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!
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I see these facts as more of a difference between the genders than a disadvantage to either.
I think it’s a disadvantage to both.
The stats I’ve seen for most countries is that 3 times as many women attempt sucide, and about 4 times as many men are sucessful (China being a notable exception, where sucide rates for both sexs are near equal). Men are also massively more likely to take others with them (murder then sucide, rather than just suicide)
Part of this may be choice of method (although I would query _why_ different genders pick different methods)
In the UK, there is a clear problem in lack of men going to the doctors for any problem, and being less likely to be proscribed anti-depressants. Both could lead to differing sucide rates – Men are less likely to get any help and turn to drastic methods. Women often get anti-depressants without proper supervision, which can lead to sudden unplanned sucide attempts -> less sucessful?
Also men are less likely to feel it is appropiete to talk about their feelings -> less likely to get help.
I suspect the huge gap in attempted sucide is caused by hormonal birth control, which can have a depressive effect on women – enough to cause an gender difference in attempts perhaps?
The UK government have been doing big pushes of a) getting men to go to doctors and b) reducing stigma on mental health problems – hopefully these will help lower rates for both genders.
I suspect the huge gap in attempted sucide is caused by hormonal birth control, which can have a depressive effect on women – enough to cause an gender difference in attempts perhaps?
Or women are more likely to lead lives that cause them to feel hopeless and trapped with no resources to ever change their situation? Just a thought.
Thanks to Quill for reminding me of that. I have always heard the same statistics – that women attempt suicide more and men succeed more. That more men than women own and know how to use guns doesn’t strike me as a good example of female privilege.
Indeed, but in this case, it was indicative of what appeared to be an assumption by Julie that “we” are American. I’m not sure precisely who “we” was meant to cover, but context demands that it at least include Clarence, who has also not indicated where he comes from.
On the other hand, I did say “It is a Western Privilege, I suppose, that such facial inequalities in the law have been largely eliminated here.”, the last word of which was intended to convey that I am a citizen of the West, and the whole sentence to convey my acknowledgment of the privilege which comes with that. In fact, I was born and brought up in England, and have lived in Scotland for nearly two decades.
I agree with McCain. They should not. Neither should men.
(For the record, I supported Obama. I still do)
Yes, feminists incoherently both oppose conscription and support sex-neutral conscription. That’s not the worst position it’s possible to take on the subject, but it’s not one which gives then any credentials, particularly given their lack of recent activism on the subject. No I do not consider the visibility of the issue to be a valid reason for lack of activism.
My position is simple: I oppose conscription and anything which contemplates it, such as registration. I oppose it for men. I oppose it for women. I reject all arguments for its extension, including the argument to extend it to women on equality grounds. I oppose it.
I can’t speak for “Opponents of feminism”, who are a diverse bunch of people. An ERA would make single-sex conscription unconstitutional. That the Government could remedy this by extending conscription, rather than abolishing it, would not be a reason for me to oppose an ERA.
I’d like to see an anticonscription amendment.
That’s an astonishing argument. I don’t think I have ever heard anyone, least of all a feminist, suggest because something is difficult, there’s no objection to making it impossible.
Would you be similarly blasé about a hypothetical law barring women from the Presidency of the USA? There isn’t a woman in history whom such a law would have prevented from serving.
Let us suppose – hypothetically – that there was a Selective Service program for women, contemplating a motherhood draft. In the event that the Government were to decide that volunteer mothers weren’t providing the nation with enough babies, women from the list could be required to receive impregnation.
Would it be your position that obliging women to register IN THE ABSENCE OF A DRAFT, would not be onerous? Do you think feminists generally would take that view?
Because I don’t. I think feminists would be screaming from the rooftops about it.
It’s your privilege to believe that.
Thank you for providing yet another example of a Western law which discriminates against men on its face.
I’ll repeat the question I raised earlier. Can anyone cite a current example from international law, or the domestic law of a Western country which privileges men over women on its face?
Men also commit suicide more often in countries which have strict gun-control, such as the UK, so I doubt that’s the reason. Perhaps more women attempt suicide, and fewer succeed, because society mounts a more effective response to female attempted suicides than to males. Certainly nothing remotely helpful was offered to me by the medical/social services in response to any of mine.
Yes, feminists incoherently both oppose conscription and support sex-neutral conscription.
Why is that incoherent? Do you also believe that one cannot simultaneously support the troops and oppose the particular war in which they are fighting? There is nothing incoherent about applying a principle of equality even to situations that you would prefer didn’t exist in the first place. I would prefer that insurance companies deny coverage to no one, but so long as they *can* deny coverage, I would fight tooth and nail to prevent them from denying it on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, etc.
There is nothing incoherent in prioritizing the principle of equality over the substantive policies (are insurers allowed to refuse coverage? will we have conscription? etc.) to which the principle may be applied. As a general rule in a democracy, when a policy applies to everyone equally, it is unlikely to be as burdensome as a policy that applies only to certain people, because voters will refuse excessively burdensome policies that will apply to all of them, whereas they might be OK with policies that will apply only to some Others.
I don’t think I have ever heard anyone, least of all a feminist, suggest because something is difficult, there’s no objection to making it impossible.
Except of course it’s not actually impossible — as Julie’s link indicated,
In the event that the Government were to decide that volunteer mothers weren’t providing the nation with enough babies, women from the list could be required to receive impregnation.
Would it be your position that obliging women to register IN THE ABSENCE OF A DRAFT, would not be onerous? Do you think feminists generally would take that view?
Because I don’t. I think feminists would be screaming from the rooftops about it.
The draft has been found Constitutional (probably due to the fact that conscription is deeply embedded in Anglo-American history), whereas forced pregnancy is not Constitutional (no prior instance in Anglo-American history of the state’s forcibly impregnating women). So the problem would be with the government’s bothering to register people for something that violates the Constitution in the first place. I don’t think the registration would be onerous; I think the contemplation of the unconstitutional act would be what feminists would find objectionable. I’d also object to the government’s registering only Christians for an unconstitutional possible future prohibition on Christian worship, even though I am not a Christian and have faced non-state persecution by Christians. One can be concerned about a violation of the Constitution without being subject to it.
Thank you for providing yet another example of a Western law which discriminates against men on its face.
You’re welcome! Nice job on completely ignoring that this is also an example of feminists opposing sex discrimination against men, while non-feminists support it.
Perhaps more women attempt suicide, and fewer succeed, because society mounts a more effective response to female attempted suicides than to males. Certainly nothing remotely helpful was offered to me by the medical/social services in response to any of mine.
What were the medical/social services offering to women who attempted suicide at the time that you did so?
Not all “attempted” suicides are of the same character. I.e. by no means all such attempts actually contain serious intent (and the accompanying attempt) to end up dead.
My understanding was that men were more likely to do things like jump off bridges and shoot themselves in the head: most men who tried to suicide were actually trying to kill themselves. A higher proportion of women who tried to suicide were not actually trying to suicide, but were in reality trying to get prevented and/or caught as a method of getting help/awareness/attention/whatever.
This is going on memory, not current studies. But I don’t think it’s really an issue of gun ownership. It’s not all that hard to off yourself if you actually want to do it.
It’s not all that hard to off yourself if you actually want to do it.
The only people I know who have done it made several attempts. The successful ones made the attempts close together and escalated the methods (e.g. from CO poisoning to gunshot). A bit of luck as well as planning that no one interrupted in between.
Incidentally, as I reread my comment it seems like it might come across that I’m implying that women don’t have motivation to suicide. That wasn’t my intent: while I believe that there are some differences in gender presentation of suicide attempts, i have absolutely no position on whether any adjustments based on those differences would change the comparative male/female statistics to any real degree.
My recollection is that a higher percentage of women use pills or cut themselves, both of which have higher failure rates period and take longer, allowing for the possibility of discovery in time to save your life. I don’t know that it is correct to say that represents less seriousness. Certainly in some cases, using a particularly ineffective method might indicate lack of seriousness/cry for help, but I don’t think you can generalize to say that a majority of women who attempt suicide aren’t “serious.” (And I put serious in quotes because I think even in successful attempts, you cannot really know what the person’s intentions were. I recall a study of people who survived suicide attempts carried out by jumping from high places. 100 percent of them regretted it on the way down but it was too late to do anything. They lived by luck alone. Does that mean they were less serious and those who did not survive were more serious?)
(Sailorman, we cross-posted. My understanding is that the difference in success rates relates to differences in preferred method. Why men and women choose different methods probably is kind of complicated. I shouldn’t have implied gun ownership was the only factor, but I don’t think you can discount access entirely when you ask why fewer women shoot themselves in the head.)
And … I feel like I shouldn’t even need to say this, but since the accusation is that feminists are “gynocentric” … I am not indifferent in the least to suicide or even suicide among men. I have several men in my life, people who are very important to me, who suffer from mental illness and who have attempted suicide in the past. But, and I realize this is anecdotal, none of them felt driven by issues particular to their maleness, but rather by general hopelessness and sense of worthlessness, that is, severe depression. And women tend to suffer from depression at higher rates than men.
Daran,
You have attributed the higher rate of successful suicide among men to female privilege, but you have not articulated what aspect of female privilege is at work or how it works. I don’t see it. It’s not that I’m “gynocentric” or think that every man is just living the easy life. It’s that you have not presented any reason for me to attribute this to sexist oppression of men or misandry.
If your explanation is to point to some of the other items on the list – like men feeling pressured not to express their emotions or have close friendships – I think blaming feminists for that is misplaced. I and just about every feminist-identified woman I know think really narrow definitions of masculinity and constraints on emotional expression among men are bad and a product of stifling gender roles that deny our individual humanity.
Current psych theory tends to indicate that while there are various ways of attempting suicide, all of them are serious. Even people who are only repeatedly threatening suicide, obviously as a way of gaining attention, should never be ignored as “just trying to get attention.” Just because they want attention does not mean that they do not also want to kill themselves.
And guess what? Nothing remotely helpful was offered to me, either. Any useful help I’ve ever had, I’ve had to go out, look for–and pay through the nose for–myself.
And I can’t fail to notice that for all the talk of males somehow being more serious, or efficient or whatever, about their suicide attempts (oh those girlies, always using dramatics to get attention while we are in Serious Pain) when compared to females, you are just as present and able to contribute to this conversation right now as I am.
1) In the US, the obvious example is the law (regulation, strictly speaking) keeping female soldiers out of combat positions. (Yes, I know MRAs will claim that’s an advantage, because it has a protective effect. But none of the women I’ve met in the armed forces see it as an advantage, and the bottom line is, women’s acts and choices are being restricted in a way men’s are not.)
2) In the US, the laws around marriage and changing your name in many states make it extremely easy for a newlywed couple to choose to use the husband’s name as the family name, and both difficult and expensive to use the wife’s name as the family name.
3) In the US, many states have all sorts of restrictions on acquiring an abortion.
4) The federal government has laws against funding abortions, which leaves both poor pregnant woman and pregnant women in the armed forced without coverage for a serious (and in some cases dire) medical need that effects only women.
5) In most of the US (New York State is the exception that I know of), it’s illegal for women to take their shirt off in public, whereas some men routinely go shirtless on hot days.
(Of course, unequal laws — while important — are not the end-all and be-all.)
Oregon would be another exception:
Is it illegal for women to register for selective service?
