#yesallwomen

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You know, I've seen an awful lot of guys on this and other forums get ripped into for presuming to understand what their opposite sex number are experiencing, yet I also never see any hesitation to do the exact same thing in order to dispute a guy claiming to have it hard(er), when really that's not the sort of thing that can really be known. I'm not particularly interested in any pity party competition over who has it worse, that sort of thing strikes me as pointless, but double standards are something that most people would agree should be avoided.



Ahh, so that's the problem, picked the wrong "side". I don't think that's the most accurate way of looking at things; I, for example, will come out against many of the moderation changes being proposed not because I agree with sexism but because I believe that "offensive" speech should be countered with more speech rather than censorship, which takes me and others like me right out of that false dichotomy. Not that some people won't try to paint me as sexist anyway, a few as*holes have already tried that.

Gotta love semantics. Tell me, tarantella, how is "curbing the airing of wrongful and harmful ideas" different than banning unpleasant ideas rather than arguing with them?

Really though, I think this is a fairly extraordinary statement, indicative of why I'm opposing much of this push for stronger moderation on WP, which is that it's less about fairness and more about labeling an opponents very arguments "offensive" and thus forbidden, to say nothing of removing the moderator's discretion on dealing with things through an ill considered "strikes" policy.

It also infantilizes the members of WP, treating them as if they're so fragile and delicate that merely encountering an uncomfortable or challenging idea is going to harm them and should be avoided at all costs, the very recipe for conformist uncritical thinking that has unfortunately become very popular in academia at the moment. Life doesn't come with trigger warnings, and I think it's doing people a real disservice to insulate them from opposing ideas, depriving them of the tools to think for themselves and draw their own conclusions, even if those are the "wrong" conclusions.

Strange, I don't remember calling. Maybe I'm not a man. Maybe I should check.

Yup, I'm definitely a man.

I feel that you lack objectivity in your data interpretation, I demand transparency!

That is what people who are not actually victimized themselves usually assume. Do you realize there is plenty of actual evidence to back up the idea that "women are victimized"? Since #yesallwomen often deals with street harassment, this is a relevant example: http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/20 ... color.html
"
What do you gain, I wonder, by refusing to believe women who say they are victimized and instead assuming they are (psychologically?) weak? Are women harassed on the street because of their personal shortcomings? Do enlighten me.

Disclaimer: just talking to women =/= harassment. Guys, please don't get all defensive or go to extremes thinking you're not supposed to speak to women or something.

Here is what the World Health Organization has to say about whether women are victimised or not:

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs239/en/

That's just physical and sexual abuse.

It's very interesting, watching the various reactions to all this business. All my life, often without understanding at the time what I was seeing, I've watched variations on "shut up, it isn't happening." I think the first really big one, for me, must've been the Anita Hill hearings.

I didn't understand for a long time how seriously invested so many people -- mostly, I think, but not only, men -- are in refusing to see how endemic and serious the problem is. To the point where I think it may not be #notallmen, but must be #quitealotofmen.

There's a depressingly long list of standard ways of attacking a woman who comes forward and says she's been attacked, and an extraordinary variety of ways of pressuring a woman to shut. up about a man's attacking or harassing her. I came in for it twice myself: once after a parking-lot attack (boss very anxious not to have bad publicity; cop tried to push me into saying I knew the guy, then decided it was my fault for wearing spandex in a gym parking lot, then threatened to arrest me when I argued) and once after an old creepy stalker guy at my synagogue died and was being eulogized, and I sent a reply-all email detailing exactly what he'd been like for real, and what it had meant in my life (shock and then a scramble not to talk about him at all and silence).

Despite that, though, a fifth of women in the US (me among them) report having been raped, which takes some courage given the treatment we tend to get when we bother to say so.

So -- yes, jwfess, before you go shift ground to another excuse about why women ought to shut up about victimisation, perhaps let's stop and think about why you want to shift ground and make excuses about this at all, in the face of massive evidence that these things go on.

I wonder sometimes, when this happens, if it's merely a kneejerk response to something outside you tapping you on the shoulder and telling you you'd better change something you're doing. I see this amongst dads-rights guys who don't, in the end, really want custody of their children -- it's a huge amount of work, raising children, and there's all sorts of things you have to give up to do it, and you really have to want to do it or it's a living hell. There's a reason why so many guys hand their kids off to their moms and girlfriends. But they're absolutely livid when the decree comes down and grants custody of their kids to their ex-wives, because here's this power, greater than their own, having its way with them. Telling them what's theirs and what's not. And you can read all their rantings about being raped for child support, even when the money they pay (if they pay it at all) isn't close to half what it costs to raise a child, meaning guess who shoulders the rest. They're enraged because someone more powerful than they is making them do a thing, perhaps in a relationship where they'd been the one accustomed to doing the bossing around and threatening.

If that's what it is, it's fantastically selfish. I mean really mindblowingly, grotesquely selfish. Because in essence what it it says is, "What's important isn't that this giant proportion of people on the planet are abused and victimised merely for being women. What's important is that I'm nobody's b***h."

Course, I also know men who don't want to believe these stats and the giant hashtag storytells because they're nauseating. Who wants to know that the world's full of so much abuse of women, or that the odds are excellent that when you talk to a woman you like and maybe even respect, you're talking to someone who's been raped, beaten, harassed, discriminated against, or otherwise abused merely for being a woman? It's easier to imagine these things are blown massively out of proportion for no reason at all.

