Why shouldn't I hate feminists?

[slingblade]

Note that there is no corresponding term for men, e.g. "Masculinist", other than male chauvinist, and were there one it would have about the same disdain as male chauvinist.

Noted. So? If you see a need for such a term, then coin one and define it and get it into the lexicon. I don't perceive such a need for myself, as I no longer look at classes or groups of people in terms of polar opposites.

In a country where collective punishment is law of the land, with racial and gender preferences, it became acceptable to have militant man-haters pushing their agenda with not even much of a pretense of equality as their objective.

I see. Thanks for sharing?

 

[epepke]

Mind you, I'm not saying it's right to want some heads to roll, and I don't actually want them to start killing men or anything. I'm just saying that that's what we humans usually do when centuries of oppression blow over. We start lining people against a wall, even if only for catharsis sake.

Again, there's the presumption thing, and it's making less and less sense.

I don't even care about this.

First of all, I don't even think it's true. When Andrea Dworkin came to FSU to speak, I was interested to note how many of the cheering crowd there I personally knew. I am about as male as it is possible to get without having two penes, and I had never gotten the slightest feeling of animosity from any.

Second of all, I wouldn't even care if they did. If I cared how many people hated me or people who looked like me, or anybody else for that matter, it would be a fantastic waste of energy. I wouldn't find it particularly objectionable anyway.

To summarize, I think that any apparent misogyny was political rather than personal, and I also don't care much, except inasmuch as it reflected delusion and stupidity.

No, I consider them loons because of a kind of preternatural stupidity that amounted to delusion. In other words, lunacy. It had many symptoms. For one thing, aspects for all intents and purposes identical to traditional sexism were presented as feminist. For another, radical feminist theory prevented them from realizing who the real enemies were, especially as some of these real enemies were women.

For example, when discussing Margaret Thatcher, I encountered a large number of feminists who insisted that she took a lot of male hormones and was therefore not really a women. This is stupid to the point of delusion. Anger I can forgive, but stupidity, no, especially as I don't find women to be particularly stupid, and I do not think that it is to the advantage of women to present women as flighty and stupid.

 

[Delvo]

The idea of reacting to "centuries of oppression" would only make sense in cases where there had actually been oppression, rather than just centuries of being stuck in one social role while others were stuck in a different social role. The fact that, as urbanization and technology increased, one of the two basic social roles had become less restrictive, and the people in the other role had decided that they wanted some of that, does not magically conjure up a past in which the people stuck in one role had ever imposed this division on the other out of hostility.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

The idea of reacting to "centuries of oppression" would only make sense in cases where there had actually been oppression, rather than just centuries of being stuck in one social role while others were stuck in a different social role. The fact that, as urbanization and technology increased, one of the two basic social roles had become less restrictive, and the people in the other role had decided that they wanted some of that, does not magically conjure up a past in which the people stuck in one role had ever imposed this division on the other out of hostility.

This one-size-fits-all apologia doesn't make sense of things like the legality of raping one's spouse, not allowing women to own property or vote and so forth.

A division of labour between home-maker and wage-earner doesn't seem to necessarily require that the wage-earner be allowed to rape the home-maker whenever they feel like it, for example, or that the home-maker not be allowed to inherit the family wealth in the event that the wage-earner predeceases them.

The idea that there was never hostility towards the female emancipation movement is so ming-bogglingly ignorant that I suspect I am being trolled, and hence will chew on this particular piece of bait no further.

 

[Delvo]

The idea that there was never hostility towards the female emancipation movement is so ming-bogglingly ignorant that I suspect I am being trolled, and hence will chew on this particular piece of bait no further.

Then perhaps you would be happier dealing with what people actually write for a change, instead of once again making up stuff to pretend they wrote.

 

[gumboot]

This one-size-fits-all apologia doesn't make sense of things like the legality of raping one's spouse

To be fair that's not actually oppression of women. A wife was equally legally allowed to rape her husband.

 

[Giordano]

The idea of reacting to "centuries of oppression" would only make sense in cases where there had actually been oppression, rather than just centuries of being stuck in one social role while others were stuck in a different social role. The fact that, as urbanization and technology increased, one of the two basic social roles had become less restrictive, and the people in the other role had decided that they wanted some of that, does not magically conjure up a past in which the people stuck in one role had ever imposed this division on the other out of hostility.

Except there really was centuries of oppression. The situation was by no means as you benignly explain it. Men held the vast bulk of financial and societal control. Wife beating was not uncommon, and was almost never prosecuted. Women could not enroll in many colleges and could not pursue many careers. Some of the oppression was due to hostility, but some of it was due to patronizing views of women. That makes it no less oppression.

