you’d be willing to let women do the same. Men should be able to be stay at home dads when they want to, and to take care of kids, and all that other good stuff, without being looked at as “less than” other men. Limiting men to masculinity is pretty evil, and I hope it’s not actually what you want.
2) More broadly, I agree that there are some misandrist feminists (although that’s not unique to, nor universal among, feminists). But feminism simply isn’t as extreme as the MRM is.
There are misandrist feminists. But I’d argue that among women, misandry is significantly lower among feminists than non-feminists. Take the list of things that are hard on men; I know for a fact that most feminists believe selective service should either be abolished or equal. Feminists have argued against the men-as-pursuers, women-as-pursued model of relationships. Feminists have argued for strict equality under the law. Feminists find the phrase “women and children first” to be infantilizing.
The “feminists” the MRAs bash are rarely feminist at all. Most are as stubbornly in thrall to the patriarchy as the most reactionary PUA. Their misandry springs from the same well that MRA misogyny springs from — the idea that women and men are fundamentally and irreconcilably different. Feminists have worked to end that view, while MRAs celebrate it. MRAs don’t want equality; they want to go back to the inequal days. But happily, those days are gone forever.
Yes, of course, speculation about his mental state or any spectrum variation is unwarranted. The combination of sheer efficacy in use of space and sterility revealed in the video tour of his house, along with the flat affect, made me think of autism as a distinct possibility without any causal connection to his actions. Certainly his horrendous history of familial abuse is a factor, and we can debate various personality disorders at length, as well as untreated depression, rampant Othering of women, lack of self-awareness, etc. And of course the issue of metaphysical evil, none of which can really yield any conclusions.
My problem with your statement, Mandolin is you seem to believe that men and women will make all choices equally at the same rates. If not , there’s obviously sexism at work, right? I’d love to have the option to stay home ..technically I do now , though a few of the laws would disadvantage me at that, they are not insurmountable. But if you ask the majority of women if they want to support a house-husband.well…
In any case you feminists have many places you can talk to your sisters from college courses to women’s commissions to panels on tv. Despite some lip service on some of the better blogs *like this one* I see precious little propogation of feminist doctrine on equality on the ground, where it counts.
As for your study: Studies done by feminists about feminism don’t impress me. I go by what laws your organizations and bar associations push, what is said by feminist spokespersons in the MSM and how the vast majority of your internet bloggers act. And those things don’t show me the supportive attitude towards men you assure me exists.
How did a post about the murder of several women and the injury of more become a “waaah, men are so oppressed because women won’t build them rape crisis centers and fight their battles for them” thread?
Oh, right. Sexism.
Also, the irony of the statement that this blog only does LIP SERVICE to equality after the “Can Men (Who Editors Think Are Women) Write Convincing Male Characters?” thread is freaking hysterical.
Wow. Do you realize how hateful MGTOW is if we take your description as accurate? Do you realize that the “one useful and proper thing” you find about MGTOW is also something that the feminist movement agrees with?
Do you guys actually hear and understand the things you say? It doesn’t appear that way from here.
Will my peppermint candy be here in time for dinner tomorrow?
JakeSquid:
I suppose in your mind any movement that doesn’t uphold your ideology is hateful. I say that some of the MGTOW has hateful or bigotted elements, you gladly use that admission to impugn all of it, and throw in a silly ” and feminism agrees with this too!”.. more lip service. By your own logic, what you call feminism is itself a hate movement – none of this it’s ok for me, but not for thee, stuff. Hate movements begat hate movements in responce. You might want to think on that.
Dude, try to either get some instruction in reading comprehension or try to stop lying by misrepresentation.
Which part of, “Do you realize that the “one useful and proper thing” you find about MGTOW is also something that the feminist movement agrees with?” implies that feminism is a hate movement. Or is it just that you find the statement that men don’t derive their worth or value from women to be hate speech.
Please reread your comment at #50 and explain how your definition of MGTOW in any way matches your new claim at comment #65 . At comment #50 you describe MGTOW with no caveat that this represents only a small portion of the movement. Indeed, you end your description of MGTOW with the words, “Hope this short explanation helps.” Yet at comment # 65 you claim that you were talking only about a small element of MGTOW. Which one is it? Was the Clarence at comment 50 lying or is the Clarence at comment 65 a liar?
You’re being dishonest and creepy and I don’t appreciate it.
It’s peer-reviewed research out of a university, Clarence. Do you dismiss all peer-reviewed research as “by feminists for feminists?”
Would anyone mind terribly if I changed my posting name from “PG” to “Read The Damn Case”?
The lack of “follow-up” was due to the fact that there has been no change in the Selective Service law or procedure since Rostker v. Goldberg, and there has been little serious threat of a draft since then. Selective Service registration in itself imposes no significant burden on men, being extremely easy to do, and so far as I know, men haven’t been filing lawsuits challenging the requirement or its sex-inequitable nature. If they did, there’s certainly no reason to believe that NOW and other feminist organizations, and individual feminists like Justice Ginsburg, would not support such a lawsuit. If you read Rostker, you’ll see it’s the conservative justices — the same ones who opposed gender equality in other cases — who opposed interpreting the Constitution as requiring the extension of Selective Service registration to women. The “liberal lions” Brennan and Marshall, along with Kennedy appointee Whizzer White, dissented and said that the requirement should be enforced equally.
Draft equality simply isn’t a big issue unless there’s a likelihood of the draft’s return. Pointing to a lack of activism on the issue as a sign that feminist organizations are OK with a sex-inequitable draft is ludicrous. Bring the lawsuit and get past the motion to dismiss for lack of standing/ lack of injury, and I’ll write you an amicus brief on why Rostker should be overturned based on later decisions such as the VMI case (the MRAs have been around at least since 1995, yet I don’t see any of them showing up as amici in favor of gender equality in military academies… funny that…).
Clarence:
“I suppose in your mind any movement that doesn’t uphold your ideology is hateful. ”
No, any movement that advocates segregation is a hate movement.
Mandolin:
As you will see if you follow the linkbacks, the sample size was 411 and was attacked by various statistical experts as being of too small a sample size.
I’m afraid I take anything from the social science fields with quite a bit of a grain of salt, usually for quite good reason.
Chris:
Well there, you go: lesbian seperatists are a hate mvement. I wasn’t aware the MGTOW ideal of voluntary separation esp if done for what they think are purposes of self defence makes one a hate movement. Guess you’ll just have to school me on that.
PG:
Thank you for responding. That being said, I will state two very important things:
A.Those who lead the feminist movement now and set its priorities are not the ones who lead then. There is certainly some doubt as to whether this practice, which affects all men in the country is of any concern to the current leadership of the major feminist groups and feminist law organizations at all.
B. I am fully aware of what the Supreme court said. That being said, when feminists didn’t like how things had gone in the past there were a heck of a lot more protests and other activities on both a personal or political level to try and get their way. Feminisms priorities can be examined in terms of what questions and promises they deem it necessary to extract from prospective legislators or judges. I can assure you that if there was a very narrow decision, for example, overturning abortion rights, the very next time a seat came open on the court – well, you get the picture. As far as lawsuits, I’ll check. I think I recall one a few years ago against the all-male draft that was thrown out at a lower level. I don’t recall any feminist help on it, either.
Jake Squid:
People of liberal persuasion who find it legally risky to have anything to do with women are hardly the same as the men who feel women are inferior intellectually and morally and should thus be placed “in their proper place”. – and since that won’t happen men should dissasociate from the disease. You may make fun of our poor liberal man, (some of whom are false accusation victims) but you at least could have the decency to dissasociate him from being the member of a “hate movement”. All political movements contain haters, though , honestly I’m not sure you could call the MGTOW a political movement b/c most of them have given up on politics and merely wish to get the word out and spread their philosophy of separatism, though, as I’ve said many will do it for quite different reasons.
As far as “and feminism agrees with this too!”. Please. Shared parenting? The end of alimony? Any male say in even whether he is going to help support a child he doesn’t want at ANY time before or after a pregnancy other than to tell him to zip it? Female dating behavior? Mutual drunken sex? Violence against Men *or people* act? (Since males are at greatest risk of dying violently?) Nope. Whatever the individual feminists on this site or on the web may feel the feminist law guilds and mainstream feminist political organizations actively resist removing female privileges or extending the same protections/privaleges to males. I go by what movements do, not by what movements say.
Please see Mandolin’s comment at #52. Particularly the bit about, “… these positions reflect[ing] paranoia and disconnection from reality…”
Clarence–
“Well there, you go: lesbian seperatists are a hate mvement.”
I’m sure many on this site will vehemently disagree with this opinion–but I actually agree. So your attempt to expose my hypocrisy on this fails, I’m afraid.
“People of liberal persuasion who find it legally risky to have anything to do with women are hardly the same as the men who feel women are inferior intellectually and morally and should thus be placed “in their proper place” ”
So then what in the hell is the idea that it’s too legally risky to have anything to do with women based on? How is that idea not based in a hatred for women?
