Yes or no?

May 29, 2014 11:10

What are your thoughts on the #yesallwomen campaign ( Read more... )

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sushidog May 29 2014, 19:36:56 UTC
Again, if his intentions really were to hurt women, then given that he was relatively bright, and said he was going to walk into a sorority and shoot everyone...
To draw a parallel, we can agree, I think, that the KKK is a racist organisation, and that they wished (and still wish) to hurt people of colour, yes? And yet they did this one by one; not by bombing places where there were lots of people of colour but by lynching individuals. Not only that, but sometimes they also attacked white people (if they believed those white people to be "n****r-lovers", for example).
Does that mean they weren't really racist, or they didn't really want to hurt people of colour? I would say it doesn't.

Similarly, Rodger wanted to terrorise and kill women, and like a lot of men, he chose knives and guns rather than poison or fire to do that. And he killed men too, at least partly because (according to him) he felt it was unfair that they were getting the attention and sex that was owed to him.

But friends are a social contact. They stimulate us, validate us, act as a release, and help us with our problems.
Well, yes, but he was clearly a pretty horrible person; he made a habit of making false accusations against his room-mates (whom he then killed), he had attacked women before, and so on. It's all very well to day that if he'd had friends maybe he wouldn't have had problems, but there's obviously a very good reason why he didn't have friends.

I think that the next fruitful field of study is to put the spotlight firmly on the men.
And people like the Good Men Project are doing that. But it's really not possible for feminism to do so and still remain feminist, because one of the issues that feminism battles is the fact that the spotlight is always on men, far more than on women. Similarly, the civil rights movement can't really focus on problems white people have, because that would be missing the point.

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sushidog May 29 2014, 22:43:20 UTC
..and even then, though I havn't seen official figures, I'm willing to bet that the vast, vast, vast majority of people who got injured by the KKK were black.
Sure, but you can see, can't you, that it's quite possible for someone who hates group A to kill people from group B (even the group to which they themselves belong) _because_ of their hatred of group A, right?

That said, again, he stated his plan was to walk through the sorority and shoot everyone? Yes? He did not, however, and even with his random attacks, still managed to miss out on majority on his professed target.
Yeah; he was disorganised. That doesn't mean he wasn't a misogynist, or that misogyny wasn't his primary motivation.

It's clear that even while he had some radical ideas, nobody checked him.
On the contrary, we're now hearing that he was seeing at least one therapist and that the police had been called on him on at least one occasion. People _had_ checked him, but he chose to hang out on MRA forums. We choose our friends, and if someone chooses people who will encourage them in misogyny, their misogyny will be encouraged.

What I have been saying is that if they turned that amazingly calibrated apparatus upon the mainstream, who knows what they might find?
When you say "the mainstream", I'm not sure what you're referring to; could you clarify?

Feminism is the study of imbalances of power structures based upon gender dynamics, yes?
No. Feminism is the effort to address the inequalities and injustices experienced by women, in the understanding that in the vast majority of cases of gender inequality, it is women who suffer.

Leave it to the MRAs or some magical "masculist" movement to deal with? Who else aside from the group who has identified itself as the movement dedicated to the study of gender?
Why would you assume that only extremists of "magical" people would be interested in addressing men's issues? Why not just ordinary men? Feminism isn't made up magical people or extremists (although there are of course extremists in any movement), it's made up of ordinary women who want to address women's issues, after all.

And as a matter of fact, there are men examining men's issues, not as a part of feminism (because people like Jackson Katz share my view, that feminism is about addressing women's issues) but alongside it, as a separate thread. I think that's actually really important, because one of the "women's issues" that feminism tries to tackle is the assumption that while women's issues are minority issues and _only_ of interest to women, men's issues are universal issues which must be addressed, and even prioritised, by everyone. So while I absolutely support men like Katz, who are trying to address the problems faced by men, I don't feel that that's the role of feminism.