 

[HansMustermann]

The idea of reacting to "centuries of oppression" would only make sense in cases where there had actually been oppression, rather than just centuries of being stuck in one social role while others were stuck in a different social role. The fact that, as urbanization and technology increased, one of the two basic social roles had become less restrictive, and the people in the other role had decided that they wanted some of that, does not magically conjure up a past in which the people stuck in one role had ever imposed this division on the other out of hostility.

Being "stuck in a social role" is no less oppression.

Slaves in ancient Rome also were "stuck in a social role", and there had been extensive writing about how that role is a fundamental and integral role of that society. See Aristotle, for whom even the family was integrally composed of a man, a woman, and a slave. In fact, he saw it as a failure of barbarians and why they never amounted to much, that they don't have the role of slave. He didn't see it as oppression either. In fact it was argued as it being for their own good and indeed some people needing to be in that role, as clearly they're not fit to be in charge of themselves or take care of themselves. And being clearly born / made by nature to be fit for that role, and not fit for the other role. And naturally ending up in that role. Again, see Aristotle.

Recognize the same arguments that have been made about women's role for centuries? Because they're the exact same. Not even just similar. You could replace "slave" with "wife" in whole pages worth of text from Aristotle and get a pretty strikingly accurate summary of the arguments for that discrimination.

Serfs in the middle ages were also just "stuck in a social role". In fact extensive rationalizing had been made for why the division between clergy, nobles/knights, and serfs was a natural form of social organization and good. Also for why it's for everyone's good, including the serfs'.

Being stuck in an under-privileged role is exactly what discrimination and social injustice are all about.

And yes, in both cases above, and a few others, the pretense that, oh, woe is us, we too are stuck in the other (more privileged) role, was there too. From slave owners in Greece to White-Man's-Burden justifications for imperialism in the 19'th century, the utter BS pretense that, why, we're not giving ourselves privileges over them, we're just stuck with the burden of being in charge, was the #1 rationalization for injustice and inequality. I hope I can be excused if I'm not impressed when the exact same pretense is used for gender relations too.

And let's not forget the repression aspect of that oppression. All through the 19'th century for example, a woman could be committed to a mental institution -- which back then it was a pretty horror thing, unlike today -- for reporting a rape. It was classified as a symptom of nymphomania, you know? So was, for example, having any kinds of intellectual interests. No, seriously, even reading books was a symptom of nymphomania.

Before 1850 beating one's wife not only wasn't prosecuted, but wasn't even prosecutable at all anywhere. It was considered a normal and valid manifestation of a man's authority over his wife. It was first outlawed in 1850 in one state in the USA, and gradually spread. Until the end of the 1870's being beaten as a wife wasn't even a valid reason to get a divorce.

I mean, for fork's sake, there were even proverbs like, "Qui aime bien châtie bien" (Who loves well, punishes well), and illustrations of them like a guy beating his wife with a cane. That was apparently a manifestation of love.

And again, it didn't just die off by itself. What even caused that change in the mid-19'th century were precisely feminists making a fuss about it.

So let's recap the big points of what it was to be a woman for most of history:
- you can be beaten at your master's discretion
- you can be pawned off to a guy without anyone asking your opinion about it
- you're stuck in an underprivileged role
- you have no political rights
- you have next to no economic rights
- you don't even have a say over your own body
Etc.

I'm sorry, but when something like that happened to guys, we called it chattel slavery. And we can all agree that THAT's oppression then. I see no problem with calling it oppression when it happened to women too, regardless of what mechanisms and social phenomena you think led to that miserable state.

 

[HansMustermann]

Again, there's the presumption thing, and it's making less and less sense.

I don't even care about this.

First of all, I don't even think it's true. When Andrea Dworkin came to FSU to speak, I was interested to note how many of the cheering crowd there I personally knew. I am about as male as it is possible to get without having two penes, and I had never gotten the slightest feeling of animosity from any.

Actually, that's just what I was saying, more or less.

When MOST (other) groups or ideologies have their extremists, we see them lining people against walls and throwing bombs. When feminists have some extremists, they just sit down and write prose about it, and the rest don't seem even particularly hostile or anything. So on the whole I'd say that feminists are a rather tame group.

 

[wobs]

Before 1850 beating one's wife not only wasn't prosecuted, but wasn't even prosecutable at all anywhere. It was considered a normal and valid manifestation of a man's authority over his wife. It was first outlawed in 1850 in one state in the USA, and gradually spread. Until the end of the 1870's being beaten as a wife wasn't even a valid reason to get a divorce.