“Feminisms priorities can be examined in terms of what questions and promises they deem it necessary to extract from prospective legislators or judges. I can assure you that if there was a very narrow decision, for example, overturning abortion rights, the very next time a seat came open on the court – well, you get the picture.”
What you’re saying here is, “How dare feminists prioritize the concerns of women above everyone else!”
Do you not see why this is ludicrous?
Your expectations are far, far too high.
Very much in favor of shared parenting which is waaaay waaay a feminist point. Both my brothers were stay-at-home dads (one still is), and while I’d probably be the stay-at-home parent in our family, we’d love to do it the other way if we could swing it. Most feminist women I know — in my generation anyway — think stay-at-home dads are really neat.
(Incidentally, my profession is full of stay-at-home parents of both sexes because it makes sense for writers to stay at home. See a prominent example.)
Unfortunately, a lot of the time, the decision about who’s going to stay home ends up being based on earning potential which, in our world, is still slanted toward men, as here. (For that matter, on the issue of striving toward men and women’s full equality as parents and housekeepers.)
However, feminists are a minority of the population, so there’s still a lot of unthinking assumption that goes into the man-works, woman-stays-home equation. That really sucks for the men who would love to be stay-at-home parents and the women who get really bored from excessive toddler conversation. The only solution for it will be the loosening of gender roles.
Alas, your next talking point is a bit silly — I, at least, am very much against the end of alimony (which benefits men when appropriate). Next?
Chris at #77:
If Feminism is only about women’s concerns then arguably it is not about equality between the sexes, for a movement that was egalitarian woud focus on male concerns as well. If feminism prioritizes women’s concerns then there is absolutely nothing wrong with men having a men’s movement to prioritize their concerns. Let a thousand separate blossoms bloom :)
Mandolin:
Staying at home for man, often involves finding a woman who is ok with it and will put up with it. It seems the vast majority of non-feminist women are very much not ok with it- many affairs, marital endings, etc. occur when a man loses a job or his women significantly outearns him , farthermore while a majority of feminist women seem to be ok with it, there is a sizable minority who for gynocentric or other reasons are not and feel women are better caretakers. Thus I must not only find a feminist identified woman, but of that small subset of the population (ten to fifteen percent tops) I must find one of the kind who are ok with it.
I think you already see that the odds of this happening are not good for a man, esp if he is not a self-identified feminist man. And thus a vicious cycle repeats itself, and feminists should consider this when complaining about why more men aren’t staying at home caring for kids : I can swear to you that quite a few wives would either block them for gatekeeping purposes or lose respect for them. And the world of work isn’t set up to allow switcharoos as that cartoon seems to suggest should be possible. I do have some criticisms of the cartoon while we are at it though: for one, having a child is a choice as is choosing to value money (the reason the man keeps his job) over a more equitable arrangement.
And as I’m sure you , yourself would admit, presumed joint custody is fought by feminist lawyers everywhere. Men are not valued as caretakers of children either within marriage or outside of it in our society.
Edit: Edited to say I realize that there are very few men who want to be fulltime househusbands as compared to the amount of women who wish to be full time housewives. I feel this is mostly genetic but with some societal encoragement instead of derision more men woud try it. I do think the majority of men in the US would love to take 1 month paid paternity leave and spend it with their new child and preferrably wife as well. The US could use some of those European laws.
I’m beginning to understand Karynthia, TABW, and nojojo better I think about their frustrations that discussions turn to trying to explain the issue to someone of privilege.
Clarence, where are your facts? Where is the study that men would rather stay home or that women don’t want them to? I’d be willing to rethink my position if you put ANY hard evidence out there. As is, your argument makes no clear point – what are you arguing? That feminism is bad? That men need a rights movement? That feminism isn’t doing anything for men and trying to gain privilege for women only? I’m not trying to put words in your mouth; I literally don’t get the point you want to make so I can’t properly respond to it.
I wonder if Clarence’s points can’t be more properly summed up as “But it isn’t happening fast enough for ME!” or “But they aren’t spending their time doing it for ME!”
The first is just impatience — it took decades for women to go from “stay-home caregivers” to “somewhat integrated in the workforce”. The second is just entitlement. Of COURSE men need a “rights movement”. The issues faced by women are not the same issues faced by men. Unfortunately, most “men’s rights movements” have focused on men having the right to tell women to get back into the kitchen …
I’m sure, JHC that you can point out where Glenn Sacks, for instance, has ever told women to get back in the kitchen or where indeed in the platform of say, FathersForFamilies it vows to restore women to their “proper place”. It’s very easy to throw around accusations here and there, forgive me if I don’t feel the need to point out I don’t think you can point out a single “entitlement” in any of my posts so far from me personally.
As for Simple Truth: you do note that I have responded to multiple people in this thread. I suppose my initial reason for posting was to clear up some difficulties people here are having with MGTOW and other such relatively unknown philosophies. I think it’s easy for people here to try to tar and feather all MRA with PUA because they consider PUA , greasy, dishonest , and disrespectful. So they take one of the most politically oriented and outspoken of the PUA blogs (Roissy) and try to tar Glenn Sacks and ToySoldiers and all the others with it. They see stuff on threads by some of the subset of haters in the MGTOW movement and think they are representative PUA beliefs , when in fact no single other subset of the MRA movement (and MGTOW is a very small one) is as hostile to pickup as the MGTOW simply because they see people learning game as being dependent on females and part of the prop that keeps the current system going. So it’s rather ironic I think, all the confusion going about this stuff, esp since if you dare to criticize feminism by pointing out what , say NOW is doing on a current issue, you’ll be told there’s a “million different feminisms” or some such.
Responding to different people, there’s going to inevitably be posts about different things and so far the only study I’ve seen quoted anyway in the whole thread was the one about how feminists supposedly are less misandric than the populance in general – and it seems there is a methodological flaw with that study. There’s precious few facts to go around, people here are merely giving their opinions and their experiences of life and there’s nothing wrong with that.
I’m now done with this thread as I think the mods think it’s gone on too long. Feel free to have the last word if you want: I find the open thread has already veered off in another direction anyway. No need to bore people by adding this to it. I think my points have been made.
Clarence,
Glenn is better than most, but still believes in making divorce harder and forcing a standard of child custody that is (while better than what exists today) often unworkable.
As for your gripes against NOW, I don’t see enough specifics to really address them. I can tell you that I support registration for men and women, equally. I also know that we presently have an all-volunteer military and registration is just not that high on anyones RADAR. I enlisted before I was required to register, and then the Navy (or someone in the DoD) “registered” me because my draft card is somewhere around the house and it has a registration date on it.
But, did I feel it was highly unfair, back when I was 18 and still of the male sex, that women didn’t have to register? Absolutely. Am I doing anything about it today? No — much more interested in opening up all military positions to women, as well as opening the military up to LGBT people.
This is why I’m highly suspicious of any “Men’s Rights” group or movement that mentions the draft — we’ve not had a draft, for men or women, since Vietnam and we’re very unlikely to have one in this country any time soon.
Some — a very few some — of the issues you mentioned are worth discussing in a feminist context, but from a women’s perspective, most of them have nothing to do with EQUALITY and everything to do with punishing women. And having spent some time of my adult life as both sexes, I think I have a pretty good grasp on gender differences and differential effect of policy changes.
As an aside — and I know this is very anecdotal — my experience is that feminists really ARE much less misandric than non-feminists. I’ve known a fair number of non-feminist women in my life whose response to Patriarchy is basically leading men around by their dicks, and then using the courts to raid the cookie jar first chance they get.
Yeah, that’s sort of the crux of it.
I tend to think that if you get rid of patriarchy, then you’ll get rid of patriarchy, and both men and women get what they need. I know that Amp and Myca have said they think a genuine men’s rights movement is needed. Personally, I’d be happy to incorporate that into feminism, and I do think that’s historically how things are going. I know there is a weird contingent of second-wave/radfem/wtf is up with you guys? feminists on the net who have made it their business to be grouchy at Barry for not having suitable genitalia, but their influence in the real world is small, and I think feminism is trending toward integration of broader gender/sex issues just as it’s trending toward other intersectionality.
And personally I think it’s generally ok to advocate for men under the umbrella of feminism, but I hear people who have reason to know saying that my proposal isn’t sufficient, so I’m definitely open to that idea. And certainly if there were a genuine men’s rights movement out there that wasn’t about blaming women or blaming feminism or chasing specters then I would want to be there, whatever that movement is called.
You know–I am responding here to Clarence–I find the placing feminism in some sort of inverse relationship to a “men’s rights movement” to be, at best, disingenuous and, at worst, intellectually suspect. Feminism is about a good deal more than “women’s rights.” It is, ultimately, about a way of being, of seeing, in relation (if you are a man) to women, to other men and to the world around you. The political exigencies that require the legal establishment women’s rights (to vote, to reproductive choice, to equal pay, to protection from sexual harassment, to legal protections against marital rape, etc. and so on) are important, crucial, and to say what I am about to say is not to suggest otherwise: Those legal issues are not, fundamentally, what feminism is about. The men’s rights movement, as far as I can tell, from Warren Farrell’s The Myth Of Male Power on down, is, on the other hand, almost (and please note that almost) exclusively about establishing certain legal rights that the men of that movement feel we (men) lack or that have been taken away from us by feminism.