Sailorman:
Yes it is.
The difficulty comes from that part of your mind – call it the “survival instinct” if you like – that will do anything it can, will make you do anything you can, to stay alive, no matter what you actually want.
I don’t know how to commit suicide successfully, never having succeeded at it, (obviously). My later attempts would include many small steps, no single one of which was such that ‘if I do this, I’ll die’, which would trigger the block. For example, the last attempt involved eating a packet of rat poison in tiny doses over the course of a couple of hours.
Crys T:
I’m sorry to hear that, both that you were driven to suicide, and that nothing helpful was offered in response.
That of those who attempt suicide at least once, about twelve times as many men than women eventually succeed is a matter of statistical record. Nowhere have I said that suicidal women use dramatics to get attention, or that they aren’t in serious pain.
While I was looking for an answer to Mandolin’s question, I came across this backgrounder, which doesn’t answer Mandolin’s question but is still interesting. Some bits from it:
The above suggests that if US feminists are ever successful in getting the armed forces to remove the ban on women in combat, then as a result of that, a lawsuit against the sexism of selective service might be successful.
I think that’s the most likely route to reform of the sexism in selective service, since as I understand it, changing the army’s rules on women’s role in combat doesn’t require an act of Congress. And once that happens, people can sue, if they can find a way around the standing problem.
The other possible route is for Congress to vote to change the selective service law. However, the Senate is structured in a way that makes it very easy for a minority of Senators to prevent change, and to benefit Senators who go along with the status quo rather than pushing for changes. So change from Congress seems less likely, to me.
Also, contrary to what Daran wrote upthread (that for the “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.”), it doesn’t appear that the barrier is the general public’s attitudes:
Here’s a chart I just came across, which I’m putting here because I think it might enrich the discussion, not because I think it makes a particular point.
This comes from a journal article called “The Gender Paradox in Suicide,” which you can read via a blurry pdf file here.
I find it interesting that the male/female ratio is so clearly high in the English speaking countries — not all countries with a high m/f ratio are English speaking, but all English speaking countries have a high m/f ratio. There’s obviously a cultural factor there, but I don’t know what it is.
Although this chart doesn’t cover the former Soviet countries, it’s my (perhaps mistaken) impression that nowadays the highest m/f suicide ratio in the world is in the former Soviet countries.
Also for the purpose of facilitating discussion, people may want to check out “Women and Suicidal Behavior: A Cultural Analysis,” by Silvia Sara Canetto (pdf link).
There’s a lot more in the article than I can sum up, but she argues that a major reason for the difference in suicide rates is that people are acting out the gender roles assigned to them by their culture:
She also writes, about societies with higher female suicide rates:
Does anyone know of a similar article with a focus on differences in motives for suicide among men in different cultures?
Wow, that article is fascinating.
My anecdata supports the US rate, though I’m wondering how family situation, and specifically whether one is a parent, figures in.
You know, I’ve never liked it when people try to classify suicide as dastardly immoral (not merely just inadvisable and unnecessary, which we can all agree on), but I’ve never really been able to articulate why. And I suppose this is it.
I think the chart does make one point, Amp. I think it would be difficult to look at that chart and conclude that American men’s affinity for and easy access to guns was anything more than a secondary factor affecting the relatively higher rates of male suicide.
I don’t know whether this adds anything to the discussion per se, but I feel like I should say this:
My sister has attempted suicide more than once, and after talking with her and coping with it etc, I am as sure as it’s possible to be that her attempts were all about ending her pain. It was not targeted at anyone, or set to make anyone “pay.” I have very mixed feelings about the fact that she tells me that not hurting me and my parents is why she is still here, because that means that she is enduring pain that she can’t bear very well, on our behalves.
And for what it’s worth, my understanding is that both times the only reason she lived is that someone found her before the overdose/ CO had finished killing her.
::sigh:: It’s only one family’s story, and doesn’t weigh much in the balance of the discussion. I just feel like someone should say that not all female suicides/attempts (much less all suicides/attempts) are generalizable, or selfish, or directed to manipulate anyone.
As for the MRA thing, my problem for the most part with the logic is that the issues they are identifying are in large part due to the patriarchy and/or capitalism– the same structures that feminism and other movements have been engaging with for decades, centuries even. So why is it that their sense of grievance seems so focused on women, or feminism? It’s like saying that your landlord is ripping you off, and then yelling at your roommate for it. When your roommate is the one who pointed the problem out in the first place, has been getting ripped off worse than you (and maybe even *by* you at times), and in fact has already been filing motions with the housing board to get your landlord to knock it off.
I agree with the people here who say that there needs to be a real movement to address the ways that patriarchy oppresses men. And, while they would be good allies to feminists, this feminist, at least, will take them a lot more seriously when they start targeting the system, not women.
Ruth, what culture are you and your sister from? Because the quote from Professor Canetto wasn’t talking about why women attempt suicide in the US, or in western nations generally, which is where most “Alas” readers come from.
I’ve not read the judgment, so can’t comment in detail on the reasoning behind it, but that seems silly. The draft isn’t only for those combat roles from which women are excluded. Men could be (and were) drafted to all kinds of roles.
A third possible route is outright abolition, which is the route I’d favour.
I put less weight on that kind of survey than perhaps you do. Analogy: Suppose a survey of judges showed strong agreement with the proposition that those convicted should be sentenced without regard to their race and sex, would you necessarily conclude that judicial attitude was not a barrier to equitable sentences, if their actual sentencing practice did not reflect their stated position?
The gender-norm of male combatancy – that it’s men’s place in society to fight, and women’s to be protected, is deeply ingrained. I think a lot of those answering ‘yes’ to the survey question you cited would still shudder inwardly that little bit more, if there was a real prospect of their neighbour’s daughter being sent into combat than they would shudder about their neighbour’s son.
Getting a male-only draft past the people is hard enough. The Government is not going to make it even harder for itself.
Selective Service is odious to me, not so much for the actual burdens, or lack of them, placed on men by their obligation to register., but because it is representative of the entrenched cultural norm of male combatancy. It’s the norm that I want to fight against. Eliminating Selective is a tactical goal, not a strategic objective.
Silly it may be, but it is indeed the foundation of the decision’s logic. Quoting Rehnquist (who wrote the decision):
Daran:
In footnote 17, Rehnquist responded to this argument by quoting a general saying “in an emergency during war, the Army has often had to reach back into the support base, into the supporting elements in the operating base, and pull forward soldiers to fill the ranks in an emergency; that is, to hand them a rifle or give them a tanker suit and put them in the front ranks.”
Justice White opened his dissent by disagreeing with that, pointing out that if it were true that every single person in the army had to be prepared to become combat troops at a moment’s notice, then — given the exclusion of women from combat — the conclusion would have to be that there should be no women at all in the army.
Anyhow, my point remains: By pushing for equal treatment in the armed forces — a push that opposes “the entrenched cultural norm of male combatancy” — feminists are (if we succeed) very likely setting up the end of male-only selective service.
My point here is not to have the 1000th round of “feminists don’t care about men! Yes they do! No they don’t! Yes they do!” with you.
Instead, I’m arguing that in this case, as in most cases, sexist inequalities against women and men are linked. It’s not a zero-sum situation; pushing for the end of the exclusion of women from combat is also pushing for a reform of the sexism of selective service registration, because the two sexisms are actually just slightly different manifestations of the same sexism.
(Similarly, if the MRA movement ever got itself together to do something useful — which they will never do, because that would require them to take time away from the feminist-bashing and ex-wife bashing that gives their lives meaning — and actually mount a campaign against Selective Service, that would help end the exclusion of women from combat.)
That’s the route I’d prefer, as well. But I think it’s unlikely, alas.
Agreed again.
Taking Ampersand’s final point first:
No, of course not. Nor is facial discrimination the end-all and be-all of inequality in law. A law that prohibits rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges is facially non-discriminatory, but highly discriminatory against the poor in effect.
My decision to focus upon facial discrimination in this subthread follows from PG’s example of a “bump” that affects women, and her (his?) question about what “bumps” have affected me particularly. I haven’t suffered at all as a result of laws which facially discriminate against men or males – I’m genitally intact, have never been subject to conscription or draft registration, etc. The point I wanted to emphasize in this line of discussion is that These kinds of “bump” exists for men in the West even though I personally am a western man who has not hit any of them. (There are other bumps I have hit.)
OK, I will admit “regulations” where those regulations have the force of law.
That those articulating a particular point of view are “MRAs” has no bearing on the its validity. In this case, I think the point is very valid. Male-combantancy is, as I have already pointed out, a deeply entrenched gender-norm whose effects extend well beyond the military. It is one of the great gender-systems which oppress men qua men, and freedom from it is one of the great unexamined and unacknowledged female privileges. It is a smooth road that women don’t know they’re on.
I do not accept that female soldiers are in general less free than male ones. There is a vast system of interlocking extra-legal processes which suck men into the military, and into the most dangerous roles within the military. The positions that women can’t get into, are also the positions that men can’t stay out of.
But at the level of facial discrimination, which is the level I asked about, this regulation is discriminatory against women, and therefore is admitted.
This isn’t an area of law I’m familiar with, but consider it provisionally admitted.
You could argue this both ways. A law which restricts only women’s access to abortion is identical in scope to one which restricts everyone’s access to it, with a single exception that I’m aware of. The facial inequality of the former law has, modulo that single exception, absolutely no effect.
This is not to say that laws restricting women’s access to abortions aren’t massively discriminatory against women, only that such discrimination doesn’t arise from its facial non-neutrality.
I have to say, having said all that, that this is a less-than-convincing argument. So consider laws which restrict abortion for women admitted too.
Is that actually written into the law? Or is it simply a matter of how public order law is interpreted.
It used to be the case in England that only a man who exposed his erect penis could be convicted of indecent exposure. A naked women, no matter what her state of sexual arousal, could only be prosecuted for the lesser (and non-sexual) offence of disorderly conduct or some other catch-all. I’m almost certain that this is no longer the case, but the change was very recent.
* * * * *
So, on the one hand, we have current western domestic laws which on their face discriminate against men in the areas of conscription, protection from genital mutilation, and international laws discriminating against them in respect of forced labour, and protection during war.
On the other, we have current western domestic laws discriminating against women’s voluntary participation in war, keeping their name on marriage, access to abortion, and their right to bare breasts.
I have a number of observations. Firstly, both lists are rather short, which supports my contention above (#93) that “facial inequalities in the law [applicable in the west] have been largely eliminated…” I concede that the immediately following point: “all of [those that remain], except one, favour women” is incorrect.
I could however say all those that remain that disfavour women, except one, are relatively minor in terms of their extent, or practical effect. All of the combat roles barred to women are also barred to men who are less that A1 physical specimens. The number of women who, but that that regulation, would serve in such a role is quite small. Similarly I would not expect legions of women to start baring their breasts in public were all laws against it to be repealed. Probably more het couples would take the woman’s name if it were made easier, but I can’t imagine – and if this is privilege speaking, please let me know – that many women feel that their lives are destroyed by their inability to retain their name on marriage.
That leaves abortion, which as I have already acknowledged is “the biggie”.