I mean, for fork's sake, there were even proverbs like, "Qui aime bien châtie bien" (Who loves well, punishes well), and illustrations of them like a guy beating his wife with a cane. That was apparently a manifestation of love.

And again, it didn't just die off by itself. What even caused that change in the mid-19'th century were precisely feminists making a fuss about it.

So let's recap the big points of what it was to be a woman for most of history:
- you can be beaten at your master's discretion
- you can be pawned off to a guy without anyone asking your opinion about it
- you're stuck in an underprivileged role
- you have no political rights
- you have next to no economic rights
- you don't even have a say over your own body
Etc.

I'm sorry, but when something like that happened to guys, we called it chattel slavery. And we can all agree that THAT's oppression then. I see no problem with calling it oppression when it happened to women too, regardless of what mechanisms and social phenomena you think led to that miserable state.

The US used a lot of Old English Law, and this forbid wife beating.
Infact throughout Europe, wife beating was not only against the law, but also punished through local custom such as the Skimmington ride. However, this ride also punished husbands that were beaten by his wife. So the husband was accountable no matter what when social norms were broken.

The more I look into this issue, the more I realise that the feminist interpretation is blind to a large part of the story, giving a very biased view. That of women as victim.

How many times have we heard the claim that women were second class citizens, and were the ones who were spending the money earned by the husband, wearing the fine clothing. In Victorian Britain, families with money often saw their women bored due to social constraints. While the husabnds were earning the money. Which are more the privileged? The bored or the over worked? Women generally chose this route, as work was decidedly unpleasent.

In the event of divorce, a wife would be due alimony, and in crime, women have (and often still are) treated more leaniently than men.

There are many more instances where women were excluded from unpleasentries of life in those days, but these are either ignored or twisted by feminists to show further victimhood. The truth is that men have always been the disposable sex compared to women.


http://www.dewar4research.org/docs/skim-revisited.pdf
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/blackstone_bk1ch15.asp
An interesting book as well, is Woman Racket, which argues that while there have been hardships for women, these are generally short live, and when made aware, society tries to address them relatively quickly.
http://www.imprint.co.uk/moxon/

 

[HansMustermann]

And conversely I see a lot of whitewashing it by people who don't even seem to have read their own links. Which is kind of sad. Let's see,

1. The image of the woman as a pampered princess in the Victorian age, aside from not being strictly true even for upper class woman, misses the point that not every woman was upper class or could afford to spend all day wearing fashionable dresses in fashionable ballrooms.

In fact, it helps if you understand the #1 drive behind fashion for most of recorded history: to show off wealth and status. Most of the point of impractical dresses and corsets that caused one to faint at the slightest exertions were to show that the wearer is rich enough to not have to do any manual labor herself: she has servants for that. There would be no point in that, if every woman could do the same claim of just loafing around all day.

And indeed where we see lower class women and girls mentioned, it's more like outrages over women wearing pants while pulling mine carts, or in one mention of child labour, that one girl's pants had been worn off in places and one could see naughty bits. And on top of that came the expectation to cook, wash, sew, etc, for the family in any case.

Basically don't confuse actual 19'th century women with the aristocrats from soap operas.

2. Even your link mentions some laws that were exceptions, and LOCAL rules at that, rather than any uniform protection. Yes, the Plymouth Bay Colony had a rule against beating wives as early as 1655, but what makes it stand out like a sore thumb, is that it was an exception. And even that one usually resulted just in mild sanctions by the community.

3. More to the point even your first link, if you had actually read it, says that in the mid-19'th century there was a lot of social disquiet over the plight of battered women in major English cities, and that that's when any systematic legal protection started being given. Whatever ancient rules you imagine existed, or whatever fantasy fairy-tale version you have about the life of a 19'th century woman, clearly they were not doing much to keep those women from being beaten often.

4. Rules like the Charivari or the Riding Skimmington were not legal protections, and even your first link says so. They were arbitrary community acts to enforce conformity, and hardly something you could rely on for your legal protection.

But it's even funnier than that. What the document actually says that it was in fact only (or primarily) used against battered husbands, i.e., to ridicule someone for not having the more acceptable role of master and despot of one's own family. Far from being a means to discourage someone from getting too patriarchal on the wife, so to speak, it was ridiculing people who were not patriarchal enough. Far from giving equal rights, it was enforcing a culture of fundamentally unequal rights, where the man HAS to be the one dominating the woman, unless there's something wrong with him.