This difference is a crucial one, and–and here I am responding to the people in this thread who have been responding to Clarence–I think it is a mistake to allow people who either are of men’s rights movement or who advocate for them to control the rhetoric of the relationship between feminism and MRM. That there is a need for a genuine men’s movement to take on the questions raised by feminism from men’s perspective (and I mean here the perspective of men from within our own lives, not an ideologically conditioned or constrained position “within feminism,” if that makes sense) is obvious. (And I would point out that the MRM is itself a response to the questions feminism has raised about gender roles, relations, positions within culture, politics, the law, etc.) I just think we should not fall into the trap of accepting the rhetoric, even in something as simple as a name, of a movement that is really about something very different from feminism.
Clarence,
Doubt your heart out, but provide some evidence for your claims, please. NOW issued an official statement in 1980 that it opposes the draft on general principles, but if there is to be a draft, supports having women registered for it on the same basis as men. That statement has not been rescinded by any subsequent leadership and thus is still the position of the organization.
Wait, your gripe is that because feminists are more concerned about the loss of abortion rights (abortion being something that a woman somewhere in America needs every day) than they are about a male-only draft (the draft not having been in effect since Vietnam) that means feminists have the wrong priorities?
Um, no. Any organization that worries more about a sex inequality that has no actual effect today and hasn’t had one for 35 years, than about policies that affect people on a day-to-day basis, is bloody useless.
If the lawsuit was thrown out due to lack of standing/injury, then it was a frivolous lawsuit and of course feminist organizations weren’t going to expend any energy on a frivolous lawsuit. That’s why I specified that you’d need to get the lawsuit past that stage for me to be willing to assist in it.
PG writes:
The only lawsuits I know of since Registration was resumed deal with male-only Registration, not the non-existent male-only draft. (Calling it “All-Male” is pretty dishonest — all males DO NOT have to register.)
Attacking male-only Registration isn’t, IMHO, a fruitful path because Registration doesn’t mean one is going to be drafted. Assuming, G-d forbid, the Draft ever comes back, once a person is actually drafted they’d be classified as regards military service. Assuming they were given a classification that led to military service, THEN they’d have standing. Registration just means the Selective Service hypothetically knows where to find you. Even gay men have to register and we all know the military thinks they have Teh Queer Cooties and won’t let them serve. Even if they are skilled Arabic translators …
Glenn is better than most, but still believes in making divorce harder and forcing a standard of child custody that is (while better than what exists today) often unworkable.
No when it comes to child custody he just wants it to stop being awarded more based on gender than who is the more fit parent and if both are fit and both want custody to give both a fair chance.
But, did I feel it was highly unfair, back when I was 18 and still of the male sex, that women didn’t have to register? Absolutely. Am I doing anything about it today? No — much more interested in opening up all military positions to women, as well as opening the military up to LGBT people.
I would just be happy if all kids had to register for it when they turn 18 or at least not make registering for Selective Service a requirement for applying to college. I recall back in my college hunting days that the top line of every app I filled out was a requirement that males 18+ had to register under threat of automatic dismissal of application, fine, and prison.
This is why I’m highly suspicious of any “Men’s Rights” group or movement that mentions the draft — we’ve not had a draft, for men or women, since Vietnam and we’re very unlikely to have one in this country any time soon.
Like I said above even without the likelyhood of getting drafted I don’t the idea of only one gender being required to register just to apply to college.
Richard:
I think it is a mistake to allow people who either are of men’s rights movement or who advocate for them to control the rhetoric of the relationship between feminism and MRM.
So who should control it? I definitely agree that the control of the rhetoric of the relationship (or the relationship itself for that matter) should not be one sided.
JHC:
Attacking male-only Registration isn’t, IMHO, a fruitful path because Registration doesn’t mean one is going to be drafted. Assuming, G-d forbid, the Draft ever comes back, once a person is actually drafted they’d be classified as regards military service. Assuming they were given a classification that led to military service, THEN they’d have standing.
So instead of heading off misfortune we should wait until it happens and then try to do something about it?
Jeff Fecke:
MRAs don’t want equality; they want to go back to the inequal days. But happily, those days are gone forever.
A gross and incorrect generalization if I ever saw one.
Danny:
This is a disingenuous question that does not really address the substance of what I wrote. No rhetoric is disinterested; no rhetoric is objective. The question is which rhetoric represents both sides as accurately as possible. “Men’s rights” is not parallel to “feminism,” in my opinion. The latter is a far more comprehensive approach to the questions of gender, gender/sexual equality, etc.; the latter is a far more narrow approach, focusing primarily on one group’s legal self-interest. (And before you start in with all the crap about how feminists are also one-sided, go back and read what I wrote. My point is something else entirely.)
Sometimes I see seriously mentally ill people talking to themselves on the streets of New York. Sometimes they’re dangerous and you need to move out of their vicinity as quickly as possible. Sometimes they’re harmless and you just go about your business without worrying about them. But whatever you do, you don’t approach them and say “Excuse me, let me offer a rebuttal to your theory. Satan isn’t actually standing here attempting to steal your brain. You are mistaken”
With that said, I can’t help but wonder what can be gained from this discussion. Your blog, your rules, and while I’m a fan of this site I can’t help but find this “debate” an exercise in futility. (Excuse me, Mr. MRA, let me offer a rebuttal to your theory. We feminists are not actually out to castrate you and destroy all men…blah, blah, blah…)
Only three of my posts made it! I’m even less off-topic that usual!
(I’ll be back on that other thread in a bit — just wanted to see what got moved …)
With that said, I can’t help but wonder what can be gained from this discussion. Your blog, your rules, and while I’m a fan of this site I can’t help but find this “debate” an exercise in futility
Perhaps it’s insanity, doing the same thing over and over, looking for a different outcome, but I actually would like the MRA set to engage with the idea that feminism is not their enemy. All of their main complaints are ones that have resonance in the feminist community.
If the MRAs are serious about men being seen as equal parents and caregivers, men being valued for more than a paycheck, women and men being treated the same by the military, and so forth, then they’ve chosen the absolute wrong enemy in feminists — as all of those things are things that most feminists believe in and support. But I misdoubt that the MRA set is less concerned with the issue of men being seen as equal, and more concerned with how to make men out as superior. As superiority is a losing argument, they’re confined to arguing at the margins. But their choice of target gives the game away.
Jeff Fecke @ 46:
If you strip out the extremist views — “Choice 4 Men”, whatever the thing about Marmosets was, “reforming” marriage to make divorce more difficult — many of the issues that remain are, I can easily imagine, significant issues for men.
Take child support, for example — with the present economy, there are no doubt millions of “child support obligors” who are unemployed and wondering how the hell they are going to pay their child support, or even scrape up the money to pay an attorney to get back into court. All too often, including on this blog, the response to that is “Oh, you poor dear! It’s costs money to raise a kid!” Well, no duh.
A lot of the issues that confront men don’t confront women. Yes, men are treated “equally” (to other men) in the workplace. No, men don’t have to worry about abortion (for themselves) being safe and legal. Yes, men die earlier than women (on average). No, men’s reproductive systems seem to be simpler, medically.
The response to “Here are our issues” is typically one of “Oh, you poor dears — GO WORK ON YOUR OWN DAMN ISSUES!” or “TPHMT!”
Do men “deserve” to be dismissed? Depends on how one means “Deserve”. I think being “dismissed” is probably therapeutic. I think that a man who is genuinely interested, and not just out to get something from women, might be able to acquire a clue and subjugate his interests to feminist issues. I wouldn’t have the least bit of a problem telling a random man who said “Hi, I want to help, here are my issues” that helping first, and getting issues handled second is what makes the world go ’round.
But some of what I see is “That can’t POSSIBLY be an issue men face! It just can’t!” Some of the issues, like the non-existent draft, are just dumb. There is no draft, call us back when WWIII breaks out and the draft is re-instated. That is, if you can find a working phone. Or if you’re still alive. Men being disproportionately killed in combat? Women are already working on that — women learned decades ago that the choicest military positions, many of which lead to cush civilian jobs, require combat experience. Or at least “combat” experience. Like, being an engineer on a nuclear submarine. None of which have been lost in combat, ever, that I recall. We’ve lost two, that I know of, to accidents, but none to combat.
It’s hard to tease out the issues because some of the ones that men repeatedly insist are important, and with reasonable arguments, are the ones that get the least respect. And that means that things like child support reform always seem to get pushed onto the back burner because “It hurts women!” is such a powerful argument against reforming child support. Well, job equality for women “hurt” men. That’s part of what it means to have a structural advantage — men “lost” jobs (they didn’t deserve) and that’s part of what it took for women to gain equality. I’m sure my ex-wife will be really upset if (G-d willing) my child support is reduced (after 6 months of unemployment in a crappy economy). Am I concerned that she’s going to be “hurt”? Well, a lot less concerned that I’m going to lose my house.