On the other side, the Forced Labour Convention’s facial exclusion of men from protection doesn’t have a significant effect upon men in the west, which doesn’t use forced labour in the ways contemplated by the Convention. (It’s exclusion of conscription and convict labour from its scope does harm men particularly, but these provisions are facially neutral.) There’s also an argument that the particular protections granted to women by the Geneva Conventions are redundant because woman and men are already protected from the abuses proscribed, by other, more general gender-neutral provisions within the Geneva Conventions and other applicable international law. A counter-argument is that it is much easier to make the case that an act is proscribed if there is a specific proscription.
Millions of males in the west have been deprived of a body part at an early age. The sex excluded from protection by the law is the sex most likely to be victimised.
Conscription in the west has destroyed vast numbers of men’s lives, many of them in the most literal sense. They’re dead. The idea that, because there’s no draft currently in the US, it doesn’t matter, strikes me as appallingly complacent.
* * * * *
In conclusion, both lists are quite short, and both contain items which are relatively minor in impact. On the other hand, both lists contain other items which very significant indeed. It does not appear to me to be the absolute no-brainer that feminists think it is, that men are in every way privileged and women oppressed, at least in the west, at the level of facial discrimination in the law.
Daran wrote:
I wonder if you, or anyone else in this thread, have read a book called Manhood in the Making? The author, I believe, is a guy named David Gilmour. The book is an anthropological review of manhood values across a wide range of cultures. His take on male expendability would, I think, interest you. I don’t have the time to dig the book out and say more, but it would provide some interesting context and perhaps some worthwhile challenges to the argument you are making.
You know, I’ve never liked it when people try to classify suicide as dastardly immoral (not merely just inadvisable and unnecessary, which we can all agree on), but I’ve never really been able to articulate why. And I suppose this is it.
My especial favorite was officials at Gitmo referring to prisoner suicides as acts of war.
Justice White opened his dissent by disagreeing with that, pointing out that if it were true that every single person in the army had to be prepared to become combat troops at a moment’s notice, then — given the exclusion of women from combat — the conclusion would have to be that there should be no women at all in the army.
And yet we’ve seen that non-combat troops do end up in combat, and I’m sure they had before, too.
I wondered about that because it seems like it would be germane to conscientious objector status, too.
Thanks, Ampersand, for quoting the Supreme Court’s majority decision and for summarizing the dissent.
One very positive point to be taken from the majority decision is the implication that “Congress arbitrarily choosing to burden one of two similarly situated groups” is or might be unconstitutional. The Court’s error was one of fact, not law: It is simply not true that “the [only] purpose of registration is to develop a pool of potential combat troops.” Nor does the decision in so far as you quoted it address the questions of whether the group of “women who meet the physical criteria to be combat troops” is “similarly situated” to the group of physically capable men, and if so, whether their exclusion from service is an “arbitrary burden”.
The fallacy here is that because “what I want” has the characteristic of “equality”, it necessarily follows that anything that has the characteristic of “equality” is something that would be “what I want”. “Everyone dead” has the characteristic of “equality”, but I much prefer “some people alive” with all the inequality that goes along with it.
In the case of combatancy, having noted the gender inequality, I want to relieve its burdens from those who have it, not to extend them to those who don’t. It’s certainly an interesting observation that allowing female volunteers into combatant roles would undermine the legal rationale for sex-selective draft in the US, but if the likely consequence of that is to expand the scope of conscription to both sexes, then that’s a step in the wrong direction.
Aside from any possible effect upon the draft, there really is something bizarre, almost macabre, that the feminist movement campaigns for female volunteers to have the same opportunity as the menz to get themselves killed oppressing brown-skinned people in foreign countries in order to line the pockets of a future Republican President’s cronies.
Actually the argument is more like this:
1. Feminist: Men are privileged. All else equal, men are better off than women.
2. Critic: Not so, for example, only men are subject to draft registration.
3. Feminist: Feminists oppose that.
4. Critic: Feminists have no meaningful record of opposition during the past three decades.
5. Feminist: That’s because we have other priorities.
In each case the critic’s point is a rebuttal of the preceding feminist point. Of the feminist responses, point 3 is a non sequitur, and point 5 affirms point 4 and contradicts point 3.
1. As argued above, it’s pushing in the wrong direction.
2. It does not logically follow that because male enforced-combatancy and female enforced-noncombatancy are mirror images, eliminating one necessarily helps with the other. Freeing women from the obligation to wear dresses all the time has not enabled men to wear them.
3. Enforced combatancy, and enforced noncombatancy are in no way equal oppressions. Enforced combatancy is by far and away the worse.
I am uninterested in your ad homs against MRAs. Any cultural shift in the US away from forcing men to fight would reduce the ability of its government to wage aggressive war, which in turn would reduce everyones opportunity for combat. Including women.
And that would be a very good thing.
I’ve not read it, no. I would point out, however, that male-expendability and male-combatancy – though clearly related and overlapping – are not congruent.
The point, which you’ve ignored, is that most people–regardless of gender–who attempt suicide don’t get “offered” help, despite what you asserted above. Surely the whole point of your bringing up that *you* hadn’t had anything help offered to you implies that women usually do. If not, why the hell bring it up?
The idea that women who attempt suicide and fail routinely get support and sympathy is laughable. Anyone, even if they have a vagina, who’s attempted suicide has to really want help enough to make a huge effort and monetary investment (if they’re lucky enough to be able to afford it) in tracking down and getting help.
I completely agree. I was just think about this, for reasons completely unrelated to this thread earlier today, and I thought about that idea that “suicide throws love away like garbage,” and how wrongheaded that is. I understand why those who are left behind feel angry, but they do have to realise that it really isn’t about them: sometimes pain, of whatever kind, is just too much.
Ummm yes, agreed. And feminists in general are AGAINST conscription. Explain how the existence of conscription–a product of the patriarchy that feminism opposes–somehow makes feminism invalid.
Male circumcision is also a product of the patriarchy and most feminists are also opposed to it, especially when performed on minors who are unable to consent. Again, how does this prove that feminists are blind to your concerns or just don’t care about males?
I’d also like to point out that male circumcision is NOT a “Western” thing at all. All the religions that practice it are, as far as I know, either of Middle Eastern origin or African. And as far as Western countries go, it’s only the US (and possibly Canada, I’ve got no information on that) that practices it. Europeans think you’re all sexually twisted Puritan loonies for doing such a thing when there’s no religious obligation to.
When you realize that many promotions within the military require combat roles, you will realize that barring women from combat is a way of barring them from promotion. Indeed, in a war without a front such as we have been fighting recently, no one over there is in a “non-combat” role and many women have, in fact, been in literal combat. Yet they are not in combat roles and are therefore barred from certain career paths. Those career paths are reserved solely for men. This is one reason feminists support allowing women in combat roles. Another reason, as was briefly mentioned earlier, is that women not participating in combat has historically been used against women as a reason we don’t deserve equal rights under the law (indeed it was a major reason the ERA didn’t get passed). Women being barred from combat has been used and will continue to be used to discriminate against women until it is ended.
(I’d also add to Amp’s list of statutes/laws that women do not have the constitutional right not to be discriminated against on the basis of sex. In fact this is the reason why barring women from entire military careerpaths is allowed).
Daran:
I know that, though I would argue that what you are calling male-combatancy–by which I understand you to mean the assumption, expectation and legal requirement that only men will go into, can be conscripted for, combat–is a subset of male expendability, and one of the interesting things about Gilmour’s book is the take he has at the end on male expendability, and a man’s embracing of his own expendability, as a defining feature, almost a categorical imperative, of manhood/traditional masculinity in those cultures where manhood is most strongly valued. I hasten to add that his book his primarily descriptive in nature–and that I am being descriptive here–and so please don’t read into this anything resembling an argument about what manhood should or shouldn’t be. Anyway, I think you would find it interesting, perhaps especially for the range of cultures that he studies.
No, the argument is:
1. Feminist: We want equality of the sexes.
2. Critic: But men are oppressed too; for example, only men are subject to draft registration.
3. Feminist: Feminists oppose that.
4. Critic: Feminists have no meaningful record of opposition during the past three decades.
5. Feminist: Technically 28 years. And who has mounted what you would consider a “meaningful record of opposition”? What are the lawsuits filed by non-feminists that have gotten past a motion to dismiss? Is there a group lobbying the legislature bodies for the expansion of draft registration to women, that feminists have failed to support? Someone who opposes such an expansion, on the grounds that it is somehow ‘incoherent’ to support both sex neutrality as a procedural matter and an end to conscription as a substantive matter, certainly can’t hold himself up as an example of opposing sex selective draft registration specifically, only as an example of someone who opposes all registration.
You seem to have left out:
6. Critic: Feminists, having established organizations, should be the ones at the forefront of this issue. What MRA or MGTOW or whatever other men’s group we can think of has done is irrelevant. What’s important is that feminists are not fighting for my issue in ways that I find sufficient. Therefore, feminism = bad for men.
At least that’s what I’ve been getting out of every discussion of this type that I’ve seen.
Yeah, as someone put it to me the other day, why is it that feminists are responsible for activism and if they don’t provide sufficient activism, then BAD FEMINISTS. But the critics aren’t responsible for apparently any activism at all ever?
Whatever. I think it’s been substantively demonstrated that this discussion is about as productive as [insert appropriate metaphor here.]
leah,
It’s more complicated than just “women do not have the constitutional right not to be discriminated against on the basis of sex.” First, the Constitution doesn’t explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, etc. either. The 14th Amendment has been interpreted that way based on the courts’ understanding of what it was intended to do, but it doesn’t actually mention race. If you went just by the words in the Constitution, there’s an equally good justification for applying the same level of scrutiny to sex discrimination as to race discrimination.
Which brings me to Second: women do have some constitutional right not to be discriminated against on the basis of sex. The courts use a “heightened” or “intermediate” scrutiny standard for laws that facially discriminate on the basis of sex, meaning that such laws must be “substantially” related to an “important” governmental interest. Military interests are pretty much always considered “important.”
This can be contrasted with the “strict scrutiny” standard for laws that distinguish people based on race, such as affirmative action, which are justified on the claim that certain carefully-tailored affirmative action programs serve a compelling government interest in remedying past discrimination, increasing racial equality and providing racial diversity in education that will translate to workplaces, including the military. The military has filed briefs in favor of maintaining affirmative action in education, in order to ensure a supply of officers who will have some relationship to the racial makeup of the enlisted men.
Third, men lack that right not to be discriminated against on the basis of sex just as much as women do, as I think the dueling lists of how American law treats men and women differently would indicate.
Daran,
1. That’s based on your opinion of conscription, which I know that many MRAs and antifeminists do not share. (In particular, the anti-feminists who are politically conservative in other ways as well do not object to conscription.) There is nothing inherent to supporting men’s rights that logically requires ending conscription.
2. Amp’s assertion is that given the Court’s reasoning in Rostker v. Goldberg, formally allowing women into combatancy would eliminate the main rationale for not including women in Selective Service registration requirements. You ignore that this is the controlling precedent in U.S. law regarding a sex-selective registration in favor of making generalizations about how things “logically” work. You cannot reason your way through Constitutional law based on how first principles “logically” work; you must attend to precedent. (Given that English law also works on a precedential basis — indeed, it lacks a written Constitution that some laymen Americans will endeavor to use as first principles from which to draw logical conclusions — I don’t understand why you’re so resistant to this.)