Having said that, quite a lot of the problems faced by men will disappear if we can tackle the problems faced my women. Someone elsewhere in this thread mentioned the bias towards mothers in custody battles; well, that bias is due to a whole load of inequalities which disadvantage women; the fact that men get paid more, the fact that "women's jobs" are often part-time, the fact that domestic work and childcare are assumed to be the realm of women, the fact that the vast majority of childcare is done by women, the fact that women are seen as naturally nurturing and men aren't. Feminists are working against all of those assumptions, and if we get rid of those and ensure that we have equality in the workplace and in the home, the pro-mother bias in custody cases will vanish. So feminism does help men, but that isn't and shouldn't be its primary focus.

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sushidog May 29 2014, 23:27:52 UTC
Right, but the majority of people injured by him were random passerby.
Yes; he was disorganised. He was also angry at men _because he felt they were getting the female attention he was owed_. So he hated men, for reasons of misogyny.

there is already a group dedicated to the study of power structures based upon gender
No. Feminism is not simply about _all_ power structures based on gender, it is _specifically_ about addressing the inequalities and injustices suffered by women. You wouldn't expect the Civil Rights movement to address white people's problems, simply because they are fighting for racial equality, would you? So why would you expect feminism to tackle men's problems?

To which I wondered 'who then?'.
Yes, and it's a weird question to ask; why not just _men_? Like, all of 'em. Why not you? Why are you looking for a pre-existing group to swoop ina dn solve men's problems, rather than suggesting that the very men suffering from those problems can and should address them themselves?

, but the vast, vast, vast majority of medicine applies to a universal neuter.
That's an interesting example, because yes, that's the assumptino that has always been made, and it's an assumption that kills women. For example, we all know the symptoms of a heart attack, right? Pain radiating down the left arm and up into the jaw, tightness in the chest, those are the warning signs. Except that when women have heart attacks, they more often have pain in their back than their chest or left arm. That "universal neuter" is not a neuter at all; he's a man, and the advice we've _all_ been given is actually good advice for men, and bad advice for women. Most drugs are tested, not on a "universal neuter" but on men, which means that we're now finding out, years too late in some cases, that some drugs which have been tested and shown to be both effective and safe are great for men, but not so much for women.

What your definition says is that a lung-specialist, who finds a tumor in a patient's lung, should back away and hope a oncologist finds it.
No; just that it's going to be the oncologist who treats the cancer, and that the oncologist who finds a tumour doesn't get to pass it back to the lung specialist, because it's his job to treat cancer.

As mens issues such as workplace safety and legal reform
Those aren't men's issues, those are workers' issues.

This is why I don't buy into people who say that feminism is about women
But it is. It also benefits men, and that's a nice side effect, but that's not what it's for or about.

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sushidog May 30 2014, 19:26:32 UTC
Were his sole target women, he should have swerved more toward them, no?
Right; women weren't his sole target, but nonetheless, the cause of his rampage was misogyny. He wanted to kill women, because he resented them for not giving him the happiness he thought they owed him, and men, because they were getting the happiness, from women, which was owed to him. He made all of this very clear in his "manifesto".

This is like saying... that Darkism is the _specific_ study of the inequalities of the absence of light, therefore a Darkist scholar would never study light.
No, it isn't, because feminism isn't the study of gender. It is _activism_, aimed at addressing the injustices and inequalities suffered by women. You're thinking of gender studies (which is the _study_ of gender). Feminism is not gender studies and gender studies is not feminism. Feminism is not about addressing the problems faced by men. It is about addressing the problems faced by women.

I'm wondering why scholars in the field of gender studies are not.
Their job is to study; they're not necessarily activists. But if you feel there are problems to be addressed, go ahead and address them.

Why do we have to form a whole new (and redundant) branch of study in order to study?
Study is not activism, and activism is not study. They are two separate things. Sure, they an and should work together, but you seem to be conflating them, which is really unhelpful.

Isn't this rather like building a whole new building for a new maths department, and barring all those old mathematics professors from studying, if a brand new field of mathematics opened up?
No, it isn't. But you seem to be saying "Hey giuze, there's this new field of maths so stop what you're doing and come over and do this new thing because I say so". They're not going to do it. They're doing their thing. If you want someone to do a new thing, go ahead and get started on that yourself, don't demand that people who already have something to do should stop what they're doing and change tracks because you say so.