It does NOT say that it was used to afford battered women any legal protection or redress. That seems to be your own invention. And in any case, whatever use you imagine it had in protecting wives, clearly by the middle of the 19'th century it wasn't working, and your own link says so.

I mean, heck, even the name of the event derives from the skimming ladle that a woman would use, and supposedly also as a weapon to clunk her husband with. And the PDF even tells you so. Did you actually read it?

4. It's funny that you mention alimony, but conveniently fail to mention how that worked in English Common Law. The husband would automatically get all the wife's wealth and property upon marriage, and would get to keep it in a divorce. The alimony was little more than some settlement to pay in exchange for keeping it. It worked mostly to discourage people from marrying some heiress for her title or inheritance, then immediately kick her out, than as some great privilege of women.

 

[bookitty]

Actually, that's just what I was saying, more or less.

When MOST (other) groups or ideologies have their extremists, we see them lining people against walls and throwing bombs. When feminists have some extremists, they just sit down and write prose about it, and the rest don't seem even particularly hostile or anything. So on the whole I'd say that feminists are a rather tame group.

Well, back in my radical youth, I was known to wear some pretty scathing slogans on my t-shirts.

 

[Travis]

The US used a lot of Old English Law, and this forbid wife beating.
Infact throughout Europe, wife beating was not only against the law, but also punished through local custom such as the Skimmington ride. However, this ride also punished husbands that were beaten by his wife. So the husband was accountable no matter what when social norms were broken.

The more I look into this issue, the more I realise that the feminist interpretation is blind to a large part of the story, giving a very biased view. That of women as victim.

How many times have we heard the claim that women were second class citizens, and were the ones who were spending the money earned by the husband, wearing the fine clothing. In Victorian Britain, families with money often saw their women bored due to social constraints. While the husabnds were earning the money. Which are more the privileged? The bored or the over worked? Women generally chose this route, as work was decidedly unpleasent.http://www.imprint.co.uk/moxon/

Not being allowed to acquire property or vote (when it came along) is sort of the definition of a second class citizen. Just because sometimes their husbands might be punished if they beat the crap of them doesn't make their situation fair. Nor does the existence of the occasional bored socialite.

 

[Beerina]

Females don’t have to kill baby boys. Just not nurture them. Females are forced to *birth* baby boys, but beyond that a female’s physical actions are her own.

Males will die without the constant infusion of female energy that they get from our wombs and from our lives. They are perfectly welcome to take the male infants from the hands of the midwife, and what they do with it from that point is *their* decision.

Females need to not be emotionally and intellectually invested in a male future.

Sounds like a plan.

The only flaw in this theory, aside from the biological (which will soon not be a problem, thanks to genetic engineering, but due to men, oops!) is that, absent arrogant men striving for power, women will do so, and will probably produce just as poor results.

 

[gumboot]

Not being allowed to acquire property or vote (when it came along) is sort of the definition of a second class citizen. Just because sometimes their husbands might be punished if they beat the crap of them doesn't make their situation fair. Nor does the existence of the occasional bored socialite.

While women have certainly not had equal treatment in western society for much of our history, their treatment has been nothing like as bad as other suppressed groups such as blacks, non-Christians, lepers, and so forth.

To equate the oppression of women with the oppression of these groups is to belittle the deprivations that were heaped on these more unfortunate groups.

Perhaps most crucially, these other groups were oppressed because they were disliked by society, and worse than the legal disenfranchisement they suffered was the every-day abuse, distrust and rejection by the rest of society.

Women have never been broadly disliked, and have never suffered that same methodical and unrelenting rejection by society.

 

[Strawberry]

You're overlooking something major there, Gumboot. Blacks, non-christians, lepers, etc can be women too. Which means they not only faced all the oppression of belonging to a disliked group in society, but all the legal disenfranchisement of being a woman.

 

[gumboot]

You're overlooking something major there, Gumboot. Blacks, non-christians, lepers, etc can be women too. Which means they not only faced all the oppression of belonging to a disliked group in society, but all the legal disenfranchisement of being a woman.

Given that the negatives of belonging to the minority group (both socially and legally) dwarfed the negatives of being a woman, I doubt it really mattered much.

If a man's beating you with a stick it doesn't particularly concern you that the law forbids his wife from beating you too.

 

[Strawberry]

Given that the negatives of belonging to the minority group (both socially and legally) dwarfed the negatives of being a woman, I doubt it really mattered much.

If a man's beating you with a stick it doesn't particularly concern you that the law forbids his wife from beating you too.

Again, you're missing the point. Comparing oppression of women to other groups to say women didn't have it so bad is a red herring - it ignores that women in all those groups suffered discrimination vis a vis their own male counterparts on top of the discrimination piled on by the rest of society. Being beaten with a stick by a police officer does not "dwarf" being beaten with a stick by your husband.

