Split Thread Are post-feminism women happier?

[theprestige]

May I suggest that, taking this admirably egalitarian view of Feminism, if it was successful the levels of happiness should be equal and the unhappier sex's hapiness should have been raised? It's interesting that in this view the success of feminism would have been in raising men's happiness to match womens, or lowering women's happiness to match mens. I'm not entirely sure that that is how it would have been seen in 1972.

Anyway, this reminds me of a rather famous Margaret Thatcher speech.
https://youtu.be/rv5t6rC6yvg?t=113


Would the goal be to get male happiness to fall faster so that it catches up with the falling female happiness?


Maybe.


But they used to in the US and now they don't.

I'm still hoping for some feedback on this post:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=13769572#post13769572

 

[shuttlt]

I'm really going to need more than your bare assertion on this. You've essentially taken the position that liberalism inevitably leads to regressive dehumanization and the removal of rights... which I'm not seeing.

I know I owe you an answer to this question. It's a tough question. I haven't forgotten it.

 

[shuttlt]

I'm still hoping for some feedback on this post:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=13769572#post13769572

These questions?

One, what's wrong with commerce?

Two, are you claiming that liberalism was invented by commercial interests to increase their labor force and customer base?

Three, what's your take on the people with commercial interests also being subject to the same forces of liberalization, and therefore subject to the same presumed detriments?

Four, how would you prefer to order society, if not along commercial lines?

Five, what is your justifying ideology, for your preferred social order?

First Emily's Cat was asking difficult questions that require long answers to deal with properly, now you are.

One - Either that will be part of my answer to Emily's Cat that I'm mulling, or I'll try to answer separately later. Please kick me if I don't.

Two - "Invented by" sounds like a bunch of cowled figures in a room. I think inevitably the ruling system of any age has a justifying ideology that is generally assumed to be true. These things don't grow up completely independently of one another. When that stops being the case it becomes very ugly trying to stay in power.

Three - Well, I'm sure the understanding of the divine right of kings and the great chain of being was understood differently by the king and the barons vs your average peasant. Equally, the spirit and ideas of the age bleed in to us all to a greater or lesser extent.

Four - I have no grand answers. I think part of the problem is that there aren't grand answers. I think much of this is actually driven by the global economy, at least in terms of the systems of incentives it must create, and our need to maintain this global financial empire. It's a big ask rethinking that if you don't just do it by building some idealised castle in the clouds that ignores practicalities. Part of my issue with the world is I think that we try to solve problems that aren't really solvable and do terrible harm in the process.

Towards the end of Rocky Horror, Janet says "If only we were amongst friends or sane persons." I feel like society has gone mad and I want to be amongst sane persons. The society I would like to live in would feel like I was amongst sane persons.

Your questions are threads in themselves.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Is it though? I'm not sure it is.

If you say some survey said women were happier before feminism, and women are less happy now, then if happiness is not a dynamic and fluid and complicated thing which redefines itself constantly, then it should be possible for women now to say they would be happier if feminism had not occurred.

As I said, more or less at least, it would not surprise me if by some index, or some miracle of time travel, we could report that the people of the stone age were happier than we are now. But if we now could not say with any assurance that we'd be happier to return there, then I think we need to acknowledge that what we mean by happiness has itself changed, and the basic question is one that cannot be accurately asked.

There's a bit of mind-reading involved in shutit's premise. They assume that females would be happier without liberty and agency... But they are looking at this from a very male perspective, based on the assumption that males know what makes females happier better than females know what makes females happier.

It's very much like watching a group of white people sit around and opine on what would be "best" for black people, without actually involving any black people in the discussion. It assumes that black people are incapable of identifying what is in their own interests, and what is of value to themselves... and that white people (who consequently benefit from certain types of melanin-based oppression) are able to better know their minds.

It's the paternalistic assumption that "father knows best", while ignoring (or attempting to sidestep) that "father" has a rather strong tendency to put more weight and value on what makes "father" happier and better off, and to discount the negative costs of "father's" dictates on the well being and satisfaction of their "children".

 

[JoeMorgue]

Okay I will admit that something has always, not bothered but confused me about feminism.

It is, to my knowledge, the only equality campaign that has statistically significant backlash to it within the culture it is a campaign for.

