Aborting Feminism, Adding Links
Not surprisingly, some feminists framed this week’s Supreme Court decision allowing states to limit second- and third-trimester partial-birth abortions as an attack on women’s rights. Like a lot of Americans — though not the ones you tend to see arguing about abortion on television, for reasons more aesthetic than political — I’m fairly moderate on the abortion topic, inclined to think that fetuses are less than full persons but more than, say, tumors and thus arguably due some degree of moral concern and legal protection, particularly the farther along they are in the development process. Rough, centrist legal remedies like, say, allowing abortion in the first trimester but limiting partial-birth abortion in the third trimester are thus OK by me, though inevitably we will always be without a perfect solution on this topic. So I’d rather talk about feminism instead.
I mentioned my opposition to feminism in an earlier post called “Brief Statement of Principles,” which is now also posted as one of the Permanent Things in my right margin, as is my half-joking Personal Ad — something you should read instead of the current post if you happen to be a feminist who might be willing to date me but will cease to be willing if you read my denunciation of feminism. Also among the Permanent Things is information on the monthly Debates at Lolita Bar that I organize and host, which next month (May 2) will feature an intra-feminist argument between comedian-debaters Charles Star and Jen Dziura over the question “Does the Beauty Industry Oppress Women?” So come hear them and, if the current blog entry upsets or inspires you, come give me a piece of your mind while you’re at it.
There’s bound to be something in the following Ten Complaints About Feminism you disagree with (all that I really have time for now, though one could write a multi-volume encyclopedia with tiny little footnotes):
1. Making A Priori Moral Assertions About Thoroughly Empirical Questions
This is really my main complaint about feminism, as philosophy, and I mentioned it in the Principles post already. I get the sense whenever listening to feminist arguments that there are conclusions I am being morally goaded into drawing about how the world works even before I have been allowed to investigate — that women and men’s intelligence “must” be found to be equal, or that if men are smarter at some things, women “must” be smarter at others in such a way that it all evens out (in some grand, ill-defined metaphysical sense) so that everyone feels like an equal partner in democracy at the end of the day. That’s just bad science.
And speaking of science, I should preface this entire list of complaints with the comment that I am well aware that individuals frequently defy the broad, relatively subtle generalizations made about them, and in my own life I’m lucky enough to have frequent contact with highly rational female colleagues, for example both ones with science expertise greater than my own (at work at the American Council on Science and Health) and ones with phenomenal writing skills in my off-hours existence, which so often involves rubbing elbows with various media folk.
Yet the data suggest that there are intelligence differences between males and females, and without going into each sub-category of intelligence (ability to negotiate three-dimensional spaces, ability to read emotions from faces, recall, math, etc.), I will say that there seem to be both more male geniuses than female geniuses and more male idiots than female idiots. For a moment, the reader hoping (for whatever a priori reasons) to find “balance” in evaluations of the two sexes might feel relieved that in some sense the IQ differences appear to “even out” — but a tendency for women to bunch near the norm while males are more likely to rise to the top and to end up in prison is hardly, I think, the sort of simple “equality” that underpins most traditional, idealistic feminist thinking. Those differences have huge implications that we’re still sorting out and may render, for example, the application of affirmative action laws to gender “balance” absurd (and unjust).
2. Refusing to Define “Feminism” Clearly Enough to Judge Its Value
If people are going to say “I am a feminist” — or be outraged by someone’s statement “I am not a feminist” — you’d think they’d have some sort of definition of the term in mind. Yet in my experience, defenders of the term are perfectly content to give slippery reformulations of it that to a less than fully magnanimous listener might seem to be offered more for moment-to-moment strategic purposes than for clarity — usually for the purposes of either reading someone out of the feminist movement (if, say, they find that someone unattractive) or insisting that someone is indeed a feminist whether he likes it or not (perhaps, for instance, because he is deemed attractive).
This problem of amorphous, not terribly useful definitions crops up repeatedly on the left — as in the case of the term “global warming” being craftily and strategically replaced in much recent discourse by the ludicrous catch-all “climate change,” no doubt in part so that anything that happens (since climate is not, and never has been, unchanging) can now count as evidence for “climate change” — which either implies business as usual or an imminent crisis demanding takeover of the global economy, depending on rhetorical circumstances (this sort of terminological chicanery tends to be closely associated with another of the sophist’s favorite tools, cherry-picking of data — the sort of selective attention that now leads to each hurricane being spoken of as “possibly” caused by “climate change” but does not, of course, lead to headlines this month saying, as they might well have: COLDEST EASTER IN SIXTY-SEVEN YEARS: DOES PLANET FACE “FREEZE PERIL”? [but for more on climate change, see the recent debate about it posted on the blog I edit at my real job, HealthFactsAndFears, which often examines the way weak data is turned into overblown doomsday rhetoric]).
One female friend and past commenter on this fledgling site has summarized feminism as the belief that “women are people too,” to which I am tempted to say that perhaps Black Nationalism, then, is the view that “black people have lungs and circulatory systems,” in which case I’m a Black Nationalist and a feminist. But it seems as if feminism is supposed to be something more than that, certainly something that implies a moral veto power of some sort over aspects of traditional male behavior.
3. Feminism Often Demolishes the Very Traditions That Could Solve Our Problems.
Fittingly, I once had a notion that turned out, like most good conservative ideas, to have been better stated by someone else before me, in this case Irving Kristol. He observed, back in the 70s, before we’d even gotten in the habit of calling politicized campus speech codes “political correctness,” that feminist and leftist taboos are not so much opposed to traditional etiquette rules as they are a hastily-constructed, ramshackle substitute for traditional etiquette. To take a collegiate example: tradition dictated that young men shouldn’t walk around half-naked in front of women they hardly know, and the left demolished that taboo with the result that women — even smart, “liberated” women — found themselves quite alarmed by the naked men walking around their dorm rooms but unable to articulate their objections in (hated) traditional language (”boorish,” “unseemly,” “not gentlemanly”) and so had to concoct (proper) leftist rationales — not always terribly good ones — for a de facto return to the old order and in some cases separate bathrooms (”All those men are potential rapists!” “If we’re all naked, they may objectify me!” “I can see his patriarchy hanging out, for goodness’ sake!”). Being a lefist means, above all else, never admitting you made a mistake — or rather that predecessors thinking along the same lines as you made mistakes — and so we “progress” on to a new set of rules, learning almost nothing from the experience of abandoning the older, more nuanced set that preceded them. So it is with liberalism, always.
4. In Any Truly Useful Gendered Analysis, Ineradicable, Natural Inequalities May Well Matter Most.
I think the degree to which people prefer pleasant illusions to truth is often underestimated. In the specific case of relations between the sexes, it is largely the women’s delicate sensibilities that determine what illusions we will all agree to use, the main one being the pretense that humanity isn’t driven largely by the animal impulse to be what the hip-hop community refers to as pimps and hos. But lest that comment be misinterpreted, let me first describe the psyche, as near I understand it (never having hired any), of the prostitute.
Libertarians tend to look upon prostitutes — hos for present purposes — as simply another sort of worker engaged in financial transactions. Liberals tend to see them as among the downtrodden, indeed perhaps the patriarchy’s lowest victims. Conservatives see them as sinners and threats to the social fabric. All those analyses fly out the window, though, if we are to believe the claim made by multiple pimps in the documentary American Pimp that their hos receive no money for doing their “jobs.” All the money goes to the pimp. And, if anecdotal psychological evidence is to be believed, this is not simply because the ho gets paid by the pimp in diamonds, shelter, and fur. Rather, many hos are psychologically dependent on their pimp in more the way we expect of cult members orbiting a revered father-leader. Many even get started on their “careers,” apparently, by doing sexual “favors” for the pimp’s friends. Something less pristine and far more sad than a cold transaction is taking place — or so it reportedly is in at least some cases (I don’t mean thereby to rule out the possibility of some hos being just as strong and sane as the rest of us and simply deciding to take up the most easy, lucrative line of work available to them at the time — people vary).
But what it comes down to is that most men, far from needing to dominate women, may actually be more naturally prone to seek out an equal, an attainable partner, while women are naturally inclined to throw themselves in huge clusters at the one alpha male — or at a tiny handful of alpha males — at the top of the social heap. This makes evolutionary sense, since the one alpha can easily impregnate them all, especially if he’s already killed off all his male rivals (whereas women basically can’t have babies any faster no matter how many rivals they displace, so there’s less point in a woman trying to amass a he-harem of ready males). Why settle for a lower-caste male, girls, when you can be one of countless harem-girls who gets a tiny portion of the endlessly-flowing sperm of The Best Guy? And, yes, some small minority of men will calculate — or simply feel on a gut level, as a result of instincts produced by evolution’s mating calculus — that they have a better shot at flourishing in a competition to become the pimp-daddy themselves than in a culture that strongly encourages permanent pair-bonding. But most males, I think, simply want an acceptable, normal girlfriend.
This is the fundamental asymmetry at the heart of all human life, and any philosophy that purports to show that the two sexes are “equal” — or that they would behave the same way if only the cruel, arbitrary rules of the “patriarchy” were somehow abolished — is as hopelessly at odds with fundamental human nature and social reality as a theory that says deer “ought” to live in an aquarium in the same tank as the octopus. Any honest examination of human life ought to start from this evolutionary psychology insight about the differential behavioral implications of wildly different sperm and egg production/usability rates.
Otherwise, feminists are doomed (and the rest of us along with them to the extent we have to listen to them or abide by the laws they inspire) to be shocked and offended anew each time, say, a Bill Clinton (or someone else with the most resources or power) amasses an army of fellatrices even while talking the talk of feminist empowerment, or all the female interns sleep with the same male partner at the law firm, or all the women in some ostensibly egalitarian art- or free-love-oriented collective all rotate through the bed of the one male guru in charge in part because all the other women have so it must be the most desirable thing to do, or half the parish women throw themselves at the priest, or countless amoral she-yuppies become mistresses to one rich already-married businessman while turning up their noses (and instinctively protecting their vaginas from entry by the genetically inferior) at more sincere romantic overtures from lower-caste, single, monogamous males.
The power of women to delude themselves into not noticing these patterns even while engaging in them would be breathtaking were it not by now so familiar. But all talk of “equality” is nonsense so long as women continue to behave like harem-girls, and the evidence is ample that their doing so has nothing to do with some slight income disparity or tragic but temporary bought of low self-esteem — this, Dr. Freud, is what women want. Having failed to hold the attention of the CEO, football captain, or other pimp-daddy at the top of the social heap, they will eventually settle (marriage rates would be far lower otherwise), but whether de jure or merely de facto, harem-formation will always be a natural tendency among mating humans.