 

[TheAnachronism]

Reading At Home by Bill Bryson and found several passages that might be of relevance here:

...[N]ineteenth-century divorce acts, like everything else to do with marriage, were overwhelmingly biased in favour of men. To obtain a divorce in Victorian England a man had merely to show that his wife had slept with another man. A woman, however, had to prove that her spouse had compounded his infidelity by committing incest, bestiality or some other dark and inexcusable transgression drawn from a very small list. Until 1857, a divorcee forfeited all her property and generally she lost the children too. Indeed, in law a wife had no rights at all – no right to property, no right of expression, no freedoms of any kind beyond those her husband chose to grant her. According to the great legal theorist William Blackstone, upon marriage a woman relinquished her ‘very being or legal existence’. A wife had no legal personhood at all.​

Some countries were slightly more liberal than others. In France, exceptionally, a woman could divorce a man on grounds of adultery alone, though only as long as the infidelity had occurred in the marital home. In England, however, standards were brutally unfair. In one well-known case, a woman named Martha Robinson was for years beaten and physically misused by a cruel and unstable husband. Eventually he infected her with gonorrhoea and then poisoned her almost to the point of death by slipping anti-venereal powders into her food without her knowledge. Her health and spirit broken, she sued for divorce. The judge listened carefully to the arguments, then dismissed the case and sent Mrs Robinson home with instructions to try to be more patient.​

In 1856, when a young housewife in Boston, from a respectable background, tearfully confessed to her doctor that she sometimes found herself involuntarily thinking of men other than her husband, the doctor ordered a series of stringent emergency measures, which included cold baths and enemas, the removal of all stimulus, including spicy foods and the reading of light fiction, and the thorough scouring of her vagina with borax. Light fiction was commonly held to account for promoting morbid thoughts and a tendency to nervous hysteria. As one author gravely summarized: ‘Romance-reading by young girls will, by this excitement of the bodily organs, tend to create their premature development, and the child becomes physically a woman months or even years before she should.’​

Sweeping generalizations were about as close as any medical man would permit himself to get to women’s reproductive affairs. This could have serious medical consequences since no doctor could make a proper gynaecological examination. In extremis, he might probe gently beneath a blanket in an underlit room, but this was highly exceptional. For the most part, women who had any medical complaint between neck and knees were required to point blushingly to the affected area on a dummy.

One American physician in 1852 cited it as a source of pride that ‘women prefer to suffer the extremity of danger and pain rather than waive those scruples of delicacy which prevent their maladies from being fully explored’. Some doctors opposed forceps delivery on the grounds that it allowed women with small pelvises to bear children, thus passing on their inferiorities to their daughters. The inevitable consequence of all this was that ignorance of female anatomy and physiology among medical men was almost medieval....

An understanding of female anatomy and physiology was still a long way off, however. As late as 1878 the British Medical Journal was able to run a spirited and protracted correspondence on whether a menstruating woman’s touch could spoil a ham. Judith Flanders notes that one British doctor was struck off the medical register for noting in print that a change in coloration around the vagina soon after conception was a useful indicator of pregnancy. The conclusion was entirely valid; the problem was that it could only be discerned by looking. The doctor was never allowed to practise again. In America, meanwhile, James Platt White, a respected gynaecologist, was expelled from the American Medical Association for allowing his students to observe a woman – with her permission – give birth.​

 

[slingblade]

Given that the negatives of belonging to the minority group (both socially and legally) dwarfed the negatives of being a woman, I doubt it really mattered much.

If a man's beating you with a stick it doesn't particularly concern you that the law forbids his wife from beating you too.

Ah, but it did matter to women, and to both the men and women around them.

How much flak did a black woman take for choosing women's rights over civil rights? Was she ever told to pick one, because her efforts were perceived as "more important to the cause" by one faction or the other?

Did anyone ever say to her, "We'll worry about your equal pay for equal work as soon as we've ended racial segregation and job discrimination, attained an equal voice in politics, can attend the schools we want...if we don't have these things, what do the things you want even matter?"

Or maybe she heard, "Oh, it's all well and good to fight for 'your' civil rights, but equal pay is a civil right, too! We need legal abortions, birth control, the right to do 'man's work' in the shipyards or on the docks or construction sites. What good's it going to do your daughter to attend the school of her choice if all she can look forward to is getting coffee for her boss between answering the phones and taking dictation?"

It did matter, and there's reading material out there that covers this issue, if you care to go find any.