"Why can't we hate men?"
- Thread starter pharphis
- Start date
Sabrina said it a lot better than I did. I'll try to spell it out differently.
There is no proportianal equivalent to man-on-woman violence. Woman-on-man violence pales in comparison. Ergo, there's a problem with men. Men are too violent and commit too many crimes. Not all of us are like that, but way too many are. Women have a right to be angry about this, since they are too often victims, esp. of sexual crimes. There is a cultural of violence in this country that affects men and women, but the violence that takes place is almost exclusively a male thing. Why are guys so violent and prone to crime? It's an honest critique women can make against us. The fact that non-violent men get victimized by all this violence does not abrogate women's anger, which is what you seemed to be suggesting.
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
Speaking of this:
No, you don't got this. You know who's "got this"? People who, as inviduals, say "*I* got this. I don't care who else is running for office. I don't care who's in charge today. I don't care who's got the power today. I'm challenging those people, and I intend to prevail in the coming contest between us."
You want my paycheck? You want my career prospects? Come and get them. You can have them the same way I got them. But you don't want my job. You want your job. A job which currently boils down to telling me to resign, go home, and wait for a woman to "lean in" to take my place without having to compete with me for it, and hopefully support me in spite of all the hate it's okay to feel towards me. Some job!
Pledge to vote for feminist women only. Don’t run for office. Don’t be in charge of anything. Step away from the power. We got this.
No, you don't got this. You know who's "got this"? People who, as inviduals, say "*I* got this. I don't care who else is running for office. I don't care who's in charge today. I don't care who's got the power today. I'm challenging those people, and I intend to prevail in the coming contest between us."
You want my paycheck? You want my career prospects? Come and get them. You can have them the same way I got them. But you don't want my job. You want your job. A job which currently boils down to telling me to resign, go home, and wait for a woman to "lean in" to take my place without having to compete with me for it, and hopefully support me in spite of all the hate it's okay to feel towards me. Some job!
It's almost as if that's a lame excuse, and if you tried to sell it to a jury to get away with a crime, they wouldn't buy it. You are not a robot at the mercy of your hormones.
d4m10n
Penultimate Amazing
You asked a question about billions of people, not about me. You should expect an answer that relates to something those billions have in common, not an answer that would make sense in the context of an individual criminal trial.
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Ziggurat
Penultimate Amazing
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You asked about the difference, and what could explain it. Well, that could explain it. An explanation is not an excuse. Your response doesn't provide any reason to doubt the offered explanation. Being offended by it won't make it not true.
Delvo
Дэлво Δε&#
Anyone saying that anybody "got this" is immediately throwing away any credibility.
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
Then abstinence-only sex education should work just fine. Celibate priests should pose no sexual threat to the communities they serve. Rape should be much rarer than it actually is.
Also, it's disingenuous say that men are different from women in the problem of violence, and then immediately refuse to consider possible biological causes of this difference. Are you concerned about accidentally validating the hypothesis that men and women are biologically different, and that this leads to statistical differences across a wide range of outcomes?
Delvo
Дэлво Δε&#
Those people aren't paid salaries. Their employees are. And that's who works the unlimited hours and gets held responsible for whatever happens to the company (or the part of it that they're in charge of).
That does appear to be what Ziggurat said in the original quote.
From an employer's perspective, that's more burdensome than permanent departure, not less. Someone who's not coming back can be replaced. Someone who is just leaves an unfillable hole in the crew for months at a time. A simple answer to that might be that managers should hire enough people to get by even when some are gone, but then they're paying extra people they don't really need most of the time.
"Surgery" tends to have an implicit sound of urgency and inevitability to it, but the comparison only works for elective surgery.
Delvo
Дэлво Δε&#
Wow, I've seen goal-post-shifting before, but this one was massive. You sent that thing off from Arrowhead Stadium to **** Ganymede.
If we individually aren't biological automatons, then we are collectively not biological automatons. You can't have it both ways: if testosterone is not a valid reason for why person X did crime Y (and it's not- our whole justice system is predicated on the belief we're not slaves to our biologies), then testosterone is not a valid reason why persons x,y,z did crimes, a,b,c.