And that means that things like child support reform always seem to get pushed onto the back burner because “It hurts women!” is such a powerful argument against reforming child support.
Hmm … I thought the problem was that one parent not paying child support hurts the kids.
Well, job equality for women “hurt” men. That’s part of what it means to have a structural advantage — men “lost” jobs (they didn’t deserve) and that’s part of what it took for women to gain equality.
I fail to see any way in which job equality is equivalent to child support. I also object to your use of the past tense.
Take child support, for example — with the present economy, there are no doubt millions of “child support obligors” who are unemployed and wondering how the hell they are going to pay their child support, or even scrape up the money to pay an attorney to get back into court. All too often, including on this blog, the response to that is “Oh, you poor dear! It’s costs money to raise a kid!” Well, no duh.
Meh, I’m one of them right now, thanks to the vagaries of the economy. But that falls squarely on me, because that money isn’t owed to my ex, it’s owed to my daughter. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t things about child support that I’d like to see changed (one major help would be altering the child deduction to account for child support; right now the child deduction is binary, whereas reality is a bit different).
But that’s an example of a place where MRAs could take the lead without being disagreeable. Rather than looking for ways to eliminate child support or to give them control of the purse strings, MRAs could look for ways to encourage child support payments. They could push for an end to welfare revenue recapture. They could simply push the argument that men are equal caregivers.
But as with domestic violence shelters, the MRAs usually complain that feminists aren’t taking the lead on these issues. Well, why should they? This could be a place where MRAs actually take the lead in pushing these ideas, in a way that is consonant with feminist thought and in a manner that doesn’t start with the question of what that bitch is doing with my money, but rather whether the current child support system benefits children in the long run, and reflects the realities of 21st century parenting.
But the MRAs don’t do that. They focus on “the bitch has my money,” and declare that society is therefore tilted toward women. Rather than recognizing that the binary structure of custody is an artifact of patriarchal ideas of parental responsibility (mom stays home, dad works), they complain that because this sliver of patriarchy hurts a sliver of men, that therefore the whole system benefits women. Rather than take a strong, positive stance that men can be — and should aspire to be — full and equal partners on the homefront, and working with feminists to make our workplaces more family-friendly, they complain that work kept them from being equal caregivers, and now the divorce court favors mom as the primary caregiver, just because she was.
All of the MRA complaints could be dealt with — and should be dealt with — by pushing for a truly equalitarian, feminist society. Again, though, the MRAs don’t push for that. They simply pick the two or three slight advantages women get in the sea of daily indignities they must endure, and declare that this is proof that women have it easy. It’s the same as those who claim affirmative action makes life easy for people of color, or that the ADA gives the disabled an unfair advantage. It’s easier to hate than accomplish something, and too often, that’s exactly what the MRAs do.
Well, job equality for women “hurt” men.
Funny how when men “lose” jobs to other men, that’s just the luck of the draw, or fair competition. When men “lose” jobs to women, it’s !!!unfair!!! Bah. If I had a dollar for every time I had to listen to someone (including some women) spew about how I “took” a job away from some man (“who has a family to support!!”), I could already retire.
Child support reduction doesn’t seem to be a problem for the trades; I have yet to hear of anyone being refused a reduction after showing proof of layoff (quitting would probably be another matter—but you don’t get unemployment if you quit, either).
All of the MRA complaints could be dealt with — and should be dealt with — by pushing for a truly equalitarian, feminist society. Again, though, the MRAs don’t push for that. They simply pick the two or three slight advantages women get in the sea of daily indignities they must endure, and declare that this is proof that women have it easy.
This.
chingona @ 48:
Which do you think hurts kids more — an unemployed parent being driven deeper into debt, or a custodial parent having to tighten up the kid’s budget?
“It’s about the children!” cuts both ways.
This is a cost-free position for them to take, because 1. There is not the remotest chance that draft registration, still less the draft, will be extended to women in the United States, and 2. They don’t have to actually do anything.
I understand Clarence’s ‘gripe’ to be a rebuttal of your statement in the other thread:
Because feminists have adopted a do-nothing approach to sex-selective draft registrations for the past three decades, their theoretical opposition to it is meaningless. Contemporary feminism has no credentials in this area. That its collective decision to focus on other areas might be justified or defensible does not give it any.
It’s not true that draft registration has no actual effect. To pick one: any male immigrant, including undocumented ones, who arrives in the US before the age of 26 and who fails to register by that age (Now why might an undocumented immigrant not want to do that?) is barred forever from becoming a US citizen.
Ain’t “Patriarchy” the theory of gender that claims that because a sliver of men get to occupy the top positions of institutional power, that therefore the whole system benefits men?
I think that when the sliver of men who are harmed by the binary structure of custody is added to the sliver of men who get funneled into the prison system, and the sliver of men who get funneled into combatancy, and the sliver that gets funneled into the most dangerous jobs, etc, the aggregate isn’t a sliver at all.
Daran,
Congratulations. You’ve successfully identified why men need to support Feminism. Because all the slivers of men who are HARMED are HARMED by the same system that BENEFITS a much smaller sliver of men.
Women are driven out of the workplace to provide economic control of women by men and to protect “Men’s” jobs. Women’s low presence in the workplace drives down women’s wages, further insuring that the man in a couple works, if there is a choice between who works and who doesn’t. “Men work, women raise kids” is further reinforced by demonizing men who want to be stay-home parents, usually by hurling emasculating insults their way.
When a divorce occurs, judges grant custody to the parent with the most contact. That “most contact” is a side-effect of patriarchy, it can even be part of the patriarchal system of controlling women, by disproportionately burdening women with the time consuming task of raising children, and leaving unethical men free to find a new wife and leave the old one and child(ren) behind.
Men who want to be parents are victims of men who are driven by power, greed and the desire for a fresh new female conquest. Once again, one group of men suffers while another group benefits.
The Feminist solution is shared parenting and equal wages, both of which will counteract the forces that set the entire mess in motion. Shared parenting allows parents to enjoy and bond with their children, and the children to enjoy and bond with both parents, without pressuring one gender or the other to assume a role they might not want in the first place.
I looked up your assertion about registration @ 82 and it’s apparently incorrect. See this — http://www.shusterman.com/natz-ss99.html
I think that a lot of the animosity between some groups and feminism comes from a (understandable) misunderstanding. Gynocentric feminism(ists) at best doesn’t do much for men and at worst is openly hostile and alienating. In addition to this, it also claims the loudest voice in the movement(it’s called feminism). People who want to address the concerns put forward in 53 and 54 run into a movement largely not interested in their grievances.
I’m not saying that there is no place in feminism for male concerns, but that mainstream feminism proceeds from “patriarchy is a system that privileges men and oppresses women” rather than “patriarchy oppresses both men and women”. This is also not to apologize for the for mentioned misogynists, who are genuinely anti-egalitarian.
The mens movement is small and young, and has a more difficult and less obvious set of issues to deal with. The problem I see is that often these people get lumped in with “MRAs” when really there should be a larger and more vocal androcentric feminist movement (masculist?) , generally known as the men’s movement.
Not to start a fight, but there is misandry among people who claim the feminist label. I don’t think it’s possible to hate an entire gender, yet be for gender justice and equality.
Daran (or anyone), what do you consider to be the best non-anecdotal evidence showing that there is a current, widespread pattern of sexism against fathers in custody court rulings, but no such pattern of sexism against mothers, when the mother and father are equally qualified to be primary caregivers?
I’ve seen a lot of horrible anecdotes about judicial unfairness from both fathers and mothers involved in custody cases. (I actually think it’s plausible that many of the anecdotes, on both sides, are true — since there are thousands of different judges making these decisions, there’s no reason that discrimination couldn’t be going on both ways.)
But the actual statistical evidence I’ve seen seems either inconclusive, or gathered with less-than-rigorous standards, or published in a way that obscures methodology. But I’ve never really done a detailed examination of the evidence, so it’s extremely possible that I’ve missed something.
Julie Herds Cats: The immigration link you provided doesn’t rebut Daran’s point (@52); in fact, it validates it.
Here’s the official government site:
It makes no exception for men now over 31, nor can I find, either elsewhere on that site, or that of the Immigration Service, any reference to such an exemption.
It’s possible that an exemption does exist which the government is keeping quiet about. Or the information on the site you cited could be out of date. Either way, it’s clear that there are some serious practical obstacles in the way of SS non-registrants seeking citizenship.
I have no idea. My research interests tend to be rather narrowly focussed, and custody isn’t one of them.
It’s true, as Clarence and Daran have stated, that Selective Service Registration does have real and damaging effects on men. I, for example, will never be able to get federal aid for college nor will I be able to get a government job. This doesn’t matter at all to me, thus my lack of effort on the issue, but it does matter to lots of other men. This is clearly an example of discrimination against men – or perhaps it’s better phrased as an impediment that men face that women do not. I’d never take the lead on this issue but I would support it, just as I suspect the major feminist organizations wouldn’t take the lead but would offer vocal support.