If I get 100 gay men at random and ask them if the support gay rights, sure like with anything I might get a very small handful of opposing voices but safe to say the extreme majority of them are going to support it.

If I get 100 black people at random and ask them if they support black people... the same thing.

But, based on statistics if I pick 100 women at random and ask them if they are Feminist... I will get a statistically significant number of women saying they are not. As with everything exact numbers are hard to find but most polls only about 60% of women self identify as "Feminist."

And that's odd on purely cultural level. It's weird. And unlike a lot of other things they aren't really clear breakdowns on age, education, even political leanings. Sure only 7 percent of women who identify as Republican "strongly identify as feminist" but only 28 of women who identify as Democrat "strongly identify as feminist" (although the "mostly identify as feminist" spread is A LOT wider here, so that to me anyway says that agree or disagree, "feminist" is far less of a dirty word on the Left.)

Again there's no moral judgement to be had here, it's just weird is all.

So there is something; branding, emotional baggage, the way the wind is blowing, the price of tea in China, something that has tainted the idea (or the term, I wouldn't be surprised if this was one of those "The majority are in favor of helping the poor, but a minority are for welfare" kind of things) of feminism.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I had a think about this on a walk. Yes, I can buy the golden rule as the basis for egalitarian ethics. Equally though, what does it actually call for?

Clearly to Emily's Cat it does not mean that trans-women should be treated as women even though she herself expects to be treated as a woman. By the Golden Rule, should she not do this? It seems to me that there have always been some quite narrow bounds on how the golden rule is to be interpreted. If anybody really took it seriously, I think it would be an incredibly radical doctrine on a par with old school puritanism. Doesn't it come up rather hard on the paradox of tolerance though? It has never been strictly followed though.

What is it that you think the Golden Rule says? "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you". Treat other people with the dignity and respect, the humanity, that you would like them to show you. It's a foundational concept embedded in a huge number of human interactions, deeply ingrained in empathy and reciprocity which are some cornerstone parts of cognitive development.

I don't have an expectation of how people treat me "as a woman". I have an expectation of fairness, safety, dignity, and consent as a female. I recognize that males and female are different, have different biological needs, and that those difference result in reasonable separations of the sexes in some scenarios. In scenarios where sex is NOT a material contributor to differences in capability or functionality, I think it should be largely ignored.

At the end of the day, transgender identified males are exactly that: males. And I think it's reasonable to treat them as males. I do NOT think it's reasonable to treat them as females when they are not female. I do NOT think it's reasonable to materially and substantially disadvantage or harm females in order to assuage the emotional needs of some few males.

I want to be treated with respect and dignity and privacy based on my consent. I'm happy to treat transgender people with respect and dignity and privacy as well. I am NOT willing to forsake my own respect, dignity, and consent in order to provide for theirs, nor would I sacrifice that respect dignity and privacy of other females.

I'm not sure I accept that "do no harm" is a principle of liberalism. My 10 seconds of thought opinion is that liberalism is much more about liberty, equality, and rationalism and that the assumption is that so long as you follow those principles, any short term harms will come out in the wash.

You not accepting it doesn't make it false. But let's back this up and refer to "classical liberalism", the foundational elements of democracy and enlightenment reasoning, and recognize that this concept is not necessarily the same as the policy positions of self-declared "liberals" of today, and I would argue largely lacking from the policy positions of "progressives".

Classical liberalism definitely held "do no harm" as a value. Your right to swing your fists around without interference ends at the tip of my nose. It's about balance in liberty. Each person is granted maximal liberty for their own agency and pursuits provided that those pursuits do not infringe upon the equal liberty of others. That equilibrium is the foundation for the majority of criminal laws in developed societies. Don't steal - stealing might provide the thief with happiness, but it deprives another person of their happiness in the process. Don't murder - the murderer might be made happy by it, but it deprives another person of their life against their will.

It's not as if you can show the harm ahead of time of changing the meaning of the word "woman" across the whole of Western culture. You kind of just have to do it, and the results always might just be a coincidence. We are kind of back to Burke here. This whole process is really a faith based exercise rather than being founded in evidence and rationalism.