And who knows, if I were sleazy enough to lie, behave callously, or jockey for position, perhaps I too could one day become a pimp-daddy (surely it’s at least natural for all males to think so).
But the tragic thing is that I am perhaps more feminist in one narrow sense than anyone: I want one truly equal (intellectually, emotionally, morally) partner and had assumed since imbibing the feminist messages pervading pop culture in the 70s and 80s that that was a natural, relatively easily-found thing. And while I was in effect being a naive feminist and trying to engage women in respectful conversation about philosophy, women were sleeping with the callous football captain and the even more callous professor (hey, beats dating your equals). So it shall ever be, and it’s time men stopped letting women dupe them into feeling guilty about it and time we all stopped denying it. They may try to silence you, boys — call you bitter, even oppressive — but we have to start breaking the silence if things are going to get better. Though they won’t. Ever. Not with this species — and the pattern is roughly identical in almost all others, as zoologists know (but probably never admit in front of their feminist spouses), right down to the male dung beetles competing to see who can offer the coy female the biggest piece of dung. (Species that don’t fit the pattern are usually abnormal in some other way that does not fit the human pattern, as with seahorse males being the ones to carry the fertilized eggs. On a related note, I think that people who worry that awareness of evolutionary theory will lead people to behave like animals have it exactly backwards — those who forget evolutionary theory are most likely to passively follow evolution’s dictates, as with religious fundamentalists who don’t believe in the centrality of reproductive drives to human behavior but “coincidentally” claim that God wants us to “be fruitful and multiply.” Cretins.)
I am reminded of a female co-worker in my ABC News days, one who considered herself both a libertarian and a feminist, who said she resented men so often choosing to date younger women, as though this were entirely up to the (icky) men. “When you were a high school freshman,” I asked her, “Did you want to date the freshman males or the seniors?” The seniors, she admitted. “Well, then, think of this as payback time,” I told her. Truer words were never spoken, if I do say so myself. In a sane world, the Women’s Studies departments would close and classes would instead be built around my words. Maybe someday.
5. The Feminsts Often Recapitulate Traditional Patterns While Demanding that No One Point This Out.
Only days ago, as it happens, I heard a left-leaning feminist of my acquaintance, one not only trained in psychology but philosophically inclined to claim some sophistication on sexual matters, express surprise that a man she’d kissed is a Republican. How did this philosophical interloper win over our sophisticate? From what little I observed, it had a great deal to do with him (a) talking about money and (b) using (consciously or not) the infamous “negs,” or offhand insulting comments, seemingly delivered without ill intent, that lower the woman’s self-esteem enough to make her think the guy must be her superior — someone from up near the top of that aforementioned alpha-male-capped heap — and thus to be desired (this technique is apparently all the rage with men who teach courses and write books about how to pick up women, and more than that I’d just as soon not know — though I’ve already witnessed it working its magic in at least two cases in my extended social circle and I’m sure it goes on all the time).
Imagine how insulted these people would be, though, if I were to suggested they’d simply repeated the widespread pimp-ho behavior pattern written (as at least one mating strategy among many, the human brain being admirably flexible) into our genes and celebrated by countless abrasive rappers. If modern women behave like hos, feminism tends to insist, the blame must belong to men, the evil capitalist system with its income disparities, or some aberrant self-esteem problem on the part of select females. But what happens to feminism’s egalitarian worldview if this is simply the way women tend by nature to like it, absent lots of rationalistic or religious haranguing to behave otherwise?
Traditional, 70s-style feminists have spent the past four decades honing their arguments against conservatives and capitalists, but I suspect their cause is ultimately going to be done in instead by a rising generation of trashy hos.
6. Feminists Tend to Disparage Current Social Arrangements Even When They Are in Fact Working to Women’s Advantage.
To what extent, I wonder, will monogamy (including marriage, so often depicted as something of a trap by feminists) be looked back upon as the chief cause of the egalitarian-feminist impulse in the past two centuries? The male-female diatom does, after all, lend itself to thinking of two equal partners. As that diatom becomes less common, I suspect the illusion of equality will also naturally erode — though that illusion will not go quietly. Liberals, being naturally inclined to totalitarianism, are willing to expend a great deal of (other people’s) resources trying to shoehorn social reality into their mental picture of how it ought to operate. As women end up poor, without husbands but saddled with children, liberals are perfectly willing to denounce traditional ideas of marriage in one breath (Who needs a male breadwinner?) and call for ever-increasing wealth redistribution with the next breath — to pick up the shattered pieces of the society they’re destroying. (I don’t pretend any of this was fully intended on the left’s part — the left, to my mind, is not so much a sinister conspiracy as a grand tragedy in which we are all players as participants in modernity.)
On a similar, though perhaps less consequential, note, I think feminists often tote up as patriarchal wrongs things that were produced precisely by the leftist/feminist sense of irony, as with an upcoming movie that might as well be entitled Vagina Dentata: The Motion Picture. If everything in pop culture that’s stupid (say, sunny weather girls with no real knowledge of meteorology) automatically counted as conservative or patriarchal, then opponents of conservatism and patriarchy would indeed have a strong case. But stupidity is transpartisan.
7. In Its Recent Manifestations, Feminism (While, Thankfully, Less Ideologically Rigid) Seems to Encourage Women to Insist They Are Not Only as Good as Men But as Bad.
What exactly is this “girl power” (for lack of a better term) form of feminism that the Generation Y members now fall for if not simply the usual feminist hypocrisy — regard us as equals even while giving us special treatment — gussied up in its latest form, in which we are ordered to believe that in addition to being exactly as smart and employable as men they are also just as macho (until they cry)?
Lately, it almost seems that “feminism” is now mainly a brand of spunky pugnacity — like they’ve gone from trying to “be men” (becoming lawyers and whatnot, as was the ideal back in the 60s and 70s) to simply trying to “be boys” (loutish, crude, oversexed, drunk, etc.).
Why is everything that’s supposedly wrong when men do it OK when women do it? Having heard for decades about how crude and exploitative it is for men to look at women’s bodies, for instance, are we now supposed to think at the same time that it’s cool when lesbians or bisexuals do it? I’m inclined to think that if it’s OK for the lesbians to do it, feminism owes a memo of apology to Hugh Hefner and company. (”But when I do it, it’s cute!” as Homer Simpson once insisted, in one of the most succinct summaries of moral double-standards ever written.)
As always, what the feminists seem most to want to be liberated from is…intellectual consistency. So if you say women today still behave in a more feminine manner than men, you are condemned by them. If you then say women behave in a more masculine manner than they used to, you are condemned. If you say that they deny the validity of such categories as “masculine” and “feminine,” you are condemned for depicting them in an outmoded, straw-(wo)man form. And on it goes, never arriving at a point where one can comfortably describe reality in anything resembling a familiar form without the feminist seeking some sort of leg up on discourse by asserting that more respect must be paid to them and their (vague) cause. And even if they found that last sentence accurate, they would most likely just assert that it is a moral triumph of some sort to perpetually complicate and render problematic all attempts at discourse — until you asserted that that was the effect they were having, at which point they would probably assert that you’re overreacting and switch back to the “we’re just ordinary women who want the usual, non-radical things” mode. It’s all quite mercurial, in my experience.
8. Feminism Seems Increasingly to Point to Worst-Case Scenarios as Evidence Feminism is Still Needed.
As evidence their movement has some point, feminists trot out things that (virtually) all non-feminists already agree with, such as opposition to rape. Claiming that opposition to rape — or intense forms of verbal abuse, for that matter — makes one a feminist is a bit like saying that opposition to the Klan makes one a Democrat.
They will also try these days to take credit for the most basic, nigh-universal rules of civility, as if thinking that listening to what people have to say and refraining from punching them in the face were feminist moral innovations (indeed, tolerance and not hitting people in the face seem to me principles that, if consistently observed, make one more eligible for inclusion among libertarians than among feminists, since libertarians are the only philosophical faction aside from pacifists to consistently condemn the initiation of force).
9. Feminism Is Quite Plainly, Though No One Ever Seems to Point This Out, Self-Interested Rather than Dispassionately Just.
Is a woman being a feminist really any more admirable — weighed purely in terms of altruistic motivation — than a white guy becoming a white supremacist? After all, I don’t think even the white supremacists these days hold out much hope of passing anti-black laws…but they are always fighting for their tribe against others and seeing the world in those terms, even while condemning others for acting as self-interestedly. What has feminism become if not self-interested, tribalist pleading on behalf of a group that has already won all its morally relevant battles? Far from feminism being a feather in the cap of all respectable “intellectuals,” perhaps it should be a sign that someone has wholeheartedly immersed herself in naked partisanship and is unfit for the polite, civil, and disinterested discourse that makes philosophy and (rational) politics possible.
The goal of the movement, one suspects, isn’t to make sense of the world or to push some coherent model of justice — the whole thing is just one more guilt-tripping tactic, no more indicative of them holding the moral high ground than their ability to make males feel bad by crying (a tactic that I think has finally completely lost its power over me — if they’re crying, they may well deserve to be crying).
If I may, by way of compensation, plead on behalf of my own sex for just a moment: it is worth remembering that there is consistent, constant state violence (in the U.S.) against men, in the form, for instance, of affirmative action laws, tax-funded set-asides for women, and speech-restricting sexual harassment laws far more likely to be deployed against males, all enforceable by fines and (like all laws) ultimately by forcible imprisonment when people refuse to pay fines (though so pervasive is the legal threat that the guns rarely need to be displayed) and no such state violence (in the U.S., as opposed to many Islamic countries) uniquely directed at women. (Even abortion laws, of which there are precious few, apply in principle to both sexes — it’s just that biology, not law or society, has placed fetuses inside only one sex, but we’re skipping that topic and its endless complexities for now.)