3. Agreed that enforced combatancy, in the sense of actually having to go into combat, is worse than not being allowed to go into combat when one wishes to do so. However, in the absence of an actual draft, men are not facing enforced combatancy, only the hazy possibility thereof. The Republican presidents you deride are actually very opposed to reinstating the draft, because that would make wars less politically popular. It’s much easier to convince people we ought to invade countries that pose a limited risk to the U.S., so long as the people know neither they nor their children will be forced to join the military.
Hazy Possibility Of Very Bad Lack Of Choice About Going Into Combat < Real, affects-women-every-day actual policy of lack of choice about going into combat.
Actually the assumption, expectation and requirement that sucks men into military service is a subset of combatancy.
When I say that combatancy and disposability (or expendability. I see no difference between the latter two. Do you?) overlap but are not congruent, I mean that, while there are a great many dynamics that fit equally well under either rubric, there are others that don’t. The school-to-prison conveyor which destroys so many poor young men, PoC in particular, is disposability in action, but not really combatancy. The boy who is denied protection from the schoolyard bullies, and just told to hit back, isn’t being expended as such.
[quote]Can anyone cite a current example from international law, or the domestic law of a Western country which privileges men over women on its face?[/quote]
In addition to the examples Ampersand gave, consider the fact that marital rape is still not a crime in the U.S state of Tennessee, or at least it still wasn’t as recently as 2006. I don’t know if things have changed since then or not. And I don’t know about any of the other states.
1. There’s really no non-awkward place to say this, which is why I haven’t said it so far, but: Daran and Cyrs T, I am really sorry to hear about both your past troubles, and hope you never find yourselves at the point of attempting suicide again.
(Sorry so awkward; my social skills have always sucked.)
2. Daran, for most of your comments to me, my response is pretty much: What PG said.
3. Daran, you wrote “I am uninterested in your ad homs against MRAs.” This is a pet peeve of mine, but that wasn’t an ad hom, it was just an insulting observation. An ad hom is a particular kind of false argument: “The argument made by X isn’t true, because of such-and-such trait of X.”
If it can’t be boiled down to “X’s argument falls because X is a big dorkface,” then it’s not an ad hom
(The exception is when the subject of the argument really does make X’s personal traits relevant — for instance, if we’re arguing over if a shirt of a particular size would fit X, then one could say “the shirt won’t fit, because X is very fat” without it being an ad hom.)
4. Daran: “Any cultural shift in the US away from forcing men to fight would reduce the ability of its government to wage aggressive war, which in turn would reduce everyones opportunity for combat. Including women.
And that would be a very good thing.”
As PG pointed out, there’s already been a huge cultural shift in the US away from forcing men to fight wars. Unfortunately, the number of people willing to volunteer to join the army and fight is great enough so that there remains a lot of opportunity for presidents to get us into wars of choice.
(And not just Republican presidents, either; Obama, for instance, is hugely expanding US presence in Afghanistan, which I think is a horrible mistake.)
What’s really needed is a huge cultural shift away from the idea that war is a reasonable thing to do in any case other than an absolute last resort. Or a huge decrease in people’s willingness to volunteer for the armed forces.
But obviously, I agree that something which would make it harder for the US to go to war would be a very good thing.
I wrote:
But then again….
As far as I know, this is still going on under Obama.
So there’s now a huge cultural resistance to having a draft, where any male in the wrong age group is vulnerable. But we seem pretty accepting of forcing those who volunteered for four years to nonetheless serve beyond the time they believed they were volunteering for.
Amp,
From what I understand, stop-less is technically not considered forced combatancy because somewhere in the pile of paperwork you sign to join the military, there’s a provision that under certain conditions, you may be required to extend your tour of duty beyond what you initially signed up for. If you sign the contract, you aren’t being “forced” except inasmuch as any contract forces people to do things they’d rather not do.
PG, that’s technically true.
But I’ve read many soldiers say that they didn’t understand that when they signed up. Given that, and that few or none consult with a lawyer before joining up — it still seems to me to be substantially a case of forced military service, even if technically it’s not.
Ampersand, and all,
I am sorry– I think I misread sylphhead’s comment (#120) to mean the exact opposite of what it does mean (now that I parse it out correctly) and that flavored my whole comment.
The thing is, I have encountered a lot of that attitude, the “your sister was just trying to manipulate you into X, it was a passive-aggressive way of trying to get attention, etc” from a lot of people, and I misread it into the comments here. I am sorry, it was my mistake.
Crys T at 132 writes
” I thought about that idea that “suicide throws love away like garbage,” and how wrongheaded that is. I understand why those who are left behind feel angry, but they do have to realise that it really isn’t about them: sometimes pain, of whatever kind, is just too much.”
That’s what I was trying to say– she says it much better.
Daran and Crys T, I am also very sorry to hear that you have been down that road. I hope you are OK. Thank you for sharing your perspective.
If a woman’s marriage contract to her husband includes a promise to “love, honour and obay” him, is it technically not considered rape for him to force her to have sex?
Unless you were forced to sign the contract in the first place.
Would any of the lawyers here care to explain to the rest of us what it means for a contract term to be “unconscionable”?
Aside from the points already made, it should be pointed out that those on the receiving end of American military firepower are often, perhaps usually, men who have been forced.
Aside from the points already made, it should be pointed out that those on the receiving end of American military firepower are often, perhaps usually, men who have been forced.
I would like to be able to respond with a comment like, “The US doesn’t fight aggressive wars so how can we be held responsible for the misdeeds of people who attack us?” but it would be a false argument since the US so clearly does attack first.
Actually I think it does boil down to that: MRA’s are dorkfaces therefore nothing they have to say carries any weight.
To borrow a concept from Chomsky, willingness is manufactured.
I was bowling to a liberal wicket when I made that comment, but if you delete the word “Republican”, my point still stands.
Well both, of course, which simply reinforces my point. Feminist activism on military matters focusses on increasing women’s opportunity to participate, thereby increasing the pool of willing combatants.
Tell me something. Do you think increased female participation in the US military will, on the whole 1. increase, or 2. decrease the military’s effectiveness. Or do you think it will 3. have no effect.
Think carefully before answering.
There’s a constant tension within feminism – and I’m sure you know this, but you’re arguing as if you don’t, so I’ll go ahead – about whether the goal is to simply move women into a position of equality with men within our current social, economic, political, etc. climate or whether the goal should be radically remaking the entire social order. It’s probably fair to say that most of the big, mainstream feminist organization fall closer to the former. So of course they’ll advocate for things like equal opportunity to serve in the armed forces. Some of those organizations’ leaders may simply not be that leftist, and some of them may feel that given how unfriendly the U.S. is to even the slightest hint of radicalism, may simply have decided to fight the battles they think they can win. And you’ll find plenty of individual feminists who feel their feminism demands they also fight against, say, militarism, and think fighting for inclusion in the military (or the church hierarchy or whatever patriarchal, irredeemable institution you want to pick) is deeply misguided.
I agree with those who say it’s not actually contradictory to favor equality in a procedural sense (like selective service registration) while opposing the whole business on substantive grounds. But I think it’s also important not to fall into the trap of “The feminist position is …”
Well both, of course, which simply reinforces my point. Feminist activism on military matters focusses on increasing women’s opportunity to participate, thereby increasing the pool of willing combatants.
I can’t speak for all feminists, but my opinion on women in the military is as follows:
I think that joining the military is a foolish thing to do whether you’re male, female, of ambiguous gender, or an alien whose gender might best be described as “orange.”
However, there are people who want to join the military, for whatever reason and since there are, I see no particular ground for discriminating against women who want to join or fill particular positions. If a woman is well suited to, say, being a combat marine, why shouldn’t she be one?
As far as the question of whether having women in the military would increase or decrease its efficacy, I think that the answer depends strongly on how it is done and what you mean by efficacy.
Daran, here’s the passage in question:
What in there can be fairly rephrased as “therefore nothing they have to say carries any weight”?
By the way, do you disagree with me that a great many MRAs seem very bitter about their ex-wives?
* * *
As for the armed forces thing, I agree with Chingona and Dianne. Part of the point of feminism is that women should have equal rights to make their own choices — even when the particular choice made isn’t a choice that I’d wish them to make. Your view (ETA: on this issue) seems to be that you favor equal rights for women unless they make a choice that disagrees with your politics.
Presumably number 2. Anything that gives the military a larger pool of potential recruits will either give them a larger armed forces, or allow them to be more selective about accepting recruits, either of which would probably make them more effective.
It is, however, possible that a vast increase in female participation might make the military marginally more peaceful, particularly in occupying and police actions. Studies have shown that female police officers are, on average, more likely to de-escalate confrontations and less likely to use violence when dealing with civilians; the same thing may apply to the military used as police. Also, female soldiers are less likely to commit rape.
(ETA: Note that “on average” and “less likely” doesn’t mean “in 100% of cases”; there are of course some abusive female soldiers and police, and many many non-abusive male soldiers and police. Nor am I saying that all male soldiers rape; on the contrary, I believe the large majority never rape.)
Similarly, if the army is more selective about who it accepts (female and male), then it will be more likely to reject applicants with criminal and violent backgrounds, which could also be beneficial.
So in that way, it’s possible that “more effective” will also mean “less abusive.” However, this is obviously completely speculative. And, of course, many of the most important abuses — like a tactical decision to rely on distant bombings rather than boots-on-the-ground, which has the result of reducing US casualties but increasing civilian casualties — happens at the command level, not at the troop level.
Stop being so condescending.
Exposing the internal contradictions of a system is a well-established mode of critique. I’m surprise, and quite honestly disappointed if I’ve given anyone the impression that I don’t know what I’m doing.
All “of course” means is that it is normative for them to do so, which indeed it is. It’s also interesting how the solution to “men and women are in different positions” defaults to “move the women to where the men are”, rather than the other way about, or “move both to someplace else”.
Personally I find the idea of the US military prohibited by regulation from employing anyone in combat roles to be rather appealing. I will concede, however, that this is probably not a realistic goal for the near future.
Since you mention it, I do think it a bit absurd to demand that women should have the same right as men to stand in a pulpit and preach 1 Timothy 2:11-12.
Of course not. Feminism is only a monolith when one is singing its praises.
Ampersand:
I’m sorry if that came across as condescending. The question contained a pitfall in so far as answering one way would expose you to a conservative critique, while answering another would expose you to mine. Perhaps you think the trap was obvious, but it’s very difficult to judge what is and what isn’t obvious. I don’t think a “watch out” call was inappropriate.
[Re MRAs]
That certainly seems to be the normative assumption within feminist circles:
1. MRA: xxx harms men.
2. Feminist: MRAs have done nothing to remedy xxx
Far from rebutting point 1, the feminist’s response vindicates it, but that never seem to be the intended implication.
I also feel – and this is a personal thing – that your invariable labeling of me/my blog as MRA/Antifeminist on those rare occasions you cite me/it is well-poisoning.
Bitter, yes, at the system, and at various women, including a lot of ex-wives, whom they feel have used the system to screw them over.
But they have no monopoly on bitterness.
In general, I’m in favour of people’s freedom to make their own choices, provided those choices don’t trample on the freedoms of others. Going to war doesn’t satisfy that latter criterion, but I’m slightly at a loss as to how I’, failing to favour equal rights for women, given my view that nobody should be allowed into combat roles in the US military.