One of the cool things about having a prefrontal cortex is the ability to extrapolate and to consider the likelihood of outcomes. "Prudent person" and "reasonable person" standards exist across a large swath of regulations for that purpose. Seriously, you could make the argument that people should start leaving their doors unlocked and their firearms sitting on the kitchen counter. I mean, we don't "know" for sure what will happen... but I bet we can make a reasonable guess as to the possible and likely results of those decisions, and recognize the increased risk for ourselves and for others. It would be a stupid thing to do based on the assumption that "we can't know for sure".

 

[Emily's Cat]

I would say that one starts with the question of "are people in fact happier or unhappier" or some version of that question and then work from there. If indeed it is impossible to tell whether anything has made people's lives better, then the whole of liberalism becomes an act of faith.

This is fallacious reasoning. You are fallaciously assuming liberalism as the sole causal element of all outcomes.

Allow me to present you with an illustrative scenario to demonstrate the fault in your approach. Society, January 2035. Liberty is a high value, most people like it, most people think it's good. There's just enough competition to keep people thriving and to prevent free riders, but sufficient resources to avoid undue hardship.

In February, an asteroid hits the northern hemisphere, releasing huge amounts of dust and debris, triggering earthquakes and tsunamis across the globe. It releases many fault lines causing tectonic shifts and volcanic eruptions. The resultant atmospheric interference causes a dramatic reduction in temperature, disrupts climate patterns, and results in a failure of many crops as well as death of livestock. Society as a whole faces widespread starvation, disruption in supply chains, and massively increased rates of death and illness.

My March, essentially every person on the planet is extremely unhappy.

Do you conclude that liberalism has failed?

 

[Emily's Cat]

Well, to pick a very stark example.... I don't think many communities are improved by allowing people to freely sell and consume crack.

We REALLY need to nail down some fundamental concepts here, because all of your conclusions are flowing from an incorrect assumption.

You keep referring to liberty as if the objective of liberalism is to have completely unfettered freedom. That is a false premise, as that is NOT the objective at all. That would be more akin to the concepts behind anarchism. If you allow some element of law-making then you're looking at libertarianism.

Liberalism as a social concept does NOT allow the harm of other people as a right.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Sure... and I'm sure Huxley's brother pushing all this stuff at UNESCO would have had some similar justification. To me, I think an objection to Brave New World, would be that if one actually tried to do it.... I am doubtful that one could get to it without a great deal of unhappiness and I am also doubtful that it would truly produce happiness. Equally a world that valued liberty above all else, but everybody was wretched, doesn't seem very good either.

One further, and more critical, thought is that things like Brave New World are partly about the tyranny of rationality. The managed world. The idea that you can and should, top down, impose utopia. That is kind of where the progressive-liberal idea of the rational utopia gets you - see Burke's criticism of the French Revolution. Liberalism talks a lot about the freedom of the individual, but it sure has been a wonderful engine for centralising power. My contention is that progressive-liberalism is precisely in the business of imposing its utopia.

Please don't conflate progessivism and liberalism.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Okay I will admit that something has always, not bothered but confused me about feminism.

It is, to my knowledge, the only equality campaign that has statistically significant backlash to it within the culture it is a campaign for.

If I get 100 gay men at random and ask them if the support gay rights, sure like with anything I might get a very small handful of opposing voices but safe to say the extreme majority of them are going to support it.

If I get 100 black people at random and ask them if they support black people... the same thing.

But, based on statistics if I pick 100 women at random and ask them if they are Feminist... I will get a statistically significant number of women saying they are not. As with everything exact numbers are hard to find but most polls only about 60% of women self identify as "Feminist."

Go ask 100 gay males at random whether they are gay rights activists. Go ask 100 black people at random whether they are black rights activists.

Alternatively, go ask 100 females at random if they support females.

You aren't asking the same questions.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Go ask 100 gay males at random whether they are gay rights activists. Go ask 100 black people at random whether they are black rights activists.

Alternatively, go ask 100 females at random if they support females.

You aren't asking the same questions.

Go ask 100 gay males at random if they oppose gay rights activism.

There's a difference between not picking up a picket sign and marching yourself and actively opposing it.

A statistically significant percentage of women as a demographic don't just passively not support feminism but actively dislike it. We don't have to pretend to just not notice that to make narratives easer.