And to those of my fellow libertarians who covet the “feminist” label — some calling themselves “individualist feminists” or “iFeminists” to show their opposition to the socialism so common in feminist writings: if some would contend that “conservatism” is too much entangled with the use of coercion for anyone of a libertarian bent to want that label, what on Earth are we to think of the label “feminist,” which seems to me almost invariably bound up with some of the most intrusive statist schemes ever devised, from legally policing what can be said in the workplace to what the composition of our workforce can be and, in many instances, what its members can be paid — not to mention the ever-looming threat of using vast, aggregate statistics regarding social power as a moral-legal trump card for demanding more spending or further changes in the law, rather than “letting the chips fall where they may” in terms of social power and marketplace performance, based on individual achievement (as laissez-faire thinking would counsel, and as most men, I think, would naturally prefer, competitive sorts that they are)? (The oft-cited “income disparity” stats about how much women earn vs. how much men earn are Marxist nonsense of the most presumptuous sort, based once again on the a priori assumption that women ought to be making the same career choices and displaying the same work habits and thus making the same amount of money as men — have we forgotten all those chaos theory lessons about how tiny initial differences can lead [without chicanery] to vastly different outcomes?)
Rather than pleading in a tribalistic fashion for women and feminists, intellectuals would be wiser to condemn all sorts of legal and intellectual double standards as a system of anti-male oppression — a matriarchy, if you will. Luckily for feminists (or at least, luckily for the handful of feminists who really mean it rather than just deploying feminist arguments as one more weapon in the quiver when, say, wiles or crying fail), men are less inclined to this sort of self-serving, tribalistic whining than women are, so an organized men’s movement — largely for reasons of chivalry — is never likely to become very aggressive. I may not even bring it up again myself, as fighting with girls seems mean.
Oh, and that raises a side point that I think is worthy of a few books and doctoral theses: far from feminism being the opposite of chivalry, it should by this late juncture in history be obvious that both chivalry and feminism are just systems for getting men to treat women more gently than they treat other men. The difference is that under chivalry, both sexes admitted this was the arrangement and under feminism, we are supposed to pretend women are being held to the same standard even when they aren’t.
If I am nice to women — and some will probably say that this post itself means I am not, itself an interesting and all too common argumentative tactic in feminist discussions — it may be precisely because I am not a feminist and recognize, chivalrously, that (for instance) when, on rare occasions, I make the mistake of arguing with women as vigorously as I would my male acquaintances, bad emotional consequences are likely to ensue.
10. Feminism Unwittingly Inspires Some Downright Bizarre Postmodern Arguments.
Getting back to abortion again, just briefly, there’s the absurd argument that men can’t have an opinion on it, since they can’t get pregnant. This seems roughly as absurd as (though of course not perfectly analogous to) saying, in the 1850s South, that only blacks can oppose slavery. This is a postmodern parody of argument, designed to discredit arguers instead of arguments — and what then happens if the same argument is made by people of both sexes? Is it at least potentially valid when women utter it but inconceivable when men do? Nonsense — and I say this regardless of the correct position on abortion. I say it merely to preserve something about as fundamental as life — the freedom to form moral opinions.
And some surveys suggest, by the way, that women are in fact more pro-life than men, so consider that before you make your next (unprincipled) strategic decision, pro-choice sistas.
I think that’s enough for one short blog post, though obviously volumes could (and ideally should) be written. I am just one man, though.
UPDATE 5/7/07: Well, in defiance of the critics, I have a new girlfriend, who you can read about here — though I admit that as I write this, she hasn’t yet read the above blog entry.
I need to read this a couple more times, as I want to address each of your points individually, however, here is my initial response:
Big legal events like this week’s SCOTUS ruling aside, women have as many rights as men do, according to the law.
Unfortunately, in actual behavior and reactions to behaviors, there are too many examples of women not being believed or trusted. This stretches as far as from the decision for tubal ligation to how womens’ arguments are received in discussions.
According to the law, yes, “women are people.” However, this is not the way we as a society behave yet, and that’s what needs to be addressed.
Red Stapler | 8:08 pm on the 21st of April, 2007
I want to leave you an intelligent reply. I want to respond point-by-point. But first, I really have to get over the feeling that you need a sound fucking beating.
Kate | 9:03 pm on the 21st of April, 2007
Todd, I thought your arguments were well-thought and I have to say that Kate’s comment disturbed me and is an example of the sort of emotional manipulation you touch upon in your article. If I ever posted on a woman’s blog that she needed “a sound fucking beating”, I think the authorities would be called. I feel she should apologize.
T.A.B. | 10:28 pm on the 21st of April, 2007
TAB: Comments like the one Kate left, and ones worse, often including sexual violence are posted on feminist blogs around the world and no one listens or considers it “threatening.”
I refer you to the lambasting of Kathy Sierra for feeling threatened on her own blog.
That is the sort of thing I mean when I make the “according to the law vs. reality” statment.
Red Stapler | 2:07 am on the 22nd of April, 2007
So since it’s done on feminist blogs, it’s okay to do?
Sorry, that logic doesn’t work for me.
T.A.B. | 4:41 pm on the 22nd of April, 2007
“So since it’s done on feminist blogs, it’s okay to do?
Sorry, that logic doesn’t work for me. ”
I don’t believe that was the point of Red Stapler’s comment. You claimed that “If I ever posted on a woman’s blog that she needed ‘a sound fucking beating’, I think the authorities would be called.” RS pointed out that such things and worse are posted on women’s blogs all the time and no, they don’t call “the authorities.” It was an appeal to fact, not logic. And RS also did not seem to be endorsing Kate’s comment at all. In fact, RS was lamenting the fact that such postings are made, as they show, according to RS, that while women are treated as equals under the law, they are still treated unfairly in other contexts.
More to the point, one should never threaten to give Todd a sound beating as he can set things on fire with his mind.
Christopher | 5:10 pm on the 22nd of April, 2007
TAB-
I didn’t excuse the behavior, I merely pointed out that your statement was incorrect.
I think statements like Kate’s fall into the “stop being on my side, your making us look bad” category.
Red Stapler | 5:15 pm on the 22nd of April, 2007
Whether Christopher’s motives are feminist or patriarchal, I know he can bestow no higher compliment than likening someone to Drew Barrymore, and I am honored. He shall not burn.
Todd Seavey | 5:41 pm on the 22nd of April, 2007
Ms. Stapler, fair enough. I will acknowledge that sometimes I (usually unintentionally) type incorrect things.
And as a result, Todd will see me burn.
T.A.B. | 7:16 pm on the 22nd of April, 2007
Christopher-
I mis-typed.
When I said that “no one cares,” I didn’t mean that people don’t take such comments seriously. I meant that women who do contact authorities, or make public the fact they feel threatened, have their sentiments belittled or ignored.
Again, this is an example of women being treated differently in action rather than under the law.
Red Stapler | 11:09 pm on the 22nd of April, 2007
If I may, by way of compensation, plead on behalf of my own sex for just a moment: it is worth remembering that there is consistent, constant state violence (in the U.S.) against men,
I see this line of thought a lot, and it bothers me. I disagree that, for example, a law against sexually harassing speech is equivalent oppression to experiencing the sexual harassment. For one thing, sexual harassment is wrong. If you don’t like sweeping moral judgements, it’s rude and has negative consequences for the harassed which are not outweighed by positive consequences for anybody else. I don’t think that a law telling you not to do something you shouldn’t be doing anyway is a) violence or b) comparable to harassment. I was going to make a second point about the relative prevalence of the two sides of this, but I can’t find solid statistics to back it up, so I’ll leave it with the above.
Allie | 2:22 am on the 23rd of April, 2007
I’m a bit too sleepy to comment on the post in full, but your second point — about “refusing” to adequately define feminism — did catch my eye. I’m not sure how many feminists you’re familiar with, but I only know a handful and they almost always disagree with one another. It’s not so much a refusal to define feminism as an inability to do so, owing to the many, many disparate minds that comprise the movement.
I’m sure it’s not a problem really unique to feminism, either. Social movements aren’t exactly easily quantifiable.
Sara no H. | 2:23 am on the 23rd of April, 2007
Came here from Red Stapler, via Feministe.
I’m not quite sure what to say to this long diatribe, except that you aren’t very well-informed about what feminists actually think, and as a result you’ve written a devastating rebuttal of the imaginary feminist inside your head. I suggest reading through the archives of Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog, and also read The Male Privilege Checklist. Chris Clarke’s How not to be an asshole: a guide for men”, which was written for men entering women’s discussions about harassment, is also a great post.
Before you go there, you need to chuck your assumptions that feminists are just arguing in bad faith or just want to make things hard for men. Please recognize that while our (feminists’) viewpoints are not the same as yours, we too have put careful thought into this and feel that we have good reasons for holding the opinions we do.
Just to address one point: You say you feel feminism must mean more than “women are people too”. It really doesn’t. It’s just that “women are people too” has astonishingly profound, wide-ranging and radical implications.
Tlönista | 9:24 am on the 23rd of April, 2007
You’re right they can have opinions on it. I would just like to see the five of the men on the SCOTUS have an opinion that cannot be described as ‘eeew, that’s icky, we can’t let the poor women do THAT!’
As for feminism, women and men come to it from different points and it can hardly be a monolithic structure when it still involves every choice, every decision and every moment of the lives of 50+% of the world’s population.
Hawise | 10:02 am on the 23rd of April, 2007
I’m here via Red Stapler. I would not have bothered to read all of this annoying post, but she is a friend of mine who insists that you are often intelligent and a good guy, but I’m going to have to agree with Tlönista here–this rant seems too irrelevant to even make me mad because you have “written a devastating rebuttal of the imaginary feminist inside your head.”
I know a lot of self-proclaimed feminists. Most of them disagree with each other on some things and agree on others. Replace “feminists” with Democrats or Republicans or Anarchists or Libertarians and you also have a true statement. Feminists, like pretty much any other group, disagree on a lot, but remain a group because of some binding, basic principles. In the case of feminists, the binding principle is that women are people, like men are people, and should be treated as such. In a world like ours, that has profound implications and feminsts disagree on the best ways to get to full personhood. I’m surprised that you, a self-proclaimed Libertarian, would have a problem with this idea.
Irene Kaoru | 10:04 am on the 23rd of April, 2007
I think the second point makes the rest of the entry moot. If there isn’t a clear definition, basically, you’re able to rebut any concieveable argument.
I also think that a few of these above rebuttals are speaking to you as though you’re criticizing women, rather than feminism. But since feminism doesn’t have a definition, what else can you be doing?
Dave | 10:25 am on the 23rd of April, 2007
First of all, I want to apologize for the stridency of my comment - it had been a long day (nee, a long week), but that’s no excuse. Secondly, I realize that things like sarcasm don’t carry over, so please take my word that it wasn’t meant in earnest. Thirdly, I commented that it was a feeling, and not a desire. I’m not actually a violent person, and I just want that to be made clear.