I have not, however, seen this raised as an issue by MRAs in discussions with feminists even though this could be a common cause. But I fear that MRAs would demand that feminists make this a priority rather than ask for their support as that’s pretty much been the extent of interaction that I’ve seen.
What would a non-anti-feminist, national organization against sexism against men be like?
I think there were clearly be a lot of issues for such an organization to cover — selective service registration, workplace deaths, , media presentations of men as beastial or idiots, bullying of wimpy boys, etc.. If the organization did nothing at first but release press releases and arguments, even that would be worthwhile, imo.
Anyone think of a good acronym? NOM is already taken by the homophobes, alas.
NAM. National Association of Men.
The sexism–about which I can only write anecdotally–often stems from the highlighted portion, so the question you ask is actually a bit inaccurate.
For example, the current tendency is to lean considerably towards the existing situation. This unsurprisingly means that mothers (who do most of the child care) end up with most of the custody.
But even the “best interests of the child” analysis wouldn’t necessarily support that link. If you’re talking about a 3 year old kid, for example, then you’re focusing on 15 years of parenting before they hit majority. The courts tend to focus on the question “who is a better parent/more involved/closer to the kid right now?” But of course that says nothing about either parent’s capabilities for such things, or about the eternal lifelong effect on the child. The ‘status quo’ bias of the courts reflects the ongoing sexism involved and the general treatment of fathers as a source of income rather than as a valued parent.
Furthermore, you seem to be demanding a fairly high standard, simultaneously asking for ‘widespread’ proof for men and proof of ‘no such pattern’ for women. What happened to the usual proof-of-sexism standard of “more”?
The ’status quo’ bias of the courts reflects the ongoing sexism involved and the general treatment of fathers as a source of income rather than as a valued parent.
Huh? If a man wants to be the primary care-giver for the children he will have, he should marry and procreate with a woman who is happy not to be the primary. If someone married a woman who expects him to provide well for the family — at a highly demanding job, if necessary — while she stays home with the kids, whose fault is it that he’s being treated more as a source of income than as a parent?
It is perfectly reasonable for a judge not to want to traumatize a three year old by taking him out of the physical custody of the person who is most aware of his level of development, likes, dislikes, etc. A judge who instead tried to make vague predictions about what the kid will be like 10 years later, and which parent at that time would be a better fit with the kid’s personality, would actually deserve the label “judicial activist.”
At trial, a judge is supposed to make decisions based on the facts as presented, not based on speculation regarding the future. If one parent proves to be good with a sweet-natured 3-year-old, but bad with a rebellious teenager, custody decisions always can be revisited with the same “best interest of the child” standard in mind. I know two kids who have had their custody arrangement changed when they got older and became a better fit with the previously non-custodial parent (in one case because the non-custodial lived in an area with much better public schools that would meet the kid’s “gifted” educational needs; in the other because the custodial parent had found the child too difficult to cope with as a single parent, while the non-custodial had remarried and could offer two parents in one home to meet the child’s needs for close supervision).
IAM: International Association of Men.
Also has a pretty nifty acronym.
One way to address that problem is, like MRAs, to concentrate only on the extremely rare case of custody decisions made by judges.
Another, more genuinely equal way, is to try and reform all of society so that fathers and mothers before divorce have a more equal division of childcare (both in the sense of having more stay-at-home fathers, and in the sense of having more families with a more even division of childcare labor within the family).
I think the latter way is more substantive and is more likely to lead to a more equal, less sexist society.
Unless you assume that parenting is a task which requires no knowledge or skill, then of course who has spent the last 3 years (or — in other, also realistic, examples, 5 years, or 10 years) doing the hand’s-on caretaking says something about capability for such things. This is even more true if there’s more than one kid; in my (anecdotal) observation, the difficulty of the juggling involved far more than doubles when a second child arrives.
It’s like saying that I’ve spent the last 10 years drawing cartoons says nothing about my capacity for drawing cartoons compared to (say) Jake Squid’s. Sure, in a theoretical sense, Jake could eventually learn to be as competent as I am — but in the immediate, are you ready to do this competently starting tomorrow sense, of course it’s not “nothing.” And to claim it is, is ridiculous.
Am I saying that this is the only thing which should determine custody? No, of course not. But it’s not nothing. And in a society which is extremely unequal in the division of childcaring labor, we would expect that a fair and neutral court system would be more likely to award custody to the person who knows how to do direct childcare, all else held even.
The way to fix that, imo, is not to say that childcare experience is worth “nothing.” It’s to try and bring about a more equal division of childcare before divorce happens.
And you think that your standard, by which the contribution of many mothers (and a few fathers) to childcare is dismissed as “nothing,” is better?
I’m not sure what “more” refers to.
As for proof of sexism, in my case it would be bringing salt to the ocean. I’m already convinced that sexism is operating in how the courts adjudicate child custody, and so don’t need any evidence that it exists at all.
The problem is, I’ve seen convincing anecdotal evidence of sexism in both directions. To get from that to the MRA claim — which is that significant sexism only exists in one direction — I need evidence that actually supports the MRA claim. (I’d also need evidence to be convinced that significant sexism only exists in the other direction.)
Daran,
From that same website —
As you can see, it’s not an absolute bar.
Amp @ 66:
Virtually ALL custody decisions are made by judges.
Are you really suggesting that fathers just agree to be screwed and then complain after the fact?
I recently requested a complete change in custody because my son got in trouble with his school, the law, etc. as a result of his mother becoming about as overly-permissive (IMHO) as can be. The judge stated that because he might run away, she (the judge) wasn’t going to change custody. The case is a complete nightmare, not because I agreed to the present situation, but because a judge has refused to even allow testimony in the case and has invented orders to suite her own biases.
JHC,
Virtually ALL custody decisions are made by judges.
Really? When I studied Family Law, the statistics showed that in most divorces involving children, the parents decide amongst themselves how to deal with custody, without necessitating an adversarial proceeding and judge’s order that contravened the explicitly stated preference of either parent. On what do you base your claim?
Men’s Equality Network, or MEN, perhaps?
Ampersand:
This is bogus for a multiplicity of reasons.
1. The remarks you quote, with one or two exceptions, can be placed into one or more of the following categories: i. justifying, condoning, or applauding Sodini’s atrocity, ii. blaming it on feminism or feminists, iii. blaming women, and iv, general rants about how unfair to men everything is.
I will provisionally accept your contention that the blogs you name would try to moderate misandrist feminist remarks analogous to category i. But those are a minority among the passages you quoted. Nothing I have seen here or anywhere else suggests that remarks analogous to categories ii. through iv are in any way beyond the blogospheric-feminist pale.
In particular, there are mass shootings of men all the time. Blaming “men” for these atrocities is a standard response.
2. You’ve cherry-picked the blogs you think wouldn’t allow such comments, and compared them to cherry-picked MRA/PUA blogs that did.
3. You’ve cherry-picked the metric. I could do the same: Another measure of feminist (respectively MRA) extremism is the proportion of North American college-affiliated feminist (MRA) groups who consider suitable for a speaking invitation, someone who would like to see most men (women) wiped off the face of the planet. At 12%, feminists surely have MRAs beat on this metric. Can you name a single MRA prominent enough to be invited to give a public speech, who looks forward to a world devoid of women?
4. You’re comparing the ideal moderation of the feminist blogs you name with the actual performance of the MRA/PUA blogs you cite. You least of all need me to tell you that moderation is a difficult task, and that moderators are fallible and miss things. So it’s quite likely that some comments objectionable to the mods would remain in view permanently or for some considerable time.
4. I don’t read MRA blogs very often, but my impression is that they are generally less inclined to use moderation to restrict what can be said by feminists and opponents alike. A culture which tends to prefer free-fire zones will inevitably expose more extreme positions
No it isn’t. But let me remind you of what I think was your core point:
I more or less agree with this. It is the primary reason I decline to self-identify as MRA or antifeminist. (There are other reasons, and other broad criticisms I’d make of them that don’t rise to the level of reasons.)
Turn it around, and you have a criticism of feminism. “But MRAs are even worse” isn’t a logical defense either. “But feminists are diverse; that’s not my feminism” is no more compelling to me than “But MRAs are diverse; that’s not my MRAism” is to you.
You’ve already acknowledged that you “cherry-picked” your quotes, and that “many condemned Sodini”, including Sacks, of course, so it’s not clear to me why he’s “unrepresentative”.
PG writes:
You do know that Feminism is about Subjectivity, not Objectivity. That Objectivity is a tool used by Patriarchy to deny the experiences of the Self. That women’s liberation came not from Objective “studies” but from individual women saying “This happened to me” and realizing that “This happened to me” seemed to happen to a LOT of women.
MOST liberation movements came about from Subjective experiences. “Objectively”, black men are criminals. After all, the Objective Statistics show that black men go out and commit crimes then wind up in jail. And queers — we’re all dysfunctional, mental cases. How do we know this? The APA “objectively” decided this. (The American Revolution was also a rebellion against the Objective desires of the Crown — just so you know that us Conservatives are well versed in Liberation movements …)
Feminist METHODOLOGIES aren’t just a good idea when they produce results you agree with. They are a good idea all the time because they cut through the BS of what is supposedly known “Objectively”.