I also disagree with the implication that men have a “right to make their own choices” in respect of combatancy, to which women could and should be granted an “equal” right. This whole discussion has been characterised by the assumption that men are essentially free agents able to chose or decline combatancy or otherwise to act freely, unless there is something specific, such as a draft, or stop-loss to limit their freedom. My remark about “a vast system of interlocking extra-legal processes which suck men into the military, and into the most dangerous roles within the military” has been completely ignored.
I presume you mean 1. More effective, since that is what you appear to go on to argue.
The only data point I have on the subject is the observation that, of all the organised forces participating in the Northern Irish conflict, the IRA had a much greater female casualty rate as a proportion of their total casualties than any other, which suggests that women might have formed a greater proportion of their exposed membership. They were also by far and away the most effective force (they inflicted vastly more casualties than they took from British Security), and one of the more abusive. (They inflicted many civilian casualties, as well as on members of their own and other nationalist organisations.)
That said, their female casualty rate was still a low 4%, the absolute number of female casualties was just 11, and the various organisations were so different that it’s not really possible to draw even flimsy conclusions from this.
You’re not exposing an internal contradiction. You’re “exposing” that different feminists, different women, have different priorities and views. Hardly a surprise. And feminism is not “a system.”
This is complete and total bullshit.
Daran, I didn’t ask you what (in your biased, feminist-loathing judgment) the normative assumption within feminist circles is. I asked you to support your claim.
You claimed that something in this particular passage:
…can be fairly boiled down to: “MRA’s are dorkfaces therefore nothing they have to say carries any weight.”
What, in that specific passage, did I, Ampersand, specifically say, that can be reasonably summed up as “MRA’s are dorkfaces therefore nothing they have to say carries any weight”?
It’s a simple question. Please answer me with a direct quote from the particular passage you made a claim about. Or — horrors! — admit that you can’t back up that specific claim, withdraw it, and move on.
Actually, it’s not “invariable.” Although I may have messed up once or twice, in this thread I’ve been specifically and consciously not referring to you as an anti-feminist or an MRA. (Note that referring to MRAs in a response to you, is not the same thing as saying you’re an MRA.)
Since you’ll clearly think that’s what I’m doing regardless of what I actually say, however, I’ll stop bothering.
Ampersands comment #2 I eventually figured out what PUA and MRM meant, but I have no idea what MGTOW is.
Ampersands comment #2 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.
Yes, correct, but this is all not that easy, as many men who find their first contact with MRAs are indeed full of hate, many of them were badly treated by women and sometimes, I agree, it is very difficult to discuss it out with them. MRAs trying to give such men some positive ideas about how to master their future.
If you look around in Men’s Rights Forums (and I know you do that frequently) you will find many comments from regular MRA members asking men who just signed up and are interested in that movement to refrain from anything hateful against women in future and to work hard for a new start and to overcome their past.
MGTOW means ‘men going their own way’.
MRAs do not promote hate or violence against women.
What we are doing is keeping a good communication among men, often using the internet, asking them to tell us their personal problems and telling them how they can avoid (or avoid to repeat) some certain mistakes in their life.
Might be that feminists do not like such advices and are calling all MRAs to be misandrists, but this is a baseless accusation, as many MRAs are married, have children, are in a financial good position and enjoy a peaceful family life.
I personally consider the present Western legal situation and especiually the execution of these laws in US/UK/EU as rather biased against men – I advice men therefore to study about their legal situation and the execution of such laws, their rights and their obligations before doing anything, which might harm them.
Laws are not the same in every corner of this world. To move on as man over the borders of your own country and to start a new life elsewhere with entire new people around you is one of the ideas of MGTOW.
Other MGTOW ideas are about to avoid any contact with females. Enjoy your life as a single. There are also recommendations about saving money and to retire overseas, and many other possible ways men might go.
MRAs are about to fight – for example in legal battles – for their rights in already existing problems, like father’s rights. MGTOW is more into prevention, to think about how avoid such problems from the very beginning on.
Hope, this short information helps…
Is the UK now no longer part of the EU? Damn you, Kilroy!!! OK, I admit, my exposure to MRAs has come from the trolls who bombard online feminist forums with hatred and the nutty antics of Fathers For Justice. Possibly not an accurate picture.
I personally have nothing against men working together to get rid of oppressive attitudes and practices. But I do have something against the attitude, expressed so often by those trolls and FFJers, that the only way they can do this is on the backs of women and children.
And, because I know this is coming: no, feminism does NOT advocate women’s walking on the backs of men in order to improve the lives of women. That’s not feminism: it’s the silly fantasy of feminism that these guys like to believe.
Amp & Ruth: many thanks for the concern. It’s appreciated, but honestly, it was all a long time ago. Nowadays, I literally do laugh about it.
I’m having trouble following you here. Can you explain a bit?
@CrysT comment 158
There are significant differences between the UK and other EU members, for example concerning immigration policy and monetary politics. There are still immigrants waiting to enter UK from France, despite there shouldn’t be a border and there are still the Euro and the British Pound.
There are also considerable differences in family laws in UK you find nowhere else in the EU, these differences are important for MRAs to study about and to inform men, that laws are not everywhere the same.
About hateful comments posted on feminist forums, you should read what kind of comments MRAs are receiving all the time. It works in both directions.
Father’s Rights are complicated – there are many complaints which are justified.
It cannot be simply said, all these complaints are troll-like solely for the reason to make trouble.
Most of these ‘father rights’ cases are unnecessary, it seems both ex-wife and ex-husband are often not much willing to solve their problems regarding their children peacefully. So what to do?
As MRAs we can only advice all men not to act blindly. Check first about your legal situation and decide slowly and carefully what you will do as next step.
Don’t have time right now to engage fully in this discussion, but just wanted to note this article, which indicates that women in Iraq and Afghanistan are doing the work of combat without being formally recognized as combatants. In other words, they get the costs without all the benefits. The article also notes that women’s equality in military service can assist in ending DADT and allowing LGBT members to serve openly, and that a recent poll indicates 53% of Americans favor allowing women to serve on equal terms with men (unsurprisingly, a position favored more by liberals, Democrats and independents, younger people and Northeasterners than by conservatives, Republicans and older people).
Daran @146,
I don’t know how it is where you live, but in the U.S., “obey” has been replaced in most Christian ceremonies with “cherish.” Also, if you were to take the words of the marriage ceremony as the actual marital contract, wouldn’t “’til death do us part” be a serious constraint?
Unless you were forced to sign the contract in the first place
The United States does not force people to sign the contract to join the military. The circumstances of one’s life might make military service an extremely appealing option (poverty, desire to speed up one’s naturalization as a citizen), but being forced to sign a contract would invalidate the contract. As for unconscionability, it’s a nearly-dead concept in contract law these days.
I took Contracts with Patricia Williams (a well-known Black feminist), and she emphasized the doctrine of unconscionability as having developed in contract law as a kind of push-back to exploitation, but even she acknowledged that the enormous increase in U.S. law regulating what can be in contracts in the first place has made unconscionability a very difficult argument on which to win in court these days. I think the only way one could win on a claim that the stop-loss aspect of the contract should not be enforced would be by claiming some form of fraud/misrepresentation (e.g. the recruiter claims that the maximum time you can be required to serve is the initial 4-year commitment) or incapability of forming a contract (underage, intellectually disabled, etc.).
Aside from the points already made, it should be pointed out that those on the receiving end of American military firepower are often, perhaps usually, men who have been forced.
Forced by other, non-feminist men, right? I’m not aware of a country the U.S. has targeted that has had a military run by women or feminist men. In any case, I’ve never seen anything international law that makes it the responsibility of one country to engage in military actions only where they can be sure that their opponent has non-conscription military. Indeed, international law recognizes the long history of conscription as an aspect of full citizenship.
Daran @153,
It’s also interesting how the solution to “men and women are in different positions” defaults to “move the women to where the men are”, rather than the other way about, or “move both to someplace else”.
Because it’s easier to convince the powerful (which, for the umpteenth time, are mostly men) to move women to where men are than it is to convince them to move men to where women are, or to move both to someplace else. As chingona has already pointed out, the concept of sex equality/neutrality is radical enough, and it’s essentially a procedural matter. Using feminism to make changes in the substantive, underlying policies — should we have conscription? should we engage in wars where we have not been invaded? — weakens feminism’s ability to achieve victories at the procedural level, because it divides the movement internally (some feminists supported the war in Iraq) and also diminishes its singular focus on sex equality. This is true for other equality movements as well: the racial civil rights movement achieved its greatest gains in demanding racial equality at a procedural level, and is less strong in its work to decrease poverty and improve education.
Since you mention it, I do think it a bit absurd to demand that women should have the same right as men to stand in a pulpit and preach 1 Timothy 2:11-12.
I’m not aware of any Christian church, even the Roman Catholic Church, that is founded on the teachings of Paul, son of a Pharisee, rather than of Jesus Christ, Son of God.
I also feel – and this is a personal thing – that your invariable labeling of me/my blog as MRA/Antifeminist on those rare occasions you cite me/it is well-poisoning.
Do you consider yourself an activist for men’s rights? How do you describe your views of feminism: pro, anti or neutral? If Amp is linking to something you have said that relates to MRAs/ feminism, it is relevant for the reader to know your views on the question. Moreover, given that one of the norms on this blog is to warn people before sending them to look at something that might be disturbing, and that many of the readers of this blog would be highly disturbed by certain MRA/anti-feminist views, your desire not to have people know that you’re an MRA/anti-feminist before they read your writing is superseded by an author’s obligations to his readers once he has established such norms.
My remark about “a vast system of interlocking extra-legal processes which suck men into the military, and into the most dangerous roles within the military” has been completely ignored.
What are these processes that do not affect women?
Daran @154,
Your example of female combatants’ behavior is how women in a terrorist group behaved? Do you think there might be a difference between a terrorist group vs. a uniformed militia in the kind of people who choose to join and how they behave after joining?
I didn’t mean in this thread. I meant when you cite me/us outside of a discussion with me. I withdraw “invariably” but you’ve done it often enough that it feels like intentional well-poisoning.
Actually, Amp, as you say that it’s a case of you having “messed up”, and not anything intentional, then I’ll happily take you at your word on that. Likewise if you have been “specifically and consciously” not referring to in those terms then (now that I know of it) I appreciate it, and hope that you will continue to bother.
Since the alternative would be to continue a branch of the discussion from which all substance has evaporated, I’ll withdraw. Hopefully this sub-sub-thread can now end.
Yohan: thanks, I was making a little joke. I live in the UK and before that lived in Spain. I just wanted to invoke the name of Kilroy-Silk, even though I suspected it’d be wasted on anyone who isn’t British.
And, btw, the rest of the EU isn’t exactly homogenous, either. Yes, the UK has some of its own peculiarities, but so do all the other states. I often get the feeling that any places that aren’t English-speaking get shoved together into an undifferentiated mass.
Also, since much of the focus here is on men in armed combat, can I just point something out? The fact that women have not been included in the armed forces (in most countries anyway) until relatively recently in no way means that the violence of war did not and still does not touch them. The problem with Daran is that he thinks war is for the rest of world like it is for a US citizen. That it’s something that happens “over there.” In reality, for most of the world, war is something that happens in your country, in your town, in your home. Women and children in most places on earth are not shielded from the violence of war. They are tortured, raped and murdered in their thousands. And most of them, unlike the soldiers, have no benefit of any sort of defensive training or arms to fight back with.