And not just feminism. Is every female related topic. Abortion, working form home, birth control. It's not hard to find a woman who is on the "not mainstream feminism" side of those issues.

It's hard as hell to find a black person who thinks we should separate the water fountains again.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Even the fact that we have a mainstream commonly used term like "feminism" instead of just calling it "female activism" (or some variation therefore) but we don't have anywhere near as common an equivalent for gay rights or racial rights or any other points to there just being some X factor in here.

Women (and again I'm speaking purely as a demographic before the claws come out) do not agree on what "Pro-woman" means as much as other demographics in similar civil rights context do.

 

[shuttlt]

There's a bit of mind-reading involved in shutit's premise. They assume that females would be happier without liberty and agency... But they are looking at this from a very male perspective, based on the assumption that males know what makes females happier better than females know what makes females happier.

No. You keep reading things in this blinkered feminist way as if arguments are being made that are specific to women. NOBODY HAS A GOD'S EYE VIEW ON WHAT MAKES PEOPLE HAPPY. People frequently think something will result in happiness, only to find that it doesn't, or what they thought would get them to this happy making thing actually leads somewhere else. This is not an argument about women. It is an argument about humans.

It's very much like watching a group of white people sit around and opine on what would be "best" for black people, without actually involving any black people in the discussion. It assumes that black people are incapable of identifying what is in their own interests, and what is of value to themselves... and that white people (who consequently benefit from certain types of melanin-based oppression) are able to better know their minds.

Yeah, that's why I'm not talking to any women. Plus I don't think black people ultimately know how to achieve happiness any more than white people or asians. You have a myopic perspective.

It's the paternalistic assumption that "father knows best", while ignoring (or attempting to sidestep) that "father" has a rather strong tendency to put more weight and value on what makes "father" happier and better off, and to discount the negative costs of "father's" dictates on the well being and satisfaction of their "children".

And yet women in the US continue to get unhappier, conservatives are happier than liberals and happiness is correlated with strong communities....

 

[shuttlt]

What is it that you think the Golden Rule says? "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you". Treat other people with the dignity and respect, the humanity, that you would like them to show you. It's a foundational concept embedded in a huge number of human interactions, deeply ingrained in empathy and reciprocity which are some cornerstone parts of cognitive development.

And yet there are some people who you do not respect. The golden rule is always applied partially and selectively. Hasn't there been a whole bunch of talk on here about "be kind" being a trap.... don't you want other people to "be kind" to you. Just apply the golden rule to the trans-activists.

I don't have an expectation of how people treat me "as a woman". I have an expectation of fairness, safety, dignity, and consent as a female. I recognize that males and female are different, have different biological needs, and that those difference result in reasonable separations of the sexes in some scenarios. In scenarios where sex is NOT a material contributor to differences in capability or functionality, I think it should be largely ignored.

Right. When one is able to create the list of how one wants to be treated to fit the circumstances, then the golden rule is a nonsense. You don't want people to "be kind" to you? Do you or don't you? You are tailoring your list of how you want others to treat you specifically to exclude having to accommodate the trans-activists. Anybody can exclude anybody else under any circumstances from the golden rule with this sophistry.

At the end of the day, transgender identified males are exactly that: males.

Just be kind to them. You want other people to be kind to you, don't you? Apply the golden rule.

And I think it's reasonable to treat them as males. I do NOT think it's reasonable to treat them as females when they are not female. I do NOT think it's reasonable to materially and substantially disadvantage or harm females in order to assuage the emotional needs of some few males.

Sure, I understand that you feel this way. I agree that it isn't sensible to put up with them or humour them.

I want to be treated with respect and dignity and privacy based on my consent.

Again, you are getting very specific here to try to exclude them from the golden rule. What about their consent, dignity and privacy..... they want the privacy not to have you wanting to know what genitals they were born with, they want the dignity to not have their gender constantly and publicly questioned, they want to have to consent before anybody looks into this private information. Apply the golden rule to them.

I'm happy to treat transgender people with respect and dignity and privacy as well.

Excellent, so you are happy to follow the golden rule.

I am NOT willing to forsake my own respect, dignity, and consent in order to provide for theirs, nor would I sacrifice that respect dignity and privacy of other females.