In my case it is an absolute bar. I can never prove that my failure to register was not knowing and willful, so…
JHC,
It’s perfectly reasonable to say “I know this happens to somebody because it happened to me,” particularly when your experiences are not represented in academia, media, etc. and therefore you must be the beginning of their documentation. (E.g., the fact that no female slaves raped by their masters were able to write history textbooks doesn’t mean that this aspect of slavery didn’t happen.)
However, it is not reasonable to make the empirical claim, “Virtually ALL custody decisions are made by judges” based solely on personal experience, unless your personal experience encompasses “ALL custody decisions.” (Which yours doesn’t, unless you’ve been the parent to several million kids.) A female slave whose entire life was on a single plantation where the master raped every woman still would not have a sound basis on which to claim “Virtually ALL slave women were raped by their masters.”
If you can’t differentiate between the two kinds of claims (“X has been Y at least once” vs. “ALL X are Y”) then you might want to back off using personal experience as your basis for empirical claims.
Like the party identification of Louisiana politicians in the late 1970s, the percentage of divorces-with-children that require adversarial custody proceedings is a matters that can be fact-checked by someone who has no personal experience at all, and thus is a dangerous one on which to use personal experience as the sole source of wisdom while expecting others to nod and agree unquestioningly.
Thanks, PG.
One must add that the exhortation of anecdote over fact here is particularly egregious since Julie is urging us to accept father’s anecdotes over mother’s anecdotes.
Regarding exemptions to selective service, my housemate Matt (father of Maddox and Sydney) actually went through the process of getting an exemption to the “no student aid unless” requirement, when he first applied to college several years ago. Next time I’ll see him, I’ll ask him what the process was like, and what level of evidence was required.
However, just to be clear, even if there are exemptions, that doesn’t make selective service registration acceptable to me.
PG,
Okay, so it’s now a fact that women enjoy working for less money than men. How do we know this? Women keep working for less money than men! Objective acts support conclusions!
Easy!
“Agreed” has a meaning, and it includes the lack of duress. Very few “Agreed Orders” are submitted to the courts, most have the familiar Petitioner / Respondent titling in the … petitions and responses.
Most men “agree” to “custody” because they know in advance that the deck is severely stacked against them. Learning this requires, as with whether or not women “enjoy” working for less than men, actually SPEAKING to men and actually LISTENING to them. You cannot determine it by examining labor statistics and quickly “fact checking”.
And as with the argument you’ve chosen to dredge up, it’s often superficial “fact checking” that supports mythologies. You have to dig deeper, like looking at what happened to the 24th Infantry in Korea. Something you still don’t seem to have done, and something that would rebut “Truman Integrated the Military”.
You’d do well to actually STUDY the origins of Feminism. That and Conservativism.
Mandolin @ 75:
Hey, I read Animal Farm, I recognize that line —
“Four legs good, two legs bad.”
Julie, you’ve been warned by moderators over and over and over, but you persist in addressing other posters here in a tone that indicates a total lack of respect for other people. You’re significantly harming the tone of discussion here and making “Alas” a much less friendly place to have a discussion.
For that reason, you’re banned from further comments on “Alas” for the next two weeks. I’m sorry if this hurts your feelings, but you refuse to take more gentle forms of moderation, so this is called for.
The burden of proof is on the applicant to show that his failure to register was not knowing or willful. If he cannot meet that burden, perhaps because it was knowing and willful, then he cannot successfully apply for citizenship, either ever, as I read the official government sites, or until the age of 31 if the lawyer’s opinion you cited is correct and current.
Sure it’s not an absolute ban. I don’t need the ban to be absolute to rebut your claim that draft registration “has no actual effect today”. It does.
You also said:
May I ask if you have a similar suspicion of any feminist group or movement that mentions the vote? “We’ve”* not had disenfranchisement, for men or women, since just after the Second World War, and “we’re”* very unlikely to have gender-based disenfranchisement in “this”* country ever again.
The reason it’s “in the near future” for gender-based conscription and “ever again” for gender-based disenfranchisement is that the enactment of the 13th amendment was both a product of, and a driver of an ongoing process of social change which is now essentially complete and almost certainly permanent. The legitimacy of women’s right to vote is near-universally accepted in America, and indeed throughout the western world.
By contrast, the absence of a draft since the early seventies is not due to any change in social attitudes, but to the particular circumstance in which America currently finds itself. It has been able to achieve and maintain the status of military superpower, not by conscripting millions of soldiers, but by spending vast sums on training and above all equipping a much smaller number of well-motivated volunteers. This in turn is dependent upon the US remaining an economic superpower, which it is likely to do into “the near future”, but there is no reason to be certain that this will continue indefinitely.
So it’s well within the realm of possibility that America will find itself facing a threat or threats that require a draft in the not-near (but not necessarily distant) future. For that draft to be anything other than male-only would require a change in social attitudes every bit as significant as the one that has entrenched universal enfranchisement. Men’s claim to non-combatancy would need to be viewed as having the same legitimacy as women’s.
There’s no sign of such a change even begining. Until there is, until that change is complete, gender-egalitarians’ concerns about male-only conscription are legitimate.
*Your US-centricism is showing.
JHC,
Okay, so it’s now a fact that women enjoy working for less money than men. How do we know this? Women keep working for less money than men! Objective acts support conclusions!
Huh? We don’t know whether someone ENJOYS something based on their doing it, we only know whether or not they do it.
Most men “agree” to “custody” because they know in advance that the deck is severely stacked against them.
A nice moving of goalposts! First it was “Virtually ALL custody decisions are made by judges.” Now it is “Well, they WOULD be made by judges, if men weren’t preemptively agreeing to custody agreements they don’t really like out of their fear of the judges.”
This isn’t comparable to women’s working on average for less money than men, because it is observable that when women have the opportunity to obtain the same amount of money, they do not refuse it based on knowing that “the deck is severely stacked against them,” but instead lunge for it with whatever energy is left after being the primary domestic worker. If men refuse adversarial custody proceedings because they are convinced that any judge they get will be sexist and not take their claims seriously, they are being foolish, as egregious determinations are subject to review at the appellate level.
What I think is more likely is that the “deck stacked against them” is the “best interests of the child” standard that gives weight to the existing record of being a care provider. If I were the parent that had spent only a couple of waking hours each day with my children, while the other parent spent several hours and was very familiar with the children’s needs and preferences, then I’d probably skip an adversarial custody proceeding because I’d have to concede that by the standards of the court, I was less qualified for custody. If that constitutes a “stacked deck,” I can’t say that it’s one I find at all unfair.
And as with the argument you’ve chosen to dredge up, it’s often superficial “fact checking” that supports mythologies. You have to dig deeper, like looking at what happened to the 24th Infantry in Korea. Something you still don’t seem to have done, and something that would rebut “Truman Integrated the Military”.
Huh? Who said anything about Truman and the military? I just pointed out that your reliance on personal experiences to support empirical claims has led you astray before now. You aren’t old enough to have been in the military during the Truman Admin, so anything you say about that is based on a historical record, not on your personal experiences. But your reference to the 24th Infantry as some sort of disproof that Truman began moving the U.S. military toward racial desegregation is typical of another problem in your argumentation, which is using a single unit within a group to characterize the whole group. Mistreatment of a single all-black unit =/= Truman made no effort to desegregate the military. You have to look at totalities before you make claims about them. You cannot rely solely on a single example.
[Note from Amp: I’ve just banned JHC for the next two weeks. Since the final paragraph of PG’s post was, in my judgement, more about what PG and Julie know than about the issues being discussed — and since Julie won’t be around to respond — I’ve deleted the final paragraph. This isn’t meant to be a criticism of PG, just an acknowledgment that FHC won’t be here to respond. –Amp]
As a liberal, bi male, I find delving into gender or queer critical studies sites and discussions uniformly depressing. They all, ultimately, assert privileged knowledge of reality and of policy decisions based on personal identity and experience. Sometimes it takes a negative form – where if a white male whines about some form of social inequality he faces, whether perceived or real, people roll their eyes and gripe about “those with privilege complaining.”
Obviously, on balance, women face more challenges and social limitations than men do in modern western society. But an approach that merely tries to stack up privileges held by one sex or another is hopelessly zero-sum.
The men that are active in the men’s right movement as currently constituted are going to be hopeless whiners. There’s no hope in ever convincing them that they have it better than someone else. On the other hand, there probably isn’t any need to – i’d think organizations that had comprehensive social reform in mind could be magnanimous about many of the complaints of the MRM. The programmatic aspect of the MRM seems muddled and, in any event, besides the point. The point seems to be to make men who feel voiceless or powerless feel like they count.
Now, is the reason that some-to-most of those men feel voiceless or powerless because they are kooks or misogynist, and would like to roll back gender relations to the 1950s? Sure. But not all of them. And I suspect many of them wouldn’t keep feeling that way if they felt less threatened by the reality of gender equality – which tends to involve significantly less vitriol and posturing than online message boards discussing gender equality.