So if biology isn't the reason why men commit so many more crimes, what is? And if biology IS the reason, do we have a moral imperative as a society to address that particular biological problem, since the real-world consequences of crime are so horrific. In other words, if testosterone is the culprit behind say, 80%, of the "extra" crimes men commit, shouldn't society treat testosterone as a dangerous drug? Would we allow any other chemical that caused so much violence to be legally available? If lowering testosterone levels isn't feasible, then shouldn't people with that much rage-inducing stuff percolating through their veins have to be monitored carefully? Go to mandatory therapy? If you're view of men is that we are a bunch of dangerous animals, shouldn't we be kept on a short leash? Isn't that what you do with a vicious dog?
If you are at the mercy of your hormones, you shouldn't be allowed out on the street. And if your hormone problem is so bad it makes you a danger to others, you should get help. Right?
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theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
Probably none of us should be, but that ship sailed literally ages ago.
ETA: And by "us" I mean humans in general. None of this "we, kemosabe?" nonsense you've got going on with the male gender.
From this
Someone gets this
That is some impressive twisting
Well done
Someone gets this
That is some impressive twisting
Well done
luchog
Neo-Post-Retro-Revivalist
But in the meantime, it's a useful stopgap to ensure that at least the majority of minorities are being treated, if not perfectly fairly, at least much more fairly than they would be otherwise.
And you're creating a chicken-and-egg dichotomy by de-emphasizing legislation. Those who are empowered by cultural and governmental standards to express their racism unfettered are going to resist any attempts at education. When those people hold power, that education is never going to be done on a large scale, because it's still in the immediate self-interests of the majority to keep minorities oppressed.
It's a problem that needs multiple approaches in order to resolve: short-term mitigation through legislation, and long-term education to counteract and destroy cultural attitudes and artifacts that support and perpetuate racism, sexism, and other forms of prejudice.
It's "nonsense" that we are far more violent and commit far more crimes than our female counterparts? Are you claiming that?
d4m10n
Penultimate Amazing
You asked why men commit more crimes (across various and diverse cultures and societies, as it happens) you did not ask for reasons which would justify those crimes in a criminal setting.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "slaves to our biologies," at any rate. Decisions take place in a specific biological organ, which is made of atoms, each of which (slavishly) obeys the laws of physics.
Who has denied this?
That's a fair point. There's a distinction between reasons and excuses. Biology, as a reason, is one thing. Biology, as an excuse, is another.
Here's the problem with the line of thinking that biology is the mail culprit: if biology is the reason why men are so violent but biology is not an excuse for that violence, then something must be done about it. The status quo in that kind of situation is untenable.
That is not how we think. If someone is punched in the face, someone else will be blamed for it. Not "someone" as in a collection of atoms, but "someone" as in "a person with a free will that chose to punch someone". That's how we think about each other. This is why using biology as an excuse for men's violent behavior doesn't fly.
Ziggurat
Penultimate Amazing
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This is a stupid argument. First off, the fact that we aren't slaves to biology doesn't mean that biology doesn't have any effect on us. Of course it does. For example, people can become more violent when under the influence of drugs such as alcohol and cocaine. We don't need to consider these as legally mitigating in order to understand that basic fact.
Second, we're talking about aggregate statistics here. And in aggregate, anything which has an influence can show up in the statistics even if that influence isn't determinative in any single case.
Third, and even more fundamentally, on what possible logical basis would you try to use our system of law in order to establish scientific facts? It doesn't work that way. We should strive to make our laws conform with scientific realities, but they may not. And we certainly cannot deduce scientific realities from what we have chosen the law to be.
You haven't established this.
We have no moral imperative to "address" any problem where the actions used to address it are unspecified.
We do, actually. That's why you can't buy testosterone over the counter.
We do. It's called alcohol.
It isn't, not without serious side effects.
Who is this "we" you keep speaking of?
Most men don't have a problem with testosterone. Some men do. And we already keep a lot of them on a short leash. It's called prison.