You aren't willing to follow the golden rule?

You not accepting it doesn't make it false. But let's back this up and refer to "classical liberalism", the foundational elements of democracy and enlightenment reasoning, and recognize that this concept is not necessarily the same as the policy positions of self-declared "liberals" of today, and I would argue largely lacking from the policy positions of "progressives".

I agree, these are distinct things.

Classical liberalism definitely held "do no harm" as a value. Your right to swing your fists around without interference ends at the tip of my nose. It's about balance in liberty. Each person is granted maximal liberty for their own agency and pursuits provided that those pursuits do not infringe upon the equal liberty of others.

That's certainly the theory.

That equilibrium is the foundation for the majority of criminal laws in developed societies. Don't steal - stealing might provide the thief with happiness, but it deprives another person of their happiness in the process. Don't murder - the murderer might be made happy by it, but it deprives another person of their life against their will.

Are you sure? These laws predate liberalism by a long, long way and exist in countries in which classical liberalism has never held sway. I agree that a classical liberal might look at the laws and see them in that light.


One of the cool things about having a prefrontal cortex is the ability to extrapolate and to consider the likelihood of outcomes. "Prudent person" and "reasonable person" standards exist across a large swath of regulations for that purpose. Seriously, you could make the argument that people should start leaving their doors unlocked and their firearms sitting on the kitchen counter. I mean, we don't "know" for sure what will happen... but I bet we can make a reasonable guess as to the possible and likely results of those decisions, and recognize the increased risk for ourselves and for others. It would be a stupid thing to do based on the assumption that "we can't know for sure".[/QUOTE]

 

[shuttlt]

This is fallacious reasoning. You are fallaciously assuming liberalism as the sole causal element of all outcomes.

Allow me to present you with an illustrative scenario to demonstrate the fault in your approach. Society, January 2035. Liberty is a high value, most people like it, most people think it's good. There's just enough competition to keep people thriving and to prevent free riders, but sufficient resources to avoid undue hardship.

In February, an asteroid hits the northern hemisphere, releasing huge amounts of dust and debris, triggering earthquakes and tsunamis across the globe. It releases many fault lines causing tectonic shifts and volcanic eruptions. The resultant atmospheric interference causes a dramatic reduction in temperature, disrupts climate patterns, and results in a failure of many crops as well as death of livestock. Society as a whole faces widespread starvation, disruption in supply chains, and massively increased rates of death and illness.

My March, essentially every person on the planet is extremely unhappy.

Do you conclude that liberalism has failed?

No I haven't claimed this. If the world is so deeply mysterious and full of confounding variables that it is impossible to say whether any change in human happiness is caused by liberalism, or presumably anything else... then the idea that liberalism has made the world better is an act of religious faith. There is nothing wrong with religious faith, but that's all it is.

 

[theprestige]

No I haven't claimed this. If the world is so deeply mysterious and full of confounding variables that it is impossible to say whether any change in human happiness is caused by liberalism, or presumably anything else... then the idea that liberalism has made the world better is an act of religious faith. There is nothing wrong with religious faith, but that's all it is.

Ah, this merry-go-round again. Human rights are axiomatic. It's always come down to statements of faith.

If that's your objection, then what? Can you come with even one moral "should" or "ought" that isn't ultimately a statement of faith?

 

[shuttlt]

We REALLY need to nail down some fundamental concepts here, because all of your conclusions are flowing from an incorrect assumption.

You keep referring to liberty as if the objective of liberalism is to have completely unfettered freedom. That is a false premise, as that is NOT the objective at all. That would be more akin to the concepts behind anarchism. If you allow some element of law-making then you're looking at libertarianism.

Liberalism as a social concept does NOT allow the harm of other people as a right.

Liberalism seems quite happy with allowing the advertising and sale of products that harm people, but that people want to buy, like fast food. Is there a degree of harm where liberalism draws the line? 6% of adults in the US apparently have some kind of alcohol use disorder, should the sale of alcohol not be allowed... 100,000 people die due to alcohol every year... it clearly harms people.

Also, who says who is harming who? If some guy has crack and I want to buy it, and I don't see it as harm... you are going to step in and say it is harm? That sounds kind of paternalistic. Who are you to tell me what is going to make me happy?