The real problem are the culture warriors, who rely on “feminists” as a way to stoke hate against the left and women, and many men who are genuinely sexist. The MRM types have more potential than whatever chunk of rush-limbaugh-listening-males who have internalized attitudes without thinking about them, because at least the MRMers are consciously examining gender relations, though they get some things wrong.
This is not obvious to me.
I’m told that the reason it’s not obvious is because I’m driving on a smooth road without knowing it. But those who say this never once stop to consider whether there might be some bumps on my road that aren’t on theirs, and they don’t know it.
Daran,
What are the bumps in your road that you think are wholly attributable to your being male?
I don’t understand what “wholly” means in the context of your question. If you are asking for bumps solely due to being male, then that is an unfair restriction. Nobody is on the road they are, and encountering the bumps they do, solely due to their sex.
Daran,
When I say solely, I mean that you would never encounter this particular “bump” if you were female instead of male. And there are certainly bumps in this world that are constrained to females.
My family is from India, which is not even a majority Muslim country, but nonetheless has “personal law” — i.e. law relating to marriage, divorce, inheritance, etc. — based upon one’s religion, such that Muslim Indians are bound by laws permitting men to have up to 4 wives, and to divorce their wives without “cause” simply by saying “I divorce you” three times. Until 2005, Hindu women’s inheritance rights were much lesser than those of their brothers. These are “bumps” in life that exist solely due to one’s sex; if one is female, one can be easily divorced or made one of four spouses or be left out of the division of property, but if one is male, one cannot.
So what are the bumps you encounter because you are male that would never occur if you were instead female?
Why “never” PG? Why not, “So what are the bumps you encounter because you are male that would occur less frequently if you were instead female?”
Although, it should really be, “So what are the bumps you encounter because you are male living in the First World that would occur less frequently if you were instead female living in the First World?” I don’t know about the MRA world, but few folks at Feminist Critics would deny that the situation outside of the West is very different, gender-wise, than inside it. And, you know, I personally can think of 24 such bumps of varying levels of importance.
Ballgame, a minor nit-pick about those bumps you linked to: It’s my impression that the large majority of circumcisions, at least in the US, are performed with some sort of anesthesia. (Most Jewish circumcisions are performed without anesthesia, but of course only a minority of baby boys are Jewish.)
Of course, by saying that, I’m not saying that a circumcision with anesthesia is all right.
I agree, that’s a reasonable question to ask, assuming that the goal is to build a picture of how sexism harms men in the first world.
Indeed.
And, just a thought that is triggered because today I’m trying to get through an online Child Abuse course so I can finally get cleared to take the California Marriage and Family Therapist exam (being a licensed MFT in another state for over 6 years and passing the national exam with flying colors isn’t good enough for California): Among the risk factors increasing the chances that a child will be abused by its parents, we find “Parents’ lack of understanding of children’s needs and child development.”
It reminded me of a (anecdote warning) conversation I had with a male acquaintance some years back, who was very angry that the court had awarded his ex-wife full custody of his 4-year-old son instead of him. “What’s your son’s favorite food?” I asked. He didn’t know. “What size clothing does he wear?” No idea. “How’s he doing developmentally – is he on track with his peers?” “Like what do you mean?” “Like, is he showing pre-reading skills? How’s he doing with delayed gratification? Can he follow three-step directions?” No clue.
Dads can learn all these things, just like moms can. But this guy had had four years to get any kind of idea about who his son was and how to parent him, and had… apparently not. And I was thinking of him as I was reading this workshop material, and thought “this is the kind of scenario that can lead to a parent losing it with their child because they don’t understand why their toddler can’t follow directions like ‘stop whining for the bubble gum – we’ll have ice cream when we get home.'” The more involved fathers are with their children, the more their knowledge of how to parent will catch up with women’s, but the horse has to come in front of the cart.
You know something I’d like to see MRAs (or more realistically, our imaginary non-anti-feminist men’s movement) address? I know men who are very personally hurt and upset that men face barriers any time they want to work with children or pre-teens in any role other than sports coaching, whether it’s informal babysitting, or being an elementary school teacher, or whatever. They take it very hard that there is this stereotype of men who work with children as pedophiles.
Now, side-stepping the facts that 1) the vast majority of sexual abusers of children *are* men, and 2) caution about small children in the care of males is not meant to personally insult any particular man or label him a child abuser… I get why men can be very hurt by this situation. (I personally know some awesome men in childcare and education fields.)
The thing is, for many of them, their perceived solution has more in common with that Bob Newhart MAD TV sketch than with good public policy – they want society to “just stop it” with the caution and concern.
What I’d like to see a men’s movement do is address this from the other side. Make a national call to stop sexualizing children, pre-teens, and even teenagers in the media (particularly girls as girls are more sexualized than boys and more at risk for sexual abuse, but children of all genders deserve not to be painted as sexual beings for the gaze of adults). Demand that they, as fathers or brothers or cousins or just friends to children, be able to have their relationships with the kids in their life without a barrage of sexualized images getting in the way. Stop tolerating the sexualization of children from other men, so when a guy at the office says “whoah, what a babe!” about your picture of your 14-year-old daughter or sister, when your buddy says he can’t wait until some starlet is 18, when there’s a crack down at the bar about “jail bait,” the response is “that’s gross.” Campaign against high heels and earrings for babies, beauty pageants for toddlers, makeup and belly shirts and thongs for 8-year-olds.
If men’s advocacy groups were organizing to try to stamp out sexualization of children at the source, and trying to shift male culture to one in which a sense of entitlement to anyone else’s body (child or adult) was shockingly deviant, rather than telling women to “just stop it” when it comes to having second thoughts about that male babysitter, I’d feel a little more optimistic that they were actually invested in social change, rather than just angrily reacting to carefully-chosen slivers of the effects of patriarchy without actually identifying the social forces behind those slivers.
Hmm. I guess I’d be inclined to say that I’d rather see education and awareness so that people know what to look for when kids are actually abused, rather than continuing to assume that any male who wants to be working with kids is an abuser? It’s unrealistic (IMO) to assume that we’re going to actually get rid of male sexual abuse of children, at least in any sort of reasonable timeframe, whether or not we get rid of high heels for babies. (Though I am probably no fonder of high heels for babies and jail bait remarks and so on than you are, Elusis.) But there must be something we can do to create more flags around real abusers when they show up, so that we can actually deal with those abusers as abusers rather than stigmatizing all men who want to care for children? Such campaigns could even happen simultaneously.
Ampersand:
The question is more personal than that. It’s about how sexism has harmed me.
PG (rearranged for reply):
Never? Under any circumstances? To any female in the world? I doubt any of the “male privileges”, or any female blogger or guest’s individual experience could be said, with certainty, to meet that criterion.
I don’t see anyone in this thread disputing this.
Yes, I do know that domestic law, both religious and secular, in some non-western nations contain many provisions which are egregiously anti-female. (There are undoubtedly egregiously anti-male laws in those same nations.) It is a Western Privilege, I suppose, that such facial inequalities in the law have been largely eliminated here. There are a few that remain, though, and all of them, except one, favour women. (Feel free to correct me if you can find any other actual law currently in force in a Western Nation that favours men on its face.)
The sole exception is the legal restrictions on abortion in some Western jurisdictions. That’s a big one which does real, significant harm to women. It’s not my intention in the following to imply that men suffer more or worse harm from sexist laws than women do. The harms to both sexes are considerable, but beyond that, I cannot see how to quantify them in any way that would make meaningful comparison possible. My only intention in the following is to point out some legally-enshrined “bumps” that discriminate against men in the west that you may not be aware of:
It’s already been pointed out in this thread that draft registration in the US does real current harm to American men, and those who would like to become American. Several other western nations practice conscription, or have only recently abolished it. Some of these drafts include women, others are male-only, but none impose a more onerous burden upon women than men.
Under British and US law, it is illegal to ritually mutilate a female person’s genitals without their consent. No such protections are extended to males, and vastly more of them are subject.
In England, a man who forces his genitals into a non-consenting adult’s mouth is guilty of rape and liable upon conviction to a sentence of life imprisonment. A woman who does the same thing is guilty of sexual assault and liable to a maximum of ten years imprisonment (upon indictment) or just six months, (upon summary conviction).
There are similar inequities in international law conventions, which are as applicable in the West as anywhere else: The Geneva Conventions give additional protections to female prisoners not afforded to men. The 1930 Forced Labour convention limits the use of forced labour to “adult able-bodied males who are of an apparent age of not less than 18 and not more than 45 years”*. The 1957 Convention further limited the circumstances in which forced labour can be used, but did not abolish it outright or extend the protections enjoyed by women between those ages to men.
*There are a number of exceptions, most notably military service, when others, including women, can legally be compelled.