Then again I also know men who recognize the problem but are afraid the sky will fall if they try to do anything about it. Really scared. Don't know where they'll go if they're thrown out of the Club of Men for pushing back against this stuff. But they also don't bother finding out how other men manage it.

That's horrible!

You know, you really come across as controlling sometimes, but nobody deserves that kind of treatment, especially from someone you turn to for help. I'd be mad if it happened to me too.

The hashtag is really problematic because it mixes up so many unrelated issues. It is horrible when women are abused or raped, but feminism (and especially in it's extreme forms) is not the answer. Feminism just creates even more problems, and not only for men, but also for women. You need to understand that violence against women is not something that can be "cured" by making men feel like dirt. It doesn't work like that. Violence against women typically happens for a variety of reasons, but quite often because males feels powerless and worthless, which isn't exactly "cured" by making all men feel like dirt.

Feminism isn't supposed to make men feel like dirt. It is supposed to be about equality and choices. If some women take it too far that is their fault, not the concept's. Saying the few extremists represent feminism is like saying the Westboro Baptists represent Christianity. Personally, I think it is a shame feminism has become such a misrepresented word.

You may a giant mistake when you decide that the actions of an aberrant few should form the basis for how you view an issue. Make no mistake, this "many" you refer to are an aberrant few. Maybe you will figure that out when you have a daughter: That misconception allows real and long term harm.

three questions:

1. Why do you assume that the intention is to make men feel like dirt (in other words, why do you figure it's all about the men, rather than about the women who are saying, "this happened to me")?

2. What is the way in which a 40,000 women can say, "A man did this to me," and not have men assume that the intention is to make men feel like dirt?

3. Why is the reaction, "they're trying to shame me, I hate them," rather than "f**k, there really is a problem, we have to do something about this"?

I mean you wind up going around in circles this way. The dance goes like this:

If one woman says, "this happened", she's a liar or a victim of a freak accident, no need to worry further about it.
If two or three women a week say, "this happened," then there's some kind of horrible freak outlier men wandering around but they don't represent men generally, no need to worry further about it (and besides some percentage of the women, probably liars or asking for it).
If 100,000 women come out and say, "this happened" at the same time, then there's a man-hating movement afoot, engage rage.
If the top governmental and NGO websites say, "this is happening to a very large percentage of women worldwide," then there's a conspiracy to make men feel like dirt and give all the power to women, in fact they have too much already, look how much of the government they own now.

Nowhere in there is, "This appears to be real. We have to do something about this."

What feminism's done so far is allow some women to escape the worst abuses. I have a house, a career, my own money, property, etc. I raise a child on my own. No one is allowed into my house unless I say so. I go into meetings and talk and negotiate like an equal, and even if some men at the table don't see me that way, they can't be overt about how they feel; they must accord me a certain amount of respect. If I want to marry and divorce, that's up to me. If I'm in a relationship and it's abusive, I can leave (because I have money and a ton of education and powerful friends). My daughter can consider her future without wondering about who she'll be married to; she can think about what she wants to do. And she can decide to be a mother or not, as she pleases. None of this would've been possible 60 years ago here -- I'd have been a scandal then. Children would have been told to stay away from my child. So personally, I find it very helpful.

Because when women say "this happened to me", people are blaming men because they did it. Simple as that. And when feminism talks about patriarchy, which means "all men are oppressive", they talk about how horrible men are.

However, the biggest issue with feminism today is that it never takes up problems with women. Everything is men's fault, and when men suffer because of women, it's claimed that "this is no problem" or "it's the guys own fault", while if similar things happen to women, it's the fault of patriarchy. The latter is especially detrimental to Aspie guys. It's their fault that they cannot get women because they cannot play the game or whatever. It's even the fault of men when highly educated women seek even more highly educated men, and fails because they are in short supply. That these women (perhaps even most women) should work on their preferences for high status males is never mentioned. In my country it was even suggested that single women should be able to procreate by themselves if they fail to find a suitable mate, which will ultimately be detrimental to children.

So, no, I do not support today's feminism. But I do support everything that will eliminate abuse and rape of women. I just don't think that feminism has identified the problem properly, but rather would blame our sexualized culture for rape and all of our psychological issues related to it for the abuse.

I had a pretty good post on this in another thread, here's part of it:



Really, it's not the semi-mythical Andrea Dworkin type man hating feminists giving the movement a bad name these days, it's the much more common gender studies bubble type.

It certainly hasn't been helped by Rush Limbaugh and his quickly adopted buzz word nicknames.

I do know there are women who take it too far, and I've never been afraid to call them out on it. Equality is equality, it isn't fair to play it any other way.

which people are saying this, and where are they saying it? do you have any examples of feminists or women saying that all men are to blame and not just the men who raped/abused/harassed them? you can't just say "people are doing this" or "people are saying that," without even specifying who said "people" are, let alone without providing any kind of evidence or examples of someone saying or doing whatever it is you're talking about, and expect to have your argument taken seriously.

Equality means that women needs to be challenged for maladaptive behavior, instead of being given ways to continue with their maladaptive behavior (for instance their preference for using male status as a way to select a potential partner). Males are supposed to refrain from maladaptive behavior in order to get into a relationship, and so should women. So until I see feminism claim that women need to work on their maladaptive status preference of males, I have no reason to believe they want to achieve equality. Another issue is some women's preferences for violent criminals. These women needs to work on these preferences, and if they don't, they will have to blame themselves if they are abused..