And it's totally irrelevant.
Maybe it is to you; it bloody isn't to the women who have had heart attacks but didn't know it because they didn't have typically male symptoms. Maybe you shouldn't be so quick to write off other people's experiences, huh?

As for the old "testing on men" canard... that may have been true 50+ years ago (and even then, questionably), but no peer-reviewed study would ever make it to release without trials on as diverse a population as can be gotten. That includes sex, age, and race.
That's really not true, y'know; I was just at a talk last week where they were talking about exactly this issue, with regard to children rather than women, but it does still cause problems.

How would the oncologist find it?
By doing his job, obviously. Oncologists aren't useless idiots who need to have someone else guide their every move,a nd similarly, if men feel they have a problem that needs to be addressed, they don't need to ask for help from the feminist movement; they can get on and deal with it.

But to those looking for new fields of research to mine,
What on earth makes you think that feminists are short of woman-centred material that they would have to look for new fields to mine? (I don't think you mine fields, do you? Or rather, I suppose you do, but only if you want to kill people... but I digress)
We have plenty of woman-centred issues to focus on. If you feel that men have problems, start working on them. When we've finished addressing the inequalities and injustices faced by women, we'll be right along to help. OK?

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sushidog May 30 2014, 22:16:16 UTC
Still, how is it in the interests of feminists (the sociopolitical movement) to pick and choose fights,
Because, as you've already pointed out, our time and our energy and our resources are limited and because, as I've already pointed out, one of the things we're fighting _against_ is the idea that while our issues are just for us to deal with, men's are universal.

Sexual identity is very obviously a feminist issue, because trans women are women. And feminism hasn't adopted people of colour as an issue; third wave feminism is recognising that _women_ of colour have their own set of issues on top of those faced by women more generally.

Fixing one issue is fixing all the issues.
No, it isn't; if we start spending our time fixing men's issues, we'll be taking a big step backwards.

Yes it really is true. This is one of the many, many reasons why they don't test drugs on prison inmates, for example.
Well, that and because it's monumentally unethical to do so.

It's really bad study design to use at risk populations, and children are a huge quagmire for researchers.

Well, I can tell you for a fact that a lot of medical trials don't accept women during menstruation, or insist that any women who take part must be on hormonal birth control (as if neither menstruating women nor women who aren't on hormones need medication). It really is true that the medical standard is based not on a gender-neutral, but on male physiology, even now, and it really does still cause problems. As an example, I know a quite frightening number of women who have gone to see their doctor with a medical issue and been dismissed because it's "women's troubles". The fact that they were vomiting from the pain, for example, is apparently just something that women deal with and not something a doctor should be concerned about. In other words, being female is treated, in and of itself, as a medical oddity; we're not people, we're dysfunctional men with strange anatomies that (some) doctors don't really want to have to thing about.
Dismissing the idea of gender bias in medicine with a wave of the hand in the way you've done really isn't helping your claim to be a feminist, y'know.

Hey, everyone wants to be the next big name.
No, actually, not everyone does. Some of us are just tying to get through the day without being patronised by some guy who thinks he knows our lives better than we do,a nd that he gets to decide where we put our time and effort in.
Once again, feminism is not about academic study of an interesting but purely theoretical field, as you seem to be treating it. It is our lives. Perhaps you could try to respect that?

And I hope I won't get mistaken for a steriotypical male trying to save the wimminz if I get involved too.
Save? No, I don't think there's much danger of that. Explain to the wimminz what's what? Yeah, I think you might be accused of that. Tell the wimminz to stop wasting their time on women's issues and start thinking about the menz? Yes, that's going to happen too.

Seriously, if you don't want to be seen as that kind of guy, don't act like that kind of guy.

if it's a good argument it'll suffer my questioning, right?
As long as you don't mind being told really very comprehensively to fuck off. No-one owes you an education, and no-one wants to be the subject of your disinterested study. If you want to study something interesting, go to school, don't look for some feminists to poke with sticks.