As to the meat of your argument: I think your arguments are generally specious. Many of your viewpoints on feminism seem to be based on what other people tell you they believe feminism to be, and I think you’re correct that the term has been twisted significantly since it was first introduced. From my point of view, feminism is simply the believe that all men and women should be treated equally: judged soley on their accomplishments and failures as people, without reference to gender. That a male math teacher who was trying to avoid giving my mother (who’d been a math teacher for a decade, and head of her department for 7 of those years) an honest answer about my difficulties in his class could feel it alright to tell her that, “Kate’s a girl, and I think she should focus on english & history more than math” is a problem.
I am particularly distressed that you attempt to be empirical, but fail to take into account social pressures and realities. Your hooker versus pimp example is a place where this failure was particularly glaring (to say nothing of the fact that you seem very willing to take the pimps, men who make their living taking advantage of the weak, at their word).
Frankly, I think the point should be made that every group, when arguing their point, can be guilty of manipulating data to make it seem to support their view of reality. That doesn’t change the fact that things are still unequal, and shouldn’t be.
Kate | 12:25 pm on the 23rd of April, 2007
The problem with this post is that you largely string together a series of anecdotal, unsupported straw-man claims about what feminism is, and proceeds to argue against them. Most of your criticisms aren’t problems with feminism, they’re problems with any socio-political movement. Some of them are completely at odds with what most feminists seem to believe, and you frequently slide into criticisms against liberalism, rather than feminism. Your major complaint doesn’t seem to be with feminism, it seems to be with liberal thought, in general.
Honestly, I’m forced to wonder if you’ve actually done any real research into feminist thought/feminist philosophy. Some of your claims about feminism are ridiculous cliches and laughable parodies of actual feminist thought.
For someone who listed his “main complaint about feminism” as being, essentially, making unfounded assertions about facts, you do that a lot in this post.
It’s not hard to argue against feminism like this. But, then, it wouldn’t be hard to argue against any socio-political movement when you do it like this.
Roy | 1:47 pm on the 23rd of April, 2007
Without addressing Todd’s lengthy post, I’d like to note that I visited some of the sites listed above for his putative edification (Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog; The Male Privilege Checklist; Chris Clarke’s “How not to be an asshole: a guide for men”). In my opinion, they absolutely themselves perpetuate what Roy criticized in Todd: “anecdotal, unsupported straw-man claims.” In fact, what’s also interesting is that generally they seem to *perpetuate* Todd’s rather heated stereotypes.
It seemed to me that in all these various sites–and what I imagine partly agitates Todd in real life–is the not-so-subtle intimation that all men fit the stereotype of the loutish, potentially violent oaf–staring at our breasts, possessing penises that constantly bear the threat of violence, making more money than we do for shoddier work, telling us not to walk about at night alone because they blame the victim, getting away with it if they are ugly, and (said repeatedly) are “guilty until proven innocent” re: the possibility of a spectrum of sexual violence from harrassment to rape. They might hide it cleverly by being nice to us at work and by complimenting our intelligence, but get a couple of beers into them, scratch the surface, get a raise when they don’t, and kerblang! sexist comments and a smack. Oh, and guys, if the woman you love isn’t admitting her fear of male violence, it’s because she’s afraid of *your* violence.
How is this portrait of men *inherently* as “guilty until proven innocent,” because they have penises, any more intellectually fair and empirically sound than Todd’s supposed caricature of feminists?
Of course, if you come back and say that these sites don’t prove Todd’s points because, well, they’re basically accurate as all men really are that way, then we’re back at square one.
To be blunt, some of the articulations of feminism on these sites were to me both specious and risible: one of the “male privileges” on the checklist is that men have better choices in cheap clothes that don’t have to be tailored! And, as postmodernists know, every absence equals a presence–many of these male privileges (can be ugly with impunity–debatable in itself) could be countered by a female one (can wear both pants and skirt!). And every major world religion teaches that men are the head of the household and women subservient? Can be problematized, and outright denied, in dozens of ways.
There’s also a sense here that feminists, at least as represented in these (again, supposedly Todd-turning) sites, are, yes, still arguing as if it’s 1967. One of the male privileges is to read the newspaper and see people who look like you, while women don’t?
“”Women are people.’ However, this is not the way we as a society behave yet, and that’s what needs to be addressed.” Red Stapler, do you really think that “society” (whatever that means–in the United States? the world? difference in social class? race?) does not behave as if women are people? Do you really, genuinely, believe that? If so, I am sorry for it, and sorry for your experience.
I’m genuinely curious: What, exactly, would have to change for you to believe that “society” *did* behave as if women were people?
Xine | 1:49 pm on the 24th of April, 2007
[…] But what is more important is that the burrito in Captain America’s pants is a reminder that responses to my most recent post, criticizing feminism, boil down in the end to the complaint that women get a lot of nasty comments from anonymous online commentators or encounter lewd behavior by men and thus feel intimidated a lot (this strikes me as either a pre-feminist or post-feminist complaint — at least in so far as feminism proper was an apparently temporary pretense of equality, versus the current frank recognition that women scare more easily or are intimidated by different things than men are). And I am not defending Captain America (or any of those louts) now, merely noting that I am unaware of any pre-feminist philosophy that committed one to supporting his behavior. People have been saying we must protect the womenfolk against boorish men since the Victorian era or perhaps the dawn of time, so it’s not clear to me how one needs feminism for that — and despite several people accusing me of having an unrealistic view of feminism, no one really did (as of this writing) spell out what we do need it for — but let’s leave the rest of the feminism discussion for bar conversation on May 2, at Lolita Bar (when one of our debaters will herself be someone known to have a thing for superhero costumes but perhaps not burrito-crimes). In the meantime, I find that the Captain America incident also turns my mind to national electoral politics, since America, mostly for ill, increasingly defines itself through elections. I recently concluded that in the next year’s primaries it would be foolish of me not to seize a rare opportunity to vote for a full-fledged libertarian who is also a major party candidate — Republican Ron Paul — thus sending a clearer signal than ever to the GOP that it should be moving in a libertarian, fusionist direction. In the general election, by which time Paul will probably have been defeated, I can always do the sensible thing and vote for Giuliani or McCain or whoever survives the whole ugly process — unless McCain gets still more “maverick” left-leaning ideas instead of sticking to budget cuts, or Giuliani loses his newfound interest in federalism and just starts acting upon his authoritarian impulses, in which case I may end up voting for a libertarian in the GOP primary and then a Libertarian in the general election, which will really mean losing with my purity intact, by my political standards. […]
ToddSeavey.com » Blog Archive » Capt. America Has a Burrito in His Pants | 11:12 pm on the 24th of April, 2007
I’m genuinely curious: What, exactly, would have to change for you to believe that “society” *did* behave as if women were people?
I’m not Red Stapler, but I’ll take a crack at this. A society — and by this I mean, approximately, the prevailing attitudes and practises in the United States, since that’s where I live — where women were treated like people, like equals, would look something like this to me:
We’d have an approximately equal number of male and female presidential candidates. And Supreme Court nominees, and congresspeople, and state governors…
An equal number of men and women would be raped every year (and that number would, I’m guessing, be rather smaller than it is now). Ditto the numbers on sexual violence perpetrators. If there were a disagreement on the consensuality of a sexual act, one party’s word would not be taken over the other’s as a matter of course without other evidence.
Advertisements would be equally as likely to use a man as a woman in an attempt to use sex to sell the product, and they’d be dressed equally skimpily.
There would not be a significant difference in pay between women and men, overall. I’m not saying all jobs would be evenly split between the genders, but that if you took a slice of people doing similar (education requirements, position in the company heirarchy, experience generally required to reach that position, etc) work, you wouldn’t see a difference in pay between men and women. And that the “most traditionally female” jobs would not pay, as a rule, less than the ones with the most men working them. One would be equally likely to encounter women as men at any point in a given hierarchy, and as many men would have a female boss as women would have a male one.
It would be equally normal for a man as a woman to be the stay-at-home parent. Women would not be discriminated against in hiring because it was assumed that they would take time off or leave to have children.
Women and men who chose to have a lot of casual sex would generally be treated equally because of it. Ditto people who chose to have no sex. Both sexes would receive equal education on and be considered to bear equal responsibility for practicing safer sex.
I’m sure there are several more important things that would be different in a country or world where we behaved like the genders were differentiated mostly by their plumbing and not by their intrinsic social status, but I can’t think of them at the moment. I hope these provide food for thought on the ways in which women are *not* treated like this right now in the US, and why that might be.
Allie | 7:35 am on the 25th of April, 2007
Allie-
Thank you for writing that. It was much more organized and eloquent than I would have managed. :)
Red Stapler | 10:58 am on the 25th of April, 2007
Wha thank yew ma’am. It also generated some nifty discussion on my livejournal, it turned out to be a fantastic question. Thank you Xine.
Allie | 1:55 pm on the 25th of April, 2007
Having moved on to the important burrito issue in the next blog entry, I’ll try to make this my last comment (at least prior to spoken ones at Lolita Bar on May 2, 8pm) on this feminist debate, but I will just briefly say that if (1.) feminists now accept that men and women are not the same and do not necessarily have the same capacities, then (2.) they should not react to differential outcomes in the marketplace — even, possibly, quite drastic ones — as if they are somehow injustices to be rectified. Similarly, if we are all agreed that women are more easily harrassed and raped, we can abandon all the “girl power” pretenses that they’re just as tough as men, that “sistas are doin’ it for themselves,” and the like. Or to put it all more broadly, you’re either (a) demanding that differential outcomes be treated a priori as evidence of injustice rather than as just outcomes of differential capacities and (b) demanding gentler treatment for the weaker sex, or (a’) accepting differential outcomes as just and (b’) claiming women can handle the rough and tumble world of discourse, aggression, and combat as easily as men, thank you very much. But you can’t logically be doing all four things at the same time, and if you pick (b) and (a’), which seem the most reasonable to me, I’d say you’re not a feminist as it is normally understood, since I take the term to imply — even more so after reading Red Stapler’s surprising seconding of Allie’s litany of thoroughly egalitarian grievances — believing that equal outcomes (regardless of initial natural differences) are normative goals. I think any further conversation about this is just going to lead ’round and ’round the same Mobius strip and make me feel more sad than triumphant, like watching a possum spin futilely, trapped in the glare of headlights.