When you defined classical liberalism and said "Your right to swing your fists around without interference ends at the tip of my nose." You meant that even if I give you permission to hit me in the nose, classical liberalism wouldn't allow it?

 

[gnome]

The entire premise of the question seems utterly ridiculous to me, that you can pick one social factor and suggest it is the primary driver of whether a group of people feels happy. You really want to know if women feel better off with strides in female equality? Ask them what they prefer. Would they choose to turn back the clock on those rights?

 

[Meadmaker]

Okay I will admit that something has always, not bothered but confused me about feminism.

It is, to my knowledge, the only equality campaign that has statistically significant backlash to it within the culture it is a campaign for.

If I get 100 gay men at random and ask them if the support gay rights, sure like with anything I might get a very small handful of opposing voices but safe to say the extreme majority of them are going to support it.

If I get 100 black people at random and ask them if they support black people... the same thing.

But, based on statistics if I pick 100 women at random and ask them if they are Feminist... I will get a statistically significant number of women saying they are not. As with everything exact numbers are hard to find but most polls only about 60% of women self identify as "Feminist."

And that's odd on purely cultural level. It's weird. And unlike a lot of other things they aren't really clear breakdowns on age, education, even political leanings. Sure only 7 percent of women who identify as Republican "strongly identify as feminist" but only 28 of women who identify as Democrat "strongly identify as feminist" (although the "mostly identify as feminist" spread is A LOT wider here, so that to me anyway says that agree or disagree, "feminist" is far less of a dirty word on the Left.)

Again there's no moral judgement to be had here, it's just weird is all.

So there is something; branding, emotional baggage, the way the wind is blowing, the price of tea in China, something that has tainted the idea (or the term, I wouldn't be surprised if this was one of those "The majority are in favor of helping the poor, but a minority are for welfare" kind of things) of feminism.

There are a couple of things I know about.

If we go back to the days of the Equal Rights Amendment, we see Phyllis Schlaffly, who famously rose up and opposed the ERA, and was the most prominent female opponent of the ERA. So, taking her for a shorthand version of anti-feminist women, I'll try to answer the question.


At the time, her biggest objection was that the amendment required that men and women be treated equally under the law. What that would have meant back in the 1970s would have been that a lot of laws which protected women would have been invalidated. In particular, in divorce cases, women were preferred in issues including child custody, property sharing, and alimony. The ERA would have invalidated laws or policies that favored women in those cases.

She wanted to ensure that if a man walked out on a woman, the woman did not lose her children, and the man still had to support, not just the kids, but also his ex wife.



A second aspect relates to shutit's themes in this thread, although it's not identical. I think one can reasonably say that feminism was an asepct of liberalism, and in this case I mean the things that would have been called "liberal" in the 1960s. A lot of people opposed that agenda, and they saw feminism as being strongly connected to that agenda.

This was especially true of the abortion issue. A lot of people opposed abortion. Feminist organizations pretty much universally supported abortion.

Similarly with gay rights. And then of course there were those bogeymen that people made up about the Equal Rights Amendment. It was all phony of course, but a couple of years ago I went back and read some anti-ERA literature from back in those days. Do you know that some people were saying that if the ERA passed, courts would end up saying that two men could marry each other, or that men could use women's bathrooms? Yeah. Ridiculous, right? How could anyone believe that kind of nonsense?


So, some women were opposed to feminism because they were opposed to the things that prominent feminists were aligned with.

I think, today, very few women, even very conservative women, would be opposed to laws forbidding women to adopt certain professions. I'm not sure what other laws that are considered "feminist" today that might be opposed by conservatives, especially conservative woment.

 

[lomiller]

This statement by shuttlt stood out to me when I was reading Meadmaker's response:



Is this accurate?

To my thinking, this is more a characteristic of libertarianism that liberalism.

Liberals, to my understanding think more about groups: labor unions, for instance.

IMO liberals are more pragmatic and willing to look at when\where\how individual liberties break down and become a new negative to overall levels of freedom within society.

Libertarians, conversely, take a more idealistic approach and are strictly dogmatic about not placing any restrictions on individuals even if the net result is much lower levels of freedom overall.