So spare me the crap about how men are the only ones who have to face the terror of war. It’s a lie, and it always has been.
PG:
You seem to be confusing “combat troops” with “combatants”. “Combatant” is a legal category which includes everyone who is a member of a military unit participating in a conflict. I’ve never heard it suggested that female soldiers aren’t combatants. (By contrast I have seen certain categories of civilian, such as police, being incorrectly excluded from civilian counts.)
“Combat troops” are just those combatants whose job includes engaging the enemy in combat. This is a functional category, not a legal one. Any combatant may find themself in a firefight. Combat troops are those whose job it is to fight fire.
“Combatancy” as I have been using the term, refers to the network of interacting social dynamics which compel indiviuals belonging to certain groups of people to fight, or which legitimise their victimisation. It extends well being the particular condition of being a combatant, or even a combat troop. Consider the following. Women are:
– More than 50% of the adult population of the US,
– 16% of its armed forces,
– 11% of those deployed to war zones,
– 2.4% of those killed,
– 1.7% of those killed by enemy action.
Using just the figures from your article. You’re talking about a glass wall. I’m seeing a filter.
The figures do not support that proposition.
I look forward to a similar change in the Oath of Enlistment.
Your argument was that “Stop loss” was “technically not considered forced combatancy because somewhere in the pile of paperwork you sign to join the military, there’s a provision that under certain conditions, you may be required to extend your tour of duty beyond what you initially signed up for.” I’m sure that this is “technically” true, just as it’s “technically” not rape in Tennessee if a husband forces sex on his wife.
I just can’t imagine any feminist rejecting the assertion that the woman is in fact raped on such a technicality.
There are men, and probably women to, serving in the US military, under pain of penalty, who do not want to, did not expect to, and who are long past the time they signed up for. Technicalities aside, I say they’re being forced.
You’re insisting upon a very narrow “technical” construction of the word “force”, one which I don’t see feminists adhering to when talking about coercive social processes which constrain women’s freedoms.
I asked if someone could explain the doctrine. I didn’t intended to suggest that it would be a viable legal argument. Winning in court against the Government is never easy. When the Government is going to argue “compelling national interest”, it’s all but impossible. Not even the thirteenth amendment can withstand the Government’s demand that it be permitted to conscript.
I meant, that the US was forcing these men to fight, by attacking them. This is a counterpoint to your claim that “there’s already been a huge cultural shift in the US away from forcing men to fight wars.”
International law, of course, reflects the cultural norms of dominant nations, particularly the US. Society, by and large, doesn’t care that men are forced to fight, but God forbid that womenandchildren be ever caught up in it.
1. I don’t agree that men and women are in their different positions simply because powerful people make it so. Cultural norms perpetuate themselves by being expressed by one generation and absorbed by the next. Powerful people are as subject to them as anyone else.
2. Even if what you said was true, it doesn’t explain the conceptual defaulting I pointed out above.
3. If men are in a bad position and women in a better one, then moving women to where the men are is harmful to both groups. Women are harmed directly, while men are harmed because the alternative solution – “move the men to where the women are” is foreclosed.
I couldn’t disagree more. The concept of sex equality/neutrality is nowhere near radical enough. The existence of a gender-inequality is a useful indicator that something is wrong, but it really is no help in figuring out how to put it right. You do that, not by asking “What’s the easiest route to equality”, and working for that, but by asking “Where are we all now? Where do we all want to be?”, and by working to get as many people as possible as close as possible to the latter.
Let me put it another way. The goal is not “equality” but “justice for all”. “Equality” is necessary for there to be “justice for all”, but it’s not sufficient. And as long as we are so far from both, it does not follow that all moves toward equality necessarily lead toward justice.
I’m not aware of any church, Christian or other, that includes a text written by Jesus Christ within its scriptural canon. All are founded upon the teachings of men about the teachings of Christ, among which are the teachings of Paul.
No. I’d hesitate to call myself an “activist” of any kind, unless it is spelled with a leading “sl”. The concept of a “right” require careful construction. The “men’s rights” and “women’s rights” framings are prejudicial.
None of those words adequately captures my views.
Which they can only find out by reading them.
Begs the question. In fact, my desire is not to be associated with this:
Not my spectrum, not my movement…
Its not that they “don’t affect women”, but that they operate to filter out women from combatancy, while funneling men into it. Describing the details is more than I can do in an already overlong comment that I want to post before I go out shortly. The figures I picked out of the article you posted show that a filter exists. Here’s another illustration: Did you know that about fourteen times as many civilian men as civilian women were were being murdered in the post-invasion chaos within Iraq during the short period when which figures were available? The reasons are complex, and include the deliberate targeting of men, and the structuring of Iraqi society so as to protect women as far as possible.
No, I said nothing about how the women behaved. I talked about the behavior of a paramilitary group which, possibly, included more women that other participants..
Yes. I already acknowledged that there were other differences between the groups.
Briefly, as I have to go out shortly
Crys T:
I am certainly not making the error you attribute to me here.
I’m certainly not claiming that no woman or child was ever hurt in war. That’s certainly not the case. But women (and children) most certainly do enjoy greater protection than men. Where women are being tortured, raped and murdered in their thousands, men are being tortured and murdered in their tens of thousands. I have yet to find casualty figures for any war in which men are not the substantial, if not overwhelming majority of all casualties, and of civilian casualties.
Sexual maltreatment is hard to quantify. Most surveys don’t even look for it in men. One that did found more male victims than female.
@ CrysT comment #163
Thanks for reply. I am originally from Austria (EU) but left many years ago to Asia, I am living now mostly in Japan, but also in Thailand and Philippines.
Well, the relationship UK between EU/US is a somewhat special one. A good report can be found here…very informative.
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33105.pdf
I do not really understand, why this thread, which should be for arguments against MRAs everywhere in the world – including myself – is moving away from this topic into a talk about military services in the USA.
As an MRA, there is not much here in this thread where I can defend myself against feminists..Hahaha….
Yes, I agree with you, that military services in USA are managed totally different from those in Europe. It’s an MRA-issue in Europe and I think for some good reason. As you know we all have to do military services over many months totally unpaid as men.
I was lucky doing my services for only 8 months, but my friends over the border in Hungary had to serve 24 months, totally unpaid. Our opinion is now, that women of the same age, around 19 years old, should not serve with the gun, but could do at least a few months free of charge various social services.
Within EU, we have a big shortage for staff in hospitals, elderly care and similar social services, and had to bring in immigrants to do that kind of jobs.
Up to now, women refuse even to work 1 month free of charge, while men are serving for free up to 2 years, depending on the EU country’s local regulations, and I think, why should young women not to do some military/social work similar to men?
About the political situation in USA, it is true, that USA never was a victim of war, never faced any major destruction.
I agree, as you said using your own words, in reality, for most of the world, war is something that happens in your country – something what many American people do not understand. On the other side, I cannot blame them for the fact, that their country was never bombed out.
Totally unpaid? They don’t even pay a stipend?
Also, this:
About the political situation in USA, it is true, that USA never was a victim of war, never faced any major destruction.
…is very wrong. There have been three wars where significant areas of the US underwent major destruction: the Revolutionary war, the War of 1812 (in which our capital was burned down), and the Civil War which devastated much of the South.
These aren’t always in the public consciousness because they were long ago, but some of their effects linger today. The South didn’t recover from the war for a century (due more to incompetence than devastation, admittedly).
Also, they won’t let you bring cigarette lighters into the Capitol anymore :)
@Robert comment #167
Yes, unpaid, in my country you get a pocket-money maybe USD 5,- per day, and these months are totally missing when you are preparing for retirement calculation 40 years later, lost years, missing years, same as not working. But anyway, in my native country women retire between 54-57, and men between 64-67… much worse in former Eastern Europe. And anyway I lost only 8 months, but 30 miles over the border, young men lost 24 months of income of a regular work.
——
I was not thinking about any war in the USA around 1800, I think no American woman and man alive today can claim to be a victim out of what happened 200 or so years ago.
I was thinking somewhat comparing during WWII a city like New York with Dresden, and San Francisco with Tokyo 1945. Or Seoul in Korea in 1953 with Seattle or any grain field in the USA in 1960 with a rice field in Vietnam after dropping chemicals.
No city in USA was ever bombed out during or after WWII, neither with fire-bombs nor with atomic bombs, no American man or woman or child living in America ever suffered what civilians and soldiers worldwide – men and women – had to suffer.
As a fact, in all wars where US-forces participated, the loss of civilian life was minimal, these wars were never carried out in the USA, but anywhere else far away from the US-territory.
The best modern example is maybe Iraq, I never have seen a Western count about women/children/old people etc. who perished or who are living now a miserable life as handicapped persons in that region. I wonder how many people died in the USA because of the Iraq War?
I agree fully with CrysT comment #163,
it’s really a good comment…’in reality, for most of the world, war is something that happens in your country – something what many American people do not understand.’
Daran, you are wrong. One example is the current war in Iraq. Civilian deaths outweigh military ones by an astronomical amount. And it’s not a recent phenomenon. I seem to remember that during the Boer War, the suffering of women and children in British concentration camps horrified even the British themselves when the details became known. And, oh yes, there was that little question of the Second World War……and the former Yugoslavia….and Rwanda….
And the list could go on and on. In all of these conflicts, civilian death far, far outstripped military combatant deaths, and huge numbers of those civilian deaths were of women and children. And the women, even those who weren’t killed but “only” raped and abused, tended to be tortured in particularly sadistic ways that were not done to the men. The idea that men have some special claim on suffering in war is your own personal little fantasy. It is flat-out untrue.
Actually, Yohan, me either. I think it’s because we (the feminist and/or pro-feminist element) always allow ourselves to get sidetracked when we read comments that we find outrageous or nonsensical. Instead of just saying they are outrageous or nonsensical and moving on, we try to debunk them, not realising that we are doing exactly the wrong thing by allowing the other person to set the parameters of the discussion.
My solution would be to completely abolish mandatory unpaid service. Maybe it could have been excused when young people in most countries could count on being supported by their families during this period, but that is not the case nowadays. When my ex-partner was younger, there was still mandatory military service in Spain (the military is now completely voluntary), and although it was easy to register as a conscientious objector, you still had to do 9 months of unpaid substitutory service. If you were an 18-year-old living at home with mami and papi to pay your bills, it still sucked, but it was doable. If you were a 25-year-old who had to work for a living, it was hell. Luckily for us, the end of the mandatory service era was in sight and people were getting really lax. My ex was able to get a cushy post in a spelunking club that allowed him to fit his hours in after work. But still. Why should he have been forced into that position? Why should anyone?
I understand why you ask this question, but I don’t think women OR men should have to work for free. Having said that, I wish we lived in a world where we all were willing to pitch in and do voluntary work to make our communities better, but the key word is “voluntary.” Forcing people just makes them resentful. We should want to help each other.
I also feel that I have to add here: most voluntary work is in fact done by women. Women may not have to do compulsory service, but most unpaid labour does come from us.
I do not really understand, why this thread, which should be for arguments against MRAs everywhere in the world – including myself – is moving away from this topic into a talk about military services in the USA.