Todd Seavey | 2:23 pm on the 25th of April, 2007
Allie-
Please to be linking? I wish to read this. :)
Red Stapler | 2:23 pm on the 25th of April, 2007
Todd-
Please be specific about which points of Allie’s you disagree with.
I’m surprised that you don’t think “It would be equally normal for a man as a woman to be the stay-at-home parent. Women would not be discriminated against in hiring because it was assumed that they would take time off or leave to have children” and “Women and men who chose to have a lot of casual sex would generally be treated equally because of it. Ditto people who chose to have no sex. Both sexes would receive equal education on and be considered to bear equal responsibility for practicing safer sex” are desirable goals?
Red Stapler | 2:26 pm on the 25th of April, 2007
“A society — and by this I mean, approximately, the prevailing attitudes and practises in the United States, since that’s where I live — where women were treated like people, like equals, would look something like this to me:”
Allie, you slipped something into the above that is significant. That is putting “like equals” after “like people.” The examples you give seem to bear this out. You seem to be assuming that for women to be treated like “people,” they must be treated the same as men.
I suspect Todd might be of the opinion that women and men are different. While they are both people, traeting them the same and ignoring their differences, constitutes a disservice to both. You seem to be ignoring the possibility that people are comprised of men and women, who differ and who therefore shouldn’t be treated identically.
Joseph Brennan | 3:52 pm on the 25th of April, 2007
Joseph:
I don’t have a link, but I read about a study where people who wanted to invest in the stock market were given the resumes of several brokers. The qualifications of each broker were identical.
The brokers who were men got picked more.
Short of personal reasons like, “That guy went to the same college I did,” or similar, why would the men get picked more?
Red Stapler | 4:07 pm on the 25th of April, 2007
Allie writes we lack a society were women are equals/people unless:
[…]An equal number of men and women would be raped every year (and that number would, I?m guessing, be rather smaller than it is now). Ditto the numbers on sexual violence perpetrators.[…]
That statement is very problematic.
Is the presumption that we must train the deviant element to prefer male targets equally to female? Unless we do so, we have failed? Um…haven’t we already failed in some deeper way with them that they’re targeting anyone?
Just running with the example, as concreteness may help — Todd’s point of differential capacity here might correspond to a natural male-bias to violence and a natural heterosexual bias. There is probably a bias in physical strength of females and bias in attackers toward a physically weaker component, especially in non-premediated attackers/defenders. It may simply physically be easier for a man to be a rape-er (of men or women) due to erectile issues (unless women rapists of the future have very good premeditation and super-viagral technology, but that just elaborates “easier” and regardless is more science-fictional than relevant). There are any number of plausible natural biases.
Allie’s standard is so strong as to deny any and all of them truth status or argumentative bearing now or even in the future. This would be the “a priori evidence” issue Todd was complaining about. It is an very strong scientific claim to assert that unequal outcomes imply unjust treatment by society. It is no less than an assertion that “social controllable treatment” alone completely determines the outcome. That is a rather extreme “way beyond BF Skinner” hyper-behaviorist claim. Without the claim, you have a real argumentative problem since some portion of outcomes arise from uncontrolled elements and some from controlled elements that might be made “more fair”. In order to use outcome statistics like rapes/year to detect unfairness you need a quantitative model of what situation fair treatment would generate. That is very tricky indeed, tricky enough that the discussion rarely proceeds to this level. Rather, people switch tactics to less model-intensive means to define/identify/engineer fairness.
If we agreed that attack bias was unfortunate and wanted to work against it, this leads naturally to Todd’s (b) of coddling the gentler sex. If we resolved to not work against it, but accept it with resignation that would be his (a’). His b’ is basically a little askew/about something else…it’s sort of (but not quite) like backing up to saying we don’t mind the attack bias in the first place.
–
Consider this. Why not take the “unequal outcomes imply unequal treatment” line of reasoning ONE step further — from victims to perpetrators. If there is gender bias in who a perp is, strong heterosexuality bias should surely suggest an ineliminable bias in the victim population. So, you really need to take this extra step in your standard if you believe sexual preference in any way biases victim selection. { I.e., sure there may be some equal opportunity attackers. So? There’s still a very likely bias in the overall perp population to be men and to be heterosexual. }
Would Allie & Red Stapler sign on to the idea that “we have an unjust society unless the number of male rapist perps equals the number of female rapist perps”? If they would, and they also stick to the original standard in outcomes, then with a bias in perps and no bias in outcomes implies a non-hetero bias in victim selection — a strange conclusion to be sure. If they would not extend the standard to perp populations, why isn’t the original standard already overzealous? They might two steps further to demand that there “should not be” any male bias to who is an aggressor at all, or even how frequently they attack and so on.
This line rapidly regresses into crazy strong “neutrality of nature” claims. People seem to mistake “influence by both nature and society” for “total determination by nature or society”. As long as there is an “and” then reasoning about much of anything from outcome statistics is really a very tricky quantitative problem. So, you probably should just avoid differential outcome statistics as any kind of argumentative point.
cb | 4:49 pm on the 25th of April, 2007
It was pointed out to me elsewhere as well that my statement about rape is poorly worded. It would be closer to my intent to say that the number of victims of sexual harassment, assault, molestation, and rape would be the same, due to plumbing differences and the other things mentioned. I do not think that the best way to do this is by increasing the number of male-targeted sex crimes (there’s an education program!), but by getting rid of the aspects of our culture that make it “ok” to target women for sexual violence, thus reducing the perpetrators of sex crimes to the truly deranged — this was also the reason I had in mind for the numbers of perpetrators to be equal. Please google “rape culture” if you’re interested in knowing more, I don’t know that I’d be the best at explaining it.
The points about males being more prone to violence, and about the prevalence of heterosexuality, are also very valid ones. It’s less punchy to say something like “The numbers of men and women sexually assaulted, harassed, molested, and raped each year would be much closer to equal than those that currently exist” but it’s a better point. I was being idealistic in the original, and didn’t take into account these factors. My essential point is that women are disproportionately the victimes of sex crimes, and I refer you here to google again for some of the reasons.
It was also pointed out to me that putting “like people” and “like equals” together as if they were synonomous is not a good choice. The popular phrase about treating women like people is, in my opinion, largely hyperbole designed to raise awareness about the fact that unequal treatment exists at all. As it was mentioned to me, looking back historically in this country we have some pretty good examples of human beings not being treated like people, and holding the current state of things up to that, it becomes clear that women are treated like people, just not always like the good kind of people. I am of the opinion that “equals” in this sense has a broader meaning than “things that are the same”. I consider my boyfriend to be my equal not because we have the same abilities or even because we agree on everything, but because I believe that we are deserving of the same treatment and the same expectations in the same circumstances, which, granted, come up less often between the two of us than between some individuals somewhere in a large population like the US. I believe that we have these rights because we are equal in a fundamental way that surpasses things like the nine-inch height difference and the differences in skills.
Todd, I’m pretty confused by your logic there. I do agree that there are fundamental differences between men and women, and even that some of them are inborn. However, for this to be responsible for the pay differential between men and women — for the pay differential between men and women in essentially identical jobs — I would have to assume that women are in some way intrinsically inferior to men. I have a vested interest in this not being the case ;)
Allie | 5:28 pm on the 25th of April, 2007
Ok, taking a closer look here:
(a) demanding that differential outcomes be treated a priori as evidence of injustice rather than as just outcomes of differential capacities and (b) demanding gentler treatment for the weaker sex
I don’t follow how these two go together. The only thing I can think of is that you’re equating “abolishing injustice” with “demanding gentler treatment”, and I’m pretty sure that if you actually thought that you’d be phrasing it in some other way than “injustice”. I would appreciate clarification from anybody who thinks they understand this better than I, if Todd has left the thread.
(a’) accepting differential outcomes as just and (b’) claiming women can handle the rough and tumble world of discourse, aggression, and combat as easily as men, thank you very much.
It really seems to be that a’ here would go much better with b above, and could be rephrased as “women are intrinsically inferior to men and would appreciate being treated more gently than men as a result”. Now that I think of it, a and b’ go together rather better as well (”women are as capable as men at doing -foo- and are not currently recognized as such due to social injustice”), leaving me utterly confused as to what you meant by any of this. Do let me know if these are unfair rephrasings.
I don’t know that all feminists “accept that men and women are not the same and do not necessarily have the same capacities”. I believe that (and also believe that “accept” is a rather loaded term to use here, with its implications that the accepted is fact), but I would not be surprised to learn that people, even many people, believe that men and women are, in fact, identical, this being an idea that posits that men and women deserve equal treatment but that doesn’t require a lot of thought on the matter, making it attractive to people who believe in a fundamental equality (by which I do not mean “sameness”) of the sexes but doesn’t consider it to be something with which they are or need be particularly concerned.
I’m also, upon closer reading, offended by this most recent comment of Todd’s, but will continue to take on faith that he’s a good guy. In case it’s biased the above, I figured I should make it clear. *shrugs*
Allie | 5:48 pm on the 25th of April, 2007
I really hate it when a bad argument is couched in overly complex terms to mask its falseness. Social causes of male heterosexual sexual violence are absolutely and noticeably distinguishable from biological causes. One need only remark that rates of rape differ between countries. While reporting bias plays a role in these statistics it can be greatly reduced by careful sampling. I also welcome any argument that biological differences make any but the smallest differences in these rates. While absolute certainty in degree may be impossible to achieve, it is obvious to assert that broad and useful social trends may be noticed, and learned from.
However, from the classical feminist point of view, my analysis is deeply troubling. Saudi Arabia is the country where a woman is least likely to be raped.
P.S. Todd: For a while, I’ve wanted to have a debate on the question: “Was the Roman matriarch Lucretia right to have killed herself?” Do you think that we could get Victor David Hanson would argue the “Yes” position?
Brain | 10:10 pm on the 25th of April, 2007
“… since libertarians are the only philosophical faction aside from pacifists to consistently condemn the initiation of force).”
This is kind of a side issue but considering the number of libertarians who supported the Iraq War I doubt the above.
James B. Shearer | 11:42 pm on the 25th of April, 2007
All right, I haven’t quite stopped commenting, but I will try to keep this brief: I was indeed suggesting that a and b (or a’ and b’) do not go together as well as b and a’, though I would claim feminists do not tend to opt for the b-a’ combo that seems to me the most realistic — and traditional — combination, that is, treating women gently and assuming most differential outcomes are just.