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sushidog May 31 2014, 02:12:08 UTC
Focusing on feminist issues is fighting against the ideas that feminist ideas are just ours to deal with?
No. Read what I actually wrote, both times.

How so?
I've already answered this in previous comments and above. Go back and read it again if you need to, I don't feel like wasting my time explaining it _again_. Or you could google for "What about the menz", that also might help.

If you admit that men benefit from feminist actions, then how isn't it a universal action?
Because the benefits to men are incidental; they're a nice bonus, but they're not the goal.

Hormones can throw off or occlude results.
Yes, that's right, they can, which is why it's _really_ problematic to insist that women should be using artificial hormones in order to take part in a medical trial.

Oh? Wasn't aware that there were that many anatomical differences between the sexes. Well, perhaps your spouse can explain to you what "gender bias in medicine" means, and why your idea of the universal neuter is so far off.

Nobody in research
But, as I _keep_ pointing out, we're not talking about research, we're talking about activism. Why are you trying so hard to derail this?

I'm fairly certain that I have, in no way, made little of women's issues.
Really? You don't think that suggesting that feminism should focus on men is making light of women's issues? Or brushing off gender bias in medicine? Or claiming that a misogynistic hate crime in which the criminal released a manifesto outlining his misogyny isn't _really_ about misogyny? Or citing inaccurate figures on domestic abuse and then throwing a self-pitying tantrum when they're challenged? Or claiming that no-one is really saying all the shitty things various women here have been told because _you_ haven't heard them so it can't be true?
Seriously, dude, your behaviour in this thread is not going to make you welcome in any feminist arena, so if you want to be welcomed, you really need to adjust your attitude in a fairly radical way.

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sushidog May 31 2014, 03:07:11 UTC
No, I don't, because as I've stated before, it's really the same thing.
No, it isn't, and frankly, it isn't up to you, as a man, to make that call. If you want to be an ally, you're going to have to let women decide which issues they want to address and what feminism is about, and learn to take a back seat. Which is precisely why I'm not comfortable with men calling themselves feminists; because inevitably it means they want to determine the direction feminism takes, which usually means diverting it away from the issues women want to address.

This does not mean that if I break my toe that I will get a different treatment then your broken toe just because of genders.
I can't speak for broken toes, but I have certainly been given different treatment from that given to a male friend who had pretty much identical symptoms, because of gender, for a medical issue which was not in itself gendered. So no, sorry, you're wrong. You are a man, you don't see what women experience, so don't try to tell us what we experience. OK?

I don't think anyone claimed it wasn't misogynist.
Your whole schtick about how he killed men too certainly came across that way.

aka 'letting my depression and exhaustion get the better of me'
Then I suggest you back away from the internet before you get to that point.

...What?
here and here.

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sushidog May 31 2014, 03:36:55 UTC
There is a huge difference when you are driving in a car and your friend says "it's faster to take the freeway" vs. the guy in the back saying "Driver, take the freeway".
That's me.
But not only are you not the driver or the owner of the car, but you don't actually know where we're planning to go and you don't know the roads. So when you say "It's quicker to take the highway" what you're actually saying is "My opinion as someone who doesn't know the terrain here is worth more than yours, even though these are your roads, and your destination".
And in fact, what you've been saying is not "It's quicker to take the freeway" but rather "I don't think we should go where you want to go, I've decided you should drive me to my chosen destination instead", to which my answer is, get out and walk, buddy.

I prod, poke, take things for a spin and that's how I understand things.
But apparently what you don't do is listen to the people who actually _live_ this.

...you mean they actually are saying that they should close down women's shelters to replace them with men's
You're really not reading very carefully at all. It's incredibly frustrating trying to have a discussion with you when you keep twisting what is being said like that; please try to read more carefully before replying.
Although in a way, it's a perfect example of why it's not OK for you to tell us to take the freeway; your understanding of the drive (or the conversation) isn't good enough for you to be able to do that, and that's at least in part because you're quicker to give your opinion than to listen to other people's.

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