Because Daran and ballgame don’t think we should be speaking of situations outside the West, and apparently preferably not outside the US and UK.
And not only that: not outside of the US over the past 100 years, and the UK since 1945.
“I’d also like to point out that male circumcision is NOT a “Western” thing at all. All the religions that practice it are, as far as I know, either of Middle Eastern origin or African. And as far as Western countries go, it’s only the US (and possibly Canada, I’ve got no information on that) that practices it.”
Canada’s rate was around 10% last I checked. It might have declined. That’s still considerably lower than the US and here we have no talk about “How will other boys react in the locker room?” as that doesn’t even enter our minds. Circumcision is rare enough for it to be the rarer phenomenon (and I believe this is also true in the US nowadays, less than 50% rates yes?). Not that either a circumcised or uncircumcised penis should be insulted or deemed lesser.
I can’t reply to all the comments I’ve read (let’s say I lack knowledge about the issues), but I like the discussion so far.
@ Crys T at 169:
From the studies Daran linked it shows that civilian deaths are overwhelmingly male. It makes sense with common sense as well – most refugees are female (because the males weren’t allowed to escape). I myself do not have supporting studies though, I’m just commenting on the idea.
That is a flat out untruth. Both ballgame and I (and Ampersand has agreed) have said that it’s not fair to compare my personal situation with those outside the West for the purpose of determining whether I suffer or enjoy gender oppression or privilege. There’s no general objection to discussing situations outside of the west. To the contrary, I relish the opportunity.
It was me who pointed out that “those on the receiving end of American military firepower” are likely to be conscripted men, all of them outside the US and UK for a very long time.
It was also me who pointed out that Iraqi civilian casualties were >90% male in 2006 based upon mortuary data provided to the UN. The Iraq Body Count came to a similar conclusion in their Dossier on Civilian Casualties in Iraq 2003-2005. As their database stood at the time, 82% of casualties whose demographic status was known were adult men, but they also point out that mortuary data indicated a figure of 90% adult men. Moreover, according to them three quarters of child deaths were male.
I appreciate that you may prefer to ignore facts that do not accord with your ideas about how the world works, but they remain facts, nevertheless.
Amp actually said, “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.”
As I’ve already stated in this thread, I brought up Indian law’s treatment of women to provide examples of what I meant by “What are the bumps in your road that you think are wholly attributable to your being [of a particular sex]?” You and ballgame then protested that any non-Western example mustn’t be raised because you live in the UK and one must always distinguish between the “First” and “Third” Worlds (which aren’t exactly perfectly contiguous with “the West” and “the non-West” — Mexico is in the West, and Japan is in the “First World”). There’s also the underlying assumption in such claims of irrelevance that that people don’t move between the two hemispheres (whether of geography or wealth), which is of course erroneous.
If you “relish the opportunity to discuss situations outside the west,” why did you ignore my reply to your claim, “There are undoubtedly egregiously anti-male laws in those same nations,” which was If undoubtedly, could you name any of them? There were certainly plenty of opportunities in this thread to discuss situations outside the west, yet you repeatedly have ignored them in favor of discussing the U.S., UK and Ireland.
@Crys T comment #169
My solution would be to completely abolish mandatory unpaid service.
I understand why you ask this question, but I don’t think women OR men should have to work for free.
http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article2333718.ece
There have been regular calls over the years for women to report for duty just like Norwegian males must do, once they turn 18. Norway is, after all, a champion of equal rights for women. With those rights, argue many, come duties.
It’s an interesting link, a short article, for sure the FEMALE defense minister in Norway does not share your opinion at all.
I think, your opinion about to abolish all these mandatory duties regarding military (not only in EU, but elsewhere worldwide) for both, men and women, sounds fine, but reality is far away from it. – And it seems not only in poor overpopulated countries, but even in very rich (and totally feminist orientated) countries like Norway with so little population – Norway without question could afford to pay for military services good salaries. It does not. Do not ask me why…
I find the present situation in Europe, where often young men are forced into military services for many months unpaid, while young women need not even to offer to serve a short time of community services for free not a fair situation if you ask for equality between men and women. Yes, this is one never ending MRA-issue in Europe.
————————————-
About Daran and his studies, and male victims, military or civil, it would be interesting to see a breakup regarding nationality and where they died.
Surely not within the USA – just my guess.
All this US-Army-talk by American people about their victims and heros is disproportional, as recent wars did not happen in their own country and their casualties overseas are minimal compared to the casualties of the enemy far away.
If you look at any major conflict with US-Army participation like Iraq or Afghanistan, I can hardly advice, how to count civil victims regadless their gender. – It’s not only about being killed in combat, it’s about dying of other war-related problems, like hunger because of missing food, infections because of dirty drinking water, generally missing medical care especially for small children and old people, accidents related to land-mines and similar war left-over explosives, killing during ‘ordinary’ lootings and robberies which are not related to combat at all, but they are indeed war-related …
About wars exported by the USA to countries like Afghanistan I really want to ask all American citizens, for what such combat missions are good for. What did USA gain out of this war after so many years and spending so much money for combat?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/14/afghanistan-womens-rights-rape
Read this!
These are laws created under US-military-control of a free Afghanistan?
Crys T, I am right. Male civilian deaths in Iraq outweigh female ones by an astronomical amount.
That’s correct. It’s not however the whole story. Despite several hours Googling, I haven’t been able to find a casualty figure for civilian men, (though I have a figure for the number of horses that died. Go figure).
In fact “Boer civilian men” doesn’t appear to exist as a conceptual category in any of the histories I’ve read. The population appears to be divided into women, children, “old men”, “hands-uppers” (rebels who yielded) and “Bittereinders” (rebels who didn’t), the latter tending to persecute the former.
This is a perfect example of what I mean by “male-combatancy” – the complete lack of freedom for men to be anything else.
The final stages of the war saw around a hundred thousand “old men”, women and children Boers, interned in concentration camps as part of a scorched-earth policy aimed at the still-resisting rebels, and we have precise casualty figures for them. Much less is known about the number of deaths among the tens of thousands of black men, women, and children also interned.
I have been able to find no figures for deaths among the 28,000 or so Boer prisoners of war, but clearly they did die in large numbers.
So yes, I will concede that the Boer war was one in which women civilian casualties outnumbered men, (as well as one with an appalling casualty rate for children) but only because other than “old men” no men were permitted to be civilian.
It does appear that civilian casualties exceeded military ones. How they break down by gender, I don’t know.
http://www.ideajournal.com/articles.php?id=24
My bold.
See also R Charli Carpenter, who questions why, given that pattern of slaughter, did humanitarian organisations routinely exclude young adult men from evacuations.
http://gendercide.org/case_rwanda.html
I’ve never claimed anything other than that huge numbers of women and children are killed, but those deaths always take place against the backdrop of even greater slaughter of men. The problem is, by and large, feminists don’t look at gender-selective atrocities perpetrated against men, don’t inform themselves and each other about them, then, in their self-inflicted collective ignorance, declare them not to be so.
Which is the relevent context for viewing my experiences.
Actually both of us were more concerned with your criterion ‘that you would never encounter this particular “bump” if you were female instead of male.’ rather than your example per se. I don’t think it unreasonable to stipulate that my position should be compared to otherwise similarly situated women.
My concern about your example was that it described a law which was discriminatory on its face. If that is the to be the criterion for a “bump” then I’ve not hit one. Gender has, however wrecked my life. I used to say “destroyed”, but in truth, I have been able to salvage some things in the past few years.
I’m well aware that there are women and other men whose lives have been wrecked or even destroyed by gender. I’d never say of them, or of anyone whose life experiences I didn’t know intimately, that they weren’t oppressed by gender, still less that they were privileged by it. I simply cannot imagine feeling so callously entitled so as to say something like that.
I use the term “West” conscious of its inadequacy. It seems less prejudicial than “first world” (Who am I to declare my country “first” and another’s “second” or even “third”?) or “developing”/”undeveloped”, which ignores the role of the We… whatever-nations in suppressing their development.
Oh sure. The cultures segue into each other. That does not mean that there are no differences between them.
Time mostly.
I consider it undoubtedly true that Indian law operates to enforce gender roles on both men and women. As I am against gender-enforcement in all cases, I would view its enforcement on men to be anti-male just as its enforcement on women is anti-female.
But as far as citing specific Indian laws, I can’t. I know nothing about Indian law, and know of no way to research the specific areas I might be interested in.
Not that I am particularly interested in it.
And Iraq. And Liberia.
War, on the other hand, most specifically how it intersects with gender, I am interested in. Hence several hours spent researching the Boer war, the results of which, together with stuff I already knew about the other conflicts Crys T mentions, are in the preceding comment.
Link unborked:
Apart from Liberia and Iraq, I’ve blogged about violence in Zimbabwe, the DRC, Palestine, the former Yugoslavia, and many other non-UK-and-US countries, that would put this comment into spam limbo if I linked to them all.
The notion that I’m supremely west-centric is preposterous.
Daran @177,
I think you would find the discussion much clearer if you understood that when a feminist tells you that men are privileged, she may be talking about the fact that males were the ones oppressing you. In your entire linked account of the mistreatment you suffered, females play an almost nonexistent role: boys were the ones who performed all the physical abuse, and nearly all the emotional abuse. These males had the power to hurt you; females largely didn’t. Of course, some men are oppressed by gender; the point is that the oppression is carried out largely by men. Men higher up in the patriarchy are hurting other men who are lower down — it’s a hierarchy based on gender role compliance, so of course those who are less compliant will be further down the hierarchy, and thus abused by those higher up.
It therefore seems very foolish for a man who is being hurt by gender to focus his criticism on feminists, who generally want to reduce gender enforcement and to make our lives and laws more neutral in that respect, rather than on the men who oppress men. It seems like someone who genuinely considers gender enforcement to be the underlying evil would want to ally with feminists who think the same, rather than paint all feminists as un-empathetic and unhelpful to men’s equality. I’ve repeatedly recounted how feminist organizations like the ACLU Women’s Rights project devoted their resources to removing sex discrimination that worked against men from the law, yet you ignore this in favor of saying, “See, there was sex discrimination against men in the law!” Well, yes, and feminists have been doing a lot more about it than MRAs have.
The cultures segue into each other. That does not mean that there are no differences between them.
But there are differences within the West as well, which I assume is why you criticized another commenter for being “US centric.”
I never claimed you were supremely West-centric in all of your online writing, so your denial that you are is superfluous. I said in this particular discussion — which is the one in which I’m interested, since I haven’t made a career of slogging through your blog’s archives — that my references to a non-Western country got shot down by you and ballgame as irrelevant.
I find it incredibly unfair as well. I also had no idea that so many European countries still had compulsory military service (yeah, American readers, all us Europeans know each other soooo well!). I (naively) assumed that most other states got rid of it around the same time as Spain, if not before. Is there no mass movement in Norway to end it? It seems so archaic in this day and age. Also, as you say, extremely sexist and demeaning for both men and women.
And sorry, but I can’t help it, but I have to add this: as a person of Southern European ancestry who’s always being lectured by Americans on how my culture is so backwards, sexist and inferior when compared to the perfect, clean, progressive, so-cool Scandanavians, I can’t help but feel a bit smug. See, Americans? Those Northerners don’t get everything right, do they?