The overarching point is that you can’t claim to want equal treatment/respect, which entails competing without special favors, and then insist that every time you “lose the race,” as it were, that is sufficient proof that society must have rigged things against you and must strive to change its ways so that you win more. You may just be slower. Likewise, Kenyans don’t keep winning those marathons because of their long history of oppressing stocky Andean Peruvians — and even if Kenyans _had_ oppressed Peruvians, that would not make it rational to point to aggregate statistics of Kenyan vs. Peruvian marathon victories as “evidence” for society to think long and hard about changing its ways and its thinking about Peruvians.
The fact that this sort of differential-outcomes evidence is so often pointed to by feminists — and it is — suggests to me that, as I’ve said all along, a presumption of the injustice of differential outcomes (and a corresponding desire for affirmative action, whether legislated or simply accomplished by moral persuasion) is indeed central to most feminist thinking, and so I am not a feminist. I think people vary and, to a large degree because of this, so do outcomes.
Tradition and capitalism seem to me to have a better handle on the implications of this observation — including _some_ perfectly rational differences in etiquette rules, expectations, aesthetic norms, and degrees of deference and gentle treatment — than anything I normally hear from feminists, who either explicitly or (with less logical consistency) implicitly take equality of outcome as their standard.
It is a step toward rationality for feminists (or former feminists) to acknowledge that males and females differ — the next rational step is to recognize that therefore outcomes will as well, and that there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with that.
Rape, I should add, is wrong regardless of the ratios of the victims, and while social changes (such as adopting Islamic totalitarianism along Saudi lines or, far more preferably, simply restoring a large measure of traditional Western civility and moralism, updated as necessary) could alter the rate of the crime, it is hard to imagine any social change that would so erase the biological reasons for males to do more of the raping than females as to achieve equity by that bizarre standard. But then, only feminism would even contemplate so stretching nature and circumstance upon the Procrustean bed of abstract equality — as opposed to building traditions, morals, and markets upon the sloppy and inegalitarian facts of life. You might as well start a movement called mindism that insists there _must_ be veiled injustice at work if smart people keep pulling off more of the successful bank heists than the retarded do.
Todd Seavey | 12:01 am on the 26th of April, 2007
I cannot come up with a comment in any depth that is not nasty. I am getting the strong sense that your message is that women are inferior or else they would not keep “losing the race”, and that attempts to change the system are, in fact, whining. If I am misinterpreting your statement, my apologies. I’m pretty sure that I have exhausted both my ability and my desire to continue this line of conversation.
It’s also true that at this point I haven’t slept in thirty hours, so if I’m actually being a rabid, completely out-of-touch-with-reality bitch, we have an excuse.
Allie | 12:56 am on the 26th of April, 2007
I think we can separate some of the core points here from what may be an unnecessarily obnoxious framing. Taking for granted that, that as things now stand, women face plenty of purely cultural barriers to (for instance) more equal pay or representation in certain professions, or more equal division or household labor, we can still ask the separate question: Is all inequality in these realms per se evidence of inequity?
Put more concretely: Might it be the case that in the most equal possible culture, women would still be less disposed than men to enter politics, or more disposed to want to be primary caregivers of children (with whatever professional tradeoffs that involves)? If it might, just because of intrinsic average differences in how we’re wired, then it doesn’t make sense to assume there’s something amiss unless 50 percent of all Senators or top lawyers or whatever else are women. You still want to point to and eliminate bias wherever you find it, but you can’t just infer bias from differential representation.
It seems to me like these are distinct issues. You could point out all sorts of particular kinds of bias against or barriers for women, and work to eradicate these, without assuming that in a culture lacking any such bias, 50 percent of top lawyers would be women, and 50 percent of stay-at-home parents would be men. And we can imagine two corresponding types of feminism: One that focuses on specific procedural inequities, and one that aims at eradicating all outcome disparities, on the assumption that only inequity is the source of disparity. I think Todd’s target is the latter, and that he’d be happy to endorse the former. Todd?
Julian Sanchez | 3:16 am on the 26th of April, 2007
Women and men who chose to have a lot of casual sex would generally be treated equally because of it.
So hopefully women will start stigmatizing men who sleep around?
Or if we’re arguing for wholesale promiscuity, what do we do when someone has a litter of kids they can’t take care of and give them up for adoption?
I am getting the strong sense that your message is that women are inferior or else they would not keep “losing the race”
I don’t like the ‘winning/losing’ metaphore. It smacks of materialism. Why is choosing a career that’s better for raising children and offers flexibility synonymous with “losing.”
To Todd -
My only problem with wholesale acceptance of differential outcome is that, historically, differences were both encouraged by societal rules and also considered as prima facie evidence that those rules were correct.
It may very well be that certain differences are due to discrimination. But we cannot automatically assume whether those differences are just or not. However there’s a good, simple test. The effect of glass ceilings of any variety, whether externally or self imposed, is that people who are discriminated against and overcome that discrimination tend to be far more capable than their peers who haven’t overcome difficult barriers. The first few women to graduate from German universities, for instance, were unusually acomplished and at the tops of their class. Discrimination culls the weakest of the herd. So we should ask, in each instance, whether evidence of this effect exists.
Ryan W,. | 3:31 am on the 26th of April, 2007
The evolutionary psychology in 4) is really unconvincing. Paternal support of children after birth is important in humans meaning women won’t be just seeking the best genes.
And complaints about the way the opposite sex ranks potential mates tend to come across as motivated by self interest.
James B. Shearer | 3:47 am on the 26th of April, 2007
I don’t like the ‘winning/losing’ metaphore. It smacks of materialism. Why is choosing a career that’s better for raising children and offers flexibility synonymous with “losing.”
The current structure means that women fall behind in financial independence, a strong disadvantage given the marriage/partnership failure rate. Not just income raises due to seniority, but pension plans etc as well. For any woman to ignore the possibility that the marriage might fail would be imprudence of the most sentimentally romantic sort, and despite the best intentions of marrying couples women would be fools not to work for their own independent financial security.
So, what would be so wrong with spouses sharing childraising - alternating one partner works, one partner stays at home?
Generally, recovering from pregnancy (and breastfeeding) means the mother is better placed to take the first stay-at-home stint. But if mother stays home the first year, why not father stays home the second year?
Then both partners’ financial security from their careers is on a par, and both parents have the advantages of the special close bonding that only full-time parenting brings.
tigtog | 4:20 am on the 26th of April, 2007
[…] Todd Seavey is a writer of apparently some standing in New York City. He calls himself a libertarian, which is a philosophical tradition I can only moderately agree with, but he has written a critique of Feminism (as opposed to something like “traditional conservatism”) that I think is well worth reading. An excerpt: far from feminism being the opposite of chivalry, it should by this late juncture in history be obvious that both chivalry and feminism are just systems for getting men to treat women more gently than they treat other men. The difference is that under chivalry, both sexes admitted this was the arrangement and under feminism, we are supposed to pretend women are being held to the same standard even when they aren’t. […]
Neumatikos » Ten Complaints about Feminism | 9:13 am on the 26th of April, 2007
“Why settle for a lower-caste male, girls, when you can be one of countless harem-girls who gets a tiny portion of the endlessly-flowing sperm of The Best Guy?”
Why not? Because humans have a high level of ‘male parental investment’. For most of our history, humans have lived close to the margins, and a woman trying to raise children alone was much less likely to succeed and have her children survive to adulthood. So a woman doesn’t need just a dose of sperm, she needs a lifetime partner. And although there are cases of rulers rich enough to support hundreds of wives, that kind of concentrated wealth and power is a relatively recent development in human history (and even then, the wives of great rulers were still only a tiny fraction of the female population), so it cannot have been a standard female strategy.
Why not get sperm from ‘The Best Guy’ and child-rearing help from some poor schlub? Some women do, in fact, try that. But there’s considerable risk involved (the schlub may find out and leave leaving the woman alone with her brood).
The bottom line is there are excellent evolutionary reasons why most women ’simply want an acceptable, normal husband’.
Slocum | 10:22 am on the 26th of April, 2007
In the mid-90s, my daughter got the full nutjob indoctrination in feminism at Antioch College.
She called me on the phone to announce that women are “oppressed” and insisted that I agree with her.
“Give me an example of how they are oppressed,” I asked her.
“Well, women didn’t get the right to vote until 1920,” she answered.
“My great-grandparents came to the U.S. in the 1880s,” I answered. “Before that they had been serfs in Germany and Wales. Neither the women or the men had the right to vote before they came to America. So, in about half of one human lifetime, women gained the same rights as men in my family. I think it shows just how fair minded men are that change came so quickly.”
I’ve solved the problem of dealing with crazy, chip on the shoulder feminist women by refusing to associate with them outside the workplace. My late wife was as anti-feminist as you can get. She also had a great job and she was my partner in the music business. My girlfriend also doesn’t care a whit about feminism and she has a great job. She sings with me, too. In the workplace, I’ve solved the dilemma of putting up with feminist twits by going into a technical field. There are virtually no die hard feminists in technical fields. They were too busy taking the basket weaving and grievance courses in college.
If you want to tell me about your feminist complaint… well, take a hike.
Shouting Thomas | 10:52 am on the 26th of April, 2007
This is a badly-argued connection of ramblings that’s too clever by (at least) half.
The author touches on somethings which, if he brought in actual data, or even a carefully reasoned argument, might make for an interesting discussion.
Sadly, what we get are the ridiculous musings of a guy who sounds like he’s still bitter that he didn’t get to sleep with the cheerleader in High School
TW Andrews | 10:56 am on the 26th of April, 2007
I think that most of the arguments about this are being made much more complicated than they really ought to be.
The basic argument that inequality of outcome must equal oppression is the basic argument for most of feminism, and is outlined perfectly by Allie’s view of the perfect world. She points out that in a perfect America, both genders would be represented equally in every aspect. However, anyone who has ever had children can tell you there are inherent biological differences between males and females, no matter how hard you try to pretend otherwise. I have 2 daughters, who were given just as many Tonka trucks and guns as they were tea sets and Barbie dolls, and invariably the Barbie dolls would be having a tea party in the back of the dump truck. My 3 year old nephew, on the other hand, was given more gender neutral, and traditionally “girly”, toys than trucks or guns, and he still manages to turn the tea pot into a weapon, and to make his dolls wrestle.
Arguing that giving both men and women equal opportunity at the beginning of the race (for this example, we’ll use graduating from college) should equal equality of outcome (position and pay) at the end of the race (say, 20 years into their career) denies the other factors involved in the outcome.