None of which goes any way toward answering your question addressed to me personally about the bumps I have encountered, which are considerable, but which don’t stem from iniquitous law. I’ll leave that for another comment.
ballgame @87,
Sorry, I didn’t realize this thread was Westerners/”First World”-only. I’d thought from Daran’s remark @80 about someone’s “US-centrism is showing” that perspectives from countries other than the U.S. were welcome. Evidently for you, only those from Western countries are.
Re: the “female privilege” list you linked, item 3 about being “driven” to successfully commit suicide is an interesting window on your ideas about the psychology of male suicide.
Daran,
There are undoubtedly egregiously anti-male laws in those same nations.
If undoubtedly, could you name any of them? India doesn’t have male-only registration, much less active conscription (indeed, I don’t think there ever has been a draft in India even during its wars with Pakistan and China). Circumcision is culturally standard only among Muslims, many of whom also practice FGM (and FGM is not specifically prohibited under Indian law); the Indian government specifically did not issue any recommendations on circumcision after research indicating that circumcision might reduce the likelihood of contracting HIV, for fear that Hindus would protest the government’s promotion of a practice strongly associated with Islam.
U.S. law on FGM, to be precise, is as follows: On September 30, 1996, Congress enacted a provision criminalizing the practice of FGM as part of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. With two exceptions, it provides that “whoever knowingly circumcises, excises, or infibulates the whole or any part of the labia majora or labia minora or clitoris of another person who has not attained the age of 18 years shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.” So the illegality in the U.S. is restricted to the practice of FGM on minors.
Sometimes I see seriously mentally ill people talking to themselves on the streets of New York. Sometimes they’re dangerous and you need to move out of their vicinity as quickly as possible. Sometimes they’re harmless and you just go about your business without worrying about them. But whatever you do, you don’t approach them and say “Excuse me, let me offer a rebuttal to your theory. Satan isn’t actually standing here attempting to steal your brain. You are mistaken”
Wow. Hello ableism. I guess bigotries do tend to travel together in people’s brains.
It’s not about “this thread,” PG, it’s about properly contextualizing your question to Daran. Daran and you may refer to bumps which he, Daran, faced, but the reality is that the overwhelming marjority of those bumps weren’t ‘personal’ to Daran but things he faced as a male living in the West. Males living outside of the West certainly have their own ‘bumps,’ but their situations are different, often radically so.
I’m glad you find it “interesting,” and I’d be happy to discuss it at length, since it’s an important part of the male gender picture that gynocentric feminists often just don’t ‘get’. Here I’ll only point out that my perspective on this issue is similar in many ways to the perspective gynocentric feminists have towards the pressures which drive women to become anorectic. You’ll notice I don’t use air quotes when I talk about women being driven to become anorectic, and I suspect you wouldn’t either.
Amp: I’ve had a lot of difficulty trying to track down the current rate of anesthesia usage during infantile male circumcision, much less its evolution through time. If you have found (or find) any documentation regarding this I would greatly appreciate it if you could flag it to my attention. AFAICT, its usage was rare at least through the 1980s, and it’s my impression that it was not routinely used until the late 1990s at the earliest. If I’m correct, that means the overwhelming majority of men walking around today who were circumcised had the procedure done to them without anesthesia. And, FTR, unless there have been new developments in the past five years or so, topical anesthesia is only of limited effectiveness in this procedure and general anesthesia is not used because of the risks to the infant.
ballgame,
I have no idea where Daran has spent his life, and I do not go around assuming that everyone on the internet has spent his entire life in what you call the “First World.” He was calling someone out for “US-centrism,” which often is indicative that someone considers American culture/law not on point for his own experiences. He didn’t understand what I meant by “wholly,” so I provided an example from outside the U.S.
Here I’ll only point out that my perspective on this issue is similar in many ways to the perspective gynocentric feminists have towards the pressures which drive women to become anorectic.
But feminists’ noting the pressure to be thin (which leads some women to become anorexic) is drawing a very specific line: beauty important to valuation of women -> beauty measured in part by being thin -> thinness thought achievable through self-starvation. Surely men commit suicide for a much larger variety of reasons than this particular reason that feminists cite for women to become anorexic. It seems rather presumptuous for you to lump all reasons for men to commit suicide into “driven to it by __.” (What is it exactly that you think is driving them?)
Daran @52,
Again, what is it that you think feminist organizations should be doing about Selective Service or the (currently nonexistent) draft? Whenever making SS sex-neutral has come up, feminists have supported it. The presidential candidate who sought and obtained feminist support, Barack Obama, was the one who said women should have to register for Selective Service. The candidate who lacked such support, John McCain, said they should not. After 9/11, Anna Quindlen and other feminists argued that women should have to register for the draft if there were to be conscription (although most feminists seem to oppose all conscription). Feminists are as active in favor of a sex-neutral draft as the visibility of the issue allows. Opponents of feminism actually try to use the inclusion of women in a draft as a weapon against the Equal Rights Amendment.
As for the burdens of Selective Service registration, current law makes it very difficult for someone who arrived in the U.S. illegally to become a citizen anyway. Can you point to an example of someone who, if ONLY there weren’t this registration requirement, would have been able to become a naturalized citizen? The requirement of registration in order to qualify for federal aid doesn’t seem particularly onerous — you have to fill out a lot of paperwork in order to get such aid, so why is this particular document, IN THE ABSENCE OF A DRAFT, a particularly burdensome one?
I am very much in favor of women’s being subject to the same legal requirements as men, but it’s a stretch to claim that SS registration is so burdensome. In contrast, I can think of some statutory differences that really do make a difference in citizenship law.
For example, if a U.S citizen male has a child overseas with a non-U.S. woman to whom he is not married, that child does not have automatic U.S. citizenship. In contrast, if a U.S. citizen female has a child overseas with a non-U.S. man to whom she is not married, her citizenship nonetheless transfers to the child. When the Supreme Court reviewed this statute and upheld it as Constitutional by a 5-4 majority, guess where the feminists on the Court (female justices O’Connor and Ginsburg, and social-liberal justices Souter and Breyer) came down on the question? They dissented, saying that the law unconstitutionally discriminated between the sexes.
The idea that feminists have such overweening power in the U.S. that if they support something, it automatically will happen, is ludicrous. Feminists support lots of measures for gender equality, including ones that will give men the same privileges as women, but are often unsuccessful in obtaining enough support to put them into law. And the MRAs’ painting of feminists as man-hating, “gynocentric,” just-trying-to-advantage-women, etc. detracts from feminists’ ability to advance gender equality.
Fair enough, I suppose, PG. Daran has been around so long I just assumed everyone knew he was a First Worlder. At any rate, I stand by the need to distinguish between First and Third World contexts when discussing gender, as failing to do so will frequently lead to confused discussions.
I completely agree that it’s plausible that men have a more diverse set of pressures driving them to kill themselves than women do in becoming anorectic. It’s also beside the point. I completely disagree it’s presumptuous to use the phrase “driven to it” here. When would it be inaccurate? People don’t kill themselves because it sounds like fun. The exact reasons go beyond the scope of this thread. The point is, you put the word in air quotes and are reluctant to acknowledge its validity because men in the U.S. are clearly dealing with stronger pressures in this arena than women, a significant female privilege.
Ampersand Writes: (posting no. 2)
August 7th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
– Well, Amp, we’ll see if this comment appears. –
Never! I’ve deleted it and now it’ll never, ever be seen! Nah-ha-ha-ha!
I cannot see my comment now.
It appeared, but only for a short time.
What I posted, was in no way any personal attack. I said, in EU, women in my native country retire 10 years earlier than men while demanding the same retirement allowances and military unpaid services are only for men, while women refuse even 1 week of unpaid service in a hospital or elderly home.
For sure, feminism is NOT about gender equality, especially when men are forced to pay alimony 30 years after divorce.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1555877/Court-ordered-payout-30-years-after-divorce.html
or when feminists demand to close all prisons for females, because they claim, women are different.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6444961.stm
Rather biased your blog really, that you even have to delete links from the BBC.
Btw, your postings at antimisandry.com are still there.
MRAs do not delete opposing opinions which disagree with us because we know, our arguments are reasonable and fair.
Item 2 on the female privilege list doesn’t seem like a privilege to me, and I don’t understand the “men driven to suicide” comments either. I think people of both genders are driven to attempt suicide more often than we’d like by a whole lot of things. Unlike anorexia, I don’t think of suicide as a problem disproportionately belonging to one gender.
Significantly more men die of suicide than women, yes. However, I have never heard the idea that this was because there are more suicidal men than women before. Rather, depression and suicidality are more frequent in women than men, and women who attempt suicide are far more likely to survive those attempts. Having the knowledge to actually kill oneself and the tendency to use very lethal methods (particularly firearms) is more common in men.
I see these facts as more of a difference between the genders than a disadvantage to either. It is a sucky thing that women seldom have the opportunity to get help instead of self-injuring or attempting suicide, and that they do those two things in larger numbers than men. It is a sucky thing that the men who become suicidal are far more likely to take their lives than women.
This is something I’ve heard from a variety of sources, including my psychologist and one of my psychology textbooks. I do not have a link at this time, but I could probably find one.