Yeah! Even though I too sometimes use the expression, I realised how silly it is the day it clicked that Morocco is actually further to the West than Paris or Berlin.
Unless that person wasn’t actually concerned with how men suffer under the current status quo, but was really concerned with keeping women in a subordinate status.
@Daran #165
Yes, true, I understand, but this is Ampersands all-out MRA/Pro-feminist bashing thread.
My problem as MRA is however that I hardly can blame the feminists for that all.
It’s not within the feminists’ responsibility, that so many men and so few women are being killed in any war.
To look about more seriously into this matter:
Your observation indicates somewhat ‘gender-selective killings’ during wars, this is true in direct combat, especially in case of Navy and Airforce, because there are almost no women around the combat area – but as I live in Japan, in case of the US-WWII firebombings and atomic bombings there was no discrimination between men and women.
What about the Jews in Germany in WWII? Women and children were more protected than men? I am not so sure.
And what about bombings like Dresden?
In those bombings more women, children, old people, Koreans doing forced labour perished than regular Japanese soldiers, and not to talk about the follow-up after the bombings, like radiation, remaining explosives etc. etc. –
I have even problems to find sources about war casualties divided into men, women, children etc. I find only numbers about military, civilians etc. and no information about the gender.
While in USA civilian casualties were minimal in WWII for example, (about 1700 people only) the Russian number might be about 12 to 14 million people.
I wonder, how many were women, or in China, reported are 7 to 16 million civilians perished, and what about Vietnam? 58000 US-servicemen dead and about 2 million or so Vietnamese…How many Vietnamese were women? Nobody really knows… What about Cambodia genocide?
Generally, looking back in history, I agree that women in USA are best protected, as the war is not within their country, but otherwise?
Wouldn’t the US-as-invaders have the same women-and-children first policy that people in Middle-East and other countries, and humanitarian organizations have?
That is, if they invaded Vietnam, they probably treated Vietnamese men as potential threats a lot more than women. At least common sense tells me that. Don’t hit girls is a very pervasive notion, extremely strong here in North America (Canada as well). It might be weakened in war or towards enemies, but then, like belligerents in that report Daran linked, wouldn’t US army men be worried about the image of them massacring poor defenseless innocent women, even from Vietnam (during the war I mean), if it ever became known?
If women-and-children-first is such a pervasive notion that people worry about their image when doing massacres and war, worry about the welfare of civilian women more than civilian men even if 5000 or more miles across a sea that they probably have never seen or known, and will never see or know, then you can call this a worldwide social norm.
@ Daran #71
The moderation policy in the MRA forum (not this one what Ampersands is reading sometimes) where I am moderator, is to avoid to edit, to delete and to ban any user, regardless his/her opinion.
There are 2 sectors, one is called Opposing View (for people who do not agree with us but are presenting their point politely) and the other one is called Trolleville (open for everybody, who likes to insult us).
Everybody might sign up in our forum, regardless if man or woman, regardless if MRA or feminist, regardless from where in this world. MRAs have nothing to hide. I think, most MRA-forums and blogs are very open to any comments of any kind.
About moderation policy in feminist forums, it is a big difference between American/British and Continental European forums.
Continental European feminist forums are not difficult for me as MRA for discussion and I never got banned or felt ridiculed or belittled.
Most of European feminists are about to creating laws or rules or a life-style, which are removing gender specific issues. It’s more about legal questions and law execution and not about to attack verbally men with insults and wishing them to go to hell or to jail.
I do not agree to many of their ideas as an MRA of course, these are feminists, but this is a totally different matter.
American feminist forums are too much orientated into USA-only political and military matters, they are often moderated single-sided.
US-forums are often acting like a religious website, which cannot stand any opposite critical opinion coming from non-believers. There is often no consideration, what is going on outside USA, thinking their country is the moral center and guideline. My impression is that US-feminist websites are not really open to ‘outsiders’. You must keep a certain party-line or your comments and yourself are gone.
@Schala comment 183
Modern war is not about fighting against men and protecting women, it is about destruction of materials as quick as possible. It’s not about humans, but about objects.
There is an airfield, destroy it, there is a pipeline, destroy it, there is a bridge, destroy it, there is a factory, destroy it…if carefully done, life there is a hell, for men and for women too, no difference.
For sure, wars are not carried out for improving the quality of life of the enemy, regardless the gender.
In the past we have seen the dropping of bombs and chemicals etc. and nobody was asking, if it mightbe ‘dangerous’ for women’s life, too.
The main target is the object, and not a human.
Incidentally, “Second world” referred to Communist countries, particularly the (now dissolved) Soviet Union.
World War 2 left many places with sex ratios skewed heavily towards women. For example, immediately after World War II ended, there were 150 Russian women for every 100 Russian men.
There’s something oddly circular about the way that when we do let MRAs post here, they so frequently post about how MRAs aren’t allowed to post in feminist forums. :-P
MRAs and feminists (at least, in the US) aren’t similarly situated with regard to each other, because most feminists really aren’t interested in MRAs. Seriously — look at Pandagon, look at Feministe, look at Pam’s House Blend, look at “Alas.” There are occasional threads (like this one) dealing with MRAs, but for the most part, we’re just not that into you.
Most feminist forums can have virtually unlimited MRAs, just by not banning them. But we don’t want unlimited MRAs. We’re not that interested in what MRAs have to say. Yet, if we don’t moderate the MRAs, they will take over every discussion and make it about their concerns.
MRAs, in contrast, are really into feminists. MRAs are really, really eager to talk to us. (Well, yell at us, more accurately). But what’s in it for us? Sitting around being piled on by people who hate me isn’t my idea of a good time.
Speaking personally, I like reading the few intelligent MRA, anti-feminist, right-wing feminist, and/or “feminist critics” out there, because they sometimes offer a valuable criticism, and they sometimes point out interesting stories of men being harmed by sexism that I might otherwise have missed. Similarly, letting them post on “Alas” is sometimes valuable; for instance, it really is wrong that some feminists say (to quote Hilary Clinton) “Women have always been the primary victims of war,” and Daran (who doesn’t identify as MRA) performs a useful service by pointing that out.
But there’s not much point in engagement, that I can see.
“Debate” isn’t rewarding with people who are mainly fighting straw-feminists, rather than listening to what I say. Nor is it possible to meaningfully “win” or “lose” a debate on the internet; no matter what is said during any debate, in the end the anti-feminists will walk away convinced that the feminists lost the debate, and vice versa. And it’s emotionally tiresome to deal with people who hold me in contempt.
So why should I bother going to a place like this, again?
Ampersands comment #187
This is totally up to you, if you go there again or not, but for sure, in this MRA-forum you refer, YOUR postings are still there, all of them, not edited, not deleted and your user-account remains active.
You might post YOUR opinion anytime there, regardless if your comment is supportive to MRA-issues in an MRA-forum or not.
You refer to an MRA- forum, where I am not a moderator, but should you ever sign up with this forum where I have moderation rights I will do my best that your postings will appear as you post them and they will not be deleted or edited – despite I do not share your feminist views at all.
As I said before, MRA-forums are open to everybody and yes, why not? Why should we not listen to opposite views? And yes, I am talking frequently also with feminists in their forums in Europe (mostly not in English) and why should I not? Any reason for that? And I am not yelling at you.
I cannot believe this.
I see no reason however, why feminists should be afraid of these few groups of MRAs, and for sure, we are not an ‘unlimited’ number of people.
Why should MRAs hate you? I do not hate anybody, actually I am a very happy man.
Well, any discussion among people, who only say yes and never say no is not very productive, I would say. Why are you so worried to face a discussion with people who do not agree with your opinion?
I’ve not seen an aggregate figure for Russia’s sex ratio before, so I’d appreciate it if you could give me a citation for that.
It’s certainly a plausible figure, though, and it looks consistent with Robert Conquest’s analysis of census data. See Adam Jones’ essay, about half way down the page. Jones’ point is that many, perhaps most of the losses occurred before the war as a result of Stalin’s purges.
That “MRA-forums are open to everyone” does not imply that “we listen to opposite views”.
Briefly, as I’ve got to go
Ampersand:
Having read just the first page of it, I for one, am glad that you did.
Possibly relevant:
Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism
We do not only listen to such opposite views, we even reply to them, we discuss your questions. You are invited to sign up and check it out yourself.
That link that Amp shared made me physically sick. The message I take from it is that MRAs are more interested in exposing women as rape liars than in reducing or ending rape.
Yohan writes:
Why do you think that should be attractive to me? I already have a forum (this one) where my posts appear as I post them, without being deleted or edited. Maybe your site has a higher readership than this one, but I’m content with the readership I have.
(Out of curiosity, however, what is your site’s URL?)
You are not all MRAs. (And I’m glad you’re happy.)
There are, on any MRA board, a mixture of MRA’s who are polite to me and MRA’s who write things like this message, addressed to me, from earlier today:
Again, why do you think I should want to expose myself to this sort of mean-spirited commentary?
This is a good example of how MRAs don’t listen. You pretend to read, but your responses make it clear that you’re not actually listening to anything I say; you’re just responding to some imaginary feminist in your head.
If you, even for one second, took away your prejudices and preconceptions and looked at my blog, you’d realize that it is full of people who do not agree with my opinion. Have you even noticed that I’m letting you post here, for example?
I also provided you with a link to an MRA forum, where I wasted my time posting many detailed responses to MRAs on their own territory. Over the last 15 years, I’ve had literally hundreds, and possibly thousands, of such debates with MRAs. (Mostly from years ago, admittedly, when I was less tired and busy).
If all you’ve gotten out of this is “Amp is so worried to face a discussion with people who do not agree with Amp’s opinion,” then you’re not listening. You’re not being honest. You’re not willing to acknowledge obvious facts that are right in front of your face. You’re just arguing with a strawfeminist.
And that is exactly why I say that for me to visit MRA forums and argue with MRAs like you is a total waste of my time.
Thanks for that, Doug. Applicable to more than one situation in which I find myself at the moment.
Wait a minute, you have a mangina? Damn it, Barry, there were more than a few nights where we were both lonely, you know!
Yohan asked me to say a few words as he will be away for some time (I believe he is travelling overseas for some time).
I think the point he was trying to make when he invited Ampersand and others to comment on our forum is that if we were the oppressive, misogynistic bullies that certain quarters have claimed we are, we would NEED to edit or delete comments on our forum because our position would be untenable. Many MRAs believe that their ideals and positions are perfectly capable of withstanding scrutiny and debate, thus the invitation. This has historically not been the attitude to rebuttals of feminist-endorsed positions, and so the assertion by a number of MRAs that feminism as an ideology is unable to withstand scrutiny or critical analysis.
Incidentally, the forum to which Yohan is referring is attached to the site http://www.the-niceguy.com/ if anybody wishes to examine it for themselves.
Solaris,
I, too, believe my position can withstand scrutiny and criticism. It just gets tiresome sometimes to have to defend, over and over and over again, the idea that I’m a fucking human being.
Solaris,
Are you confident that if someone engaged in rebuttal on your MRA site, that it would not be met by any responses like those Ampersand has received at other MRA sites? If you missed it, he quoted one such response:
Do the folks on your site respond to rebuttals with the kind of insults just quoted, or do they constrain themselves to facts and logical argument?