Todd is not saying that because women, as a whole, do not achieve as well in the long run that they are inferior. What he is pointing out is that women make different choices. There are, of course, exceptions to every rule. But the bottom line is that women are going to be more apt to stay at home with the children, or take lower paying jobs which allow them more time at home. Thus a man and a woman entering the work force at the same time, with the same qualifications, will end up with a large disparity of income, all through the choice of the woman.
There are, of course, millions of examples of women who choose not to have children, or to not stay home with them, and they make every bit as much as men in equal positions. But one has only to look at the large number of “mommy blogs” to see example after example of strong, educated, career-driven women who got married, had children, and subsequently abandoned that career, or dramatically altered its course, all resulting in lower incomes.
On the flip side, men are less likely to alter their careers in order to accommodate children, and they are more likely to be the aggressors in any type of sexual crime. Women may be less likely to be raped in Saudi Arabia (a fact I will dispute, but we’ll let it stand for this argument), but they are also not allowed to vote, drive, speak to men other than their immediate family, show any part of their bodies except their eyes, and are much more likely to have experienced female genital mutilation. I don’t know many women in this country who would make that trade.
Frank | 11:55 am on the 26th of April, 2007
I find it quite impressive that after a rousing demarche of ‘the sophist who cherry-picks data’ under point (2), you then proceeded to write point (4) as though to be a demonstration of what that looks like. I regularly reviewed better polemics back when I was commentary editor of my high school’s monthly fish wrapper.
First, as essentially noted by Mr. Shearer, humans are not dogs — impregnating every female on the lot (including your aunts, sisters, and any other available fertile entities) is neither the scope nor extent of paternal duties in a healthy community of humans. Every successive generation in the past thirty or forty years is increasingly demonstrating the results of being raised in a society where, as often as not, at least one of the parents doesn’t feel any strong commitments or obligations to the offspring s/he progenated. It’s not healthy for a society to go that way, and it readily explains why many of the keepers of the more extreme traditions that sparked your rant were not nipped in the bud, and their energy redirected toward more constructive pursuits.
Second, your closing snear at religious conservatives — coupled with a citation of ONE biblical passage, taken out of context and without respect for broader physical evidence on the matter, and which therefore in NO way demonstrates your thesis — is far beneath the level of someone who (as noted above) seems to hold contempt for sophistry and cherry-picking.
In fact, more’s the pity that you didn’t abort point (4) entirely and compile the limited amount of reason it contained into points (3), (5), (6), and (7). Any more irony, methinks, and there would be rust forming on your keyboard.
anony-mouse | 1:01 pm on the 26th of April, 2007
I more or less agree with the thoughts in this post but what do you mean by, “…is a bit like saying that opposition to the Klan makes one a Democrat?”
The Klan, like Bull Connor and Governor Wallace, is a Democrat thing. 99% of its membership has been Democrats.
CAL | 1:16 pm on the 26th of April, 2007
In point 1, you mention that there are both more male geniuses than female geniuses and more male idiots than female idiots. Some scientists hypothesize that some genetic coding for intelligence occurs on the X chromosome. Since men have a single copy, they have all their eggs in one genetic basket, so to speak. If you got a smart X, you’re smart. If not, too bad. Since women have two copies, the law of averages makes it less likely that they would receive two genius X’s, but also less likely to receive two idiot X’s.
ChE | 3:16 pm on the 26th of April, 2007
They will also try these days to take credit for the most basic, nigh-universal rules of civility, as if thinking that listening to what people have to say and refraining from punching them in the face were feminist moral innovations…
That’s funny. This thread is filled with feminists complaining about how civility is a tool of the patriarchy.
Brandon Berg | 3:27 pm on the 26th of April, 2007
Why not? Because humans have a high level of ‘male parental investment’. For most of our history, humans have lived close to the margins, and a woman trying to raise children alone was much less likely to succeed and have her children survive to adulthood. So a woman doesn’t need just a dose of sperm, she needs a lifetime partner.
There is a “freerider” problem. At the level of *societies* encouring male investment in offspring produces a healthy and successful society. As Tyler Cowen put it, you’ll never hear of an Amish Cad. However, at the level of *individuals* the opposite is true. For those blessed with alpha male genes, you will suceed at the individual level if male parental involvement is optional. Thus the best interests for society as a whole are at cross purposes with the best interests of the most powerful men in society.
Thus, dovetailing into Todd’s point, the challenge for successful societies is to empower the masses of non-alpha males enough to keep the alpha males in check. This is traditionally done through strong marriages.
However, I think there is truth to the feminist’s point: at a reductive genetic level, non-alpha females benefit from a caddish society in which the spoils accumulate to the alpha male. They get a chance to carry the superior alpha male genes rather than the inferior beta male genes. But in a society with strong marriages, only the alpha females get to carry those genes.
Justin | 3:37 pm on the 26th of April, 2007
I disagree with a lot of what you said, but I’ll try to keep this short.
You suggest that feminists are too eager to point to outcome differences (such as, I imagine, the low female representation among top scientists) as evidence of discrimination, when there may well be other less sinister causes. Essentially, you think that feminists start from an assumption that women and men have equal intelligence and similar motivations, and they make it anathema to question whether that assumption is accurate.
I think you raise an interesting point, but I also think you discredit yourself by not acknowledging your own assumptions. For example, you use anecdotes, and present them as patterns, to show that it’s natural for women to all seek out an alpha male. You say that feminists are against monogamous marriage (what feminists have you been talking to?) and present this as evidence that feminists are working against women’s self interests. You seem to have an attitude that there’s a reason traditional societal structures existed, and that they’ll usually provide the best outcomes for men and women. In short, you believe we should proceed from the assumption that society was never that biased against women to begin with, that outcome differences are usually just.
I find this assumption to be at least as “unscientific” as the assumption that outcome differences are usually unjust. Ideally, a scientist would manage to avoid either and attempt to make an unbiased judgement on the relative fairness of each outcome difference independently. You seem to believe that you possess this unbiased judgement, and that empirical evidence supports a lot of things that it’s just not clear it does. For example, I believe you’d support the idea that the traditional role of females as solely primary caregivers has “stood the test of time” so there must be some intrinsic qualities in women that make them like this role when men do not. Even if it is true that women are more nurturing on average, I do not think it’s clear that given the choice, women would prefer to go back in time and give up the independence to have careers and identities outside the confines of their families. I do think that in general, the advances that feminism has made for women have made most women happier, and I’d hazard that making half the population happier has had a net positive effect for society.
Sasha | 3:44 pm on the 26th of April, 2007
Allie said:
We’d have an approximately equal number of male and female presidential candidates. And Supreme Court nominees, and congresspeople, and state governors…
And an approximately equal number of male and female prisoners, suicides, murder victims and victims of industrial accidents?
Men are currently about 10 times as likely as women to fall into one of these catagories. Is this proof of discrimination in favour of men or women?
If you wish to argue that these statistics can be explained by claiming that men (on average) act differently to women (less risk averse, perhaps) surely this argument can also explain the excess of male presidential candidates.
anonn | 4:37 pm on the 26th of April, 2007
Allie claims that in a feminist world:
We’d have an approximately equal number of male and female presidential candidates. And Supreme Court nominees, and congresspeople, and state governors…
And prisoners, suicides, murder victims and victims of industrial accidents? Men are currently ~ 10 times as likely as women to fall into one of those categories. Is this evidence of discrimination against men or women?
If it is not due to discrimination it must be due to men acting differently from women (less risk averse, perhaps). But that argument can just as easily explain differing numbers of presidential candidates.
anonn | 4:48 pm on the 26th of April, 2007
My first thought is, “Well, duh. Couldn’t agree more.” You laid the most eloquent smackdown on feminism that I’ve ever read or heard. Bravo.
I’ve never met a perfectly consistent feminist. They claim to want equality, but then they turn around and ask for special help — extra coaching in coddling, all-girl math camps; freedom from being “objectified” in magazines they don’t even read; and an end to stereotyping, even as they stereotype All Men as Evil. Hel-lo?
Clara | 7:43 pm on the 26th of April, 2007
[…] From Todd Seavey’s scathing indictment of modern feminism, published this week on his blog: What has feminism become if not self-interested, tribalist pleading on behalf of a group that has already won all its morally relevant battles? Far from feminism being a feather in the cap of all respectable “intellectuals,” perhaps it should be a sign that someone has wholeheartedly immersed herself in naked partisanship and is unfit for the polite, civil, and disinterested discourse that makes philosophy and (rational) politics possible. […]
LIBERTY BELLES » Feminist or Female Supremacist? | 7:49 pm on the 26th of April, 2007
Todd, your feminist smackdown is so cute. I can’t imagine why you don’t have a serious relationship with some nice city girl. And your cheeks! So squeezable!!!!
Bella Lu | 10:26 pm on the 26th of April, 2007
Or, we could just reject the entire basis of feminism and argue that culture has always been the result of a consensus of men and women that, as a general rule, men would tend to take on certain roles and, as a general rule, women would take on different roles. These roles were largely influenced by biology and technology. When technology, including control over biology, changed sufficiently to allow the sex-tied roles to change, they did change — quickly and peacefully, unlike, for example, changes in racial power relations.
Which brings us to the real purpose of feminism: to keep white women “ahead” of black men.
David Cohen | 10:52 pm on the 26th of April, 2007
Allie,
Would you consider women more or less likely to commit to a job only until they find something better than men would? Would a woman be more or less likely want career stability than a man? Would she be more or less aggressive in negotiating her position? Would this impact salary? I know in my daughter’s case, I had to push her to demand what she was worth, and she got it. If I hadn’t pushed she would be representative of your pay inequality argument, but not for the reasons you sited. This is obviously anecdotal and doesn’t, in and of itself, prove the worth of your argument one way or the other but it does show that there can be other possible causes for the same outcome.
B's Freak | 5:15 am on the 27th of April, 2007
I note some feminist commenters have taken you to task for assertion #2, but I think we need to back up to #1. Feminism is the radical notion women are people (too), but I don’t think you get that, because you’re too busy attempting to defend all the good reasons you think they might not be: why, you ask do we have to accept on faith that they’re just as smart/capable/good as men?
As someone, probably Amanda Marcotte pointed out, it doesn’t even matter if they’re not as good/smart/wonderful as you because in this country, once you’re an adult, you’re a citizen, and you get a vote. One vote. Not 67%, nor 3/5ths, nor even 10x because you’re contributing so much more to society.
So I was reading some PoC site a couple of days ago, and it was about how this other blogger was persecuting them because they felt pigs were smart and we should be vegetarian, and oh yes that burka thingie, and my basic reaction was that her argument was a rambling, poorly defended mess. In fact my thoughts were eerily like your writing in this post, which is what inspired me to take the trouble to write this.
But two things I noticed: one, angry as she was, it was deeply clear even more that she was hurt and in tremendous pain at the injustices she’d experienced. The other was that her commenters, whom I recognized from other PoC blogs, even though they were kinda all over the map — black women, latino men, etc — immediately and strongly identified with her.
Now, with feminists, I can say, this assertion’s a pile of crap, that’s one’s a little over the top but still making a good point, the other is dead-on. With the anti-racists’ concerns I couldn’t get into it, except to realize I wasn’t getting it. I’ve read enough to know that, when in doubt, the best thing is simply to listen. You’re not listening, you’re too busy defending all the problems with feminism.
Being in one privileged and in one oppressed group, any time I start thinking “those brown people are complaining too much” I just check my feelings against “those women are complaining too much” and that usually stops me in my tracks.
Red Stapler says you’re a good guy. I think you probably are. So’s my brother, who despite his liberal upbringing has become a fundamentalist style Christian who thinks women are too irrational to vote. But, yanno, it really hurts to have random white guys spewing crapola all over what I am, what I do.
I will give you credit for this: you’ve posted your views on your own blog, not all over the feminist blogosphere. That is your right as well as your privilege, and I thank you for it.
woodland sunflower | 7:21 am on the 27th of April, 2007
[…] Here Be Anti-Feminist Check out this rambling but entertaining critique of feminism (via Asymmetrical Information). Some excerps: […]
Here Be Anti-Feminist « The Asylum of TerminalFrost | 9:24 am on the 27th of April, 2007
heh, Todd, you would probably find it substantially easier to simply define yourself, and let the rest go. Essentially you fall into the smae trap you decry, by worry over the difference between intellectual thought and evolutionary practice. Perhaps what you say is true, does it make one whit of difference in your life? I understand your descriptions, and have seen them as well, but you seem to think that pointing out logical inconsistancies to someone is all it take to get them to say ‘oh, my bad’, Yeah, no. The big thing is that humans in general, can think logically while their instincts go the other way. The effort to understand that and find a way to compromise the instinct with the intellect is difficult but worthwhile. But you can only do that for yourself, you can’t make others do it. You MAY get other people to think on it, to go on their own quest to figure out their internal drive, but you can’t MAKE them.
Oddly enough, those very same people may get you to think as well.
Equality itself is an ethereal idea. No-one is the same as me, so how can they be equal? We have laws to do some of the heavy lifting there, but they won’t apply in every situation, and indded why should they? That’s just on our side of the gender line. Once you look across that divide, there are a great load of things that ARE NOT THE SAME. This is the way it is supposed to be. If it were not to be that way, then humans would be designed to self reproduce. Then we could all be more or less identical. Since it isn’t like that, compromises will have to be made.
By both parties. For what it’s worth…
D | 10:45 am on the 27th of April, 2007
Maybe isms are the problem, not feminism.
People band together to believe stuff and this always happens. Arguments fraught with internal contradictions. Self-righteousness, often founded on accidents of birth rather than proof or deeds. Collective emotion dwarfing rational discussion and thought.
It’s not a male/female thing, it’s an us/them thing that happens in all religious and political movements.
Solidarity provides comfort and gets attention, leads to cultural change and even saves lives. But the core philosophies eventually spin in all different directions, “meaning” gets lost, emotion-based groupthink and fascism can take over.
Anne E | 1:20 pm on the 27th of April, 2007
Woodland: Given your question about “why do we have to accept that women are as smart as men”, it seems you didn’t read what he actually said, but immediately tried to “decode” it to reveal the oppression beneath.
Todd was not saying women are stupider than men.
He was saying they’re not identically smart as a group. He was talking about distributions, not the mean.
Combine that with your focus on how you feel about it, rather than whether or not he’s right about what he actually said, and I can’t help but wonder if you’re very subtly trying to prove his point for him.
Probably not.
Sigivald | 1:26 pm on the 27th of April, 2007
The problem with all of this is that the political, in this case, is very personal.
Many men don’t have that experience, and therefore don’t have emotional reactions to politics.
If a policy that restricts women is enacted, women will get angry because by its very wording affects them personally.
I’m not saying that men aren’t personally affected by laws, but very often, the effects aren’t tied to their very identities.
To put it in more Libertarian terms:
Taxes on stuff hurt in the wallet.
Restrictions on abortion mean I’m personally in trouble if I get pregnant and can’t afford pre-natal care, let alone to support a child.
Red Stapler | 1:42 pm on the 27th of April, 2007
You shouldn’t assume I take attacks on my wallet less personally than you do attacks on your womb — I’m a libertarian, after all.
Seriously, though, while I’m briefly back here, let me add that I should perhaps have made clearer in item #4 above, which bothered commenters over on JaneGalt.net even more than it did the commenters here (and over there they’re much more willing to diagnose my whole position as a result of not having sex, which seems to me about the most retrograde and unfeminist analysis of an opponent’s position one could come up with), that I’m not saying the pimp-ho dynamic is necessarily the whole story on the human race but that it’s the kind of highly contingent, physical, evolved _sort_ of tendency that might be at play in society that makes it ridiculous to talk about us as if we’re equal, tabula-rasa abstractions or (worse) should simply be _trying to act as if we are_.
Again, why not be different and simply accept the consequences (aside from violent ones already proscribed by other philosophies and political regimes, but let’s avoid getting into other political issues — like the Iraq War, which may have been this thread’s least-relevant tangent)?
One minute (though, believe me, I’m well aware feminism is not a single, easily-defined position and need not speak with one voice) I’m told, sure, of course, feminists accept differences and their consequences, the next one of them (sometimes the same one) tells me men should be doing more of the parenting. Why isn’t the differential parenting pattern one of the acceptable sorts of differences? _Who cares about this differential pattern_, unless one makes (some version of) the a priori assumption we should be aiming for sameness? And if the answer is merely that “well, _some_ people, such as the feminists themselves or women they purport to speak for, care,” I would only add that it’s unclear the _rest of us_ have a moral obligation to care, and feminism certainly speaks the language of moral obligation, not merely preference (few feminists would see a statement such as “I want to see more female CEOs in this town” as morally equivalent to a mere statement of preference such as “I want to see more Arby’s open up in this area and would like it if a new Psychedelic Furs album came out”).
Because of this I am very hesitant even to embrace Julian’s bias-eliminating formulation of feminism, as it seems to me to derive much of its psychological appeal from the still-lingering assumption that we ought to be doing _something_ to promote _some_ sort of greater sameness (or a somewhat closer approximation to equality of outcome), when that’s the underlying assumption I think we ought to reject. As long as (preferably minimal, basic) legal rules are the same for all, our work in this area may well be done — and the game of life is afoot, let the chips fall where they may, even if it means that every CEO from now until the end of time is a fat man with a beard and all the women decide to become low-paid jazz musicians, as I would myself be more likely to do.
Todd Seavey | 4:59 pm on the 27th of April, 2007
[…] http://toddseavey.com/2007/04/21/abortin… […]
dispatches from TJICistan » Blog Archive » I can see his patriarchy hanging out, for goodness’ sake! | 9:11 pm on the 27th of April, 2007
Red Stapler The problem with all of this is that the political, in this case, is very personal.
Many men don’t have that experience, and therefore don’t have emotional reactions to politics.
Being told that because you have a Y chromosome you are a rapist is pretty personal. If you object to that, you are whining, if you do not object you are assenting. Maybe you haven’t read anything by Catherine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin and other, similar-thinking feminists, but other people have.
Remember, men are not supposed to show their emotions; it’s unmanly. So just because you don’t see us taking things personally, it doesn’t mean we aren’t doing so. We just don’t let you, or anyone else that cannot be trusted, see such things.
All Men Are Rapists And That's All They Are | 10:30 pm on the 27th of April, 2007
All Men Are Rapists And That’s All They Are:
Aww, it’s so nice of you to troll Todd’s blog.
1) I am not a Dworkin feminist. I, for one, like penis in my vagina.
2) I strive for a world where men can show their emotions and not be accused of being umasculine.
3) I never called Todd a rapist.
Red Stapler | 12:10 am on the 28th of April, 2007
—Restrictions on abortion mean I’m personally in trouble if I get pregnant and can’t afford pre-natal care, let alone to support a child.— red stapler
This statement takes us down an interesting path. Why is the father of that child NOT equally in trouble? Naturally there is a basic difference because it grows inside you and not him, but that is where the laws requiring his support are supposed to provide some redress. It’s a thorny issue to be sure, but it certainly also points up an idea, that he as the father, has no say in the matter. On the one hand, since it is your body, you should be in control of it. On the other, if the guy has no say anyway, why would he give any support [emo, or monetary]. If you hold him accountable, seems like you have to give him the right that accountability goes with.
I would say this is where you see a breakdown, where both things cannot be true, where equality is not in the cards. Much the worse it is. Having both known women who kept the child regardless, and men who had no input at all, over the decision to abort what would have been their child too…
I’d like to hear takes in that, just because the must be an inherently unequal condition…
D | 12:50 am on the 28th of April, 2007
Feminism defined: All sexes are equal, but some sexes are more equal than others.
Peter Bessman | 3:58 am on the 28th of April, 2007
D:
Why is the father of that child NOT equally in trouble?
He very well may be.
If I get pregnant, and the man I slept is just as financially or emotionally ill-equipped to support a child, then we’re back at square one.
Naturally there is a basic difference because it grows inside you and not him, but that is where the laws requiring his support are supposed to provide some redress.
I think there should be an escape clause for the involuntary fathers of such children. A legal form they sign and notarize saying that they rescind responsibility for said child, but in doing so, remove them from the child’s life entirely.
That being said, a woman, in bare science, becomes an incubator at the time of conception. However, to treat any woman as such is reprehensible. The child she carries has no more importance or value than she does, and in fact, carries quite a bit less.
The “innocence” and “potential” of such a life is a manipulative tool to shame people into keeping children they may otherwise have aborted.
Adoption is a wonderful thing and a wonderful opportunity for couples incapable of bearing their own children, however, that is useless to many women who spend three-quarters of a year in need of expen